Traveling at full speed while grapple hook is active will now start to disintegrate the hook, this is visually apparent as the grapple turns red.
If Ball remains hooked in place & travelling at full speed for 5 seconds, the grapple hook snaps. Timer resets upon not moving at full speed while grappling for 2.5 seconds, you will see the grapple hook “cool down” and return to normal color. This allows Ball to grapple to ceilings or walls for an infinite duration so long as he isn’t constantly spinning, allowing pendulum swings and pre-setup for initiations, allows him to survive off ledges as he did before, and doesn’t remove too many (if any) other techs/strats he has at his disposal, but does drastically reduce the effectiveness of spinning around on point. There are now also extra voicelines for when grapple hook snaps due to overheating giving enemies an audio cue that grapple is on cooldown.
Your thoughts? Maybe the math isn’t perfect but I feel like 5 seconds of full speed spinning is a long time & 2.5 seconds is a good amount of time to cool off, instead of Hammond just not being able to grapple for more than 6 seconds regardless of speed with no indicator besides an internal clock like it is now.
Hanging from a wall or ceiling waiting to initiate on unsuspecting enemies. Pendulum swinging. Using grapple for movement outside of combat/spinning on point.
Wouldn’t it be possible to just slow down slightly to reset the timer before speeding back up again? I think a better option would be to check if he was in combat or on the objective for 5+ seconds instead.
Yes it would, but 2.5 seconds should be more than enough time for a team to do something about Ball since he isn’t travelling so fast. If Ball doesn’t totally slow down for that full duration of 2.5 seconds they’re going to snap their grapple.
Combat means just getting hit in the past 6 seconds. I’m not convinced a Ball shouldn’t be able to maintain grapple if 1 stray bullet hits them while grappled. I also don’t think Ball shouldn’t be able to hang above a point as long as he isn’t swinging full speed. Spin2win is the issue, not so much being able to grapple for long periods of time for other reasons
Wow that’s actually way better fix for the issue because it doesn’t kill him off ledges, prevent trying out a messed up rollout again and if you have a spin spot where you’re not stalling but using the spin for AoE damage you can sit on the spot for a while to reset it. Also it has the visual indicator for everyone. Quite the 5/5 idea for the ability. Couldn’t have had a better idea myself sheesh
Here are my thoughts on this, since they there are SO many topics on this they get buried.
What if instead of grapple being a one use ability, it functioned more like pharahs flight (with the fuel being like gas on ODS gear.)
So you have a “fuel” gauge and you can always launch and retract the grapple with no cooldown, but the longer it is out it runs out of fuel and disengages. That way you can use it for mobility, but if you try to hold, it will run out and release. Once its not being used up it fills up with fuel again, just like Pharah.
Remove the grapple cooldown time so that you are limited to 6 seconds but can regrapple right away again. This makes spin to win much harder to accomplish since you would have to aim and regrapple while dealing with the other team.
Treat ball like his mortal enemies Mei or Sombra. Put him exactly as he was before months ago… no nerfs at all. but make him like Mei in Ice Block or Sombra in invisible mode where they cannot cap the point until they come out spinning fireball mode.
Make the grapple time 15 seconds so that you can spin some (and for crying out loud, provide a timer), but not stay permanently.
I’ll shamelessly plug my own solution because I think it’s even less impactful on his gameplay (this one still could ruin some of the more complicated swinging rollouts)
This would make it even more broke on experienced Ball players, allowing them to quickly do huge damage by restarting their speed (even with single grapple use they can do a double, sometimes triple boop)
Since there’s a “cooldown” after you restart capping, it would be possible to get out of fireball and restart it to keep the stall.
This would better align ball for what everyone wanted him to be and require a decent level of needed experience to master. Not saying it is the ideal solution, it could be altered in decreasing firewall damage somewhat. Honestly how much more or less damaging is a speeding hamster than a bullet.
Point 2:
Honestly if you are spinning on a point and not capping it, you will die pretty quick. But if you must have something you could have a cooloff before starting fireball mode again.
I think one thing that all of the options need to remember is that Ball still needs to be fun to play but not OP. If he does no damage or everything is overly restrictive. People just wont play him… That may be what some people want, but I doubt that is what everyone wants.
There are equally annoying aspects in Overwatch that still exist… Camping bastions, Pharmercy, etc.
Would be a way better option and easier to implement in the current state. “In combat” can be considered just like it happens with Torb’s turret, where you can’t redeploy it if it attacked/was attacked in a few seconds.
I think that could work depending on a few things, that I can already see people screaming about.
I think the grapple breaks 6 seconds in combat is good, but NO time limit outside of compat, or it could be 6 seconds in combat on a point idk. If the other nerfs are reverted like the spawn grapple cooldown.
Some have mentioned have it be a destructible object. It DEFINTELY depends on the size of the hitbox of the grapple. If it is too small people will complain. If it is the size of Hammond, it will be a easy target. It should require a fair amount of hitscan or damage to break
People will always complain about stuff. The change affects spin2win which is a problem mostly in the lower ranks, that are the ones that also would miss the infinite time for some tricks and getting back (I’m pretty sure in high ranks instead of hanging around you’d be scouting the enemy and if you grapple out of the map and won’t likely get back in 6 seconds you’d just reset).
Although spawn cooldown annoys me too, I think overall it’s healthier.
Now having the hook be a destructible object… Arguably if you can quick shoot the hook to stop the movement you could just directly shoot him down so he will have less chance to escape.
Shouldn’t all heroes have spawn cooldown resets when leaving spawn. If that is the case for Wrecking Ball. Then shouldn’t if affect all heroes manuverability… No more Lucio Speed, No Soldier Run, No Pharah flight, No Sombra invisibility, etc. Not that I want that to happen, but it is a imbalanced mechanic.
Not that much since Ball rolling without grapple is as fast (maybe faster?) than Soldier running, stealth Sombra. Pharah doesn’t have enough mobility for a stall maneuver. Lúcio’s amp it up maybe for sake of being fair could be put in a smaller cooldown (since I don’t think anyone would be using amped heal in the first 3 seconds of leaving spawn or so). Smaller cooldown mostly because it does require a lot more of technique for a proper stall rollout with Lúcio than with Ball.