And weirdly didn’t they like say in the AMA it doesn’t have much of use anymore since they are doing more frequent balance updates…
Yeah quote:
Josh (Lead Balance Designer - Blizzard) —
The Experimental Card was much more useful in the past when the patches were further apart (months vs weeks). The turn around time to have it patched and reacted to between releases means it isn’t really feasible as a testing for upcoming live patches sort of thing, though hopefully we’ll try to find some fun uses for it again in the future outside of just patch previews.
It’s so frustrating though! Like these rework ideas they have Mccree’s grenade could be tested and fine tuned right now by the help experimental.
There’s so many future potential changes they can run through that mode and help perfect the changes.
They have the tools, but they don’t even want to utilize them. It’s so god damn frustrating.
hog is getting a rework so hes temporarily left in the dumpster and mercy is still good and viable, just less annoying to kill and nonetheless shes still hard to kill.
Perhaps they just want to create themselves more work.
One of constant issues with programmers is that some companies measure their performance in number of changes they made. Blizzard has odd system, that ranks low 10% of developers as underperformers, even if they did everything.
So, to keep their profit shares and bonuses safe, causing harm to their game is useful - it creates more work to do.
I’m surprised the balance team still has their jobs as balance developers tbh, but they have got to go with how much they’re actively trying to kill the game. Surely they’re brought in by Kotick to kill the game before he leaves because this is just unreal lmao, it would explain why they’re still on board.
It seems OW2 team is afraid to make a Brigitte situation again and they’d rather tweak very little details, look at stats and we’ll consider it as a success since numbers don’t drop (as they did for Moira necrotic orb ie).
Cause crying is an individual experience. If you’re crying about Mercy but her pickrate is still fine, that means most people are actually okay with the new Mercy.
If your anger was shared by the majority of players, her pickrate would lower.
The winrate also shows Mercy is still as viable as she was ; she’s not becoming OP or underperforming.
And tbh, I don’t remember the metrics about Hog before his nerf. I know a lot of ppl had a problem with him since Zarya’s nerf. Maybe, because of “immortal Hog” strat going on in some pro matches, his pickrate was going up and devs decided to cut it out before it becomes “meta”.
But what metrics don’t tell is how people play Mercy. If her pickrate and winrate don’t change, what does it mean about how Mercy is played ? Do people still pocket ? Do people still sit damage boosting the DPS letting the other support do all the healing ?
I feel the latest changes were to make Mercy more active and less afk-pocketing but it might not something shown by metrics.
Ofc their metrics are fine, when they have changed one overpowered aspect of hero into another. But the thing is that her movement at least take some skill, rathere than just putting the beam over 50% hp allies to have this 50% healing bonus. If they think that playstyle is something better, well, I wish them to be imprisoned and playing some 2 cp like anubis with that mercy changes for 8 hours a day against some goats. Because I bet they spend less time working on the balance and they never play their own game at a half-decent level TO BE ALLOWED TO ANY BALANCING!
What also doesn’t help is 3-4 hour commune to work. If that’s too much they could always rent a place out in the city where $70k a year will barely scrape you by, dig straight into your savings or worse into the credit hole. You gotta take the least path of resistance, i can definitely tell you that starvation will cause much more problems.
They already did, by creating Kiriko to counter Ana. Same “we would create hero to counter a problem, instead of dealing with problem”, that gave birth to Brigitte.
And, surprise, they had exactly opposite effect. Which seems to be common theme for changing Mercy.
She was made to counter dive heroes, Tracer in particular. But, just like with Kiriko countering a lot more, than antiheal, consequences were a bit too large.
Game is in one of the best balanced states its ever been in 7 years
All supports are playable
Pretty much all tanks are viable. Hog is on the bench waiting for his rework and ball could use some of his buffs reverted
A large % of dps are also extremely viable now that sojourn isnt a must pick. Even symm and torb are actually strong. Genji is arguably one of the weaker dps and he’s still pretty mid tier
How do you make a character less “AFK” when you REDUCE her AMP?
People keep thinking, oh we reduce her G/A so it take more skill to play!
No, it doesnt, youve removed skill expression…And made her able to be played in 1 way. No deviations. For that i chose to delete Overwatch and put back that time into other things.
I died laughing when i saw “You guys dislike your character being clunky and a shadow of her former fluidity? Cool, no changes planned”
I pretty much predicted this response before hand, only difference is I said they’d stubbornly refuse reverting and keep iterating until they gave up when in reality they just immediately gave up and dropped it.
I gave up on this game, with this CLEARLY half baked rework, that clearly had noone playtested. Because of its conflicting design choices that they are doubling down on.
Hm would could keep her fluidity intact by reducing the jump height and speed, lower her max HP making it more risky, but leaving the skill expression intact.
Or, you can just take the nerf the thing that allows for skill expression making it too lethal for anything outside hard pocketing behind cover and reducing her movement to merely an escape.
