Don’t mind me, just continuing from here. This is a weird post to make in the current climate of it raining tank tears over expected nerfs to Orisa and Sigma but here we’re in a parallel universe where there is no 2-2-2 role queue. Instead, role restrictions apply at the hero selection screen and they are a minimum of one hero per role and at maximum three heroes per role. Aside from the likely prospect of a solo tank or support the scourge of GOATS cows the hearts of us all; worse still, with Mei and two substantially buffed other pieces.
There is a group of chronically neglected heroes that see little competitive play whom you could call upon when there’s something strange in your neighborhood - the GOATS busters. They are Bastion, Torbjorn, and Junkrat. We’ll assume Reaper is in an ok spot. What we want of these heroes is to buff them against heavy, high sustain comps that walk up to your face to kill you.
- Bastion in Configuration: Sentry - A long time ago the Overwatch developers did something smart - they dramatically increased the spread of Bastion in this form. With a relatively narrow spread he can be a toxic hero to play against, but with the large spread he becomes rather ineffective at range. Revert to or increase his spread again in this form, but give him back the ability to critically hit on headshots. He’ll remain good at taking down a barrier and Mei’s wall without having the potential to be an all-around monster, while when his enemies try to step up to his face they are in for a world of hurt.
- Bastion in Configuration: Tank - Give him a knockback.
- Torbjorn Rivet Gun Secondary Fire - Increase its spread too. Give it Buckshot - each pellet inflicts an additional 1% damage of the victim’s maximum health.
- Torbjorn Deploy Turret - Gains AI Learning. After shooting 20 rounds (which is 5 seconds of uninterrupted shooting, to give an impression of the time involved) its damage increases by 1 per round until it crits (over another 3.5 seconds of uninterrupted shooting). The Turret will have to destroyed or redeployed for the damage to reset. This change has broader implications due to the range of the turret, which could be reduced somewhat, but is a complication for the target comps especially depending on its placement.
- Junkrat Frag Launcher - In the first 1 to 2 seconds of being fired (unsure which is more appropriate) the projectile deals 30-50 more damage on direct impact and 20-30 more splash damage. Maybe it comes out of his gun on fire for the short duration.
Perhaps Symmetra can start becoming more useful by some association with or against. On the flipside, we should be concerned with dive being prohibitively hard-countered. Here we can give Tracer and Genji some targeted buffs.
- On key 2 Tracer gains an ability called Time Incorporeality that reduces the damage she takes from rooted or immobile sources (i.e. Bastion Sentry and Torbjorn’s Turret) by 75% for 2-3 seconds.
- Genji Deflect - If Genji deflects damage every second the duration of Deflect is increased by 1 second under the same condition up to a maximum of 2 additional seconds