Although nothing has been confirmed in regards to reworking Hanzo’s scatter arrow, I think increasing the cooldown as opposed to removing it for a different skill completely is an option the Blizzard development should test before coming to a consensus on what type of updates they would want to make on the hero.
Personally, I would like to see a skill such as volley be integrated into a passive ability that triggers after a number of simultaneous successful arrow shots on an enemy hero. This would make Hanzo a slightly more viable hero in regards to the rate of projectiles he can fire and at the same time would incentivize/reward players for their accuracy.
After rewatching Hanzo’s animated short on “Dragons” and “Dragons of the Nexus”, it did not make sense to have inconsistencies in his actual in-game abilities and the animations/lore surrounding the characters.
Blizzard have confirmed it’s being removed, they posted that they tested changes on it but were not happy with it and tested several new abilities as well and ended up with the rapid fire/leap abilities.
That’s why Jeff Kaplan said it’s moved on to the animation stage as it’s been decided that that is the new abilities to replace scatter.
Um, they did confirm that they are reworking Scatter Arrow. You even talk about what they confirmed your post. It was in recent Developer Update about Hanzo.
Do you really think the devs take these kinds of changes lightly? They have and are testing the rework extensively. Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean they are just going straight from drawing board to PTR. They have to invest a ton of resources between art and sound design, voice work, and playtesting to put a new ability in the game. Believe me, if they had any doubts, they wouldn’t be putting it in the game, and they certainly wouldn’t have told us about it.
This is great, thank you for taking the time to source these and post a reply. Last question, is there a way to follow Jeff Kaplan to see when he actually makes posts into the Overwatch forums?
Unsure if you can follow, but if you’re curious, this is a huge buff to Hanzo’s that can aim, like the max potential of this skill makes it the most op ability on paper
doing 80 dmg per shot(6 shots in 2 seconds and can headshot) you can do 480~960 dmg, besides that
with a mercy pocket, each headshot can do 200 dmg, thus allowing you to oneshot 6 200 hp heroes in 2 seconds
this ability lets him melt tanks far more consistently than scatter did and helps bring his consistency up by a longshot, only difference is, you need to aim
I think volley is a great addition to the hero. But I think what makes Hanzo great as an assassin with the trade off in his mobility was his ability to play angles with Scatter Arrow. Understandably, I could see why the community would be frustrated playing against him because of getting one-shot. But maybe increasing the cooldown to be on par with Sonic Arrow could have nullified those concerns. Nevertheless, excited to see what the Blizzard Development team has in store for us.
Don’t worry your little head about scatter arrow going away, once volley is in everyone will be complaining about how much damage that does when you unload all 5 shots into the same person.
HI all (devs especially). First off, I’d lke to thank you for your continued efforts to try and balance the game. In regards to the hanzo changes specifically, as a hanzo player since day 1, I’m worried that the loss of scatter will remove some of his (already fickle) reliability in many in game scenarios. I did not quite grasp the full extent of the changes you are making but I was wondering, in addition to volley and the horizontal movement, are you guys changing his regular arrow speed or his sonic arrow cooldown?