🚀 Let's Have A Rational Discussion About Pharah

General Discussion
1

I am obligated to preface this post by stating that I am emotionally invested in this topic due to my love for this hero. With over five hundred hours of Pharah playtime spread across three accounts, it would be a strange thing, indeed, if I did not feel I had a personal stake in her state of balance. However, I am also a logical person who tries to operate based on fact over emotion, and so I will attempt to refrain from allowing my personal feelings to influence my judgement. I was reminded in a post below that perhaps I should also mention that I am a PC player and I am aware Pharah is a different beast on console.

Pharah needs help.

While not in as dire of straits as some other heroes, Pharah has long suffered under the oppressiveness of her counter-picks. Every hero should have other heroes that counter them, but the sheer amount of counters Pharah has makes choosing her at hero select a questionable decision in almost all cases.

Why bother choosing Pharah at all if the moment you appear on the battlefield, the enemy team will suddenly have one or any combination of the following heroes: McCree, Widowmaker, Ashe, 76, Ana, Baptiste, Zenyatta, Bastion, or Torbjorn?

While the last two are a lesser threat, whoever made turrets lock on to airborne heroes first is evil.

In addition to the myriad heroes which counter Pharah due to her giant rectangle of a hitbox, she also suffers from the concept of a required Mercy partner in order to stay alive and perform on the battlefield. While I have never been a person to demand a Mercy at my side when playing Pharah, there are a lot of people who do, in fact, do that. This leads to issues where the DPS is trying to dictate what support is played, and people who don’t really play Mercy then try to Pharmercy and can’t stick with the Pharah or don’t know when to peel off and heal their team and then rejoin Pharah later.

In addition, the concept of the required Mercy is one of the things that makes people say that Pharah doesn’t need any help, because if she has a Mercy stuck up her butt, she can be harder to kill, particularly in lower and mid ranks.

Now, while I don’t ascribe to the idea that I need a Mercy in order to play Pharah (I don’t), it is a fact that without Mercy, Pharah is very vulnerable in the sky. Between healers that just can’t reach her and those who seem to be incapable of aiming their camera in a vertical direction, Pharah largely relies on using line-of-sight obstacles and health packs to stay alive.

So here we have these issues and a conundrum. Pharah is too easily countered and carries the stigma of ‘requiring’ a Mercy, but the ‘requiring’ of Mercy is also why people do not want to buff Pharah, because then Pharmercy would be too strong.

So what do we do?

How do we help Pharah? Strong at low levels of play, medicore at mid-levels, a potential throw pick at high rank where people can aim—unless they are very, very stubborn.

I have a couple ideas, and I’m curious what the rest of the community can come up with.

First, I think it’s important to lower Pharah’s reliance on Mercy. Something that would go a long way toward this would be a horizontal movement ability much like Hanzo’s leap. In my mind this is an ability on a 5-6 second cooldown which just allows Pharah to swiftly juke to the left or right depending on which directional button the player presses. This would allow her to avoid more incoming damage and get behind cover faster, which means she would need less babysitting.

Second, I would like to see Pharah’s hitbox changed. This isn’t something that would have to come with the ability mentioned above, because then she might become too hard to hit, particularly in gold and below. However, right now she’s this giant flying box that doesn’t even really move all that fast in comparison to the run speed of some heroes. She’s a giant, flying, boxy sloth. With rockets. Her hitbox could be slimmed down a little bit and conform more to her body.

Finally, I would like to see the splash damage nerf reverted. I’m aware this is a pipe dream, but if you fire a rocket into a crowd, the debris and shrapnel do just as much if not more damage to the surrounding people as those directly hit.

I haevn’t been able to play Pharah with any seriousness for about six months now. First Ashe. Then McCree got buffed. Ana becomes more meta. Now 76 gets a buff. He deserves it, but so does Pharah. She got a great skin for the Archives event, but what does it matter when I can’t show it off because I’m countered before I even leave the spawn? Or because someone who never plays Mercy will pick her just because I picked Pharah, and then she neglects our team or doesn’t heal me at all anyway? It honestly makes me sad.

What ideas do you guys have to help Pharah? I think many of us can agree she does need something.

10 Likes
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Giver her 100 armor so that Pharmercy doesn’t become oppressive, that way the Pharah mains are happy and the people that hate playing against Pharmercy are happy.

3

We did the changes to help that and people screamed. The answer is however more of the change they made last time.

And the above is why it is a pipe dream, if you are to balance her, you need to make her less strong at low ranks and stronger at high ranks, not stronger at low ranks and balance based on that like a revert to splash would cause.

The changes to splash etc was to fix the problems above, and make it so she could be stronger at high ranks.

Ultimately I think the fix for pharah is more dps enabling supports which can heal at range, having Mercy connected to her is because Mercy is really the only one who can do the job.

You can’t make her independently strong without making big changes to Mercy, so the other answer is make more supports work with her.

Pharah + Echo will have some pretty odd interactions at best, regardless of what Echo is like, so I expect they will hold off modifying pharah till echos release.

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Sorry but until Mercy is needed for healing, I’m against pharah changes.

She works fairly okay with Zen and brig is decent. So I’m guessing it’s that heal pocket being airborne.

So until Mercy is changed…neither should pharah

5

My desire to see the revert of the splash damage nerf is mainly due to how I would use it to destroy turrets around corners or hit Bastion for a significant amount while behind a corner.

Yes, this goes toward what I was saying about lowering her reliance on the presence of Mercy. It ultimately hurts any team when one of their support must babysit another player instead of being freer to move about and support the entire team.

And this is what I’m saying is the problem. Pharah shouldn’t be balanced around Mercy. We don’t balance Mercy around Pharah. Pharah needs help so that she is less reliant on Mercy.

1 Like
6

I was thinking about this earlier when I saw that Pharah got a pretty cool skin. I thought to myself “Wow, now if only Pharah was playable”

Still waiting on that flight speed buff that’s never coming

6 Likes
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Unless you want pharah to have tracer level of how, I don’t think any avenue of changes can be done without changes to mercy. Because no changes to pharah inherently weakens pharmercy. Any change to pharah equally buffs that synergy.

Again, that’s because of aireborne pocket potential.

Nothing on pharahs end can change until Mercy is fundamentally incapable of the airborne pocket.

1 Like
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Yes but there isn’t much we can do which wouldn’t make her crazy op with Mercy. Unless either Mercy gets a rework (not happening) or we get new supports which I suspect hell will freeze over first. (Or ow2, whichever happens first, check with mei for details)

The best they could do is change her self boop with concussion to give her extra mobility in the high ranks.

2 Likes
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Exactly. I LOVE the skin. I saw it and I thought, “OMG. PHARAH GOT A TOP GUN SKIN!”

And sure enough, she even has a ‘zone’ spray with fighter jets in the background that’s totally a reference to the Danger Zone, so I’m all about this new skin… but I can’t play my favorite hero to show it off.

1 Like
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Given all the buffs to hitscan, Sombra, and D.va, that’s a non-issue.

At worst, have different buffs for console and pc

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Maybe I should add into the OP that I am a PC player. I’m aware that Pharah feels like a different monster on console.

12

Yeah, but…

Her win rate overall isn’t bad. if you are coming from a fix pharah point of view, the answer is overall she is pretty balanced, so it now comes down to, at what rank do you want her fixed and why?

Like global win rate is EXACTLY where you want it to be (on PC)

So the question isn’t an overall buff or nerf one, but more details at particular ranks.

1 Like
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PC player too, but I like to maintain a “big picture” view of things.

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  1. I’m pretty skeptical about winrates, given how they have a lot of other statistical biasing going on.
  2. Pickrate is a lot more important.
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Which happens at different ranks, global is immune to everything except mirroring.

But she doesn’t have the pick rate for mirroring issues.

Like the first stage is, is there something wrong here?
The second is what is wrong?

Lets clear the first stage first.

1 Like
16

She’s the second to least picked hero between Plat through Masters, and the least picked in GM…

17

Cool, so she has issues outside of the low ranks, so that means your target is her upper rank play.

Which means things like splash revert is VERY much out.

1 Like
18

Well, I would like to see her viable at all levels of play. This becomes more difficult the higher up you go because aim improves exponentially between something like silver and diamond and gold and masters.

And the thing with Pharah is this: If she isn’t countered, she will destroy you. But if even one of her counters exists on the battlefield, her effectiveness is lowered to almost nil. Combine this with the fact that she has so many counters available in all three roles, and it actually makes picking Pharah in the first place a potentially losing decision. You’re likely to see one of your counters immediately out of the gate just because so many exist and are seeing play.

In lower ranks, people can’t aim so Pharah still does decently well even if there is a Cree or a 76 on the field, she can just use LOS obstacles and take potshots and that can be enough. But as you ascend in rank, you hit this wall starting in gold, actually. What happens is people start using natural cover and don’t stand out in the open so you have to fly around to get them in sight, and then you’re dead. So you have to swap, which is no big deal, except this is going to happen every single game.

And you’re not guaranteed a Mercy, either. That doesn’t happen with any consistency till about platinum, and then when you’re in plat, people can aim well enough that they have a pretty good chance of just shooting you both out of the sky, and then the chance of that happening goes up even more when you hit diamond and masters and GM.

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Oh totally but it means we need to target for upper ranks which changes the kind of things we need to fix.

This is going to be a buff things more useful at high ranks and nerf other parts of her kit time.

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It’s really not though. Since the playtime during a match weights the importance of the pick.

And the team that defends the longest usually wins, and the team that has the shortest Attack usually wins.

There’s some heavy biasing if a hero is primarily used for Attack or Defence.

Then you have the issue of a hero only being picked in ideal situations.