In the patch notes it said that moira orb builds have been her most popular build and thats true. To combat that they decided lets nerf chain grasp (one of her best weapon powers), remove deconstruction and make orbs even stronger with attack speed debuffs and explosions. I get they were trying to buff coalescence but its such a buns ultimate its only really used on orb builds since that builds on ability power and on weapon power builds for the health regen on moira herself. I was beginning to enjoy weapon power moira builds but changing up ethereal, removing deconstruction and nerfing chain grasp it feels like shes been gutted. Removing deconstruction im fine with and it doesnt effect the builds too much as you’re building on weapon power anyway. Chain grasps nerf may be better reverting since 2 seconds is not long enough, moiras weapon power is easily countered by flash heal builds which is common and also struggles in later rounds. Ethereal I believe could do with a revert as once again this is just pushing orb builds even more with the added bonus of having more damage with grasp and coal.
They have entirely ruined Moira. Both her WP and AP builds are gutted down to nothing. and to top it off they took out the one small bit of utility she had with team fade. This must be changed back or she is a dead character
Came here just to say how much i hate these changes! I dont know why they decided to nerf her wp power build into the ground as it wasnt as popular as the orb builds to begin with but they did. Its so much worse, limiting chain grasp to 2 s. Wp was my favorite way to play moira. I really only play moira in stadium and this pretty much ruins stadium for me. Probably won’t be playing stadium unless this gets reverted back. I feel robbed. Like why….
She was a bit strong that way in Stadium to be fair
The Chain Grasp change can be a buff. If you get the Necrotic Orb power and a gadget, Moira can use Necrotic Orb, Fade, Biotic Orb, and a Gadget to get 8 continuous seconds of Chain Grasp and then use another ability off cooldown to keep it going.
They did straight up assassinate Ethereal Excision though. Making Moira’s grasp powers dependent on her orbs was always dumb, but making Ethereal Excision only work if an orb is actively touching someone is the most asinine hoop to jump through for a paltry 20% increase in damage. They also killed Alternative Energy for the weapon speed builds since it doesn’t refill your biotic resource on fade anymore.
I also dislike how they made “Fade through someone” a requisite to activate abilities. Fade is Moira’s only escape tool and if you’re blowing it just to get a little overhealth or 1.5 seconds of Coalescence, she’s just gonna die once it ends. They killed Voidhoppers by combining it with Scientific Deathod too and I’m really upset about it.
I made it into Legend on Moira doing mostly weapon speed builds and I’m very disappointed that they’ve chosen to make it suboptimal to build her that way versus just running the exact same orb build as everyone else.
Yup….can’t wait to face DVA now, this will be fun…
A bit strong in the early rounds with weapon power and chain grasp if nobody picked her off but it would soon taper out extremely quickly as rounds progressed. Also most moira players in stadium stuck with orb/debuff builds instead of using weapon power so you’d have one match in every blue moon where’d you’d have to pay attention to your backline once moira dives in there.
I came here about to write my own topic, cause I couldn’t agree more! There is far, far too much interest in making all powers have equal pick rates. Certain players will gravitate towards certain playstyles, some more niche than others. But the overall truth will remain: on average, players will tend to seek to increase their efficiency/output with as little effort as possible.
In Moira’s case, this naturally means most players on average will build into her orbs. More orbs = more free heal/damage with little risk to the player (and simultaneously making her ult stronger), therefore, players will tend to be like wow cool! I’m better for very little effort and risk on my part, yippee!! And that’s fine, Moira is an ability based character so it is natural players will lean into this playstyle. It’s okay that your average not-a-Moira-main-but-support-player-who-sees-her-value runs this build and not a weapon power build. It doesn’t mean the weapon power build needs changing, it means that many players don’t experiment and choose the path of least resistance with greatest value (which they ought to know is only magnified by the hero builder literally telling people to build the same things).
Moira isn’t the only one hit with this in this patch, the first that comes to mind is the change to Ashe’s Pin BOB power, one that I’ve only ever seen one other Ashe pick (I love it!). Now rather than BOB auto pinning his next target and serving them up, the power has him pin towards your crosshair, when the value of BOB on stadium maps often comes from chucking him out there to contest objective while you the Ashe player are very far away, meaning that I actually have no clue what the battlefield looks like but BOB does, and my crosshair may provide no useful location for him to move to. Not to mention that serving them up is a huge part of the draw, not just for the impact damage but for the disorienting movement. Yes BOB would occasionally chase after a target and drop to his death but I don’t think this change will stop that entirely and frankly I’d take the risk with the added benefits it used to have (BOB being smart enough to auto target). But it’s like someone thought “this change may be useful,” when they lack the informed understanding of the power’s workings to begin with.
In Moira’s case this means we’ve said “we want to make her weapon power build viable,” but what we actually did was tie her wp build into relying her abilities? When again, the issue wasn’t that the powers were bad, it’s just that most players choose the easiest value build and Moira’s orb build goes absolutely bonkers! Removing crit unless someone is being attacked by either her damage ability or her ultimate necessarily means that you can only crit in relation to ability damage. If I have to use a damage orb on a target just to get crit (so I can’t use it to heal myself now), an orb that moves around the map btw, like what is the point? Why not just build into ability power at that point, since I’m already reliant on it and the three orb will invariably end up doing more damage than a teeny crit on her paltry grasp that lasts for a blip of time, and with cross-orbal you’ll heal yourself more than the grasp’s self-heal anyways? And it may not seem flashy, but in a duel that extra movement speed was actually noticeable when strafing around and dodging. Plus, ya know…the crit damage lol.
Remote Reciprocity is interesting (after 300 healing, increase grasp range and dmg for 3 seconds), but it’s a ramp-up that is dependent on having a nearby ally that needs an amount of healing that only a tank has the hp pool for in early rounds. Requiring her dmg boost to need nearby healable allies seems like a limiting design choice, but I haven’t run it yet to see just how viable it could be.
I’m disappointed that they’ve nerfed her wp build while claiming to want to buff it, but what really gets my goat here is the fade changes. My issues are twofold: one, changing Voidhoppers such that it requires phasing through allies to proc is a terrible choice considering that I’m not in charge of anyone else’s movement and absolutely guts her ability to remove debuffs when we’ve yet again added even more random burns (why does Reaper burn you if he phases thru you lol) while simultaneously removing two-zu (and these are the ONLY two ways two remove debuffs as a support barring Wuyang’s specific ability to cleanse burns with an item); and two, “spectral beam” by design encourages bad Moira play, requiring players to use their escape movement ability to phase into enemies to briefly proc her ultimate.
Now, a good Moira player would use that wisely. But as we all know, Moira is the most picked support in stadium by far and it’s not because these players are all Moira specialists lol. I encountered this actually in a game I played earlier, enemy Moira kept fading into us from round 1 onwards and got absolutely no value because I on Mercy could outheal her meanwhile she’s a continent away from her team and doing nothing. And the obvious: giving Moira a coalescence build means giving her another ap build, which the blurb in the patch notes specifically said they were trying to branch away from…
IMO the solution was actually quite simple. The ONLY issue I ever faced on a Moira wp build is that you get decreasing value from your ultimate as the game goes on as all players end up with very large health pools that a 0% boosted coal is just not gonna burst heal or burst down with any sort of effectiveness. Ramattra actually has an item that allows his Pummel to also be increased by ap, and I think it would’ve been easy to just give coal the same treatment. Without a power to proc her ult every few seconds, it would be no real balance issue that every so often she has a consistently viable ult versus an ult depreciating in value over time. Her orbs should remain solely tied to ap obviously. But if we kept Moira from last season and either changed out a power or tacked onto Destruction’s Divide that it allows coal to scale with wp, I think she would be solid with an incredibly powerful wp build. Well, without the item that refreshes her healing resource on fade, she’d take a hit for sure. But man those ethereal excision + chain grasp games were some of the easiest of my life!
She could stand to have some of her orb powers removed into something else to be honest, multiball + cross-orbal is just absurd free value but it seems pretty clear that the ideas on how to introduce interesting ways to engage with the characters while still leaving them balanceable are somewhat lacking (see: multiple “use your ult when you use your ability” powers, auto aim powers, and so on). But with her wp build now being gutted and shifted into reliance on her abilities like… I’ll just go back to running orb build every game like all the other Moiras 
And okay, I’m so sorry to just complain, but let’s be honest: supports get the short end of the stick in stadium. When they’re “too viable” they get nerfed. When they have a power or item with a high pick rate, it’s changed or gone for the sake of “build diversity.” We removed the utility of Alternative Energy presumably due to high pick rates from its value, but we’re what, one year into stadium now and Dva’s item “Dae-hyun’s Detonator” (+100% once an even more absurd 200% nerf radius) is still there! Wow we FINALLY made it cost a whopping 9k rather than 4, but did we remove the free extra value? No! Will you die to nerf almost guaranteed if a Dva picks this item? Yes! But that’s fine. We removed and altered half of Moira’s power selection by now, but Freja, a character these patch notes openly calls problematic due to her kit’s oppressive nature, has had her offerings go completely untouched! In fact, rather than nerf or alter her two primary builds, both overwhelmingly chosen (machine gun by actual Freja players, bola build by the same people who will default to orb Moira for the same reason), we’re just gonna buff her lesser chosen powers 
Like it just doesn’t add up lol. Supports need to be like, operating at half capacity of the rest of the roster or the game will explode. I just think like, maybe build diversity shouldn’t be dependent on pick rate. It should be dependent on actual balance concerns. Moira’s wp build was actually solid it just needed a little something to buff up her burst potential in later rounds. The changes to the fade powers were clearly made to make room for the coal on fade power and idk… just seems like, weird. Like ask a Moira player which they’d prefer and I bet “I wanna use ult on fade” is just not a priority. Would love to see these changes given another look cause I think their hearts were in the right place but the execution was sadly a miss
Pff, you ruined her and Zen. I played 2 games in Stadium this season - enough to see how awful it is. There is no even point in “giving stadium a chance” after reading the patch notes - no, the problem is not in my resistance to the changes, it’s you just ruining the builds. You want “Melee” build for Zen? Go play Genji. Nah, it was a fat flat end of the mode.
Also, bug with non-rendered teammates was… Did you ever test it?
Returning to a regular competitive mode - wasn’t there since the Stadium launch
She feels awful to play now
Necrotic orb is almost useless. It’s hitbox is absolutely tiny so you can’t even hit anyone with it half the time and it doesn’t bounce either. Waste of a Power slot.
honestly thank you, I was so looking forward to using moira this season in ranked stadium to get to allstar again. I had started watching a youtuber (arx_uk) and he introduced me to wp moira builds, I had a blast with them in qp last season and wanted to try them in ranked this season and now its pretty much useless. As you said to get true value off of moira wp builds I need team mates around me or to invest in ability power! Its a good idea trying to boost her wp builds but a terrible execution! if im already investing in ability power for a build I may as well just stick with it.
Her orb powers are awful now compared to before. Orb Splosion is a terrible power compared to what she had previously.
If you consider how many orbs you could generate from spamming left click and using fade to refill resources, this is a massive overall nerf to the potential of orbs in Stadium.
Maybe you’ll occasionally see someone get a kill using a multi-orb fade combo on top of someone that’s not really moving and blowing up the orbs, but to say orbs are stronger is simply not the reality. Orbs are massively nerfed.
I feel like this sums up my complaints in a nutshell. Rather than emphasizing a different playstyle than only orbs, the weapon build now to require orbs to get the same effect as they did before. I think the Coalescence build could be cool, but I don’t like that we had to sacrifice Voidhoppers for what is ultimately another AP build.
okay but this has also nerfed her weapon power builds by changing or straight up removing the powers that made them, yes orb builds may have been nerfed too but weapon power builds took the bigger hit. Maybe you didnt use a weapon power moira build you so you dont know what they were like but they struggled to begin with when it came to later rounds and now they are mostly going to struggle unless you also buy ability power with it and use her orbs to unlock the full potential of what should be just weapon power
Wasn’t saying wp was in a good state, just that orbs were overall nerfed and not improved.
The new spec seems like it’s mostly going to be DPS focused since you need to fade through enemies to proc it and are probably going to then focus that ult onto enemies. You’ll do some healing with it, but nothing compared to an orb spamming build before this patch. It’s a very odd choice if that ends up being the strongest AP build. At least with orbs you could always seamlessly swap between damage and healing mostly with the same build where the new build requires you to get up close to enemies which naturally will make you want to focus your ult procs onto them. It also forces you to use your defensive/escape to engage.
If people complained before about Moira focusing on damage and not on healing they’re going to be even sadder if the new powers turn out to be her strongest.
So they pretty much did the exact opposite of what they intended: orb build is the only viable build now. And you might be able to skip out on picking a fourth power
The new chain grasp sounds powerful: get 2 seconds of chaining grasp when you use an ability, until you realize it doesn’t stack. It resets the duration. So you have to use abilities at specific intervals. Doable maybe, but not effective in many matches.
The mini ult build is garbage. It’s predicated on you constantly fading through enemies and giving up your only defensive tooll for a scuffed short duration ult. No thanks.
As far as a healing focused build, not even sure what to take anymore. Voidhoppers was a key ability to cleanse allies and give them overhealth. But that’s gone.
What a massive disappointment.
Moiras design causes issues like this. She does not really have a skill floor since she is so easily accessible by everyone. So if you have something that is good it is likely really good and can become problematic quickly. So you have issues like this where she gets gutted since that is how OW devs balance.
the only perk that allowed some mechanical skill gap was the old excision and they removed it.
I agree! I don’t like using a lot of orbs (cross orbal max) and taking away fade to refill/a lot of other perks I used for my builds has thrown me a fair bit