It's apparent that the devs struggle to rework heroes. They need to focus more on balancing

General Discussion
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The main 2 reworks I want to focus on are Mercy and Symmetra. Neither of these reworks helped. After all of the nerfs, Mercy is similar to 1.0, and Symm is similar to 2.0 (win % wise). They have these ideas and visions for heroes but they have trouble executing them.

As a Symmercy main myself, I believe that the Mercy rework was 100% unnecessary. They just needed to tweak some aspects of her ultimate. The Symmetra rework was somewhat justified, as she was extremely difficult to pull off in some situations. However, they removed the aspects that we loved about her, like her lock on beam, piercing balls, and shield gen.

Both of these reworks clearly ignored what the playerbase wanted, and the devs went down their own path of what they thought was right. While I understand that in some ranks Mercy 1.0 was a niche pick and Symmetra was a niche pick in every rank, they still shouldn’t have disregarded the thoughts and opinions of the playerbase, no matter how small it is. They struggle to maintain the identity of the characters when they rework them, but they try and force it. Take Mercy’s rez. Blizzard was so persistent on keeping it in the game they sacrificed every part of her kit to “preserve her identity”. Yes, her Rez was her most iconic move but they made it bland and horrible to use and play against.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully trust Blizzard again due to this year of blatant disregard for the community and the constant nerfs, but they need to do what’s right and either revert Mercy with some tweaks or rework her again.

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Sorry they are working on OWL. If you want Hero fixes then you might be out of luck. They seem to lack in the care department. too many bugs still from day 1 and heros who get flat out ignored and the devs dont talk with the community unless its small talk.

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Assign some teams to work on the OWL and others to focus on the game itself… it’s not that hard. If they’re putting all of their resources into their eSports scene and neglecting the game itself that means they just care about money.

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That makes too much sense. Stop doing that.

Seriously though, if the OWL is pulling actual resources from the game then they should just scrap it. No competitive events should pull from the games balance and resources to fix/balance the game. Period. Seeing as they’ve announced a college version I’m guessing the expectations are low for season 2… this reeks of HotS’s attempts at an esport.

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Sure it did. Mass rez is gone and Mercy is balanced. That’s what it was supposed to accomplish.

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Sure it did. Mass rez is gone and Mercy is balanced. That’s what it was supposed to accomplish.

Mass rez wasn’t a problem. In fact, it was underpowered until they gave it invulnerability which made her overpowered. Us mercy mains would much rather take an underpowered and fun hero than an overpowered and boring hero

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Except she’s not overpowered anymore xD

Holy shiet, they nerfed her into the ground but STILL don’t understand that the only thing wrong with her is her Res being on E. How dumb, ignorant and illiterate must you be to have countless players give you feedback, pitch ideas for fixes - and then do nothing of what people wanted, instead ignoring freaking everything and doing their own shiet?

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Reworks happen because the core of a hero’s kit isn’t healthy or fitted for the game, which is why we see reworks most commonly with heroes that have been in the game for a long time (Mercy, Sym, Hanzo, and Torb have all been first-reveal heroes). The reason they get reworked is because their kits simply don’t make sense for what Overwatch is anymore; passive ultimates like Symmetra’s have too low of an impact, Mercy’s kit was based around an ultimate that wasn’t healthy for the game and lacked anything else, and Torbjorn’s turret and armor encourage snowball games that no body really likes.

Blizzard would absolutely prefer to just tweak heroes and make smaller adjustments; it’s more cost effective, it’s easier to manage, and the community is relatively less hissy. However, sometimes that just isn’t possible, and bigger sweeping changes need to be made in order to correct heroes so that their kit is in a better place.

Mercy got reworked because Resurrect as an ultimate was extremely unhealthy. Not only did it encourage bad playstyles and strategies that grinded games to a halt, but it compressed all of Mercy’s power in a place that couldn’t be easily tweaked. Note here that it isn’t because Mercy 1.0 was considerably unbalanced, she was a little on the underpowered side, but they couldn’t make Mercy better in any regard without having to draw that power out of an ultimate that was just badly designed. She was stuck in a place where either everything about her was focused on Resurrect, or Resurrect would become too unintuitive of an ability that it would be more frustrating than rewarding.

Sym, Hanzo, and to an extent, Lucio, all got reworked because their kits were not fitted for the game. Passive ultimates like Teleporter and Shield Gen are too low of an impact to regularly have on any team. Hanzo had a similar issue to Mercy where so much of his power was in Scatter Arrow, both for defense and offense, and it was healthier to expand Hanzo’s kit into something more rewarding, less overly punishing. These changes brought these heroes more in line with what Overwatch currently is and strives to be, whereas before their kits were outdated for a game that was significantly slower and where your only main tank was Reinhardt.

All of the reworks have been for the better of the game’s health for one reason or another. There are some bumps along the way, that’s bound to happen when you’re essentially reconstructing a hero. The primary problem that comes with reworks is that a big part of the fanbase will simply despise the change, purely because it’s change, and refuse to adapt. It opens up tons of doors for free complaints; “If Blizzard had enough time to do THIS, why didn’t they try out my idea which totally isn’t flawed and they definitely didn’t consider?”

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For the love of god, please use paragraphs.

As for what you wrote, the reworks were needed, though Mercy were handled poorly. Symmetra seems better in nearly all aspects, and the wall and teleporter can make for some great teamplay, though it requires communication.

And really, the lock on beam were disgusting. Good riddance.

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Actually, they came out and said they intentionally used some resources for the OWL last fall. Whos to say they aren’t doing that right now with the exclusive skins?

I’m afraid what this game is becoming.

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Not only did it encourage bad playstyles and strategies that grinded games to a halt

THIS WAS NOT THE PLAYSTYLE MANY MERCYS USED. This negative playstyle was used by inexperienced/new Mercy players. Most players used her ult to rez 1-3 people to keep the momentum of a fight going. But still, let’s use the hide and rez as an example. How is this different than zen’s ultimate? It would effectively undo ultimate combo’s (minus grav dragon, but that was fixed now). How is that any better than a team rez? They both have the same function.

Passive ultimates like Teleporter and Shield Gen are too low of an impact to regularly have on any team.

Just because you never saw the impact in the kill feed doesn’t mean it was not impactful. The extra 75 shields made your team so much tankier, and the TP was great at rushing teammates back into the action to try and remove a numbers disadvantage.

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plenty of ways to change 1.0 to make her balanced and fun to play while increasing her skill floor and deincentivizing her bad playstyles in favor of staying in the fight to get value.

2.0 really hasn’t been fixing any of those issues and only amplified them as now mercy must hide to pull off rez on e and her ultimate is even more unhealthy for the game while detracting from mercy’s already passive kit.

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whoops didn’t think about adding paragraphs in. i edited it to fix that :slight_smile:

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they need to focus on map design, thats how you balance the game…i can’t believe they still havent figured that one out…its been a balancing method in the industry for over 15 years…

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Map design doesn’t have too much of an impact with Mercy’s abilities… Minus finding cover to hide and rez with her E

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Idk the maps have been overall decent the only outliers being old lunar colony and like Anubis.

but yea we have a serious lack of maps compared to our hero roster.

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According to all the Mercy mains I’ve talked to, no Mercy ever used these strategies. None! Crazy how apparently this just never, ever happened, even though they totally did.

I’m not getting into another Mercy revert-type conversation, I will simply say this. It didn’t matter if “not all Mercys” did these strategies, what matters is that it did happen, the mechanics encouraged it to happen, and it was a viable enough strategy that it could consistently work – and when it did work, no one was having fun.

You can make the claim that you never played Mercy like that, even though I guarantee that on a micro-level, every Mercy did because that was how her ultimate functioned at its core. It was still there, in the game, restraining all of her power, and all of the suggestions people have for reworking the ultimate…

… such as what Sandity here adds, are a direct result of what I mentioned at the end of my first post: people like to think they know all the answers for balancing reworked heroes simply because they think the possibilities are literally endless and Blizzard is just “lacking in creativity.” Mass Ressurect was bad on a design stand point, it’s better for the game that it’s gone for a huge multitude of reasons, even beyond mere hero balance.

I’m not saying these passive ultimates lacked any impact, what they lacked was meaningful, consistent impact. 75 extra health regularly did not give your team enough of an advantage to warrant sacrificing, say, a Rip-Tire, or a Transcendence, or a Graviton. This is on top of Symmetra’s other problems, which was a shallow turret-based kit that encouraged snowball games where either the snowball piles up, or it gets melted and Sym is forced to swap off.

This is on top of the ultimates just being unwieldy. 75 bonus health within a given area felt bad when those teammates left that area, and the teleporter consistently put players in problematic situations, such as not using the tele that was active because they wanted to save charges, using the tele too much and then it’s desperately needed, the tele gets destroyed just before it can be used and thus it was entirely worthless for those 4+ minutes, only half the team gets teleported before a point cap and they’re stranded in a horrible position, etc.

The reworks are meant to solve huge, broad problems with a hero, and notice that they do exactly that. Even if they don’t succeed in putting a hero in some massively better place, like with the Sym rework, the core problems do get solved and we end up with a hero that’s better built for the game as of August 2018 and not for a game still in development back in 2013.

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5 Mass Res was so juicy and amazing, but usually the best way was to tempo res 1-2 players to keep the fight.

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All of your points are invalid and biased. I’m not in the mood to write an essay about how 1.0 Mercy was okay for the game and how to balance it. There are dozens of other articles focusing on that. All you’re doing is further normalizing the Mercy hate by generalizing us into the group of “we want 5 man rez because it was OP”. Take time to read Titaniums post

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I never made that implication at all in my posts. I never tried to say why you or anyone personally wants Mercy 1.0 to come back, I’ve simply made my statements on why it was removed. If disagreeing with a Mercy revert is “normalizing the Mercy hate,” then I guess I hate Mercy, even though I’ve played her consistently both before and after the rework because I’m entertained by playing her.

Look, I’m not trying to widen this divide in the community any further, I’m just telling you why reworks happen and the problems they’re meant to solve. It’s got nothing to do with me hating Mercy or, whatever. I would like to think I’ve kept any biases out of this, it’s not like I get anything by viewing the reworks from an objective standpoint.

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