I’m going to assume we’ve all seen them by now, so I won’t dwell on it.
Adding her giga-slow, but cutting her effective DPS in half, are both the same fundamental problem of how this game is balanced. This makes Mei ridiculously unfun to play against due to the horrors of CC and how slow down effects are always awful. Overwatch is a game where mobility is king, so having a hero whose entire identity is ‘no mobility for you’ is just no fun.
But on the opposite end- this will also make Mei so unfun to play as. Sure, the slow is powerful. But 55 dps is horrendous on a character in the Damage category. Hell, it’s worst effective DPS than the majority of the support roster can output. So yes, while this may be a change that is from a balance perspective not automatically bad (I wont pretend to know), but it turns Mei into both a character no one wants to play into, or actually play as.
And that’s the core issue with OW2 balance. The developers are almost intetionally trying to balance the fun out of the game. Balance is hard, I know, and no hero should be allowed to be so oppressive they can dictate an entire game just by themselves. But a hero should first and foremost always be balanced with the question “Will this be fun to play as, and will it be fun to play against?”.
And before people say ‘a hero is only fun to playu against when they’re bad and easy kills’… No. Not at all. You can have a hero who is fun to play into without them needing to be so weak anyone can 1v1 them. Or heck, even just a hero who isn’t actively anti-fun to play against is fine. But Mei is going to be anti-fun, both for her players and for the enemy team (and for her own team since Wall is such a disruptive ability).
Besides JQ being to OP, Weaver/ RH being a joke and sniper being just more out of place than they were in OW1, I personally think, the balance is pretty much fine.
Will it still be after S5 launches? Who knows. I agree that cutting Meis damage in half is a very bad move, but the ICE HERO should have at least a big slow. I also think that they will buff the damage back to 80 or so in the mid season patch. They do this all the time: at first to crazy changes and then they go back to 50% and settle there.
I am sure they only want to get some data and if she sucks even more… she will be reverted or get some other changes. Meis beam is not much the problem and rather how inconsistent and slow the alt fire is. It could be 50% faster and she would still be balanced.
It is a mega slow not a stun so it probably is a net nerf. As the enemy will still be able to use movement abilities, crouch/spin and shoot back. The revert to her old dps is just bad.
The apparently trade-off is that if you apply the full freeze effect to an enemy, her alt fire does an additional 40 damage on top of the 75. It’s unclear if this also applies to crits or if it’s just a flat 40. That means that she does about 83 damage in the 1.5 seconds it takes to apply the “freeze” and then 115 damage with a follow-up body shot. That is, unfortunately, only 198 damage, but quick melee finishes would be enough for her to kill every 225hp character and below. If you land a headshot, that 190(?) plus the 83 freeze damage is enough to kill pretty much everyone in the game except Bastion and tanks.
It requires more skill to pull off now, but it does slightly lower her ttk for squishies compared to the live game. At least with her primary fire alone. Seems like they’re trying to move away from the “Mei players that hold m1 all game” playstyle and back to combining her primary and alt fires for more expressions of skill.
I’m skeptical about this change, because it still doesn’t solve the issue of movement abilities. Her slow has no effect on skills that grant movement, so it’s effectively useless against skills like Blink, Echo Flight, Dva Booster, Cassidy Roll, Doom Jump, etc
From the patch notes, Cassidy is FAR better as a CC user because he locks all movement abilities like Zarya.
The 55 DPS reduction makes her significantly worse up close, because she can’t close in kills.
These changes essentially force her back into a Tank Punisher role, which is a huge regression because this is the same exact role she had in OW 1 where she was consistently one of the worst dps in game. Now that she doesn’t even have freeze, I don’t see how this is beneficial outside of punishing Ball / Junker Queen.
No it’s not. This isn’t Titanfall 2 where the whole game was designed around hyper mobility and everyone has it.
Overwatch 2 is a game where mobility is massively over-tuned because all the counters to mobility got drop kicked out the game so you get to abuse your hyper mobility against the heroes with no mobility. Spoiler alert, heroes without mass mobility are the majority so having mobility be so strong fundamentally destroys the balance.
CC is unfun to play against but lets not act like fighting vs hyper mobility is somehow any better.
How do you define ‘mass’ mobility? Because if you think its the majority who lack it, Id argue you may have a different definition than me to ‘mobility’
#2 is wrong. One mei will not be able to stop a full on dive with a tank and dps diving. It will shut down a single dive character, but won’t survive against focused dives.
I’m worried about the mei’s slow buff also. Good thing there’s only 1 tank now, because if it wasn’t for that, we might not have any tank players left. OW2 is mostly for DPS and supports right now. They get to have the most fun.
Or… A brawl tank? Sure people say it’s going to be for dive. But do you think this is going to just… Never hit brawl character who can’t dodge the slow as well as Genji or other mobile characters? JQ is essentially nerfed hard by this, same with Rein, same with Ram. I’d include Hog but he’s already bad enough to not care.
Something you use pretty much 24/7 while on that hero in and out of combat. For example, Genji and Tracer. Genji has dash, double jump and wall climb, he’s constantly mobile and constantly using the movement abilities. They are engrained into every single combat situation with the hero. Tracer is dashing constantly to try not be hit. Phara and Echo are lumped in here too.
Heroes with a movement ability does not automatically mean they have mass mobility. For example, Winston. This hero has mobility, but it isn’t something used 24/7 365 in and out of combat permanently. It’s mainly used to take space or dive on a hero (before you say it yes you can use Winston mid combat for a hit of damage but his leap is for taking space or diving. Once he leaps he hasn’t got any mobility). They aren’t used in combat actively and consistently to win that duel. A tank with mass mobility would be Hammond. He’s pile driving, rolling and swinging for the majority of his uptime even during combat.
Kiriko is not mass mobility. Being able to climb up a wall is something used very sparingly. Moira’s fade is not mass mobility.
To use titanfall for my example again. In that game you are always wall running, always sliding, always double boosting. It’s available to you 24/7, the game is designed around this fact. It’s used to take space, evade, fight. Weapons are tuned with this in mind. Abilities are made with this in mind. There is no situation where someone has insane amounts of ability compared to anyone else. Overwatch does not have this. There are heroes that blatantly have more mobility than others.
Just like sticking a titanfall pilot in the middle of a COD match would completely break the enjoyment for the got players, having hyper mobility heroes in Overwatch compared to heroes with nothing and having no real way to counter it except “lmao just shoot them” isn’t fun for anyone outside those with hyper mobility. It’s why Genji’s insist the game is fun when he’s super overtuned while everyone else is having a miserable experience.
