Yes, high rank and top players will say that she is amazing and probably too good but for the average person that is simply not in very high ranks like M/GM/T500 or that is playing QP and trying to have some fun, she feels awful to play and get value from.
Her Kunai is not easy to land and it’s even harder to consistently headshot with. Her body damage is very low. So you have Kiriko players not even trying to do damage at all or barely having like 500-1000 damage per match.
Her healing “reload” animation nerf made her healing even more clunky to use and with it’s slower travel time and having to be tracked Kiriko players can’t keep up and especially can’t sustain a team during the fights.
Teleport and Suzu are both obviously good and her Ult is still powerful. But again, it’s a struggle to time the Suzu right and for the team to actually benefit from her Ult and use it properly.
But her two main things, her primary damage and her healing both feel awful for the average player and you see many Kiriko players not being able to use her kit properly anymore or switching to another hero.
Balance team wanted to dictate how the hero SHOULD be played. So to me, her healing reload nerf makes no sense at all. They apparently wanted to get rid of “healbot” Kiriko. But the only thing they actually did is made the hero feel bad to play for average/casual players which is majority of the playerbase and healbot even more but worse in every way. We see Kiriko being picked a lot in TOP 500, that is because they can use this hero to her full potential which i repeat for the average player is not easy to do at all. Main issue is, her healing feeling supper clunky and weird, not having a good audio/visual feedback and her base damage being super low and not easy to land.
Some of you will probably say “well git good”. But that is not the point of this post. The point is that imo. hero should feel good to play and have impact across all the ranks. And thing that makes her very good, her Suzu is not being addressed, while other parts of her kit are being nerfed. So we have a hero that is constantly being played at the top, still being top pick but being made worse and worse for the majority of the playerbase. I think that they went in the wrong direction with her balance.
Kiriko needs a nerfing flat out. She’s the best support in nearly all situations. Even if you can’t make her work, she’s not a bad option at all for lower tiers due to the healing output and banking on making powerful game winning fights on her ult.
This is why they hit her healing. They are trying to keep Kiriko’s main identities (not gutting Suzu, kunai hs, etc), but somehow nerf the character. Hitting her total healing throughput reduces how frequently her ultimate comes up while being offset slightly by being able to double kunai between each heal.
As they said in the interview. Just giving her less healing makes people focus on the healing even more waiting out the duration. With 1sec duration it feels bad to wait and not do anything, so your alternative with that 1sec recovery time is actually throw two Kunai.
I don’t think its a bad thing to have an inherently high skill character, especially since if you want a more entry level character overwatch has a lot of options
You just have to deal with the fact that some heroes are easier to play than others, you can always play moira or mercy if you want to get instant value without needing to do much, kiriko was designed for the people who enjoy that kind of rewarding gameplay. and i am pretty sure they said that at least one of the new upcoming support is going to have an easier gameplay similar to mercy or something like that, so they’re trying to appeal to everyone.
As someone who is average at best, I don’t feel the same way. The healing reload is when I can freely chuck in kunai, and it seems strange to not do that, even if my kunai miss or only do a body shot. If there really are Kirikos out there who did nothing but chuck out paper and felt that they were getting full value then that’s a flaw in pre-nerf Kiriko, imo.
I’m glad that this is the healing nerf they went with. Having more time between papers to aim kunai makes her feel less frantic to me. If they’d simply reduced the amount of healing paper does, it would still be mental overload while getting less out of it.
Mostly other t500 roles complaining she’s broken just so they have a character to take out their frustrations.
Since launch her healing feels slower, TP feels worse/ delayed, suzu less forgiving and harder to hit.
She’s just clunky enough for me to say,“nope.”
The thing about balance in low and mid tier ranks is we can feel the balance and extra value from over-tuned characters ( vice versa as well with undertuned heros). Some OP characters slip through mid and lower ranks due to their reliance on teamwork and need for followup to actually be overtuned.
I’ve noticed that once the teamwork based characters get nerfed out of the meta, the go-to “pub stomp” characters that all the lower to mid ranks are playing quickly come into fashion for high ranks.
Thems just my 2 cents though.
Edit: in regards to kunai.
Zens ttk for headshot is on par with kiriko.
For balance purposes and so I might be able to play zen without getting flamed in the future. I say it’s a question of buffing zen or nerfing kiriko.
People can’t handle a 25% damage received debuff from discord or even a blue beam damage boost from one person of 30%. So we’re back to the chicken or the egg question of nerfing healing or nerfing damage. Those damage numbers are what the Support role thrives off of.
A single healing nerf to one character nerfs the entire support roster if you consider the sum total of overall healing in the game as a whole. You could say the same about tank HP pools and DPS damage numbers as well.
If healing goes down then damage goes up. If damage goes up then supports have less impact and DPS more (playing selfish). If healing goes up then the more supports healbot while nothing dies (playing for ults). In terms of “fun” to play for support, balancing around healing and damage is a lose-lose scenario. Sometimes it’s fun to crunch numbers but it’s more time on theory than actually playing the game in order to increase a win-rate.
Most of the support ults just feels less impactful. lucio beat, amp matrix, cole, valk, and zen transcendence all don’t feel fight winning anymore. Especially when DPS ults by-in large counter supports ults now and not the other way around. Mostly due to ult damage numbers and how long they last. Most DPS ults just do more overall and are better fitted for use in more scenerios. adding tank ults, i’d say tanks don’t favor support ult economy either.
Kiriko just happens to have an ult that charges other ults efficiently.
Don’t worry, she feels awful for the GM player too. In GM it feels like absolute trash that basically both teams need a Kiriko, and you have to play her or lose, regardless of if you want to or think she’s fun or anything.
So it’s really a lose/lose with her kit. But as long as she’s got around a 50% WR right boys! Hahaha… :’ )
Even T500 players can’t consistently hit her kunais. This was a pretty big complaint ml7 had them as well. It’s actually a bit easier in lower sr since nobody has decent movement to avoid it.
But no matter the sr, it’s never actually consistent. They travel waaaaaay too slow. She’s not like zen in the slightest with her dps, she’s more like Ana combined with the inconsistent nature of Hanzo.
But the rest of her kit is so strong that it doesn’t matter.
They just need to make supports support, instead of damage and support. It solves all the problems with the game. The trouble is they don’t know how make supports feel unique without giving them a damage package. Sad. They probably shouldn’t create new supports if they design field is that narrow.
I think it’s obnoxious that they want supports to dps at all. Supports should only have enough damage to finish off a low health character and have very little ammo.
Oh you poor poor thing, it must be so hard playing the best support in the game that does the job of every other support all in one. My deepest sympathies.
Nah. In lower tiers her tracking heals are difficult to aim. So not even good healing output for non-tanks.
She’s balanced in a way that makes her meh and low ranks too good at high ranks. She needs to be tweaked towards the middle. All-or-nothing isn’t working atm.
I don’t have issues outhealing the other Support from my team and doing overall better. But majority is clearly struggling with her and almost everything about her feels slow and clunky.