There’s no way to overstate this, hitscan characters in Overwatch are too accessible and too powerful in the game, as it stands currently. I’m a masters (3500-3700) hitscan player, mostly Widow, Cree, and Soldier. I am in the top 1% of Kovaak’s players in the world, and have very little gamesense, or game knowledge and yet I’m in the top 2% of the playerbase of the game.
This game is meant to be a combination of MOBA elements, FPS mechanics, and team based strategy. Hitscans are singlehandedly capable of ignoring both MOBA elements, and team based strategy by simply hitting shots. Ordinarily this would be fine, given that with minimal team play, or gamesense you SHOULDN’T be able to succeed in this game. Unfortunately this is not the case.
When I first played Paladins, the first thing I noticed about high level play was the sheer amount of snipers being picked in practically every game. (I was also very high rated in Paladins for the exact same reasons as OW) The game, and its speed --or lack thereof-- meant that connecting crits was exceptionally easy for a player who had any level of mechanical prowess. This is an easy pitfall to land in, Paladins and its dev team had intentionally slowed the game down to give incentive to team play and thoughtful decision-making. They solved the problem by essentially nerfing the powerlevel of snipers and slowly increasing the speed of the game.
I haven’t played Paladins in many months, and have since dedicated a number of hours to OW instead. I had only played this game on Xbox since release and was a little underwhelmed at first. Upon picking it up on PC and putting some time into it, I was pleasantly surprised by the gameplay. It was much faster than Paladins, more mechanically intensive, and seemed to have a lot more of an active community. (that last bit was what really killed Paladins for me, I couldn’t be bothered to sit in a 40 minute queue for a 15 minute game)
However upon dedicating many hours to competitive I realized why I was having so much fun playing the game. I was simply playing a deathmatch game with practically no teamplay and exceptionally little MOBA mechanics. After playing Quake for many years, I’d like to say that my awareness and aim are my two strongest attriutes, and I was able to easily adjust to the slower engine of OW. Given that those were my two strongest suites, I was immediately drawn to Widow, Soldier, and Cree. By effectively three-tricking those hero’s, I had placed 3300 and was climbing with relative ease.
By the time I had hit 3900 I realized just how little I knew about the game, my teammates were discussing which hero picks were most viable, which positions to hold, etc… Me, however, I would just camp highground and click heads. I didn’t care if we had double off heal, dive, two hitscans, I just ignored my team and shot the enemies.
Over the past year or so I’ve put hundreds of hours in the game, and as much as I enjoy my playstyle and the spoils of it, I cannot deny that what I do is not in the spirit of the game. I should NOT be able to carry games by simply clicking heads, I should NOT be able to camp highgrounds and ignore my team, and i should NOT be able to carry games with my current playstyle.
CSGO, R6, and Valorant are games I’ve invested many hours in. Those games are fundamentally different from OW in one very specific way. They maintain their emphasis on aim WITHOUT over-rewarding braindead play. I peaked global in CS after many YEARS of studying the game, learning nades and trying my best to understand the game at a high level. The same can be said about R6 and Valorant, in both there’s a substantial emphasis on mechanical skill, but no player can simply carry games without a fundamental understanding of how the games MEANT to be played.
All this to say one thing. Hitscans are capable of over-riding the nature of Overwatch uninhibited. I’ve only dropped to 3500 one time in my career playing this game, and it was during the fabled “double shield” meta for obvious reasons. Other than that, I’ve only gained SR by being more mechanically talented than my opponents, and that’s not ok.
To nerf hitscans, there’s many options but none of them are reasonable. The first is to make them less accessible; increasing the speed of the game, giving them less reward for their relatively low risk, or to give them MORE incentive to play around their teammates and use their abilities in tandem with their colleagues. The other option is to give hitscans more competition; allowing projectiles to be used more consistently RATHER than where they are currently --which is just spam more than skill–, or to simply nerf the raw dps of hitscan characters in favor of a more utility based kit. Unfortunately those options are all flawed in some way that would undermine the goals set out by blizzard, and none of them are really an option. I cannot think of a single solution that would A) make hitscans less powerful, and B) not make hitscans unplayable. Blizzard is treading toward a Paladins-esque future, where the community is more consistent at hitting skillshots than the game was designed for.