I have 100% winrate on Torb because I picked them for 3 minutes ONCE during a season and won the match with him…Does this mean he needs nerfs or buffs?
Well it won’t be that black and white but a higher pick rate means a bigger sample size.
2 Likes
and the ratio of pick rate to win rate becomes exponentially smaller the more that pick rate goes up
the pick rate is not so small that it skews the win rate terribly, it will change it but not by much
Yeah.
For example - I don’t think anyone’s really worried about Ash right now - low PR/high WR in higher ranks - but people are looking at Moira/Brig as being maybe a little too good at doing whatever it is they’re doing - because they’re so consistently valuable at every rank right now.
Which is funny, since people are also saying brig is trash at the same time.
Ashe is a beast, but there are dps players who think they are so good that they get more value out of widow, rather than the somewhat more forgiving Ashe.
Win rates tell the true story there of how correct they are.
1 Like
i think it indicates they need power redistribution more than a flat buff or nerf, as it usually just means they are too situational. look further into more specific data, find out if there are instances where the win or pick rate is significantly different from the average, be it on certain maps or with certain comps.
once you have that, you know where they are perhaps too strong and where they are too weak. try to buff aspects of their kit that are underused or may help them in more general scenarios but wouldn’t change much of their performance in the situations where they do well already. if you can’t do that without making them op in their element, nerf an aspect that makes them more powerful in those scenarios. do all this while keeping in mind what you want the hero to be and making sure you aren’t just walking them to a personality-less All Situations Generic Drone
ow kinda made the job of balancing difficult for themselves bc a lot of heroes were designed from the get-go to be situational and stronger in certain places and with certain counters. then people would fall in love with playing a certain hero, and you would get onetricks, and they wanted those people to be able to have fun so they have to walk back situational heroes to play more consistently and in more places. for a game trying to keep its whole point of “swap heroes to counter others, picking the right hero at the right time is important, be smart about it!” while also trying to keep those who only want to play one hero happy by making them usable in as many places as possible, while ALSO having a unique personality and playstyle for each hero… it’s a delicate job. so i’d say low pickrate high winrate heroes are maybe the hardest problems to solve and requires the most care and thought put into the changes, it’s a lot more than just buff or nerf
3 Likes
walk back, this is where everything took a turn for the worse
they needed to have fully fledged out LFG from the get go, instead of subjecting the player base the random chaos that some call “the matchmaker” lol
there’s also something funny with SR that currently exists, everyone has a widow SR and a dps SR, generally people’s widow SR is lower than that of soldier
Overwatch is an enigma lol
This. It used to be common knowledge, but somewhere along the way people just stopped discussing it in those terms. Too much bias. And the developers tried to rework Sym and Torb to be more general, but did a relatively bad job at it, so I guess people have no faith and prefer to call for buffs or nerfs.
This is so true. When Sym gets buffed and is picked more, my SR tends to drop. When she’s nerfed / not picked as much, it tends to rise. lol
1 Like
It kind of depends. Symm and Torb used to have busted winrate but low pickrate. Reason being they were only used on first point defense and if they didnt work, people swapped off. So statistically they only got half a loss, if at all even though they were terrible that match. That inflated their winrate. Not being picked is usually a hint the hero is either niche or straight up bad, or both. If a hero is just niche but good in their niche, you could make the argument that they are fine, but thats also iffy because one could argue that they are too good on their niche, but too terrible outside of it. But a niche hero kind of need to be OP in their niche to justify being niche. Otherwise the hero would be pointless.
1 Like
Really? I WISH that was the case. But I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around. Some heroes are very unfun and/or difficult to play against, yet they get buffed because of their pickrate alone. Seems very unfair to me but i can understand it from a business perspective - blizzard doesn’t want to let any hero to be in trash tier, nomatter how unfun they are to deal with. Otherwise it’s wasted content
Sombra?
if a hero has a 0.0000001% pick rate, that hero needs attention. Not immediate attention, but attention nonetheless.
If that hero had a 0.0000001% pick rate for three years in a row, this may be considered questionable. but still…meh, acceptable.
this is my opinion
It doesn’t matter if a hero never gets picked. Because technically right now, we have 41 heroes and ten heroes are never getting picked.
Character A is extremely high skill requirement, and has been out for a long time, so it has settle. Only the people who are really good at that character play them, and everyone else avoids them.
More people start playing them, and in comes the trash players, and they decrease the win rate.
3 Likes
Balance is a mix of all things, statistical and otherwise. Looking at just one specific stat skews the entire conversation to a biased standstill.
Context matters. Please don’t ignore it.
Agreed 100% with this.
But really, weather such heroes receive a bug or a nerf depends on the hero and is a really touchy subject overall since we’re talking about situational heroes.
I would say that the devs have to first decide weather they want said heroes to remain niche or not. If the pick the first option, the best solution in my opinion would be to simply leave the hero as he is, but if they pick the second option, then a rework for the hero, soft or not would be the best choice, as most of the times their situationality lies in their fundamental design, which can’t really be changed otherwise.
That and the fact that net buffs to heroes such as Bastion, etc. would result to absolute disaster for this game… 
Needs a lot of context. Nerfs should be somewhat rare, though. If you are having to CONSTANTLY nerf then your development team is doing a poor job.
Someone tried to tell me McCree is the worst DPS in GM because characters with a .8 pickrate have a higher winrate.
Means they perhaps have their niche, so when picked in the right places can do a good job. Whether they need buffs or not depends on Blizzard’s view on heroes like that.
low pick rate high winrate often implies they’re being played in a specific niche. implying that if those heroes were to be played outside of that particular niche there would be more losses (since they’re not strong in other gameplays)