I'm gonna say it

General Discussion
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What is your response, Blizzard? You were quick to reply to the thread about hating tank heroes. What about the countless Mercy posts throughout the year that detail what’s wrong with her? What about the concerns of Bastion players? Surely you’re an ally of Bastion as well, right? Or does the 14k comments post from July not matter? Hell, I’ve even seen Symmetra posts skyrocketing lately. Thousands of posts, yet not a single response. So now I’m asking you Blizz: What is your response?

I do see that you have made changes to Soldier: 76. Who was complaining about Soldier: 76 lately? That is not a rhetorical question. I legitimately wonder where they got that feedback from because it sure wasn’t from the forums.

Orisa as well. I have only seen a few posts concerning Orisa, and it was just to compare her to Reinhardt. So far, however, I have yet to see a single megathread about her, or Soldier: 76 detailing any major problems with them. Please feel free to include threads in the replies in case I am mistaken.

Previously, I stated that submitting helpful feedback to you is important for the game’s future development. I still stand by that; however, your continued (and intentional) ignorance of these posts is making me rethink that statement.

Edit: I should probably add that I don’t want Blizz to prioritize anything. My grip with Blizz is that they do prioritize what they want to reply to, and it can feel confusing and frustrating to other people that have yet to get a reply after months of activity. By “these posts” in the last sentence, I meant posts with a lot of activity and passion in them; not the specific posts I listed. My bad.

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I can’t speak for Blizzard, but I’ll offer my thoughts on the points you raised.

Mercy: I feel like mercy is very close to balanced, which is saying a lot after she absolutely dominated the game for months and provided some of the most uninteresting, unrewarding gameplay to watch or take part in. Personally, I think 55 HP/s would probably be the sweet spot for her, but I’m enjoying the fact that other supports are getting their time in the spotlight recently.

Soldier:76: Not entirely sure where you’ve been, but S:76 has been widely regarded as inferior to most other DPS choices for a long time now. He is very much a jack of all trades, master of none sort of hero, and doesn’t offer enough to make him worth picking over other heroes. The buff he’s getting seems perfect, and I think will go a long way to making him a more viable pick.

Orisa: Orisa is also a hero who has suffered. She can shine in certain niches, but on the whole she underperforms when compared to Reinhardt and Winston. Giving her a tighter spread will at least help her damage output, though I’m not sure it really addresses her biggest weaknesses.

Bastion: Bastion is pretty much the definition of a niche pick. He can be absolutely devastating with the proper support, and I’ve seen some really innovative play by Bastion one tricks who were constantly repositioning and flanking to great success. That said, I’m a little apprehensive when it comes to buffing Bastion. Turret form Bastion is one of the most boring heroes to play as and against, in my opinion. Perhaps this is selfish, but I’m kind of glad that this playstyle is a rarity.

So yeah, that was a little long-winded, but I think Blizzard is doing a pretty great job with balance, recently. Minor, incremental changes are much more likely to result in well-balanced heroes. Not every hero needs massive changes, and not every hero needs a megathread. Also, just because a hero does have a megathread doesn’t necessarily mean it’s filled with valid suggestions. The devs are the ones who make the final choice when it comes to the direction and balance of the game. It’s wise to take the community’s thoughts and concerns to heart, but they’re not always right.

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They cannot respond to a “Blizzard hates Mercy” thread because what are they going to say? They cannot exactly confirm the truth, that would be awkward.

However, yes, the inherent problem is that they address non-issues or if there is a problem, they do not actually attempt to fix the problem. I can promise you, the problem with Soldier is not his spread as you can tap-fire to mitigate it and that is what all competent Soldier do rendering this buff negligible and McCree, well, to be fair, I suppose one of his problems was the long cool-down on roll. But this is not going to make the character’s win-rate go up and people are still asking for McCree buffs because this does nothing to address the core problem with his kit. It was just to fix a weird discrepancy.

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most of these heroes are fundamentally not fun to play vs or to watch. i dont think any one wants bastion to be meta if he was not reworked in his current state

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I completely disagree. This buff allows a competent Soldier to consistently output damage more accurately over a longer period of time, thus increasing his overall damage output. I think it’s actually a very substantial buff.

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When it comes to mercy, the situation is hilarious. She was pretty close to balanced pre-rework with only a few tweaks needed to her rez’s mechanics in order to balance her. In fact, she had been receiving small buffs up until her rework because she was considered underpowered. It wasn’t until the rework that she really began to dominate. Now we’ve seen nerf after nerf for an ability that shouldn’t have made it past release like they originally intended. Personally, I don’t see how nerfing her healing would help at all. If she does similar heals to the other supports, then what’s the point of using her at all when you can pick another healer that’s basically her + damage. In addition, her healing wasn’t really what made her broken to begin with. It all began with valkyrie.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. Not at all. That was just my input. The point of my post wasn’t to demand blizzard act on these threads. It would just be fair to the fans if they would at least get one response on their megathreads from the devs. I can see how it would be frustrating for them to be patiently waiting for a response while other newer threads with tens of responses get immediate dev attention. Not just the Mercy threads, but also the bastion megathread that seems to have a lot of traction over the months; among other threads.

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Tanks deserved the justice and no one complained about 76 because he’s so forgettable. I never see him so I forget he’s even playable.

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Because jeff is a tank main and sees that playing tank is akin to taking a nap. Literally all you do is soak up crowd control abilities and hope your dps are better than the enemy dps. Mercy on the other hand has been slowly chipped at to find a good place for her, they went a little to far with the recent hps, and they need to put it half way or something, but she has seen so much more attention than any other hero.

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Dude if you guys don’t understand that Mercy is where Blizzard wanted her to be, I don’t know what to say. Mercy posts are unrecognized because Blizzard doesn’t have to follow what the forums say.

I also want to point out that JEFF KAPLAN responded to the tank post.

He’s a tank main. He isn’t a designer.

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Why does it always have to be like this on game forums? What is the appropriate length of time between dev posts? Every day I see complaints that they never post anything and on the rare occasions that they do post people complain about that too.

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Not meta, but at least more viable.

But I guess he’s a very tricky hero to balance and someone who can easily become too overwhelming if he was buffed/reworked wrong.

I too am curious what the developers think about Bastion.

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Geoff Goodman is your guy for hero balance. Iirc Jeff said he’s kind of shoehorned into tanking and I think he said he likes playing Hanzo the best but I could have hallucinated the second part

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I think you missed the point if you think this is a post advocating for a certain hero(es)

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The devs will probably start communicating more with the Mercy community when they stop asking for multi-rez, or no-rez.

And start focusing on fixing the current design.

Constantly nagging the devs to do the one thing they aren’t going to do, borders on harassment, instead of constructive feedback.

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Your initial post made it clear it is since it wasn’t the hero you cared about.

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If that’s how you take it, cool. Not saying it’s correct.

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OOF, I know papi jeff released a playtime for himself at 122 hours rein, like 56 hours monkey, and the next was moira or something.

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Well aside that, its obvious people have complained about other characters they believe to be under performing, there are threads scattered about them. Its just there aren’t any mega threads about it yet since there hasn’t been substantial changes to them. And they don’t always get the attention from the devs either. Sometimes you see a Reaper complaint thread, it gets 5 replies then gets hidden away by the new dozen threads looking for attention for Mercy/Symmetra or complaining about CC and Doomfist or some toxicity thread.

Additionally, people will inadvertently complain about how lacking a character like McCree or Soldier is in relation to characters like a Hanzo or Widow being the better picks in a competitive environment. Hanzo having been recently reworked, will get the focus rather than Soldier, who people think will need some love. But those characters themselves are simply being over shadowed but not deemed OP or UP, so people wont really complain that they are not balanced like they do with Mercy or Symmetra. Plus, I think a character like Mercy simply has a large following, its own fandom, so that community is will be quite vocal compared to others.

As for why devs don’t reply, I simply think they said all that there is to say, and they seem to be determined to move toward an obvious direction. There has been an ebb and flow in the reactions of Mercy/Sym players in relation to each update but the devs seem to take the initial consensus and stick to it regardless of the results and sudden changes of forums opinions, as the devs seem to be confident in that path. Regardless, there hasn’t been any posts in that mega thread, here or anywhere else that asks anything original that needs to addressed.

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and you have come to conclusion that X hero is definition of niche pick how? Niche in ow means f tier hero i don’t like, so I will give some fringe case I saw among 1000 matches to justify the magic and measurable thing such as ‘oppressive/boring to play against’.

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You couldn’t have posted this first? This is a constructive post. Not your initial haughty reply.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter who the character is. If people are pissed off about a character’s performance, they will be vocal about it. It doesn’t even have to be about a certain hero. The thread concerning console players feeling like second class citizens is very vocal despite a majority of the community playing on PC.