Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a long one.
I feel like people who support Brigitte believe that well, the hatred for Brigitte stems from the idea that her haters believe she can go in 1v6 and has nobody in the game that can counter her. Anyone who has tried fiddling around with the hero select screen for more than a minute would know that Brigitte gets absolutely trashed by a competent Pharah or Widow. Brigitte is not necessarily a hero that can wreak havoc wherever she feels like whenever she feels like.
The problem- is her core mechanics.
Counters are supposed to work like this-
Oh, hey, the enemy team has a Pharah. Can we get on that?
Sure thing. I’ll play McCree.
Alright, got her, she’s dead. Hit my shots.
pharah respawns, comes back to team fight
Ooh, she actually got me that time. Hit two direct rockets. Almost got her, though. Darn!
Counters, when best designed, are characters that can prevent enemy characters that are doing a lot for theie team team to destroy your team without a check. Yet, if someone has spent lots of time on the character, they learn how to play around their counters, and even though they will lose most of the time, they can win some fights; the best examples of this are a Winston playing in and out of bubble against a reaper, a widow baiting out deflect against a genji, and a doomfist asking for heavy heals when hacked by Sombra or trying to contest her with his primary (although that’s probably not reccomended). If they are really getting shut down with no luck in beating their counters, they switch heroes. But they still feel in control of their character and feel able to get value when they are playing well against the counter.
Brigitte does not work like this.
Brigitte works like this:
Oh, the enemy has a (literally any hero in the game with close range damage). I’ll go Brigitte.
Goes in, whips around the character, lives through everything with her passive, shield, and team’s healing at her disposal.
Enemy has a, let’s say, Tracer. She does a double blink, blinking forward and backwards again, forcing Brigitte to move her shield and getting shots into her. At 10 HP, Brigitte shield bashes, stuns, whips and flails, killing the Tracer.
Enemy has a, let’s say, Roadhog. He gets a hook onto Brigitte only to be bash whip flailed comboed and DC’s after also getting stunned out of Take a Breather to avoid embarassment.
Enemy has a, let’s say, Winston. Nah, I’m just kidding. Winston can’t outplay Brigitte.
Enemy has a, let’s say, McCree. A hero that should, considering his skillset, defeat Brigitte, rolling backwards and constantly firing into her shield while walking back as she slowly marches towards him. He is able to throw a flash over her shield, yet at the end of the FTH she gets off her own bash, and whips him around a bit before killing him, spamming the “Mace the Face” voiceline.
Are we seeing the problem yet?
The problem isn’t Brigitte’s supposed lack of counters. The problem is her lack of counterplay outside of the heroes that directly counter her.
Counters aren’t supposed to be something that always has the direct advantage, regardless of skill level. If I want to play a certain hero and am fixated on that hero for that game, I shouldn’t get completely shut down with no chance of playing against my counter competitively, especially considering she unintentionally counters heroes she wasn’t even designed to counter. Having a hero that automatically makes a video game actively upsetting and stressful to play is completely destructive for the game itself.
But, hold up, HalfBaked. Yeah, Brigitte is a pain in the tush, but she’s in this game for a reason. We need a check for Dive.
We did need a check for Dive. It was practically all that was being played at a pro level and at many other skill levels for a good year straight. It gets tiresome to see the same thing in every game. The loss of variety makes the game unsatisfying.
But we did not need this counter to Dive. What Dive should of gotten to take out its relevancy is something that could be played against like any other counter- something that greatly reduces its ability to run rampant with no check but can still play if played smart. What happened instead was a quick band-aid fix to Dive in Brigitte- a hero that disrupts and plays against all of Winston’s abilities and weapons in a way that Winston can’t do anything about, a hero that quiets down all of D.Va’s skillset, and a hero that ferociously takes down Genji and Tracer (a good thing but really bad- we’ll get to that in a second). This was not a counter to classic dive. This was a grave.
What about the difficulty of the hero? Why is it that Dive takes coordination, shotcalling, teamwork, and timing at such a difficult level to be played correctly, yet Brigitte just needs a mouse? I’m not trying to be one of the accused “skill fetish crowd”, I’m just trying to look at logic. This was the problem for a long time with the unbalanced state of Mercy and Ana, during the Mercy meta. Ana was nearing an unplayable state before her nano boost whereas Mercy was a must-pick for every competitive match. The character that takes much more time and practice should be more rewarded for that time and practice than the one that doesn’t, yet the easier character should still be able to played as well, which is why the current state of the supports is a lot better (although I do hope Mercy gets a little more help at where she is right now).
So what happens to that idea of reward for practice when it comes to Brigitte? Genji and Tracer take hours of time to perfect their mechanical ability, timing, and multiple aspects of their kit but people with 100 hours on the heroes can be slammed into the ground by a one hour Brigitte (can be, they won’t always win, but they shouldn’t win at all) , and she has much more value than Tracer. She shouldn’t be more rewarding at a low amount of experience than a hero with a high amount of experience. Then why even spend all of this time digging into the dimensions of the character, when there are those who soared to GM from plat in Season 10 by picking up the new character.
We do need a check to classic Dive, but it shouldn’t be one that takes no practice to work properly. It should of been one that needed the same amount of practice and mechanical ability as the heroes it was taking the advantage against and could be played against like any other counter- someone with a skillshot stun, someone with a large radius knockback, someone that needs to pay lots of attention in order to properly protect the backline from Dive and then has a way to beat it but with meticulous timing, someone, anyone but what we got. Not to mention what we got is now enabling a new version of Dive and works in almost every comp (Irony alert)!
Brigitte doesn’t even feel satisfying to play. When I play the game, I like to feel like I’m getting better the more practice I put into the hero. It’s why Lucio is my all time favorite- I get a chance to practice and perfect rollouts, aiming primary, speedy boops: nearing 180 hours on the hero and being ranked #686 this season in Overbuff, I still have a lot to work on. Brigitte I can lock in and swing around my primary at 20 sens, stun whenever I really feel like, and heal with a 20m radius (and use an ult with the same radius that gives me extra sustain). I don’t feel like I’m risking anything when I go in and ruin other players’ experiences, because I’m really not.
Brigitte currently has the second highest winrate in the game at 4 times the pickrate of the #1 winrate (Torb), 55.82%. I have heard Overbuff is sometimes unreliable, but it’s really all we have to go off of, so I’m going to take it as legitimate until there is a satisfactory alternative.
So, going back on everything I said, a short TL; DR here:
-Brigitte does not have counterplay outside her direct counters
-Brigitte takes too little time to get too much value with too little risk
-Brigitte actively makes the game feel out of control for most characters
-Brigitte was a character designed to counter a concept but her design went about it the wrong way
-Brigitte isn’t even a fun hero to work on playing
-Brigitte enables the wrong kind of gameplay
-Brigitte skips the concept of time and reward
The game is fun. I am glad to see many people still playing and having a friend or two to play with. Brigitte, a character inside the game, is not fun. She was counterproductive, shattered balance up to the point where she was released, and incited a decline in playerbase and variety. She was, simply, the worst character we have ever recieved.
Thank you.