How About We Don't Talk Balance In Terms of 1v1 and Lose Our Minds

So I’ve given in and returned to the forums after over a year of peace and tranquility, and I decided I’d post a critique about the thing that seems the most broken about forum posting. (Yes, I know, it’s the forums, and nobody cares. I’m well aware, but I enjoy writing so I’m having fun either way) :wink:

Why do the VAST majority of balance discussions happen in terms of 1 v 1 matchups? “Feels bad to play tank because X Y and Z character eat my lunch.” Yes, yes they do. And they will continue to eat your lunch 1 v 1 all day long because that’s how the game works… Except, it’s not. The game is not 12 people going 1 v 1 in 6 individual cage fights. It’s 12 people going 6 v 6 in one brawl. That’s the game. That how things get balanced (incorrectly sometimes, YUP, but that’s the paradigm around how they are balanced).

So, when somebody says Mei beats up on tanks, she’s OP. Reaper is too strong against tanks, feels bad… Yes, but the point is if you run a Reaper or a Mei you are instantly at a disadvantage against a Ashe, or McCree, or Hanzo, or Pharah. Yes, you will get skunked as Winston against Reaper, but to act like the goal of balance is to make that matchup 1 v 1 less lopsided is a non-starter.

I like talking balance, it’s fun, but let’s at least discuss it in the proper context of the game.

Peace out!

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Hmm, some characters are specifically looking for 1v1s though. In the old days “flanking” was a legitimate playstyle that was played even by heroes not capable of one shotting their enemies.

That’s one reason why Moira got nerfed I assume. Whilst a flanker like Genji used to actually flank, in modern times his job is to throw shurikens from afar until he can press q to win because frankly he struggles to kill healers in a 1v1.

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True, but the net effect of every possible character on your team has to be taken into account when you talk “balance.” So yes, Genji isn’t as quick a finisher as Reaper for example, but he has supreme mobility and a small hitbox. So Genji’s attack should be weaker than say a Reaper because it can be dealt from further, he’s harder to hit, and has more constantly available mobility.

If I’m playing a team game, it is easier for my team to target a Reaper than a Genji because of the items stated above. Pharah for example isn’t nearly the counter against Genji that she is against Reaper.

Moira is a backline anti-flank what wouldnt be a problem if there wouldnt be more anti-flankers like Mei and Roadhog already.

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because it only takes 1 player to counter a dps

and it sometimes only takes 1 player to punish a tank or healer who is out of position and they don’t think that is fair even though they are by far less vulnerable than dps players

That’s sort of a yes and no situation I think. Fundamentally damage output needs to be sufficient to validate a hero choice. Nobody would pick a hero that does no damage even if they were impossible to hit.

Genji has an awful damage output, and is specifically balanced around his dueling capability. This is because his mobility allows him to engage in duels. He is not a hero who can stand in the frontline and be effective. As his dueling capabilities are now mediocre to bad against his intended targets, he is now exclusively run in environments where he can press q to win.

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I would argue that as long as a character has utility they don’t need damage. I would play an impossible to hit character as long as they had any positive use at all.

Genji’s damage output is relatively unchanged since release isn’t it? I don’t remember his shirkins having too many changes made to them… I don’t think any of his “targets” have had HP buffs either so his TTK should be relatively unchanged. He’s always been a harasser not an assassin.

True, utility adds to it. The overall output has to be good enough.

And, literally every post-launch support is far less duelable for Genji than a launch support, and every launch support has been buffed in that duel. Also Genji has lost 30 damage from his main combo.

Reaper arguments are not happening in a vacuum. The fact that there’s 2 players in that lobby with little counterplay alternatives should be enough for this non-sense hard counter to cease existing. And guess what, those two masochists can’t switch to counter.

And let’s assume you got into a lobby with a great team, everyone on voice chat and willing to work together and sing kumbaya as if it were Woodstock after hours, everyone magically agrees they need to deal with Reaper. You need to switch your tank line, so right off the bat Reaper might have forced up to 2 swaps. Those swaps are limited in number, map dependent and work very poorly without their paired up synergies, so you wanna play a MT with an off tank, and then you want that MT to have synergy with your off tank, like Rein/Zarya, Orisa/Hog, Winston/Dva, Rein/Hog ain’t gonna work out too well, but then there’s also map consideration, probably not he best idea to play Rein in Well, for instance. But okay, Overwatch is a amazingly mature and not-toxic community at all, your team isn’t comprised of random internet pricks who could bicker about the colour of the sky and they all agreed to follow a plan, whichever plan that happened to be.

Nice, your tank line switched to work around or flat out counter Reaper… Great! Though, it’s hard to work Rein/Zarya without a Lucio, and hopefully you have a Moira for Orisa/Sigma, or maybe you thought spread out mobile tanks where the best, thus you need Mercy for Ball/Winston, right? So now you’re switching up to two more slots, for a total of up to 4, to counter 1 Reaper.

And remember, that’s a best case scenario, where no one was listening to music instead of joining VC, your support line was open to switch, your tank partner was happy to work together.

But wait, there’s more! Is Reaper map dependent? No. Does he favour any specific support synergy? No. Does he need a strong pocket or any otherwise unusual amount of resources from his team? No. Does he prefer a certain tank line? No. He works day and night, 24/7, literally gives no forks about the composition and knows for sure that there will be 2 tanks in the other team he is countering.

The result of all that mind boggling lack of freedom is partially why DPS have such long queue times. Why would you choose to put yourself in this castrating, extremely disempowering situation while playing a game?? No way, rather just pick DPS and avoid all that.

That’s why Reaper is a problem even if one considers him balanced, which I propose he isn’t thanks to his 3-3 buffs and the 2-2-2 lock. His job, to counter the category, is a design problem as well as a balance one, the same way Brigitte hard countering an entire composition (OG dive) wasn’t healthy, Reaper isn’t either.

He need a nerf to his life steal ASAP and the armor nerf that buffed his damage 14% against armor needs to go. Tanks should not be free kills for Reaper same way Tracer shouldn’t be for Brigitte. This community got all rilled up about hard counters when a support deleted the DPS category, now it’s happening again, it is not okay just because it’s tanks, particularly if you wanna better queue times.

I am not making a tl;dr.

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Wowzer! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

  1. Yes, a large portion of the player base isn’t playing the game correctly, isn’t trying, isn’t communicating, etc, but that shouldn’t effect balance decisions. The game shouldn’t be balanced incorrectly just because people are often incompetent.

  2. You don’t need all that to counter Reaper, all you need is one of your DPS to pay attention and be half-way competent. Reaper comes in, (must be in easy to aim at range to do damage) your Rein fire-strikes, swings, and your McCree hits one body shot. Reaper is at less than 50HP any any additional damage deletes him. No tank switch, no complex communication, simply two players looking out for their own survival. If they don’t then Reaper kills Rein. If you want Reaper weaker, then he’ll never kill anything without help like he did for 12 months+ back in the day.

They are competent enough to play Reaper in 2-2-2.

And thus the queue times problem and why hard category counters are bad. “All you need is one DPS”, so I will queue as that and we should all enjoy those awesome queue times!

Maybe I’m short-sighted, that’s possible, but I rarely see games, at least in competitive, come down to one player picking a character. Yes, I see them come down to one player picking a character and then nobody reacting correctly and thus making the game much harder, but that’s the players fault and not inherently the balancing of the game.

You are right, that Reaper in his current state does force people’s hand and require something to overcome, but I guess I don’t see that as an intrinsic problem. I see the strategy to counter that as the heart of the game.

If I pick Pharah and get good healing, and the opposing team picks Junk and Reaper, we have a higher chance of winning then if they switch to McCree and Widow. If they switch to McCree and Widow they have the edge, but my team can negate that edge by going Winston and Soldier etc.

Is it frustrating when nobody makes the switch and you slog through a game where your team is fighting an up-hill battle the whole time, yeah, yeah it is, but for me that isn’t because of Reaper being strong, it’s because of people’s ability to strategize on the fly being weak.

Hit me up if you want to play comp sometime. Can always use people to play with who understand the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and how to adjust.

So what you’re saying is you want genji to kill all the healers with his normal self, then on top of that press q to win?

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It’s fine if you force a counter, but there is no counter for Reaper for any single person for 4 out of 6 people in a team.

You have to luck out your DPS can - and is willing to - deal with Reaper.

If you’re out of luck, it takes a disproportional amount of effort from 2/3 of the team to deal with 1/6 of the enemy. That enemy was 100% guaranteed value because either he gets countered and just forced a bunch of swaps and resources out (without needing any special resource or swap himself) or he gets value hard countering the stubborn team. It’s value even when countered.

It’s broken and cannot remain as he is. He needs to be toned down to the point where he should need more help from his team to work, a Mercy pocket, Lucio speed, Discord, Harmony, DM cover, anything, and doesn’t leave 66% of all players in a lobby at the hands of the other 33%.

There’s zero skill, mechanical or of any type, in lucking out that your DPS can deal with Reaper.

Flattered, I’m on SA server though, ping is prohibitive to any other server for me.

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How about we actually do. Because at the end of the day no matter how much a game wants people to play as a team real teamplay happens ONLY when everybody in the team know eachother and are consistently communicating. Yet you see 80% of players playing solo not in a group with anybody be it quickplay, arcade or comp. And 99% of these solo players do not communicate in any way (it’s better in comp obviously but only in diamond will you meet people who can communicate propelry AND play as a team. In every rank bellow it’s usually only one or the other. Or none.).

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In the past the games ebbed and flowed completely differently. I’m not sure what the difference is but the overall mobility of all characters in the game result in pretty much a constant ‘out of sync’ problem - top it all off with a general disinterest from the majority of the player base to really pay attention to their team and just do what they think needs to be done, rather than - watching where their tank goes and following - the overall community’s playstyle is just… Different now.

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Honestly it’s a big design issue. Some characters are more independent then others and are able to get away with not working with the team while still being effective, these are usually the more popular characters. If all characters were team dependent then I’m sure this would be a very different game.

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Sounds like we’ve come back to the same thing. The players are the problem, not the only problem certainly, but a problem that Blizzard can’t fix even if they want to.

Mozts, you are correct that Reaper has a low floor at the moment and unless you have a higher skilled player available to counter him with Pharah or an attentive hit-scan he can run rough-shod over tanks like a knife through butter. That said, I think this is even worse because the tank roster is so dull and doesn’t offer enough utility within its own ranks. If you had three Zarya like tanks with defensive utility outside of a direct shield I think Reaper (even in his current state) would be less of an issue.

Akira, I have to disagree, because the game is still one of the best out there IMO when people play it “correctly” as a team, and I don’t want to give up that possibility just to make the game more like every other shooter where lone-wolfing has almost the same feel as playing with a team.

Carver - Yup, even finding one good player to group with can make a difference.

It’s because Blizzard put too much arbitrary restrictions on classes that make it unfun when another has a massive advantage. Reaper vs tanks, Supports vs Flankers. In the beginning it fed this mentality of 1v1 because Reaper just steamrolled diving winstons, and Genji/Tracer ran rampant on supports who needed to rely on randoms to play the game. Not to mention if something was favored to kill you you would have to coerce people into playing together and that isn’t a healthy gameplay experience.

Because of that it has fed this “I’m X hero, therefore I should win 1v1”. The game has been shifting away form this “Team reliant/Depend on 5 others to play game” tier balance with several hero releases.

The balance should go like this…introduce a Tank/support/DPS hero that introduces new mechanics, utility, and synergy and release a different hero that counters that utility in a different class.

For example. There should have been a self sustain, hitscan DPS that can burn through barriers quickly to deal with Sigma’s synergy, that’s weak to other existing heroes.

This way we can always run viable comps and have it anchored around certain hero picks.

ANother example - Dive should roll Double Barrier and immobile/no CC healer comps, but should not be favored over Deathball/Brig comps.

P.S. - I’d also add that reverting nerfs on “meta anchor” heroes would also give us variety, Namely Hog, D.va, Brig and Zarya. To a lesser extent Junk and Sym.

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They did have answers. But when answers exist outside of DPS, DPS players cry that tank and supports aren’t free kills.

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