Hammond gets shut down fast with a single counter, and he doesn’t last long on his own lol. Trust me, adaptive shields get him far, but not as far as you imply.
If you’re looking for a nerf for him, my lord you must be new. He’s actually pretty balanced.
Hammond needs some rebalancing. He’s unstoppable without counters and unplayable against them. This feast or famine gameplay is neither OP nor UP but rather just bad balance.
For starters, his grapple needs a time limit. 6 seconds is reasonable. 4 seconds might even be reasonable.
Infinity seconds…is not reasonable.
Length of time that adaptive shields last also needs to be reduced, and/or shields per enemy should be lowered.
To compensate, adaptive shields should now provide CC immunity and Sombra hack should not take Ham out of ball form.
Finally someone got what I was trying to say lol
What sense would it make to limit time on grapple? Have you ever played WB? Creativity with traversal and movement is almost his whole thing.
Sombra and to a lesser extent Mei are not just counters but in some cases literal cancels.
An observant junkrat that uses traps well will make life miserable for a WB. Bastion melts him, Reaper melts him, McCree can 100 to 0 him with flashbang and fan. Sym turrets and their slows make for autodeath most of the time.
DVa’s rocket attack is very tough on WB. Hanzo’s storm arrow destroys him. Torb can make things irritating and is there a bigger target for Zen’s discords?
That’s a lot of options for mitigating WB.
I just don’t get why he needs good dodging ability plus permaboop with a way too large hitbox plus adaptive shields plus no critbox while doing all of this. Compare him to D.Va, who has a sorry 2 seconds of Defense Matrix with now silly downtime and a huge critbox and no way to mitigate most damage she takes because of that, and also massively feeds ult charge while diving.
The tanks in this game are not well balanced at the moment, and Wrecking Ball is one of the worst offenders, not because he is really OP, but because the tanks with similar roles are much worse at disruptiveness and survival.
He needs some toning down, or D.Va and Reinhardt need some buffs, which will never happen because Blizzard absolutely wants DPSWatch to be meta, even though all the tanks that are crucial to GOATS don’t perform unreasonably well in balanced comps. So toning down for Hammond it should be.