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.
Yeah, sure, because no one gave feedback on how to tweak Mercy before the rework. Blizzard skimmed through the entirety of forums, searching for some help, but didn’t find anything! Oh poor them, forced to do a rework of a hero they effed up themselves while no one pitches them ideas! Oh wait they do, no one gives a yuck about them though.
Mercy got reworked because Resurrect as an ultimate was extremely unhealthy.
Oh man, tons of ultimates that can wipe the team entirely are fine, but as soon as there is one that revives the whole team - everyone loses their minds. Talk about double standards.
Not only did it encourage bad playstyles and strategies that grinded games to a halt,
Bad playstyles? Bad playstyles of hiding somewhere to get POTG you mean? Gosh that surely doesn’t remind me of snipers, Junkrat, Reaper, McCree… Yea, only Mercy did that, sure.
but it compressed all of Mercy’s power in a place that couldn’t be easily tweaked.
Her ultimate was easily tweakable, don’t be silly. Adding invulnerability broke it and made her OP - instead you could just add cast time. But no, rework happened and now she’s no fun at all. Well at least her NEW ultimate is very well designed! Chain healing and spectator mode, which means you can be focused by literally the whole enemy team! Wooo, what a fantastic new ultimate!
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.
Maybe because the whole character is about resurrecting? This is what makes her special! In a similar way Rein’s playstyle rotates around his shield, Zenyatta’s playstyle is all about his save/kill balls, Sombra’s playstyle is around invisibility. The hell are you talking about?!
Sym, Hanzo, and to an extent, Lucio, all got reworked because their kits were not fitted for the game.
Um, no, notice how their ultimates (except sym’s) weren’t reworked. Hanzo was “reworked” if you can even call that a rework to give him more mobility and remove the scatter arrow which everyone whined about.
Lucio was reworked to make him heal more in a shorter radius so he’d be with his team more and not somewhere far away
Sym was reworked because… Yuck if I know.
Passive ultimates like Teleporter and Shield Gen are too low of an impact to regularly have on any team.
Teleporter was a yucking GODSEND, the only unimpactful thing about it was that you couldn’t charge it while it’s already standing there.
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.
Ya, except Hanzo’s whole character didn’t revolve around scatter arrow. Mercy’s character revolved around her res though.
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.
So you’re saying Overwatch is striving to be a game for DPS mains and fans of OWL? Agreed, they showed a big “yuck you” to the uncompetitive community long ago
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.
Yeah, it’s all for the better, which is why people are leaving the game.
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?”
First of all, the fanbase despise the rework because it’s yucking GARBAGE. And it’s not hate out of nothing, it’s hatred of players who tried the new character and hated playing it. Mercy is absolutely unrewarding right now. Her ultimate sucks, res on E sucks, slowdown on res sucks, losing your E when you’re picked sucks, her healing sucks - everything sucks. Maybe that’s why people hate it? You don’t see people hating on Bastion or Hanzo reworks, maybe because they were good?
And no, making what Blizzard did with her rework is a one day job. As someone who works as a full time programmer - I know what I’m talking about. Which is why I have no yucking idea what these people are even doing in their seats.
And yes, many fans’ ideas are flawed. But they’re much better than what Blizzard did.