I was surprised to realize this hasn’t actually been a topic on the forums yet. How strong, in general, should ultimates be? Something you have to move around a corner for, or a real uphill battle like Genji’s blade?
Give me a number you think ultimate’s power level should be from 1 to 10. 1 being Ashe’s Bob or McCree’s deadeye, 10 being Genji’s blade or Ramrattra’s annihilation.
I kind of liked the way paladins did it (or at least when i played it) where ults felt more like regular abilities with long cooldowns. I guess the closest in my mind to that is Moira’s ult. It’s not exactly fight winning, and with the speed nerf, you can kill her pretty quickly if she’s too careless.
i feel like it should scale, directly with how long it takes to charge. if it takes two minutes of shooting straight to charge have a 10, if you can get it halfway through the first fight like coalescence have a 1
I don’t think it should be an absolute value, I think the strength of a character’s ultimate should depend on a number of factors. For example, how strong the character’s base kit is, or as an incentive to do healing (since healing is an easier source of ult charge than dealing damage, generally speaking).
Honestly it should depend on the hero. There are a few characters that have base kits that are pretty strong throughout an entire match. So some don’t need huge power in their ults to get value. I think the team does try to do this.
Ideally I’d rather have all heroes with strong base kits, and ults should just be “stronger abilities on a long cooldown”. But that would require pretty sweeping changes on some heroes.
i dont think ultimate’s should be a stable equal value from hero to hero. if tracer had an ult as good as sigmas she would be the most broken hero in the game, but if everyone had an ult as bad as cassidy’s the game would be so boring
It should be dependent on the hero’s kit.
A weak or middling kit should have a stronger Ult then a really solid or jam packed with value kit should.
Like if x hero has a great ult, but they’re kinda mid or ignorable until they build it, meanwhile y has a pretty awful ult but a 8-15/10 base kit to build it with they kinda balance each other out. You have a great ult, but your average fight is going to be more difficult or uncomfortable or you can have an extremely solid moment to moment kit but you have an ult that is kinda whatever. A player can chose which playstyle they need, maybe their team keeps stalling out right before they could win a fight so going for a better ult to finish the fight with would be beneficial, on the other hand maybe they need more of their power available at all times to get through a fight so having a solid kit is more valuable.
If every ult has the same value you don’t have that layer of weighing a better ult vs a worse one, so I think standardizing all ults to the same power level is a bad idea.
Powerful enough to turn around an encounter that’s going south. That’s the whole point.
And in combination powerful enough to provide only a slim chance of losing the encounter.
Not all of them achieve this for sure. For example, ball’s ult these days is garbage.