In terms of damage, his current viability is ok. Not the best but certainly not the worst.
His dueling potential has gone way down and he feels like a$$ to play but Hanzo can still throw out more than enough damage to secure kills.
The reason why he is such a stupendously bad pick at the moment is because he has basically no method of surviving any sort of focus fire or dive.
Since time memorial, back to the Scatter days, Hanzo survived by essentially punishing the diver for miscalculating. If the diver wasnāt 100% sure they could secure the kill on Hanzo, they were get nuked by some of the highest burst damage in the game.
Hanzo still operates the same. If you donāt kill Hanzo within the first couple of seconds of diving in, you would get melted by Storm arrows.
This dynamic is now completely broken.
Any sort of dive on Hanzo results in a dead Hanzo. Even if you are skilled enough to land the headshot, it is not enough. Dive characters like Genji and venture do not care.
They can burst you down with their abilities, knowing that you have less hp than them and literally zero method of escape.
In my 8yrs of playing this game, I have never felt so hard countered.
I definitely understand how you feel, the only strategy I have found to make Hanzo somewhat functional is playing him like a rat. It isnāt fun but you die less and at least can provide value to your team.
Iāll be honest though, I find myself not wanting to play.
I actually started dabbling in playing support. I have been pretty much a hardcore DPS player since the game has released.
All Iāll say is jesus supports are a lot more fun to play than I remember. They also seem really strong. I mainly played Illari , Bap and Kiriko. There dueling potential was INSANE.
I loved it tbh, my DPS tendencies got in the way with probably focusing a little too much on damage but it was actually fun.
I still donāt understand why they nerfed his ultimate of all things. Literally nobody once has ever complained about his ult at any point in time.
It was fine, in fact actually pretty weak if it wasnāt comboād with things, mostly just used to zone. Now it canāt zone well because they made it faster, and itās kill potential alone is still trash. Itās flat out worse in every single way.
Iād say itās the worst ult in the entire game.
That is because the devs blatantly donāt understand Hanzo. There is a 90% chance that they thought it was a buff.
It is not even surprising to be honest, looking at half the balance changes the devs make, it feels more like a stab in the dark than fine tuning with deep understanding of their own game.
And then they claim they ālisten to feedbackā and ālook at the forumsā, and literally everyone that plays Hanzo here and on twitter keeps saying the ult change was a nerf and complete garbage, and they justā¦ wonāt change it back.
They just donāt care.
Sadly heroes that donāt have a vocal playerbase to speak for them are left to the whims of the devs, which 99% of the time donāt understand the hero they are balancing.
He already was kinda throw pick ever since season 9. Now heās definitely throw pick cuz all your need to do is to not have a whole team of 1 tank and 4 <225hp heroes and heās basically cooked.
im noticing i can win 1v1ās against hanzo with heros I used to avoid him like the plague with he is really a free pick. once storm arrow has been used heās literally a wet rag its crazy
Hanzo became a throw pick when they took away his one shot on āmediumā classes. At that point, the risk of running a tricky character simply isnāt worth the reward. Yeah, he can spam some damage, but so can Torb.
Well he isnāt hitscan nor he is absurd mobility hero so by definiton he is throwpick in this game.
Btw: ashe requries the same number of shots to kill hanzo as he does to kill her (1 head + 1 body, or 3 body), despite her having nearly 3 times the shot speed and being hitscan
