I think Pros base their decisions on forum threads and the devs listen to the pros. 
I do hope they ratchet down his ult charge tho. Iām Broke Thumbs Hanzo and when I played on Gibraltar last night I had Dragons up before the first curve God only knows how fast a real Hamzo charges it.
Make the damage 75 and nerf the duration for example you can activate the storm arrow ability but you can still wait about 3 seconds before you fire his 6 arrows if they do this he would still have his full potential while being nerfed
It should be balanced around all level of plays, because thereās no point to have unusable heroes or god-heroes in bronze, only to have balance in 0.000001% of the player base that plays OWL.
yawn. Still nothing intelligent to say I see. I guess that is what putting emotion over logic gets you.
Youāre like a Vulcan 
Itās hilarious. Please, never change!
If you havenāt seen the pictures, all 6 meta heroes are must pick in GM. So why is Hanzo the only one getting picked on?
Iām just curious how they nerf him.
They will just remove some arrows from storm arrows or reduce the damage. Iām guessing they will just take away an arrow or two from storm arrows at first.
The skill cap is irrelevant, GM players as a general group will use the hero that maximizes their odds to win, individual preferences aside. They might complain about being āforced,ā to use Brigitte, but nevertheless they are still generally picking her because she works. Most comp players are playing comp to win.
Hanzo requires less skill than Widowmaker at the moment, which youāre seeing a lot of complaints about, but they are still picking him. They are picking him because he is the optimal choice.
This is why pickrate is a good metric to measure things by, because generally speaking people will choose heroes they think will give them the best odds of winning. You obviously have to contextualize that with other data, as youāve stated, because there are heroes whose stats are inflated by the meta strategy that arenāt going to pull those kinds of things off outside of it.
Brigitte upsetting the balance dynamic was intentional, that is what all meta-defining heroes do. They do this by giving those heroes tools that help them combat some type of strategy, and that other heroes can then take advantage of to make their own strengths stronger and their weaknesses smaller problems. That doesnāt make the individual heroes that define the comp overpowered as individual heroes.
She did not have actual metrics that showed her as overpowered in her given role. When you combine her healing and her armor, she mitigated about as much damage as Mercy. A hero that is largely viewed as balanced.
She has less overall damage and elims than all of the DPS heroes and tanks. She only outperforms most of the supports, and even then Zenyatta outperforms her.
Her damage blocked is less than that of all the tanks capable of blocking damage.
The reason they are nerfing her is because they donāt want the meta she defines to be overly strong, and that starts with tuning down the meta defining hero. As an individual hero, Brigitte is not doing anything ridiculous, but the āBrigitte meta,ā IS overpowered and running other strategies besides it often results in a loss.
Thatās why they are taking their time with her, and that is why her nerfs havenāt been pushed through to live yet. They want to be careful not to over nerf because they know that her strengths are being amplified by other heroes, and itās not all on her.
Hanzo is classified by the game as a sniper. That is how he got the label. He has sniper damage, sniper range, and the game itself calls him a sniper.
His status in GM is not how it should be. The DPS heroes should have a smaller pickrate than the supports and tanks in a well balanced game because there are more DPS to choose from than healers and tanks. Thatās simple logic.
In addition, youād expect a hero that is balance shifting and mandatory for a meta to be picked the most often than the current most popular and synergy-benefiting DPS. Thatās because you require their kit to pull off the strategy, and the rest of your picks are built around maximizing what that hero brings to the table.
That Hanzo is still picked more than her despite all those odds stacked against him is an indication that heās overtuned and that is not merely that heās a beneficiary of the meta.
Tracer, for example, was not picked more than Zenyatta. Who was the mandatory support in the main tank+ support combo of dive. Likewise, Hanzo should not be getting picked more often than Brigitte.
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Go compare Hanzoās win rates for the last six months to his win rates for the last week.
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Much like Brig, Hanzo is on the OP side of things right now. A slight adjustment to the E should be where they look. If they change arrow speed (or mobility) heās going back down to D or F.
I donāt know how anyone could think he doesnāt need a nerf. Like I understand thereās a lot to like with the changes to him; no one is suggesting Storm Arrow or his arrow-speed boost should just go away completely. But heās now a problem from several angles.
Storm Arrows can 1-shot a squishy hero with Mercy Boost. Mercyās boost numbers were limited to 30% SPECIFICALLY because you could 1-shot people with stuff like McCree. Getting 1-shot by something an opponent fired 6 times into your team in the span of a second, something that is too fast to dodge in most cases, is a major problem, even if it required two heroes working together.
Storm Arrows also absolutely demolish tanks. This is basically the old Fan the Hammer problem, which resulted in a humongous nerf to the ability. Except Storm Arrow, in exchange for a small cooldown, can also headshot and is precise from much further away. Hanzo destroys tanks EVEN FASTER than something that was blatantly overpowered in the past.
Taken together, itās clear the damage needs to drop down to at least 75, possibly 70 if you donāt hate Tracer. It probably also needs a tighter limit on how fast you can unload all the arrows, or perhaps just a lower total number of arrows. His air-leap might also deserve a longer cooldown; as is heās completely overshadowing McCree and Soldier by having more mobility while also more consistent firepower.
It is perfectly relevant.
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Hanzo require factually more skill than Widowmaker. There is objective evidence to support this. Because his skill cap his higher, he provides a higher maximum potential and therefore the skilled players are able to reach this output. That called working as intended.
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Claiming that pick rate is a good metric to go by is the same as admitting that you do not understand how statistics work. I raise you āskewā.
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Brig did show metrics that supported hero being overpowered. She was a jack of all trades and her performance statistics were on the rise to meet many others in each role. Furthermore she completely disregarded the balance functionality of other heroes on a more permanent basis. Just as certain heroes are balanced in their ability to perform burst damage, by their lack of HP. She contradicted that reasoning.
So again, a High skill floor and High skill cap hero, in this case Hanzo, Should be out performing a low skill floor and therefore low skill cap hero in the higher skill groupings. That is working as intended. So again, there is no objective evidence to support Hanzo needs any change at all.
OWL is not even playing on the same version. Nerfed Brig and new Hanzo wonāt be in OWL for weeks if not months.
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I think most of us knew he would have some numbers retuned, similar to Brig, without seeing what OWL players say.
Thats a lot of words there.
You are working under a false assumption though that skill caps (nebulous to define) make up for balance considerations.
Its not ok for a game to have a hero out classing all otherās because of āskill capā.
Hanzo will eat a small nerf, just accept that its coming.
2 Likes
It is not a false assumption.
They do make up for balance considerations.
It doesnāt matter if you are okay or not. and there is zero evidence to support he will be getting any changes at the moment.
If low skill requirement heroes were performing with the same maximum potential as high skill heroes that means that the very existence of the latter is moot.
Think of it like input vs output.
What? Because Brigitte is totally a OWL high skill character right?
They have stopped balancing it around OWL the moment Tracer is considered a throw pick in situations, and they give Hanzo a FTH. What needs to be done is for it to be balanced around higher levels, like it was around S2-6, where the game was in its best state.
Honestly think about it. If you balance a character around the best of the best, the lower you go there shouldnāt be hard balancing issues and the good players will rise. Thatās why the good Widow players were mostly in masters and GM, the good Hanzoās were in that range as well.
They complained about the buffed Sombra before she even got to OWL and she got nerfed into worse state then pre-buff. Right now current OWL patch will have Brigitte but not the buffed Hanzo. So more then likely storm arrow Hanzo will get nerfs before he even goes to OWL.