Having dive demolish its counters goes way beyond “the people that play brig”. It affects literally everyone that isn’t viable in a dive-dominated meta, which is… most heroes, including most tanks.
It also affects the people who were viable but had to bear the brunt of it, like… you know, nearly every support player.
I get that you want to try to rectify queue times, but this both won’t do that and will throw the whole nursery out with the bathwater.
Look, if you think more things need to counter anti-dive, that’s fine. But making dive counter anti-dive is tautologically silly.
It makes you pretty vulnerable to stall attempts if you don’t have one. Free spinning ball and wallriding Lucio on the point forever while you watch helplessly.
TBH I’m a little worried with how hard a pick Brig is in pro play. I play in GM as a support main, so I understand meta trickle and that they’re an organized team and the like…but Brig is the answer to dive, while also being the solid pick to play with dive. I’ve felt this way for a while, but this opening weekend is really nailing it home; Brig just does too much. She’s the strongest pick for and against the same very strong meta.
IMO Brig needs to be tweaked. They have to take something out of her kit to shine up the rest, so she is either dive or counterdive, not both. Ideally counter-dive, as that was what she was designed for. She (and Bap) are just way too overdesigned as heros from the kit-design up…but she’s overall way more broadly useful. She needs to be honed in and have her kit refined to be a little more specialist.
Because Blizzard is such a genius in character design that they thought it was a good idea to take a off-support and give them healing on par with a main support. I mean sure, it worked with Ana but it wasn’t going to work every time, like with Bapt.
I think Blizzard was trying put in heros that entice more support players…which I understand…the support roster is very strong -and that’s pretty much what they’re doing with making one Brawler tank for OW2 instead of two tanks like OW2- make it a super strong, OP feeling character to play and more people will gravitate towards it.
The problem is Brig -still, after countless nerfs, because Blizzard only nerfs supports in the tiniest incriments lest they upset their delicate mental balance- is too strong. The argument about risk/reward and skill floor/ceiling can go on and on, but Brig is too easy for what she does simply by existing, across all SR. She also vaguely invalidates other support heros and their roles, without any of the risk they take on.
I’m puzzled because, I’m pro Blizz balancing around top 1%/pro play…but the EXP card is lukewarm at best in the face of what is being played pro right now. Obviously the card might not go live, and obviously it came out before S4 started…but I’m worried that the OWL meta (and while it is more varied than it has been in a while, there IS a pretty strong general meta here) is going to boil down…and we’re going to wait months for any balance. Again.
Brig is just too strong a pick overall in pro play…and I think that with the solidly strong pick rate we see from her OWL, it’s going to start trickling down the ladder again, when Brig, even with poor ladder PR, should have been looked at months ago for what she offers a team…and she’s not particularly difficult, requires almost no team-work to get value out of, and works in almost any team comp.
Can’t buff Tanks when you can stack so many defensive abilities without causing overly defensive compositions like DoubleBarrier or a comp similar to GOATs.
I think more Lethality and SelfSufficiency is the way to go with Tanks. (I.e. 2x firestrike, and Tanks regen 10% of their max hp after 5sec of not attacking/getting attacked.)
What’s more likely is that Orisa/Sigma/Rein become more lethal, with strong barriers, but easier to kill at close range. Paired with the other Tanks being more effective at peeling. [AnchorTanks vs OffTanks] Widening the HP gap
I think that was more of the mentality behind Bapt and particularly Ana. Moira was created due to the lack of defense against flanker style characters (which was specifically aimed towards Genji). Moira wasn’t really able to deal with Tracer and they needed some kind of answer to Dive (as at the time they were more about creating answers to problems instead of dealing with the problems) so we got the unexpected, a release of a support hero after a support hero.
And no, Blizzard doesn’t do only tiny increments because of supports “delicate mental balance” (where the hell did that come from?). They did major nerfs to her kit, even removing aspects entirely.
Blizzard is just really, really bad at balancing supports, more so tanks. DPS are really simple to balance besides the characters who focus on utility and are more complex then simple number changes. Anything past damage and healing numbers is just too hard for them, that’s why they have slowly but surely started to reduce characters to how much healing and damage they can pump out.
Any additional heroes added will be overlapping previous heroes roles, DPS characters have been having this issue since the beginning because they have so many characters.
Pretty much Brig in non rush Monkey/Ball comps is there to counter the mirror as most teams once they lose to a comp will start to mirror. Lots of the time both team will start with the same comp as they have scrimmaged a lot and know what is common on most maps. Right now most maps are Double bubble is best but has ball/dive switch ins for teams that think it will work in certain situations. Then there is bunch of rush down maps/teams also. With one or 2 maps that they run double shield bunker. So things are fairly map dependent right now which might change come next patch (I think double bubble will be in most maps after)
For clarification I define
soft-cc as partial loss of control: displacement, slow, silence…
hard-cc complete loss of control or long lasting movement impairing ability: stun, freeze, sleep, trap, flux, grav…
Tanks: 5/8 have at least 1 hard cc (8/8 have hard or soft cc)
DPS: 4/17 have at least 1 hard cc (7/17 have hard or soft cc)
Support: 2/7 have at least 1 hard cc (3/7 have hard or soft cc)
For comp without hard CC you would have to chose from
Tanks: Orisa / D.va / Winston
DPS: Ashe / Bastion / Echo / Genji / Hanzo / Pharah / Reaper / Soldier / Symmetra / Torb / Tracer / Widow
Supports: Baptiste / Lucio / Mercy / Moira / Zenyatta
The only comp you could make from this is some variation of OG Dive or weird double sniper. Orisa + D.Va doesn’t sound competitive in the current patch.
