In the old days of Overwatch, D.Va’s defense matrix was actually an ability that had a duration and cooldown. For added context, it lasted four seconds and had a six-second cooldown.
Obviously, this is overkill, but what I’m asking is what do you think of its mechanic? Do you prefer matrix with a duration and cooldown or do you prefer the current matrix with a gauge?
prefer gauge. It’s more flexible.
Reworked one is much better. This is a no brainer.
It was absolutely terrible as a CD. It was one of the few times in ow history that dva was actually bad. But after her changes she was a meta pick for years.
That’s not entirely true. It took both switching it to a gauge and fixing a bug that caused damage to still go through DM if the firer was barrel stuffing their target for it to break. Aka… making DM impossible to counter. Go figure an OWL level DPS can do some serious damage if they are functionally invincible for 4 seconds.
Dva was hard meta before they removed the minimum range with matrix.
Yes she did get some other buffs other than just matrix no longer on a CD before she was meta
1.1.0.2 - 7/19/2016
Defense Matrix
Self Destruct
Defense Matrix
Call Mech
Fusion Cannons
Defense Matrix
Yeah… between 9/2/2016 and 11/15/2016 she wasn’t meta… despite us being in Triple Tank at the time. Those 11/15/2016 buffs made her meta because she suddenly became much more lethal and much more resilient in the same patch. Meta… but not because of DM.
If I remember correctly, she started to fall off again after the 1/24/2017 patch but then came back in force for pros at least after the 2/27/2017 patch.
Original dva was actually, legitimately, the worst hero in the game. Even worse than bastion if you can believe it.
Umm… all I’m asking is do you prefer defense matrix on cooldown or gauge? Why are you guys overthinking this?
The current one is objectively better.
However I am willing to trade it off for the old one if d.va gets to be as tanky as she was when she had it.
gauge used to last 4 seconds omegalul
Why wouldn’t anyone prefer a much weaker and less versatile version of it?
The gauge matrix is way more powerful. Whether or not that is good for the games balance I don’t really know. In general I think tanks should be more powerful defenders and less powerful attackers.
Its mechanic was awful, and theres zero chance it would ever be as good as it is on gauge no matter how you tweek it.
All i want is 15m back
This was when D.Va was played in Troll comps prior to Season 3.
No thank you
Because she’s a GREAT example of what off-tanks should be made around 
And Zarya ofc.
We need more characters who are easy to play & pick up but take massive amounts of hours and game sense to fully understand and play to the best of your abilites!!!
Honestly, the removal of the dead zone is what made d.VA so busted. Getting up in her face was a specific trick that DPS players could use to get around being smothered by matrix, but Blizzard decided that needed to be buffed out of the game for some reason.
Also, the OG cooldown version of matrix was junk. You almost never needed the full duration when you pressed the button, and since it was all or nothing you would often waste it eating one or two attacks and be useless for the remainder of the cooldown period.
Looking back on it, it’s kind of crazy that launch d.va didn’t have missiles, died to her own ultimate, and had defense matrix on a massive cooldown. I played her a lot back then but I have not idea how
And yet she was better and more fun to play than current d.va.