I am going to be really cynical. Junkrat is never going to be viable in upper tiers. There might be a brief moment after a buff or rework that he becomes viable but I reckon he would be nerfed very quickly back in obscurity the moment he even becomes slightly popular at higher ranks.
He is just one of those heroes. The problem is that around diamond players start to get good aim and if Junkrat becomes good enough to consistently run at GM level, the trickle down effect would mean that he would start to be played in large numbers at every-rank, even if most players couldnât use him effectively.
As Junkrat doesnât require traditional good aim âcoughâ hit-scan. He would be rejected.
Iâd honestly prefer to reward Junkrat with more value beyond his primary weapon because his primary weapon is already hilariously inconsistent. You give someone McCree/Widow/Ashe/S76 and youâll have done more damage consistently from a given range than you ever would as Junkrat.
His whole character is around chaos and a slow, arcing, bouncing, exploding projectile canât compete with the raw damage output hitscan can give. Iâd rather they just give him extra tools like swapping out junk trap or his grenadier passive with something more useful. Even his own grenadier passive is not helpful at all.
Its exactly like Reaper soul candy in that you need kills in order to win more. Most fights are won off who gets first kill anyway from numbers advantage.
Potentially true. That isnât reason to stop trying though especially when the devs appear to finally be attempting to balance the game.
Agreed. However this is what the devs seem to be looking at so this was a brainstorm on what they could do which could then open up the possibility of further changes. This change would significantly raise his skill floor and ceiling which I think is the direction the hero needs as he then wouldnât hold low ranks hostage if he were ever buffed.
Do not get your hopes up. You have to also remember what âbalanceâ means. Hit-scan heroes are balanced around top rank of play. Projectile heroes, not so much with the nature of them being stronger in lower-ranks in general.
I can almost guarantee that current Junkrat in OW1 is considered balanced by the devs.
Funny thing is this isnât even enough to take him anywhere above c tier in ow2.
He needs this direct damage buff and no fall off or reduced fall off on mines and potentially 225 if that isnât enough to make him âgoodâ
Oh and a revert to trap, ow2 trap is so dumb and bad.
Junk currently does 120 damage. The suggestion was an increase of 10-20 in exchange for lower aoe.
His overall kit does need changes too but thatâs outside of the point of this thread. Like I said this change alone wouldnât be enough for Junk to be good. Itâs just a good starting point.
Iâd probably do this stuff and call it a day with a Junk rebalance:
That gets you dynamic damage that does no additional damage to barriers, thatâs thematically correct, that also can be made visually obvious to both the victim and shooter, that an outplay of aim has been made.
It also cuts down a bit on the annoyance factor, since these burn effects can be somewhat counteracted by Support healing or medical packs.
Ever since I heard his minister of engineering line I thought Junkrat should be area denial builder like Torbjorn.
Also steel trap is dumb and doesnât make sense since its only purpose is to trap someone so you can blow them up with a mine. And concussion mine isnât even a mine, its a remote bomb.
Like why not just make it a mine that does 200 damage when you step on it. But yeah a trap that stuns for 3 seconds can help Junkrat do more damage than just 200, and the âmineâ can be used to airburst and jump.
Now, trying to make ur idea work, not saying if the idea itself is a good one or not, if I were to see it work, I would think maybe more along the lines of 50 AoE and maybe 80 Direct, making 130 total. I feel like 110 and 30 dmg is kinda over-killing it too much. Too little to even do anything at all, and making it so that u HAVE to do direct hits to dish out any form of dmg at all. With my idea, not only is the idea still being supported, but it should be A, less oppressive if u fight a good Junk who knows how to hit the Directs, and B, making things a bit more balanced? Maybe even have things equal could work. So, like, 60 Explosive dmg and 60 Direct dmg? (be the currently 120 that we have now btw) Or maybe 70 Explosive dmg and 70 Direct dmg? (keeping the total u made of 140) I can see a good amount of experimentations here, persuming we wanted to try to make that work. Otherwise, I think Junkâs fine currently as-is, honestly, in both OW and OW2. Maybe a slight buff to Trap, so that it reduced speed further, so for example, maybe 80% speed reduction instead of the current OW2 version of 65%? Like I said, lots to experiment here.
Depending on how much faster they make it they should lower the damage I dont want to get 2 shot comboed by a high firerate spam projectile with no charge time that can bounce.
Doesnt really mean anything so that sounds fine doesnt change how fast he kills you might make concussion mines more powerful since you wont have to be as precise with them.
Think he would still crutch mines for kill confirms it would actually make it easier to crutch mines since you have to be less accurate with mines to do the same amount of damage for the 200 total.
Tbh they should just giga buff his firerate so he does similar dps, make it 3 hits for a kill and buff the projectile speed to a more mid range speed maybe make it so projectiles slower than Hanzos but 2-3x faster than current junkrat so maybe somewhere between 60-75ms rather than the current 25?
Maybe make projectiles keep their damage even after bouncing.
ok unless youâre proposing to up the projectile size dramatically, that is straight up not happening if you lock the projectile speed variable.
ok I donât play junkrat, but even I know that a big reason why junkratâs weapon fire isnât straight up trash and why it makes sense is exactly because of the rebound + lingering mechanics (lingers + timed explosion if it misses).
i.e. the whole point of junkratâs nades is to spam and accumulate a âno-go zoneâ for the enemy via spam.
Sure hitting directs is obvs more efficient and stronger, but we cannot deny or ignore the fact that the weapon has been designed around that former mentioned notion when you look at why lingering mechanics were put in.
and as said at the start, if we want a projectile to be more âprecision/aimâ based, then you must renumber and redesign the mechanics of the projectile around faster projectile speeds.
because if itâs slow, itâs just easily dodged in plenty of ranges no matter how good your aim or prediction is and itâs just trash.
if you want a reference, look at symâs orbs. because thatâs precisely the situation theyâre in.
Well worse, because sym orbs canât be spammed well with the sniper-tier low firerate, but the point in regards to âdirectsâ/precision weapon fire aspect stands.
I think it would be. The issue is there are a couple of play styles with Junk, and one is the assassin style.
This could be a really big buff to the assassin style, but at the price of a massive nerf to the âindirect fireâ version of rat.
I think having junkrat being able to âclear out a nestâ is still useful, and this basically gets rid of it, but if you want to turn him into assassin rat, then this should do the job.
I mean, personally, I would just buff both until he was doing ok.
except we saw the issue with this in the previous expC for junkrat: his tools for assassination is just bad.
and thereâs nothing in this direction that indicates an increase in range nor effective range. itâs essentially the same general direction of the previous expC tbqh: worsening spam capability, but make his weapon better for cqc that he canât really get in to do cqc all that well in the first place thus being a net nerf.
I think it is a survival thing. He needs to be basically on top of them to assassinate, and he doesnât survive getting there. The issue is, fixing that will always add problems elsewhere, more mobility is an issue.
