I’m making a huge mistake thinking I’m anywhere qualified to make this kind of post- but I feel like doing it anyway. I’m improving as Brig, and I thought I could try and shine some light directly on Brig, and see what the community says.
As such- this post will be split into three parts- How to play, How to counter, and how to “fix” Brigitte. Skip to any part you like, or give any opinions, I just ask that you don’t be toxic about it.
PTR HAS FIXED SOME THINGS, and made brig a little less strong in result. This is a good step in the right direction
How to Play Brigitte
Your role is split into three parts:
- Protecting squish characters that are getting flanked (tank)
1.1 Using your shield effectively to block ults/damage/flanks (tank) - Healing your healer(s) and dps, or clutching your tank’s hp (support)
2.1. Making sure you keep your packs off cooldown for when you need it, and understanding the travel time of your health packs. (support) - Picking off and 1v1ing overextended/flanking enemies. (damage)
3.1. Fighting on the frontlines to provide aura sustain and keep general damage high. (damage/support)
Let’s talk about protecting your healers/backline.
IF YOU ARE THERE TO HELP: watch your flanks on your backline, shield if someone can run behind you to prevent a quick pick from reaper/sombra/etc. and kill or make distance between you and the flanker. (easier to do if tracer, harder if reaper)
On large area ults, you are very important! If a doom ults, you need to shield your ana to the best of your ability, even if it means using your Shield Bash (SB) (and brig leap, more on that later), same goes for dva bomb or McCree’s ult*. You are also key for canceling a variety of ultimates. Sym, Widow, Doom, D.va, Ana are just a few of which that are hard to cancel, while Reaper*, Moira, Lucio, Sombra, Rein, and others are some that can be easily canceled.
*The more people behind your shield, the more times McCree/Reaper will fire at you, thus putting yourself at risk if you can’t deal with it properly.
If someone is getting flanked, throw a healthpack at them, and provide your shield for cover. SB/Whipshot (WS) are great for stopping the momentum of a flank.
Onto providing your healing…
Your health pack is really good at healing your squishies, so use it to do so. If a tank is low, and you do have another healer with you, you can use it on them to give your other healer(s) time to focus them, but if it’s just you and your tanks are dying, and you don’t have inspire procing consistently, don’t bother. The armor is nice when a solder or tracer is on that person, but otherwise, the healing is really more effective. I haven’t found the temp torb armor pack to be too useful in heat of battle, so try not to use it as a top off mechanism too much, that’s your other healer’s job. Remember! No benefits are given if a hero is anti’d, so try to expect it or don’t bother if it happens; 6 seconds is a long time in a team fight.
Additionally, and this is the nail in the coffin, you have to make tough decisions when giving the armor pack, as you will have to weigh the value of possible extra survivablity for 6 seconds on a hero, versus getting the total 150 healing ult charge on a hero. Super situational, don’t spam it for the sake of spamming it (like firestrike ult building).
Onto inspire, which I think is really underappreciated, it triggers when your whip does damage on a hero (i.e. not a shield). This includes WS, so if you need to top off, feel free to try and hit one of those to get the proc. You have to realize, that it is a 40m sphere, from your position. MUCH larger than lucio’s 24m sphere. In fact, the only things about brig vs lucio, is that lucio is consistent with his healing, and it is only .25hps higher than brig (excluding amp), BUT it’s ~12hps for lucio, while Brig stays at 16hps. If brig is always doing dmg, she can heal everyone on and off a point easily, esp since she isn’t moving as fast and out of the way as lucio. Make sure you are being effective with your inspire, as your self sustain should make it easier to get closer to your team if you ever find yourself away from them. Also, OW Devs, can we get an indicator of how many people are in our radius as brig (both rally+inspire), kthx. Make sure your key teammates are in your radius (usually are), healers and tanks. People say brig/ana is a bad combo, but if your ana is focusing gernades on your team, brig becomes really powerful, because the burst healing+inspire just gets so much more effective.
Subset in here, Rally.
Kind of healing, kind of not. The armor is nice if you want to stack before a fight, but I prefer using it a second or two before one, as it provides a really nice sustain comboed with inspire. Stacking your armor with zen/zarya/sym is really important though, as it goes under their shields giving them way more survivability. You can use it whenever, I find it has more impact during a teamfight for sustain, as it lessens the work on the other healer to do their job (and saves resources). Think of it as a discount transcendence, as a lot of long duration damage can be extended with rally. Your ult builds kind of fast (being a dmg/heal), so if you’ve already won a team fight, use it on the next one, cause ideally, you want it every other team fight or more.
Onto 1v1s
For any 200hp hero, you need to do 3 whips, 1 SB, 1WS to quickly kill them.
Two ways to pull off this combo:
W,W,SB,W,WS (anim cancel)
or
W,SB,W,W,WS (anim cancel)
the first one is easy to do if they are oblivious, and allows you to finisher combo them without being able to escape the cc,
while the other gives them a split second to escape before WS hits.
for any 150hp hero (tracer, baby dva)
SB,W,WS (anim cancel)
This, if pulled off quickly, will kill them before they can do any abilities.
for any 250 hp hero (reaper, mei, doom) needs 4 whips
W,W,SB,W,W,WS or W,W,W,SB,W,WS
again, if you can get off three whips before wraith/cryo, you can kill them after a SB, otherwise, you risk the wraith/cryo in the first combo.
*Small point about mei, if you hit her a couple times then whipshot, and she cryos, you can wait with your shield up to shield bash her as soon as she gets out and have you and your team finish her quickly, as she won’t be able to wall immediately.
I’m going to ignore bastion, for the sole purpose of you aren’t going to have to be 1v1ing him often, and the fact that his dmg reduction makes him hard to deal with. If you dive with your team, stun the healers and whipshot bastion.
Torb: His overload can make it hard for you to capitalize on your combo if he reacts fast enough. if you got your two hits and stun in first, you are fine, otherwise back off, because the damage to your shield and your face is very high from Torb.
Tanks: Whip until they get to about 5 bars, then finisher combo (W,SB,W,WS), isn’t really your job, as you’ll feed healers ults, but it puts pressure on them to use their resources when you aren’t. Make sure to bash rein out of charges or when reins are getting into hammer fights about to hammer down.
Healers: A lot of them will have self-sustain, and whipping them a few times will force that out of them. You have to be consistent on lucio and then finisher combo him quickly to get the burst you need.
1v1ing a brig:
Bad brigs will initiate with a stun. They lost unless they have other healer support. Your goal is to get her down below 5-6 bars of hp by simply whipping, then finisher combo (155dmg). If she’s rallying, then don’t bother, esp if you are rallying, you guys will just be there for 10 seconds.
Watch your flanks as brig, and choose fights you can pick. Make sure you are aware of their cooldowns and apply your finisher combo appropriately to deal with them.
Armor isn’t too much of an issue, since none of your damage is below 10. Your finisher combo will do as low as 140 dmg (if there is armor at every point), which is still substantial compared to tracer or sombra trying to deal with armor.
Why I Bring this up- Torb and (EDIT: New Torb rework removes armor*) rally armor, just whip until you got them to a normal health point- not worth wasting your resources for it.
Other than that, m1 is your friend for doing dmg on the front line. I could talk about stunning rein for openings and whatnot, but you’ll figure that out as you play.
One last note, Brig’s whip range is 6m, and her stun range is 6m, so if you can hit them, you can stun them.
Also, Brig’s whip has the same effect as rein’s hammer, if you are just out of range, look a little to the left/right if your opponent, and you’ll hit them. It’s very slight, but you can try it out in the practice range.
*With the new Torb rework, health stacking is now only viable on brigitte, making her A KEY PLAYER in extending the survivability of your team. Make sure you are stacking armor on key players and using it as soon as needed to start building a new one.
Countering Brig
THERE IS NO HARD COUNTER. That’s the whole point. The devs have “stated” it, it’s obvious in her kit, let’s talk about it.
Her 1v1 affinity makes it really hard to have a 1v1 counter.
Phara and junkrat are nice choices, but then your team can counter pick to support your Brig.
This was something I thought about, and I wanted to bring up here before I go on to the unedited post. You counter pick again and again, but ideally, you never need to change brig. Because you are already counterpicking the dps/tank to counter the brig, your brig just ends up having more survivability- without the need to switch.
I guess with this, if we wanted to take it to the max, a comp that would counter brig on all aspects would be as such: Winston, orisa, sombra, phara, moira, ana. It is weird at best, but I guess it provides multiple counters to Brig at different points. (moira provides huge healing, fade and longrange pressure on her shield, ana can anti, winston can pierce shield, sombra can hack, phara has the splash, orisa has CC resistance)
Anyway- onto the rest of the post:
Brig is weak to distractions and splash dmg.
WHICH MEANS you need at least a MINIMUM of two people to easily deal with her. If you run junkrat and phara, her shield will quickly die and she can’t do much about it. Sym orbs and helix are also really nice splash to try and tick her down, but you HAVE TO BE CONSISTANT, or she’ll just heal it back.
One of my favorite counters is mccree/soldier with a widow/hanzo. You crossfire the brig and she dies quickly, her shield is only so big.
Sombra is tricky because of the 200hp combo, hack brig and get out as fast as possible, and call it out to your team.
Sym is kind of a nice character when played correctly, tping all three of your turrets next to her then death orbing next to her as well. You can also drain her shield with primary, but you have to keep a considerable distance.
NEW: Torb rework. The only real thing effective about this is his ult doing 190dmg instead of 130dmg when it is damaging armor. This counters rally and armor packs, make sure you aren’t playing too close with rally, and understand when torb’s ult is active or close to being ready. Be careful when running goats. As torb, you can easily build ult while playing defensively due to turret spam and m1 spam, so your ult builds twice as fast as brig’s ult, allowing you to be more liberal with how you use it. I.e. 1 for area denial, another for rally shutdown.
It’s a team effort to counter brig, so stop complaining about a hard counter. Remember when dive didn’t have a hard counter? Team effort. Work on it(again, i still don’t think I’m qualified, I can still have my rants) I yell focus brig all the time in my comp games, and I tell who should be where to kill her, and guess what? She dies and she isn’t effective. 10 seconds of downtime is 160+ health the enemy team isn’t getting.
“But dive is a whole team comp, and brig is just one person? how is that fair?”
Right! But that’s her kit, if you play around the brig instead of into a brig, you may just kill her faster than you expect. Stupid brigs will make risky plays that your team will have to anticipate, punish, and follow up on.
However, that doesn’t stop her from being a little too powerful overall.
Fixing Brig
I can provide a few ideas, but I’m not going to be an overwhelming archive of ideas.
- Patch REDUCED SHIELD HEALTH BY 100 Neat.
Side note- new patch means another nerf for brig… at this point she really doesn’t need changes for any one thing, rather, possible rework shifts on CDs.
- Shield Bash damages her shield, maybe like 100-300 for any target, to 300-600 for charging targets.
- Shield bash has a bit lower range (1-2m at max)
- Inspire buffed, damage reduced (slightly on both ends)
Rally needs a rework, maybe possible duration of armor after her ult (30-50s), higher/lower max armor, etc. Her sustain/prep right now is awkward to use.Torb Rework again causes my thoughts to change. Possible higher armor cap, and also…- Longer duration on overheal armor on health pack
- Whipshot increased CD, Health Pack reduced CD.
– Side note here, it’s hard to give ideas, as it’s confusing what role to put her in, support, damage, or tanky (she’s not a tank, but like a subpar off tank). I know she’s a hybrid, but she’s a hybrid across all three roles, hard to kill, hard to outdamage, hard to outheal (as an opponent, specifically on her burst healing)
If you have other ones, feel free to post constructively, cause “deleting Brig” isn’t a really good suggestion at the moment.
One last Thought
I see a lot of people complain about brig, and while I’m really indifferent (brig main), I think the main reason is they are going to 1v1 a backline character, and brig shuts them down. Or they ult infront of/near/towards a brig and get shutdown. You can’t get angry at this, because at the end of the day, you need to learn to play around certain characters before ulting. Reaper shouldn’t ult with a widow/hog/mcree online, bastion ult is better when there’s no tanks around, etc. Same goes for brig, wait until the brig is distracted or dead to actually ult. Brig can peel for the backline, so you need to provide a lot of frontline pressure to make brig useless. At the same time, if you stay out of range of the brig, she can’t get her passive healing, also making her useless.
Just a thought…
Outro
Wow- I can’t believe I typed all this. Thanks for reading if you did. I kinda got sick of the “no skill brig” comments I’ve been getting in game, so I made this as a rant to the forums. Any hero requires skill, maybe not always mechanical skill, but your game sense, positioning, and call outs are all important skills. Mechanics can only get you so far, but a combination can get you even further(However, as compensation for brig, you should always never be missing your whips). Again, am I qualified to make this post as a first? Probably not, but I wanted to. If this was too much ramble and random crap, let me know and I’ll revise it.
Thanks for reading-
Surg.
