I can’t believe you consider the wacky comps argument to be particularly compelling. At the very least you should try something new and see how people respond to it. Right now, Mystery is often fun, but occasionally frustrating as hell, and for no good reason.
“Broken” comps are only fun if you can counter pick them in some way. It doesn’t take much to completely skew a game in one team’s favor. Even a single competent Torb can be insanely difficult to deal with when you aren’t able to counter pick. Being torn apart for 10 minutes straight by an unkillable comp (worst I’ve seen: 2 Torbs, 2 Orisas, 2 Mercy) in Mystery is not fun.
Nobody on the losing side is laughing, and the winning team knows their win is cheap and unearned.
Hero stacking has never been fun, which you guys seem to have realized because you removed it from quickplay. Not all stacks break the game, but some of them do so to an incredibly harmful degree. You say people love broken comps. Those players have No Limits, they don’t need Mystery as well.
I almost exclusively play Mystery now. I don’t enjoy comp, quick, FFA or most arcade modes. I don’t play Mystery because I like wacky comps. I do it because it removes the ability of my teammates to only pick dps, thus allowing me to play something other than tank or support. Also importantly, the inability for people to willfully turn every game into a dps wankfest makes players significantly less toxic because they aren’t stressing over annoying picks.
I want a randomized mode that has some semblance of thought and care put into it other than “straight RNG and call it a day.” Mystery could be the flagship mode of the game if you would just build a bit of structure into it.
Hero stacking is bad.
Role stacking over 3 is bad.
Rolling the same character several times in a row is bad.
Killing someone who was almost impossible to kill, and them getting the same hero again despite there being 25 other heroes is bad.
The only two changes I would add to Mystery Heroes to make the mode perfect to me would be:
You can’t spawn as any hero in your team when you die. Dead players have their new hero selected at the moment of death, and that is considered when someone else dies. Eg, your team’s Mei died, then you died. You can respawn as Mei because the previous Mei now is “something else”.
If you died (in a non-suicidal way) before getting your ult, your next life have a bonus to ult charge. That bonus can be either keeping part of your ult charge on respawn (exact percentage TBD), or reducing the ult charge requirement until you charge it once (I don’t know if its feasible to return to normal ult charge after the first ult, or if you can only adjust that on respawn).
Jeff, I share your opinion but I am more on the side that the RNG is why the mode exists. Maybe I am weird but when I spawned to attack junkertown, and we couldn’t even leave our spawn because they had 3 Orisas, a Torb, a Lucio, and Mercy, I honestly couldn’t stop laughing. You just can’t have this much fun with team comps in any other mode, not even no limits
One simple change will make MH a lot more playable, while still keeping the mystery. Give “situational defense heroes” (Mei, Bastion, Torb, Sym) half the chance of coming up as everyone else. These heroes can be the most oppressive on defense, becoming almost impossible to deal with if there are multiples, while at the same time getting some of them on attack can make it a lot harder to win.
It keeps the mystery in mystery heroes , along with the chance at “broken” comps (4 bridgets 2 reins would be crazy), but it’ll cut down on things that are truly awful to deal with, like 4 Mei’s on defense.
Whacky comps are indeed super fun. Please keep it like this. It’s Arcade for a reason. There’s lot’s of other modes where people can play the more serious comps.
How about “Mystery Mayhem” (no rules much like total mayhem) and “Mystery heroes” where you adhere to quick play rules (you can’t land 6 bastions, only 1 at a time) this alone would make the mode more fun to play honestly. I’ve gone against 3 orissas 2 bastions on a payload, it was impossible to dislodge
There are two main issues with mystery heroes, and random comps aren’t either of those. One issue is a new one that should of been fixed when they rolled out the changes to MHs, the other one has been in MHs since the beginning and is the real reason random comps annoy people.
The first one which is smaller is from the change to heroes not changing from suicide, which allows people to kill themselves right before they die to keep their heroes. Many a time a group has all but a few enemies dead and the mercy from that group jumps a cliff to keep a healer, or Pharahs who are mid fight kill themselves, whether by accident or on purpose, keep the pharah while killing their target. It needs to be at the point any enemy damage will make them change on respawn.
The bigger issue is Ults. Due to how ults work you lose them on death. Without said ults breaking through BS comps is all but impossible, since a lot of the BS comps people have issues with are ones with high damage high kill potential characters like bastion or pharah. This gives a snowball effect where one team has all their ults in reserve for when the enemy team finally has a proper comp or even one really close to take out the BS ones. If in this mode at least you can have some ult kept in anyway a lot of the BS comps could within time be pushed through just like if they were used in quickplay or no limit.
The BS random comps might be frustrating but the ult issue is what compounds it to the point of insanity. If nothing else is changed but the Ult issue then it would still fix a lot of the problems felt in MHs.
Combine No Limit with Mystery Heroes, then do your ‘Slightly Balanced Mystery Heroes’ as randomized 2-2-2.
At some point, you have to embrace the use of ‘roles’ in the game. Put in big letters/graphics the words “SUPPORT”, “TANK”, and “DPS”. It can’t always be about the heroes. So people realize they were randomly assigned to SUPPORT first, and Zenyatta second. Just in case they hate Zenyatta. Subtle reinforcement is necessary.
Don’t kill the fun of the chaos. If I wanted guaranteed viable comps I would play other modes.
People need to learn to take an L especially meaningless L like Mystery Heroes. It’s a mode where you see how well you can flex under ever changing conditions.
I’ve gotten bad roles before where my team is all supports. If I we die we die. If we got 3 Bastions maybe we never re-take the point. But sometimes we get one or multiple counters and Bam things change. I like the crazy.
Only once in two years of playing this mode have I ever got all Mercy’s at spawn. We we’re cracking up on mic cause every time one of us died someone would Rez. Keep the madness of mystery heroes
I just want 1 hero limit…that is it. Yeah, it sucks when a team gets D.VA, Orisa, Winston, Mercy, Moira, Zen…but it has far more variety and flavor to the comp than 4 D.VA and 2 Moira. Have you ever had to deal with that nightmare???
You could introduce a version of Mystery Heroes where the same character can’t spawn twice and then do another variation like “MYSTERY HEROES: NO LIMITS” which would be what we already have.
I like Mystery Heroes as it is to a degree, but “whacky” comps are really only fun for the team that gets one. For the other team, it’s often a painful time-waster, worse than being stomped by a massively better team in Quick Play. And when it happens multiple times in a row, it can often be an Overwatch session ender, where you go play some other game instead.
On the balance, though, I enjoy Mystery Heroes more than any other mode, and such things are pretty rare. But it would be nice if they were even more rare, say, with Mystery Heroes being more likely, though not guaranteed, to avoid certain double-heroes or hard-to-break compositions.
So MH is how I learned the game. I love being able to hop around heroes, it is my second favorite arcade format (Mayhem is god and deserves to be evergreen as well).
I would love to see MH variants for various formats. MH Mayhem would be the absolutely most ridiculous and awesome thing ever. Relatedly, it would be a great variant for most other formats. Maybe not Deathmatch but I don’t like DM anyway (please put less of it in rotation??).
Mystery Heroes is my favorite mode and I hope they don’t change a thing. The problem is the unbalanced roster of 15 DPS, 6 Tank, 5 Healers in a game where a team needs a minimum of 1 tank and 1 healer to have any real chance. And seeing as how a 2-2-2 comp is the pseudo ideal, you can see where the issue lies.
We all see how the team with a Mercy has a massive advantage in Mystery Heroes for the simple reason that they are now the only team with reliable healing that any person can play well.
They need to stop adding any non-tank or non-healer characters for a long time… Years unfortunately. Unlikely though since they have a massive infatuation with flashy dps heros.
At least Brigitte is a good start. I see the game moving more towards these hybrid heros since it solves so many of the dps locking issues of the player base not wanting to work together with heroes that are one-trick dps ponies.
They need to not add another pure dps/defense hero that can’t also tank or heal for a very very long time.
Personally, the main thing I would want from Mystery Heroes is reduced chance of duplicate heroes. Three D.vas flying around the field can be fun but, anecdotally at least, happens too often; it would be more special if it were a rarity. My suggestion would be make the random hero-selecting algorithm repeat the process if it picks a hero that already exists on the team; if it picks the same hero a second time, then it can keep it. It makes it random enough without completely getting rid of duplicate heroes.