Niche vs generalist. This has been explained many times. Niche heroes will rarely be meta and if they are it wont be as often as generalists will be. This isn’t something that will ever change and isn’t something that is wrong with the game. Its working as intended.
Its the design of certain heroes that keeps them from being popular picks not their damage numbers.
Blizzard designed the heroes this way and they have their use, they are just not to be 1 tricked and played all the time. Blizzard has literally stated this.
Why this is confusing or people still dont get this is crazy to me.
Your mistake is assuming that people don’t understand this. They do. A lot of them just want heroes they dislike to be underpowered so they never need to deal with them.
OWL pros are good enough to play the generalist well enough to not be bothered by using a niche gimmick pick.
They can play a generalist at god like levels that they dont lose much at all from not playing a niche hero in their niche. And they gain more than they lose by not playing a gimmick hero.
In a super completive environment , consistency is always better than RNG spam you get from some of the niche heroes. Even if you dont rely on RNG spam, you cant be as consistent with niche heroes than the generalists.
And using OWL is not a realistic environment. As most of the player base are not OWL players or close to it.
So you’ll have people that cant aim, or not good enough consistently, so they gravitate towards these niche heroes that are not very mechanically intensive.
So FOR THEM , niche heroes perform better in their niches, because they cannot play a generalist good enough to make them better than niche heroes in their environment.
So they have their uses, but not so much at the very top elite 1% OWL player base.
The longer the range the projectiles are shot from, there can be more than 1 projectile in the air at once.
That’s how the enemies behind the ones that are targeted, are often the ones to get killed much more frequently, than the actual targets that stand in the front.
Because the targeted enemy often dodges the shots, thinking that they have no teammates behind or near them.
And you can’t deny that most players that play a projectile hero, are often firing from a long range position, when you think about any map you may have encountered them in.
Whether it’s a Torb, Junkrat, Pharah, or Symmetra, they are often seen spamming from that mid to long range, more than spamming from close range for an “easier” chance of successful hits for a reason.
The longer the range projectiles are shot from, the safer it is to spam from & high chance to force enemies to change positions, due to the high spam of zoning a single area out & the frequency of kills somehow occurring from that long range spamming.
So basically, you want niche heroes not to be strong enough that they are the better choices in their niche.
That isn’t how it works, the niche heroes in the hands of a pro player should be total killers in their hands.
Would you field the Niche experts all the time? nope, but you would have them, because they would give you a massive advantage when their niche comes up.
No? Generalists should be so strong, and the niche heroes so bad even in their niche they are not played at the top levels?
A shotgun user not being able to snipe is not a design issue.
Unless you’re trying to say that Reaper can’t contest from a long distance being a problem, due to the nature of shotguns, that would be a fair statement to make.
But because of his good design, that was never an issue, due to his ability to close distances on enemies from far away & have a way to survive shots at close range, despite his slow walking speed.
(And that self healing from dealing damage, adding to his survivability in close range fights.)
Reaper is one of the best designed characters in the game.
He was underperforming in his original version, due to no self healing during the fights, but all the tweaks & buffs he got since the beginning, he has become the best designed hero.
It was an example. That Reaper is a close range hero with 2 shotguns. Meaning he wasnt designed to be strong from 100 meters away.
The reason i made that example is because players that want buffs for Junk for example, want Junk to be good against every hero, close or far away. Without understanding that he wasn’t designed to be good at all ranges.
And I get that they want him to be strong in his niche which is close range, and HE IS.
Any Junkrat player has a huge advantage in close range.
You fight a Junk lets say in that room with the mega on Anubis, you will lose more than not if you go against a good Junk.
Being strong in a specific niche does NOT mean that they automatically win 100% of all fights in their niche.
This is what it seems people want for heroes like Junk when they say they should be very strong in their niche.
Players should be able to play any hero well enough to win fights even in another heroes niche.
That should all depend on the skill of the player controlling whatever hero.
As that is good game design. A players skill trumps everything else.
GOATS is another can of worms.
And no DPS hero was effective vs that cancer comp. Not just Junk and Reaper but non of the dps heroes were of any use against endless sustain, endless barriers, endless anti-death abilities, and endless ultimates.
You think any DPS hero stood a chance of doing damage when all 12 ultimates on both sides would go off and no one would die most of the time.
Right, because the niche heroes were not good at their niche.
Junkrat should have been having a field day. You should have put in your anti close up death ball niche DPS and let them rip it a new one.
But those are heroes like Junkrat. Literally every time their niche comes up, they are not strong enough to be involved.
Like, having strong Niche heroes is your answer to Meta’s getting out of hand. If they were actually legitimately good. People would pick em, and pull the comp apart.
You would have a naturally rotating comp, because the niche heroes would be outstanding at putting an end to a more static one.
The fact we end up in long term meta’s is because we don’t have strong niche heroes.
What part of NO dps heroes were good at doing anything against goats dont you get. You are using an extreme example that makes no sense in what you are trying to prove.
Thats like saying , why cant a professional weightlifter lift a full grown elephant?
If its the weight lifters job to be strong.
Literally no human can lift an full grown elephant. This isn’t the issue of the weight lifter. Its the ridiculous scenario they were put into.
OH NOES the generalists were not good enough to be fielded, that means NO DPS should have been strong enough.
Lets take this example.
You would send a crane to lift the elephant, but you want your generalist athlete to be the only answer.
Not even, We should send in a weightlifter to the weightlifting contest, but, “eh that is a niche thing, we should be able to send our regular track and field guys there, and do well”
Coz every other game is not more or less hitscan? Especially the popular ones, some might claim “bullet drop-off”, but the scope of that is rather limited. Apex hitscan, Warzone hitscan, CSGO hitscan, valor and hitscan, RB6S hitscan.
“I do not like it so change it!” Is also a terrible argument. Evidently since there is no evidence for the requirement of such ch ages outside of some at this point quite annoying personal bias. As these forums are kept being spammed by these meaningless posts.
I’ve played Unreal tournament. Hitscan being a highly played thing is a new development. Also you have games like apex pushing back on that.
Historically FPS almost always was projectiles.
Good thing I am not making that argument. My argument is niche heroes should be really good in their niches.
Yes, you should see generic hitscan being played, as filler in OWL, but mostly when it comes to hitscan it should be mostly widow. She has a niche, and she should be good at it.
For Deathballs, you should see a lot of Junkrat, Mei, Reaper.
For games where people are pushing a lot of flankers, you should see a lot of Torb being fielded.
But we don’t in OWL, the generalists are better in the niche heroes niches than the niches heroes are.
But if we do look at the niche of specific heroes like Junkrat & Symmetra, for example, we need to pay close attention to what exactly their niche is.
Originally, their kit designs were really good in the start of Overwatch, when the speed of the game was super slow, across the board.
Their kits were on par with other heroes to an extent, when it came to the uptime of utilizing their kits, respectively.
And despite the slow moving projectiles, I used to be able to snipe Pharahs out from the sky as them, back in the 1st year of OW.
But as time passed, the fluidity of playing each hero gradually increased, causing the speed of fights to move faster & faster, up to a certain point.
So if we look at the kits of Junkrat & Sym, we start to notice that the old, slower speed of matches that they used to really shine in, doesn’t work as well with their kits as they once did.
Like the devs mentioned in that recent Beta blog post, increasing the fire rate for Junkrat would remove the feeling of firing a grenade launcher.
And for Sym. Well.
She just needs a completely replaced kit, overall.
I’m tired of them just rehashing & rotating the same 3 abilities into different keybinds, giving them different cooldowns & tweaking a bit of the numbers, and calling it a day.
Since the Sym 1.0 days, up to the current Sym 3.1 version, her kit was designed for high consistent close range damage & high inconsistent long range damage, for a passive support playstyle.
Sure, they increased her full charged Orb to be the same as Pharah’s rocket, but the charge time between each shot at range are often quickly healed up by the enemy team, compared to Pharah just consistently firing away her shots.
So yeah. I agree that for these two, the design is pretty bad, but only because their updated versions were never changed to properly accommodate the increased speed of the fights.
They were designed for a slower & methodical playstyle & slow isn’t going to happen anytime soon, despite attempts to increasing the speed of their projectiles.
The Reaper & Torb updates were elegant changes & buffs, where they can have an increased uptime of fully utilizing their entire kits.
History has nothing to do with the current tends in the market and design of this game is rather unrelated to it as well. It is not a sequel to unreal, half life or quake.
Maybe not, but it is essentially what any argument here is that wants changes to hitscans. Accept it or not, there is no objective need for change nor should the creators of the game compromise their design philosophy for a obvious minority to implement such changes either.
The fundamentals of the game in regards to hitscan/projectile have not changed since release so if it does not fit one’s taste the obvious question is, why are you still here playing 6 years later? Or at lest complaining.