OverWrite - Let's Fix Everything: Part 2

[Titanium-1686]

Greetings!

Some of you may remember this thread, which I created a few weeks ago on the old forums:
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20761757292#post-1

I’m here on the forums to recreate this thread, as the old thread is no longer capable of holding discussions. When it was still active, I made several modifications to it (flagged by “edit:”s), which I have naturalized into this post, along with other adjustments including:

• Updating statistics to match current values.
• An additional change to Symmetra.
• A random idea for Lucio.
• A new Variant for Reaper.
• Roadhog now has a section to himself.
• 330 changes from HTML to whatever the new forum uses for the “list item” function, as the old command no longer works with the new forums (CTRL+F is a wonderful thing).
• Some other random changes distributed throughout the post.
• The occasional typo that I come across… seems as though even proofreading the paper doesn’t always catch all of the errors when it is 82+ pages long.

Speaking of 82 pages, that’s how long I said this megapost was when I originally posted it last time. Thanks to the additional sections in conjunction with me naturalizing my previous edits further combined with the format changes, I am happy to present to you a post that smashed my previous record yet again: 97 pages.

Have fun.
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Table of Contents (use CTRL+F to find the sections)
1.0 - Torbjorn’s Issues
1.1 - Solutions for Torbjorn
2.0 - Mercy’s Issues
2.1 - Solutions for Mercy
3.0 - Genji’s Issues
3.1 - Solutions for Genji
4.0 - Doomfist’s Issues
4.1 - Solutions for Doomfist
5.0 - Symmetra’s Issues
5.1 - Solutions for Symmetra
6.0 - Reinhardt’s Issues
6.1 - Solutions for Reinhardt
7.0 - Bastion’s Issues
7.1 - Solutions for Bastion
8.0 - Ana Things
9.0 - Reaper’s Issues
9.1 - Solutions for Reaper
– Break, because this post exceeds the 99,000 character limit –
10.0 - Mei-be We Should Do Something
10.1 - Mei-king Progress
11.0 - Junkrat Things
12.0 - Sombra’s Issues
12.1 - Solutions for Sombra
13.0 - Hanzo’s Issues
13.1 - Solutions for Hanzo
14.0 - Roadhog Stuff
15.0 - Lu-ci-yo!
16.0 - Matchmaking
17.0 - Report System
18.0 - Developer/Forum Communication
19.0 - Other Miscellaneous Things
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1.0 - Torbjorn’s Issues
Torbjorn isn’t in exactly a good spot. He, among others, is often referred to as a “troll-pick”, as players often assume that the player who chose Torbjorn is throwing and proceed to throw themselves.

What causes this behavior? A few things…

- Torbjorn’s. Beard.
“What’s wrong with his beard”, you say? It’s not about how it looks; it looks fine. It appears to be well-groomed, and despite Torbjorn messing with grease all the time, it stays surprisingly clean. No, the issue isn’t how Torbjorn’s beard looks. It’s that… well, I’ll just let the video speak for itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5j4HWS3sik

Um…
What the actual [chocolate fudge! :D] is that critbox?
The problem is that his beard, along with just about everything above and between his nipples, is part of his face. Furthermore, because Torbjorn is short (but not a dwarf!), what would be a body-shot for most heroes is a headshot for Torbjorn, both because of the critbox’s position and its size.

- Torbjorn’s viability is too dependant upon the situation.
Torbjorn’s ability to succeed in-game depends heavily upon the map and his team’s willingness to build around him. In situations in which one or the other isn’t the case, Torbjorn is underpowered. This would be okay if two things were the case:

1. Torbjorn was granted equal or better reward than generalists in those same scenarios (Soldier:76, for example).
2. The situations in which Torbjorn became effective were not terribly uncommon occurrences.

Neither of the above points are the case. The occasions in which Torbjorn is effective are exceedingly rare, and even in many of those scenarios it simply would be safer to pick a different hero; Soldier:76, as already mentioned. The only real advantage provided by Torbjorn’s existence on a team is that the enemy team instantly tilts off the face of the Earth when the possibility of losing to a Torbjorn becomes a potential reality. However, this also comes with a drawback; picking Torbjorn can also tilt your own team off the face of the Earth.

This lack of viability in most situations comes from the fact that Torbjorn’s turret requires that Torbjorn spend 4 seconds slapping it with his hammer at the very least before it becomes a real asset to the team. Because of how fast-paced this game is, 4 seconds is an incredibly long time to not be directly contributing the the fight, especially when playing on offense.
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1.1 - Solutions for Torbjorn
Build 1:
First and foremost:

• Torbjorn’s critbox more accurately resembles the size of his head.

I really don’t think I need to explain this one.

Autocannon Turret:

• Torbjorn’s level 1 turret now gradually upgrades itself over time at a rate of 1 “tick” every 2 seconds.
• The turret does not need to be at full health for it to upgrade passively.
• Hammer/turret swing priority (upgrade vs repair) is unchanged; turret must be at full health before Torbjorn can manually upgrade it.
• If the Turret is damaged before passively upgrading to level 2, the amount of remaining health is doubled upon upgrading (example: 75/150 HP on level 1 goes to 150/300 HP on level 2).

Armor Pack:

• Torbjorn can now provide his turret with armor by using his E on it. However, this only provides 50 armor. Other than the reduced health, the armor on his turret functions the same way it would on players.
• Allies can now see Torbjorn’s turret through walls.

The objective with this change is to make Torbjorn more versatile. Torbjorn can now place his turret and leave it to upgrade itself to level 2 over 10 seconds (one “tick” is the equivalent of one hammer swing, and Torbjorn needs five of those to upgrade his turret) while he plays more offensively. This will also help Torbjorn set up a little faster manually, as it will now only take 4 hammer swings to upgrade his turret (or 3.2 seconds) if it is not taking damage.

Torbjorn could drop his turret in a location and defend it using his Rivet Gun, playing a game of “Protect my baby” while it passively upgrades. This could be further reinforced with the ability to spend 50 scrap for 50 armor on the level 1 turret, which increases the durability of the construct.

The last change where allies can see Torbjorn’s turret through walls is a QoL change that just makes sense to have.

Variant 1:
Torbjorn’s turret does not upgrade overtime, but the turret no longer needs to be at full health for Torbjorn to upgrade it. Each hammer swing heals the turret for 50 health and simultaneously increases the level progression of it.

This would help Torbjorn set up his turret when under light fire, but focus fire will still destroy his turret before it can be upgraded.

Build 2:
This was requested by someone in the previous thread, so I added it as an edit to the original post.

As said in Build 1:

• Torbjorn’s critbox more accurately resembles the size of his head.

Rivet Gun:

• Primary fire projectile speed increased from 57 meters/second to 80.
• Bullet drop remains the same as before, meaning that despite a different velocity, the projectile will still take the same trajectory.

This aims to make Torbjorn’s primary fire feel more consistent. Note that 80 meters/second is the same projectile speed of Torbjorn’s secondary fire.

Autocannon Turret:

• Now refocuses to attack targets being attacked by the Torbjorn player, as long as they are within sight and range. Hitting an enemy as Torbjorn causes the turret to re-target.
• Shooting barriers does not cause the turret to re-target if it is already shooting at an enemy.
• After 2 seconds of not taking damage or shooting, the turret heals at a rate of 25 health/second.
• Once the turret begins self-repairing, shooting does not interrupt this process. However, taking damage will.
• Level 3 turret health reduced from 800 to 600.
• Level 3 turret visual change: the four plates of armor surrounding the turret’s guns do not appear upon activating Molten Core.

Build Turret:

• New functionality: A friendly targeting reticle (think Mercy’s beams or Zenyatta’s Harmony Orbs) now appears when looking at level 2+ turrets. By targeting his turret and pressing the key assigned to Build Turret, Torbjorn can activate blast shielding on the turret.
• Does not apply to level 1 turrets.
• When used on level 2 turrets, it grants them a temporary 50 armor and 50% frontal damage reduction for 3 seconds.
• When used on a level 3 turret, it grants a temporary 100 armor and a 50% reduction to frontal damage for 3 seconds.
• Visuals: When this buff is used on a turret, the turret develops the four plates of armor removed from the level 3 turret visual.
• This turret buff runs on the same cooldown as Torbjorn’s Build Turret ability.
• Cooldown does not start on this ability until its 3 second duration ends.

This does not increase the speed or ease at which Torbjorn sets up his turret, but it allows for more of a “remote maintenance” playstyle once it is set up. This does not necessarily affect Torbjorn’s viability on attack, but it does improve his viability on defense or payload maps.

When I say “frontal damage reduction”, I mean that the turret takes less damage from sources that it is facing. For example, if I am shooting at a level two turret while it is returning fire to an ally close to me, I will deal 50% less damage to the turret for that 3 second duration. However, if I were to shoot the target from the side or from behind, I would still deal the full 100% damage to it.
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2.0 - Mercy’s Issues
Those of you who are familiar with some of my previous threads on this topic (“Why I Despise Mercy’s Current State”, parts 1 and 2) from the old forums will likely recognize much of what I will be saying in this section, as most of what I will be saying has already been said in those threads (and soon will be said in a part 3). However, because I don’t want to bore you with a huge copy/paste from either of the preexisting posts, I will be typing most of the following text from scratch. That is, at the time I originally typed this up; I’m not retyping this entire thing since the new forums dropped.

For the sake of relevance, usefulness, and possibly my sanity, I will not address the reasons for the rework or developer comments at all in this section. If you want to see me do that, go read the threads I mentioned above.

So what’s wrong with Mercy?
A lot of things. Let’s throw out a quick outline:
- Resurrect isn’t earned.
- Resurrect doesn’t offer flexibility or variation in value or availability, and will therefore always be most useful in one specific scenario.
- Resurrect feels bad to use.
- Valkyrie’s value remains the same regardless of the amount of risk taken; there is no reason to take risks, and the skill cap is reached by holding jump and her primary fire.
- Neither Resurrect nor Valkyrie feature an all-in commitment to a teamfight, unlike Resurrect when it was an ultimate.
- Valkyrie is underwhelming for the player using it and feels more like a chore rather than an ultimate.
- The old mind game that was Mercy 1.x simply does not exist to nearly the same extent in Mercy 2.x.

I’m going to take these one at a time.

- Resurrect isn’t earned.
Resurrect used to be an ultimate. Because of how slowly ultimates charged on their own (Resurrect would have taken five and a half minutes to charge if the player did nothing to accelerate that), players are forced to earn them in order to use them on a recurring basis. Because Resurrect was often one of two or fewer ultimates on the team for the purpose of countering 4 or more ultimates on the enemy team, Mercy players were often rushed to earn a last minute 10-20% charge on Resurrect before the next teamfight. In order to do this, the Mercy player would need to play more aggressively; healing targets that would normally be considered too risky to heal, amplifying the damage of aggressive allies, shooting at enemies when no other sources of ultimate charge were available.

Playing aggressively like this inevitably opens more windows for enemies to attack the player, and overall makes the playstyle more risky. Charging Resurrect alone was a game of maintaining balance between risk and reward, and winning that game (by charging Resurrect without dying) felt good, just as doing something similar as any other hero would. Because the player worked for their Resurrect, it felt good to use it.

In its current state, Resurrect isn’t earned. Every game goes as follows:
- Use Resurrect to negate a pick.
- Resurrect is unavailable when it is needed during the following teamfight.
- Resurrect comes off cooldown in between fights.

Resurrect is given to the player at a constant rate regardless of performance. There simply is no reason to take unnecessary risks, as there is no reward to do so. The rush of earning it and the small amount of pride gained from doing so does not exist. Valkyrie fails to replace this feeling for other reasons, but I will get to those later.

- Resurrect doesn’t offer flexibility or variation in value or availability, and will therefore always be most useful in one specific scenario.
Resurrect in its current state always has a single moment in which it will always have the most impact. Because the structure for teamfights is always the same (pick, engage, overwhelm, reset), and Resurrect will only revive one player every 30 seconds, the best way to use it will always be to revive the first pick in order to prevent the opposing team from snowballing over your own team. It is both more risky and significantly less effective to use later on in the fight, as the scales have already been tipped too far in one direction or the other.

A basic ability should never be restricted to being useful, and incredibly so, at a single specific time during a fight, and both unavailable and ineffective during the rest of the fight. The only ability that can be compared to Resurrect in this field is Shadowstep, but that thing is nearly useless anyway.

For reference, the only other basic ability with a cooldown longer than 15 seconds is Hanzo’s Sonic Arrow, which has a 20 second cooldown and a 10 second duration, allowing for up to 50% uptime.

When Mercy players asked for an E ability, it was under the assumption that it would be both flexible and available; Mercy is the generalist healer, after all. So why does she have a very situational ability on the longest cooldown in the game when that ability should be an ultimate in the first place?

- Resurrect feels bad to use.
By a show of hands, who here likes being immobile and helpless for 1.75 seconds, completely at the mercy (no pun intended) of your own team and the enemy team? Who here likes to do that because an ally made a mistake or did something stupid and got themselves killed, and now you need to recover their sorry [gluteus maximus]?

Anyone? Didn’t think so. From this perspective alone, Resurrect is a chore to use. Of course, Resurrect needed to have the cast time to be… more balanced, but I’m honestly not sure how the developers haven’t figured out that Resurrect as an E isn’t really balanceable. Or maybe they have, but they just don’t want to admit that publicly because it would mean acknowledging a mistake.

- Valkyrie’s value remains the same regardless of the amount of risk taken; there is no reason to take risks, and the skill cap is reached by holding jump and her primary fire.
Valkyrie allows limitless flight and increases the range of Mercy’s Caduceus beams to 30 meters for its 15 second duration. With the Resurrect bonuses in Valkyrie being removed, there is no reason to not completely utilize the 30 meter beam range and free flight. The closer Mercy is to the enemy, the more vulnerable she is. There are no longer any downsides to being way outside the effective range of the enemy, nor are there any upsides to staying close; therefore, there is no reason to stay remotely close to the fight, and it is actually more dangerous to stay do so.

The beam chains to all allies within 10 meters of the primary target, removing the need to prioritize targets.

Timing the usage of Valkyrie isn’t a concern, as 15 seconds is roughly the amount of time a teamfight lasts. By using it early on in the fight, the player can be confident that they will be in the skybox until the fight is either lost or won.

“I will watch over you” is a very fitting voice line being that it is a 100% accurate description of what the player will be doing; watching. Valkyrie is a glorified spectator mode.

It’s difficult to call and ultimate “engaging” when it actively promotes being as far from the fight as possible, and does everything for the player. There are no complicated maneuvers the player can execute to increase their impact in the fight. The player flies to the skybox and asks themselves a single question for the next 15 seconds:

“Damage boost or healing stream?”

- Neither Resurrect nor Valkyrie feature an all-in commitment to a teamfight, unlike Resurrect when it was an ultimate.
Valkyrie and Resurrect both feature all-in commitment to usage, yes, but not to the fight going on around the player; there’s a difference. With Mercy 1.x, using Resurrect meant that the Mercy was there for the rest of the fight, regardless of the outcome. Resurrect as an ultimate encouraged the player to use it in the middle of the battleground, as that was typically where most players were dying part way through the teamfight. This put Mercy directly in the middle of the fight, and forced her to commit to it. In contrast, Resurrect as an E is most effective to bring back an ally who got picked off early on in the fight, and requires that Mercy uses Resurrect from a safe position. This safe position obviously isn’t in the middle of the fight, and therefore does not force Mercy to commit to the situation.

Valkyrie, as said above, incentivizes the player to be as far from the fight as possible. There is zero commitment to the fight upon entering Configuration: Moth. If the fight goes south, Mercy is already 30 meters away waiting to regroup with the team when they respawn.

- Valkyrie is underwhelming for the player using it and feels more like a chore rather than an privilege.
This is the result of two things. One has already been stated; it was the fact that Valkyrie has a constant value and an absurdly low skill ceiling. The other is how weak Valkyrie is in an actual ult-fight. Valkyrie is objectively powerful; 15 seconds of teamwide healing or damage amplification is huge.

15 seconds.

Note how powerful this ability would be overall if it only lasted 6 seconds, the same duration as Zenyatta’s Transcendence.

Not very.

You see, Valkyrie is powerful because it provides allies with a decent edge in the fight for the next 15 seconds. It does not rapidly swing the tides in one way or another, nor does it counter enemy ultimates. As the fight drags on, both teams become weaker and weaker. A use of Valkyrie prevents or slows that process happening to one team, which means the opposing team is slowly “starving”, if you will, while the team with Valkyrie remains strong. It functions similar to Symmetra’s Shield Generator or Orisa’s Supercharger, except now Mercy is the equivalent of the constructs rather being the one to place the constructs.

Reread the paragraph above. Do you see where the ultimate becomes underwhelming? “It does not rapidly swing the tides in one way or another, neither does it counter enemy ultimates”, and “It functions similar to Symmetra’s Shield Generator or Orisa’s Supercharger, except now Mercy is the equivalent of the constructs rather than being the one to place the constructs”?

I often see players on the forums complain about how difficult it is to kill Mercy during Valkyrie. A common response, typically from a Mercy player, is that they can use an auto-aim ultimate like Deadeye or Tactical Visor to shoot Mercy out of the sky.

Both sides miss the point. Valkyrie is evasive, but does a very poor job of countering ultimates. Why bother trying to kill Mercy, with or without an ultimate, when those resources would be better spent killing enemies Mercy is unable to sustain? 60 HPS will not protect a player from normal focus fire, what do you think would happen if the team playing against Valkyrie got a well-placed ult off?
Rocket Barrage?
Earthshatter?
Blizzard?
EMP?
Graviton Surge?
Death Blossom?
Hell, even Pulse Bomb?

Winston alone can completely negate the impact of Valkyrie with his Tickle Cannon, how is Valkyrie supposed to sustain a team through incoming ultimates?

It can’t.

Combine this with the incredibly low skill ceiling applied to Valkyrie at which point the player is unable to operate at a higher capacity, and there’s a certain feeling the player gets in this situation. This feeling can be described by the following adjectives:

• Helpless.
• Powerless.
• Useless.

If I didn’t know that refusing to use Valkyrie is outright detrimental, I would rather play as Mercy without Valkyrie during an ult-fight because I at least feel occupied with trying to keep my team and myself alive through target prioritization and positioning, rather than banging my head against the skill ceiling for the following 15 seconds.

One might wonder why this is an issue being that other ultimates like Symmetra’s Shield Generator and Orisa’s Supercharger also have set impacts and low skill ceilings (Q+left click and Q respectively, plus knowing where to/where not to place them). The difference between those abilities and Valkyrie is that both Shield Generator and Supercharger are place-and-forget abilities. After using them, the hero’s playstyle is unchanged except for the fact that they are slightly stronger. Mercy on the other hand is the Shield Generator or Supercharger. Symmetra and Orisa place down constructs so they can have moments of heroism following placement. There’s nothing heroic about being the constructs.

Do you ever see Mercys player activate Valkyrie to chase an enemy using their pistol, completely ignoring their team and going full Battle Mercy?

They do that because they are bored.

- The old mind game that was Mercy 1.x simply does not exist to nearly the same extent in Mercy 2.x.
This comes as a result of several of the above issues. Resurrect isn’t earned and has no variation in value or availability; Valkyrie does everything for the player; neither Resurrect nor Valkyrie require commitment to the fight.

Let’s compare this to 1.x.
Resurrect as an ultimate had the potential to be the most powerful ability in the game. It also has the potential to be the most detrimental. Unlike other ultimates, where the hardest a player could screw up was pressing Q and instantly dying, wasting the ultimate and making the team wonder what the hell they were doing, Resurrect has the ability to directly interfere with the performance of allies. Mess up a Tactical Visor, and you have wasted an ultimate and likely gotten yourself killed. Mess up a Resurrection, and you have wasted an ultimate, gotten yourself killed, reset at least one ally’s respawn timer, and fed the opposing team additional ultimate charge. Other abilities have a range of value from 10 to null. Resurrect as an ultimate had more variation in value than any other ability, ranging more from 11 to -5.

Resurrect could not only make or break the current fight, it could determine the outcome of the next fight. When we further consider that there was no backtracking upon using it because of its all-in commitment to the engagement, and that its availability varied from fight to fight on top of this, it becomes clear that Resurrect needed to be used much more surgically than it currently does. Because the only source of game-changing impact in Mercy’s kit was Resurrect, the player’s thoughts became centralized around three goals: surviving, healing the team, and perfect utilization of Resurrect.

Remember those three goals; we will be revisiting each of them.

Perfect utilization of Resurrect:
Because Resurrect’s value was different every time, it was up to the player to track the variables that determined the value of Resurrect, and make a decision quickly based upon those variables. To throw out a quick list…
- Allies and enemies present at the beginning of the fight.
- Number of allies down.
- Number of enemies down.
- Number of ultimates available for both teams, and what those ultimates are.
- Position of the dead allies, living allies, and living enemies.
- Respawn timers on the dead allies.
- Status of living allies.
- Location of the hypothetical Resurrect.
- Flankers.

To provide insight as to how these variables affected the thought process for Resurrect, I will quote one of my previous threads regarding Mercy:

"I am going to construct a hypothetical yet likely situation to give an idea of the factors considered when deciding how to use Resurrect in its ultimate form.

Defense on the first point of Hanamura. Enemy team is grouping for a push. Resurrect is fully charged.
- What ultimates do the enemies have? What synergies do those ultimates have with each other?
- Of those ultimates they have, which will they expend first? Will they wait until they have a pick to start using them, or will they use them as soon as they arrive for more shock value?
- Where can I position myself that will allow me to both heal my team and quickly find cover? Is there a location I can reach that will provide an advantageous fighting position for me if the need arises?
- What ultimates do we have? What are their synergies with each other and will they save us from the enemy’s ultimates without Resurrect?
- Are all of the enemies accounted for? If not, do the missing enemies have ultimates and will they flank to use them? How can I evade them if they come for me?
- Is my entire team alive? If not, can I/should I revive the fallen ally so we are a full team for the next fight, or can we stall the enemy until they return?

A single ally is killed.
- Does that ally have their ultimate up? Who are they and what ultimate do they have?
- Is the enemy pushing in? Have they started using ultimates yet?
- Where is that dead ally positioned relative to the enemy team? Would a solo-rez put that ally in a good position to kill enemies, or weaken them enough that my other allies can press the advantage? Would a solo-rez discourage the enemy from pushing in if they haven’t already?
- Can my allies push the enemy back with their remaining ultimates? If I do solo-rez, will the other support be able to use their ultimate and keep the team alive through the following fight?
- Is the enemy firing ultimates yet? Is it time for me to withdraw to a safer location, or can I get my team to bait more ultimates without risking myself?

Assuming the player chooses not to use Resurrect…
Two more allies die. A third is at half health. The enemy uses two ultimates, which are both still active.
- How many enemies are still alive?
- Of those living enemies, who still has their ultimate ready?
- Should I revive my teammates now, or wait for more to die? If I choose to ult now, will that ally at half health survive post-resurrection?
- Who on my team has what ultimates? Have any been expended so far?
- Is the enemy aware that I’m still alive? Will they be hunting me, or will they prepare to counter my Resurrection with remaining ultimates? If so, can our other support help with their ultimate?
- Where are all of my allies? Are they close enough to all be caught in a Resurrection? Is there a specific angle I will need to fly in from in order to revive all of them?
- How far apart in time have all of my allies died so far? How long will it take the last one to die, and will I be able to rez all of them without worrying about the respawn timer? If I have to choose between reviving different players because of either space or time differences, who would be the best candidates?
_ - Is this Resurrection going to be useful at all, or are my allies too poorly positioned? Will it cause a snowball effect in the enemy’s favor if I choose to carry on?[/quote] If we were to take Mercy as she currently is and place her in that same scenario, we would get this: [quote]Defense on the first point of Hanamura. Enemy team is grouping for a push. Resurrect is fully charged. _
- Are all of my allies alive? If not, can I revive that one ally without dying or getting that ally killed again?

A single ally is killed.
- Can I revive that ally without getting myself or that ally killed?

Two more allies die. A third is at half health. The enemy uses two ultimates, which are both still active.
- Welp, this fight is lost. Better go regroup for the next one."

There’s no thought required for Resurrect anymore, and Valkyrie, as already stated, does everything for the player. The thought process for what the most effective use of Resurrect isn’t there, because it will always be the most effective when used to negate an early pick.

Perfect utilization of Resurrect is no longer a goal; it’s placed directly in front of the player for free.

Healing the team:
Because Resurrect is now available every 30 seconds, healing the team, which encompassed healing prioritization, is no longer as significant as it used to be. Keeping allies up all the time isn’t as concerning when the player has a recovery ability every 30 seconds. Prioritization, while still important, is less so than it used to be, requiring less attention.

Surviving:
The cost of dying as Mercy isn’t as high as it used to be, as she no longer packs the team’s second chance. When we further consider the fact that Valkyrie is a part of Mercy’s kit and can be used as an escape tool, it becomes apparent that surviving is both less important and easier to do.

When Resurrect became an ability, it not only removed one of the thought processes required to play Mercy well, it also reduced the importance and significance of the other two.
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2.1 - Solutions for Mercy:
Three of the following solutions I have already proposed in my “Why I Despise Mercy’s Current State” thread. I went ahead and slapped one more in there, along with justifications for each one.

Build 1:
Resurrect: Removed as a usable ability unless Valkyrie is active. One again sets Guardian Angel’s cooldown to 0 upon use. Does not have a cast time.

Resurrect needs to be locked behind an ultimate if it is not an ultimate by itself. It is impossible to balance Resurrect and simultaneously make it feel good to use if it is locked behind a basic cooldown.

Double Jump: By pressing the jump key twice in rapid succession, the player gains extra lift, the animation showing Mercy’s wings activating to give her an altitude boost. This can be used to establish LoS to targets on high ground, or get a better view of allies who are currently obscured by closer allies. It cannot be used more than once since touching the ground.

This is mainly out of preference, but Mercy would feel better if she wasn’t 100% dependant on allies to not be a sitting duck.

Valkyrie 2.0:

• Duration reduced to 8 seconds.
• Free flight removed.
• Current beam setup removed.
• Regeneration passive during Valkyrie removed.
• GA range during Valkyrie reduced from 50 meters to 35 meters (30 is normal GA range).
• Resurrect becomes available when Valkyrie is activated. Upon using it, it has a 3 second cooldown, and will continue to run on 3 second cooldowns for the rest of the ultimate.
• Once the ultimate ends, if Resurrect is not on cooldown, the player has 6 seconds to use it before it is no longer usable. If it is on cooldown, the ability completes its cooldown and then has 5 seconds to be used before becoming unavailable.
• New passive while Valkyrie is active- Angelic Presence: All allies within 8 meters of Mercy including herself receive an uninterrupted 10 health per second.
• Mercy no longer points her staff at her allies and engages a healing stream, she now swings her staff in an upward arc at a rate of once per second whilst using one of her streams (damage boost or healing). Each swing causes an eight-meter cone AoE effect of the current beam, but amplified because this is an ultimate.
• If Mercy’s healing stream is activated when she swings, all allies within the AoE receive a burst 100 HP. If her damage stream is activated when she swings, all allies within the AoE receive a 60% increase in damage for 1 second.
• Pistol damage during Valkyrie increased from 20 to 25.
• Mercy’s base movement speed and Angelic Descent horizontal speed increased by 0.6 to 6.1 (5.5 is the base movement speed for all heroes except Genji and Tracer, 7.1 is Lucio’s speed aura).

This forces Mercy to be in the fight, as Mercy has neither the free flight, nor a 30 meter beam range. Being this close to the fight will jeopardize the player, yet it still open lots of opportunities for the player to feel heroic. The reduced duration and increased stats makes Valkyrie more potent but for a shorter duration and less annoying to play against, as Mercy is now directly in the fight rather than 30 meters away. Because Mercy is now forced to be in the fight, commitment is required to use Valkyrie, and the player must use it carefully because of the reduced range and duration. Target prioritization will need to be considered in the event that not all players can be healed in a single arc of Mercy’s staff.

Variant 1:
Rather than a Double Jump ability, 3 seconds of free flight at base movement speed are granted to the player upon hitting the jump key twice in rapid succession. This ability has a 7 second cooldown, which begins once its 3 second duration has ended. This results in a maximum uptime of 30%. Can be used in Valkyrie.

This is mainly to appease the players who enjoyed the free flight granted by Valkyrie and want to keep it to some degree. Note that none of the other bonuses from the current version of Valkyrie (chain beams, range increase, etc.) apply to this ability.

Variant 2:
Free flight is added to Valkyrie.

This variant was created for the same reason Variant 1 was created; to appease the players who enjoyed free flight. I, personally, would not prefer this variant, but it would still be miles better than Mercy’s current iteration.

Build 2:
Valkyrie:

• Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
• All outputs (healing, damage amplification, pistol damage) increased by 50%, Meaning: Healing -> 90 HPS, damage boost -> 45% increase, pistol -> 30 damage.
• Primary beam range reduced from 30 meters to 20 meters.

This makes Valkyrie more potent with a shorter duration, making it feel more impactful. The reduced beam range is to prevent players from spending the entire fight in the skybox, and makes it feel a little more fair to play against.

Resurrect:

• Players can now reduce the cooldown time for Resurrect by healing/dealing damage/amplifying damage.
• Cooldown is doubled or tripled.
• Movement penalty upon activation reduced from 75% to 50%.
• Mercy can now heal, damage boost, and shoot while reviving.

If this change is executed properly, this could overall be a cooldown nerf to Resurrect without feeling like it. The cast time was modified in order to make Mercy feel less helpless upon using Resurrect.

Variant 1:
Duration of Valkyrie reduced to 8 seconds, outputs increased by 60%: 96 HPS, 48% amplification, 32 pistol damage.

This is basically the same as the above version but even shorter and more potent.

Variant 2:
Valkyrie has a 10 second duration, primary beam target receives 120 HPS/60% damage increase, secondary beams apply 80 HPS/40% damage increase.

The goal for this was to create a need to prioritize targets. To do this, the strength of the primary beam was increased while the strength of the secondary beams were decreased.

Variant 3:
Valkyrie has an 8 second duration, primary beam target receives 128 HPS/64% damage increase, secondary beams apply 85 HPS/43% damage increase. Mercy’s blaster deals 32 damage.

Variants 1 and 2 mixed together.

Build 3:

• Mercy reverted to 1.x.

Guardian Angel:

• GA modifications from Mercy 2.x applied.

Resurrect:

• Range reduced to from 15 meters to 10 meters.
• Line of sight requirement added.

Valkyrie:

• Added as an E ability.
• 4 second duration, 12 second cooldown. Cooldown begins once the ability’s duration has been exhausted, allowing for a 25% uptime at the very most.
• Primary beam range only extends to 20 meters, down from 30.
• Movement speed reduced from 9 meters/second to 6.5 meters/second.
• Guardian Angel range is not extended when Valkyrie is active.
• Passive self-regeneration is no longer constant.

A revert is the most definite fix. The line of sight requirement and range decrease were applied to Resurrect for two reasons; one, to compensate for Valkyrie becoming an E ability, and two, to incentivise tempo-resurrections without forcing them. Note that the charge requirement was not increased for the latter of those two reasons.

Variant 1:
Resurrect has a 15 meter range and no line of sight requirement, but can Resurrect a maximum of 3 players at once. If more than 3 players are within range, the 3 closest players to Mercy are revived.

Just an idea. There really isn’t any justification for this idea, and there doesn’t really need to be.

Variant 2:
Valkyrie no longer grants free flight, GA range is once again extended, beam range is again set to 30 meters. A double jump ability is added to Mercy’s kit.

This allows Valkyrie to be used to heal allies that are otherwise unreachable, but does not make Mercy herself unreachable. The double-jump was added to provide Mercy with a little independant mobility.

Variant 3:
Valkyrie’s primary beam applies 80 HPS/40% damage increase, secondary beams apply 53 HPS/27% damage increase.

Valkyrie but with the added requirement of healing prioritization.

Variant 4:
Any combination of Variants 1, 2, and 3.

Have fun.

Build 4:
A build I stole from ReinStein (with permission, so i didn’t actually steal it) and then modified:

Valkyrie:

• Removed.

Resurrect:

• Is once again Mercy’s ultimate.
• Now uses a charge/stack-based system, stores a maximum of 3 stacks. 1320 ultimate charge is required to gain a single stack of Resurrect.
• Cast time removed.
• Resets GA cooldown upon use.
• Otherwise functions like Resurrect does currently.

This fixes the issue that Resurrect is not earned and adds variation to its availability. I didn’t just pull 1320 charge out of my butt; I took the amount of ultimate charge the average competitive Mercy player was earning every game by healing/damaging/amplifying (11562.4), added the passive ultimate gain from existing for 10 minutes (3000 charge) to total 14562.4, and decided I wanted the average Mercy to earn 11 Resurrect charges/game. 14562.4/11 ~ 1320 (rounding to the nearest ten). For reference, Resurrect from Mercy 1.x required 1625 ultimate charge.

New E ability: Alter Stream

• Pressing E activates Mercy’s chain beams, which function as they currently do in Valkyrie but without the primary beam range increase. Pressing E again returns the beams to normal.
• The strength of Mercy’s beams is decreased, reducing her damage boost amplification to only 10% and her healing to only 20 HPS.
• This ability has no cooldown.

This adds more depth to Mercy’s allied prioritization, allowing her to choose between affecting one ally with a potent beam or multiple with weaker beams.

Changes to damage boost in relation to ultimate charge:

• Ultimate charge is no longer generated based on how much damage a target amplified by Mercy is dealing, but by how much damage is amplified.
• For every 2 damage amplified, Mercy gains 5 ultimate charge points.

There’s a reason for this change. If you are not interested in watching me crunch numbers, I suggest you skip over this part. If you enjoy math like I occasionally do, feel free to stick around.

Currently, the amount of charge Mercy gains from amplifying teammates is determined by the total amount of damage the ally in question is dealing to enemies. Note that this is not the base damage, but the amount of damage the ally is dealing total, after Mercy’s 30% damage increase is factored in. This is then fed through a 2/3 conversion ratio before giving us the final amount of ultimate charge gained through damage amplification. In other words…

If [player currently being amplified by Mercy] deals 200 base damage to [enemy], Mercy’s 30% amplification increases that damage by 60, resulting in a total of 260 damage dealt. This number is then multiplied by 2 and divided by 3 (because reasons, the developers slapped a random conversion ratio on top of this), resulting in a grand total of 173.3333… ultimate charge gained from this endeavor. 60 damage amplified resulted in 173.3333… charge points.

Why the developers made this conversion so unnecessarily complicated is beyond me, but I digress. The reason this is no longer an effective system is because of the proposed E. Why? Let’s compare Mercy’s normal damage boost to the suggested chain boost:

For Mercy’s normal boost, she gains 173.3 charge for 60 damage.

For Mercy’s group boost, let’s assume she is increasing the damage output of three allies, all of whom are dealing 200 damage. With Mercy’s 10% increase, she is increasing the damage of each ally by 20, for a total of 60 damage amplified. However, the targets she is boosting are dealing a total of 660 damage. If we slap this into the same conversions currently in place for Mercy’s damage stream, we get 440 ultimate charge gained; here lies the issue.

Normal: 60 damage amplified = 173.3 charge.
Chained to three allies: 60 damage amplified = 440 charge.

The amount of charge gained is not consistent with the amount of impact Mercy is creating; this is why I very strongly suggest that Mercy’s charge gain from damage boost is determined by how much damage is amplified rather than how much damage the affected allies are dealing.

If we want the current charge rate for Mercy’s beam to remain unchanged while solving the issue, we simply divide the amount of charge gained from the normal scenario by the amount of damage amplified in that same scenario:

173.33…/60 = 2.88…

So, for every 1 damage amplified, Mercy receives 2.88… ult charge. Because Mercy has the potential to gain ult at a faster rate by amplifying/healing more than three targets, however, I figured it would be better for Mercy to gain 2.5 charge/1 damage amplified to counterbalance. Hence the 5 charge for every 2 damage amplified.

Variant 1:
Resurrect stores up to five stacks. The range of Resurrect is increased to 15 meters and all allies within the radius (and within LoS) are Resurrected upon a single use of Resurrect. Mercy receives one second of invulnerability upon using Resurrect, and she can only use Resurrect once every ten seconds. If she uses her ultimate, it is put on a ten second cooldown.

This makes Resurrect feel more epic to use, but still actively incentivizes tempo-resurrections rather than mass-resurrections because of the line-of-sight requirement and limited invulnerability. The cooldown upon using Resurrect is inflicted for two reasons; One, to prevent Mercy players from abusing the invulnerability by chaining Resurrections, and two, to make the Mercy player think carefully about how they use Resurrect. Ten seconds is the same time it takes a player to respawn after death, so a Mercy must consider how they use Resurrect if multiple allies are down at once and some are not reachable.
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3.0 - Genji’s Issues.
Let me be clear about one thing: While I have every reason to hate Genji, I do not want him nerfed. I am not about to call him overpowered. My complaint is a simple one:

- Inconsistencies between hitboxes and animations.
Deflect’s hitbox is far larger than the animation suggests. I know this has already been discussed to death in threads like these:

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759150839#post-1

But seeing that the issue is not fixed, I believe it is important to continue addressing it. Deflect’s AoE is not only is larger than the animation suggests along the Z and X axes, but it is also enlarged along the Y axis; this is also demonstrated in the above link.

One thing that is not discussed in the above post, however, is the hitbox of Genji’s Swift Strike ability.

https://youtu.be/Zu9O1V0Aul8

A player can use Swift-Strike while they are offset a full body width to the left, right, front, or back from the target and still register a hit. Swift-Strike should be somewhat forgiving in hitbox size, but its current state is simply too forgiving with its allowed margin for error. The player doesn’t even need to have their crosshairs in close proximity to the target in order to hit them.
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3.1 - Solutions for Genji.
Deflect:

• Hitbox size reduced slightly in all dimensions, more so in depth than in height or width.
• Animation size enlarged to meet the hitbox.

While Genji’s deflect hitbox overall is stupidly large, the worst part of it is that Genji can deflect shots from enemies who are not even looking at him by standing next to them. After the hitbox has been made more fair, the animation must be increased in size to be more clear as to where the hitbox boundaries are.

Swift-Strike:

• Hitbox width decreased.

Unfortunately, I feel the need to spell something out for the developers, assuming any of them happen to read this thread:

DO NOT PULL A DOOMFIST ON GENJI. I want Genji’s Swift-Strike hitbox to be fair, not unusable. Do not shrink Genji’s dash hitbox remotely near the point where a direct hit on a target does not register. We already dealt with ghost-fists, let’s not cause ghost-dash to become a thing.

Oh look, a perfect segway into our next topic:
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4.0 - Doomfist’s Issues:
- Doomfist simply isn’t in a good balance state.
Unlike other heroes we have/will be discussing, Doomfist doesn’t have any particular niche, or if he does, I have not seen it. There aren’t any specific compositions, maps, or rotations (offense/defense) that Doomfist excels in relative to his normal performance; he’s just kind of… bad.

That said, there is a specific source for his lack of viability: He lacks survivability. Allow me to explain.
Doomfist’s playstyle is one-of-a-kind within the Offense category. Rather than laying constant fire from a distance (Soldier:76, McCree, and Pharah depending upon how you play her) or harassing the opposing team’s backline (Tracer and Genji), Doomfist’s playstyle is more of an agile in-your-face frontline DPS. The former two of the aforementioned playstyles have certain traits that make them effective: Soldier:76, McCree, and Pharah all have long range, good damage at said range, and decent survivability because of that distance between them and the enemy; Tracer and Genji have high mobility and small hitboxes. In order for Doomfist to succeed in his role of agile in-your-face frontline DPS, he too, must have some of these advantages. He has good mobility, but he has a very large hitbox for an Offense hero. He does not have long range to increase his survivability. Here lies the problem; Doomfist’s mobility advantage is counteracted by his large hitbox, and he has no other advantages strong enough to counteract that. His passive, The Best Defense, which is supposed to fill that gap, does not make up for his large hitbox. Currently, it provides only 30 temporary shields to Doomfist for every enemy hit with one of his abilities.

His lack of survivability in comparison to his Offense counterparts reveals itself through his stats on Overbuff:

https://www.overbuff.com/heroes/doomfist

When we contrast this to other Offense heroes, we see that Doomfist is averaging 1-3 more deaths/game, and 1-5 fewer eliminations/game.

Doomfist’s job is to get into the enemy’s face; the problem is that doing that will too often get him killed.
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4.1 - Solutions for Doomfist:
Build 1:
Rocket Punch:
*Hitting a target with Rocket Punch reduces the remaining cooldown of both Seismic Slam and Raisin Apricots (I’m sorry, I’m just feeling very bored at the time I am typing this. That should be “Rising Uppercut”) by two seconds.

“How would this increase Doomfist’s survivability”, you might ask? The Best Defense grants shields for every hit on enemies with one of his abilities. As Seismic Slam and Rising Uppercut are both capable of hitting multiple enemies in a single use, adding various bonuses to Doomfist’s kit that allow them to be used more often would increase his midfight sustain. This also increases his damage output, which, comparing his average damage to some of his Offense counterparts, is a needed bonus.

If this change alone is not enough to put Doomfist into a viable position, there are other ways to follow up on it to help Doomfist out further:

Variant 1: The Best defense now grants 35 shields for every hit instead of 30. Doomfist’s maximum temporary shield capacity is increased from 150 to 175.

Variant 1: The radius of Meteor Strike is increased from 7 meters to 8 meters. The damage of the entire ability is increased by 1/3rd of its current damage, meaning that it will now deal 400 damage at the epicenter rather than 300.

Oh, and one more thing: Make Doomfist’s Rocket Punch hitbox a tiny bit larger:

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20761716321#post-1
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5.0 - Symmetra’s Issues:
- Symmetra’s viability is too dependant upon the situation.
Symmetra and Torbjorn are in the same boat on this one, although Torbjorn is more dependant upon team cooperation, and Symmetra is more dependant upon the map and rotation. There are some maps that Symmetra simply is not a good pick regardless as to how the team forms around her; Watchpoint: Gibraltar on offense, for example. Like Torbjorn, even in the scenarios where she should excel, it is often safer to pick a generalist instead.

- Symmetra’s role is area control, but she lacks the capacity to control an area.
This is an issue on both offense and defense, but it becomes more clear on offense. Other heroes that are designed to lock down an area have one key trait that allows them to be successful; range. Symmetra’s long-ranged attack is an angry ball of mild irritation/death (depending upon how long the player charges it) that has a movement speed matched by a wall-riding Lucio with his speed aura on. If the Lucio in question decides to press E, he can outrun the angry ball of mild irritation/death in a linear race. A player can easily evade this attack by, to quote one of my favorite YouTubers, using the Get-out-of-the-way move. That’s not exactly what I would call an effective long-ranged attack.

Instead of long range, Symmetra has six Sentry Turrets she can place throughout the map, each slowing and damaging targets they attack. This would be a decent amount of compensation, except for a few problems:

• Symmetra is slowed while placing her Sentry Turrets, which makes using them on offense very ineffective.
• Players can destroy the turrets by breathing on them.

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5.1 - Solutions for Symmetra:
Build 1:
Photon Barrier:

• Symmetra can now press and hold E to keep the Photon Barrier in front of her for up to 4 seconds before releasing it. While doing this, she can turn to adjust the way the shield is facing, the same way Reinhardt can with his barrier.
• The shield is released when the player releases E.
• If they player taps and releases E, the barrier behaves as it currently does.
• Symmetra cannot attack or use abilities while holding her shield.
• Cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.

If you don’t play on PC, replace “E” with whatever key you use that activates Symmetra’s Photon Barrier. That’s just me being lazy… I say as I am currently typing my 37th (make that 44th as of the time I a revising this) page of text… shut up.

This change will make Symmetra more versatile and allow her to better support the frontline by taking some of the pressure off the tanks for a short period. This can also be used to close the distance between Symmetra and a target down a non-linear pathway, which can help to mitigate her lack of range. The cooldown reduction on her Photon Barrier helps to make her more consistent in her ability to protect/attack/close distance.

Sentry Turret:

• Placement no longer reduces Symmetra’s movement speed.
• Sentry Turrets now have an additional 19 health in shields, resulting in a total of 20 life/shields for every turret.

This will make Symmetra’s turrets better at controlling an area, as they now collectively have significantly more health. They are still weak, but at least now have somewhat of a presence rather than being annoying until the enemy decides to glance in its general direction.

Removing the movement penalty inflicted upon Symmetra by placing Sentry Turrets will make her more viable on offense, as she can now evade more easily while placing turrets.

All Constructs:

• All of Symmetra’s structures (Sentry Turrets, Shield Generators, and Teleporters) can now be seen by allies through walls.

I’m honestly not sure why this hasn’t been implemented already. This change has no drawbacks, and yet it has been repeatedly requested. There is no reason to not implement this, and it would fix a very common issue seen while playing with a Symmetra on the team:
“My Shield Generator is under attack!”
“Great! Where is it?”

Variant 1:
The cooldown on Symmetra’s Sentry Turret ability is reduced from 10 seconds/charge to 6 seconds/charge. The casting time for turret placement is reduced from 1.4 seconds to 1 second and the placement range is increased from 10 meters to 11 meters. However, the damage of each turret is reduced from 30 damage/second to 25 damage/second.

This make Symmetra’s turrets more flexible, as she can now place them more often and under more risky circumstances, along slight extension to her placement range. The damage reduction makes the turrets overall weaker, but this should be compensated by the increased uptime and rate of replacement.

Variant 2:
The base damage of Symmetra’s primary fire is increased from 30 damage/second to 45 damage/second. The damage no longer scales exponentially to 120 (30/60/120) over 2 seconds, but it now scales linearly at a rate of 15 damage/second every .75 seconds, maxing out at 120 damage/second (45/60/75/90/105/120). Her ammo consumption/second from her primary fire is reduced from 7 to 6, and her reload time is reduced from 1.8 seconds to 1.5.

Symmetra will be a little more powerful upon first contact with enemies, but will now scale slower to 120. It now takes 3.75 seconds to reach maximum damage potential. However, Symmetra can use her beam for longer without reloading, and reloading does not take as long. The power of her beam also does not decay as severely as it did formerly, allowing for a longer period of rest between targets before losing significant damage.
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6.0 - Reinhardt’s Issues:
- Reinhardt’s viability drops off at higher ranks.
Reinhardt is picked for one main ability; his Barrier Field. His barrier has a flat 2000 HP, which used to be balanced throughout most, if not all, ranks. However, a quick check on his pickrates throughout the ranks on Overbuff…

https://www.overbuff.com/heroes/reinhardt/trends

Reveals that his viability has dropped dramatically in higher ranks. Reinhardt starts off strong in Bronze with a pickrate of 6.1%, climbs to 6.9% in Silver, remains steady through Gold, and proceeds to drop by a little under 1% for every rank following that point.

“Oh, that’s because Reinhardt isn’t good in this meta”, you might say. It’s true, Reinhardt isn’t good in this meta, but that’s not the whole story:

https://www.overbuff.com/heroes/orisa/trends

Orisa, the closest comparable hero to Reinhardt, is far more consistent in pickrates throughout the ranks. However, she ends with Reinhardt’s pickrate in GM, despite Reinhardt being more popular overall.

What causes this?
Orisa can constantly pump out barriers regardless as to how much damage her previous barrier takes. The rate at which her shields are destroyed is independent from the rate at which she can place new ones. Furthermore, Orisa can place barriers ahead of her and stand further back while she continues firing from behind said barrier; she isn’t tied to the shield.

Reinhardt, on the other hand, has a single barrier attached to his arm that begins to recharge after it’s been unused for two seconds. He cannot shield and attack at the same time, and his basic attack is within melee range.

Orisa’s viability is not heavily based on how fast her enemies can break her barriers; Reinhardt’s is.

This is why Reinhardt’s viability falls off at higher ranks while Orisa’s doesn’t. A team of Gold players might have a hard time dealing with Reinhardt’s barrier at full health, while a team of GrandMasters will pop shields faster than D.Va popping the lids off cans of Mountain Dew. Orisa can mitigate this by being further away while still contributing with her ranged attacks, further covering the gaps in her barrier uptime with Fortify. Reinhardt is kind of useless without his barrier, as being within melee range of a team of GMs without protection is basically asking to get yourself killed in under two seconds. Charging into the enemy team isn’t exactly a good move either (Dammit Reinhardt!).

- Reinhardt’s abilities are buggy and weird.
Specifically Earthshatter and Charge. Both are inconsistent. Charge has a tendency to bounce players away rather than actually pinning them like it should be. For example, my brother, who was playing Overwatch right next to me, saw one of these instances firsthand. He was playing Orisa, and an enemy Reinhardt who was standing right in front of him and was looking directly at him somehow bumped him into the air rather than pinning him. And no, he was not using Fortify; he acknowledged that he should have been pinned.

As for Earthshatter… This video is old, but it does a good job of explaining the ability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n1QnXhXjes
2:56 - 3:50.

Of course, Reinhardt’s Earthshatter no longer reaches as high as shown in that video and now has a more reasonable altitude, but Earthsatter’s affect AoE is still determined by those five projectiles, making it inconsistent with the animation.
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6.1 - Solutions for Reinhardt:
Build 1:
Barrier Field:

• Barrier now recharges at a rate of 235 HP/second, up from 195 (roughly a 21% increase).

While this is a possible fix, I think it would cause other problems later on. Reinhardt is pretty balanced in Bronze to Platinum, but needs help in higher ranks. A straight buff such as this one may put him in a better spot in Diamond+, but might also destabilize him in lower ranks, causing power creep.

Build 2:
Barrier Field:

• No longer has a 2 second delay before it begins recharging.

This change would more dramatically affect higher-ranked players, as Reinhardt’s barrier is down more often in high-tier games than it is in lower ranks.

Build 3:
Barrier Field:

• Melee attacks recharge Barrier Field for 50% of the damage dealt.

This has the same objective as Build 2, but puts the power of the recharge rate into the player’s hands. If the player can strategically drop their shield and get a good hit off, they can increase the durability of their shield. This also adds more teamplay to the equation, as damage amplifications (Damage boost and Discord Orb) will now add to Reinhardt’s shield durability.

All Builds:
Charge:

• Hitbox size increased vertically.

This is to prevent scenarios in which a hero should have been pinned, but is bounced straight up instead.

Earthshatter:

• Number of projectiles over Earthshatter’s AoE is increased from 5 to 15.

This will make Earthshatter more consistent with its animation.
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7.0 - Bastion’s Issues:
- Bastion isn’t viable outside of a few specific scenarios.
Bastion is in the same boat as Torbjorn and Symmetra. He isn’t viable in the majority of situations, the scenarios in which he is useful being restricted to ones in which both the team composition and map allow him to be. Again, this would be okay if:

1. Bastion was granted equal or better reward than generalists in those same scenarios (Soldier:76, for example).
2. The situations in which Bastion became effective were not terribly uncommon occurrences.

Neither of those are the case, so here we are.

His rework took an already-struggling Bastion, buffed him to god-tier, and then proceeded to drop him into F-tier once again. He arguably came out worse after the rework than he was going in, which is ironic being that the developer comments on the topic went as follows:

“The goal of these changes is to move some of Bastion’s power from Configuration: Sentry to Recon, while keeping its sentry mode a strong option, especially versus tanks and barriers. Overall, Bastion should feel stronger and more flexible with these changes.”

Although I suppose that’s just Blizzard’s balancing for you.

- Bastion’s Configuration: Sentry is in a worse state than it was before the rework.
When Bastion was reworked, his spread and magazine size in Sentry mode was increased, his ability to headshot was removed, and he was given 35% damage resistance from Ironclad; except that last part was brokenly overpowered, and the developers quickly slapped Bastion back into F-tier by setting that reduction to 20%. In short, Bastion went from a glass cannon to a graphene peashooter (thanks to spread increase and inability to headshot), and then from a graphene peashooter to a plastic peashooter (damage resistance nerf).

- Bastion’s Configuration: Tank is in a worse state than it was before the rework.
Before Bastion’s rework, he gained 150 armor upon entering Configuration: Tank. At the very most, the armor was capable of affording an additional 300 HP equivalent, bringing his maximum possible health in Tank mode to 700 (200 health and 250 armor) and the minimum to 455. When he was reworked, this armor bonus was removed and replaced with a 35% reduction to incoming damage. This instead afforded the equivalent of an extra 215.4 HP, totalling for 615.4 maximum HP in tank mode. This was a nerf overall to Bastion’s potential sustain in Configuration: Tank, but it certainly did not seem that way when Nano-Tank was a thing.

When Ironclad was nerfed, it brought Bastion’s maximum HP in both of his alternate transformations down to 500. Nano-Tank is no longer an effective strategy with the maximum damage resistance being maxed at 50%, and Bastion is left with an ultimate that increases his sustain by a very slight amount, significantly less than it used to. His offensive capabilities in Configuration: Tank were never increased to compensate.

- Radoom inconsistencies between Configuration: Tank’s transformation and its first shot.
I don’t know a whole lot about this particular issue, but this was brought up in the old thread, and I think it is worth displaying again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXYRFsVr5zI
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7.1 - Solutions for Bastion:
Build 1:
This is another solution I took from Reinstein and then heavily modified.
Ironclad:

• Damage resistance increased to 35%.
• No longer becomes active in Configuration: Sentry.

Configuration: Sentry:

• Bullet spread reduced by 33% (reversing the 50% increase from the rework).
• 50 of Bastion’s normal health is turned into armor when activated. If Bastion is below 150 HP upon transforming, this effect does not apply. When Bastion begins healing past 150 HP in Configuration: Sentry, his health regenerates in armor. This effect is reversed when transforming back into Recon mode.

The objective of these changes is to return Bastion’s Configuration: Sentry to its previous state of being a glass cannon, but with a little less damage capacity (still no headshots in Sentry) and a little more sustain. This also buffs Configuration: Tank’s maximum HP equivalent to 615.4, and the minimum to 469.2.

Configuration: Tank:

• Main cannon’s projectile speed increased from 60 meters/second to 90 meters/second.

This is mainly a quality of life change for Bastion. I find the delay between firing and projectile impact a little weird, and it feels off.

Variant 1: Self-Repair is moved back to Bastion’s secondary ability instead of his alternate fire. Bastion’s alternate fire is empty until entering Configuration: Tank. While Tank mode is active, his alternate fire becomes his light machine gun.

This grants Bastion a little more firepower while in Tank mode in the event that increases to his sustain are not enough to make it an effective ultimate. It also makes sense to have a machine gun available in this mode when compared to real-life applications, as most modern tanks have machine guns mounted on them.

Variant 2:
Bastion’s Self-Repair resource meter capacity is reduced to 3 seconds of use (down from 4), but Bastion can now use Self-Repair while firing.

This will increase Bastion’s sustain in combat scenarios without only delaying the inevitable, like the current design seems to. As it currently stands, resorting to healing while in Sentry mode turns the player into a sitting duck that poses no threat and only makes it easier for enemies to target them.
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8.0 - Ana Things:
Ana is in a weird spot. She isn’t necessarily bad, but she is way out of favor with the current meta. Hopefully the proposed suggestions for fixing Torbjorn, Bastion, and Symmetra can bring them far enough into viability to push back the Dive Meta, and allow for a more fluid meta to take place. When the Dive meta goes away, I think we will see more successful Ana play. That said, I do believe that there are a few changes we should make to Ana.

Biotic Grenade:

• If Ana presses and releases E (or whatever key it is bound to for your PC/console) she throws her Biotic Grenade. There is no change here.
• If Ana presses and holds that same key for .4 seconds, she detonates the grenade in her hand without throwing it.

This makes it so that D.Va cannot position her Defense Matrix around Ana and prevent her from healing herself or any allies within 4 meters of her. Often what happens is that Ana gets dived and tries to throw her Biotic Grenade at the floor to heal herself. However, because D.Va was using DM, it disappears before hitting the ground. Now Ana is pretty much screwed because she lacks the damage to be effective at close range.

Similar scenarios occurred with other abilities. For example, sometimes because of where the grenade is positioned when it is thrown, it will explode on one side of the barrier while Ana is on the other because she passed through it and tossed the grenade at the same time.

Nano-Boost:

• Now increases the healing dealt by the affected target by 50%.

There are three reasons for this. One, it increases the flexibility of Nano-Boost, making the strategy of applying it to healers a viable one. Ana could use it on the team’s second healer in the event that her team needs a bit more healing during a teamfight, or she could use it on a tank/DPS to initiate or capitalize on an ultimate.

The second reason for this change is to buff Ana a little bit in ways that are not easily negated by barriers/dive. A rifle damage increase might be helpful, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference if all of her shots are blocked by barriers/DM.

For the third reason, I have one word:
BOOSTIOOO!

One might be concerned that this may enforce another tank meta. To that concern, I have three answers:
- Nano-Bastion: Lots of damage, damage reduction, 112.5 HPS self-regen. Basically, if the player can aim in Configuration: Sentry, anything that doesn’t move out of the way is going to die.
- Nano-Rat: Bombs dealing 180 damage/hit. Anything that doesn’t move out of the way dies.
- Nano-Reaper: In the event that Reaper becomes viable (see next section), a nano would give not only increase his damage and make him more difficult to kill because of the 50% damage resistance, but it would also increase the effectiveness of his The Reaping passive by 50% on top of the 50% damage increase.

If this buff makes the tank meta more dominant, it in combination with the other changes listed in this massive post would do just as good of a job of suppressing it.
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9.0 - Reaper’s Issues:
- Reaper isn’t even good at his job: Tankbusting.
Reaper is in a pretty crappy spot, as has been for a while. He is designed to be good at killing tanks, but most tanks have one trait that completely throws that out the window: amor. Armor blocks 50% of incoming damage, up to 5 damage for every source of damage. In other words, if I deal 2 damage in a single attack against an armored target, that armored target takes 1 damage. If I deal 20 damage in a single attack to that same target, they take 15 damage.

The reason this becomes a problem for Reaper is that he has shotguns. Each time he fires his shotguns, Reaper is shooting 20 hitscan projectiles, each dealing 7 damage before falloff. That’s a total of 140 damage/shot against normal health, assuming all 20 projectiles hit. However, if the target is armored, that’s 70 damage/shot; each projectile deals 7 damage, and armor is most effective against many weak projectiles. It reduces the damage of each pellet by 50%, therefore reducing the damage of the full attack by 50%. Reaper, who is supposed to be good against tanks, ultimately fails to be successful against them because of this.

Let’s compare this to Soldier:76.
Soldier:76 deals 19 damage/shot, and fires 9 times/second. Armor reduces the damage dealt by Soldier:76 by 5 damage/shot, so he is dealing 14 damage 9 times a second. That’s a total of 126 damage/second against armor, excluding critical hits.
Reaper fires twice a second, brining his damage versus armor up to 140 damage/second, excluding critical hits.

Comparing raw damage shows that Reaper is only marginally better than Soldier:76 against armor, and he needs to be within 11 meters of his target to prevent damage falloff from occurring… even closer if he wants all of his projectiles to hit. Meanwhile, Soldier:76 can be 30 meters from his target before he experiences damage falloff. Taking this a step further, Soldier:76 has a burst 120 damage to utilize from his Helix Rocket. If we were to add that to his overall damage/second, we would subtract 5 damage from that and divide that by its cooldown: 8 seconds. By doing so, we get an additional 14.4 damage/second, bringing Soldier:76’s damage/second up to 140.4.

Soldier:76 is as good as Reaper at dealing with armor, but he can do it at much longer range. Furthermore, Soldier:76 has better utility with his Sprint and Biotic Field. From a practicality standpoint, why choose Reaper when you can have equal or better reward with less risk on Soldier:76?

- Wraith Form doesn’t really help.
What Wraith Form does:

• Disables everything except for movement.
• Makes Reaper invulnerable for 3 seconds.
• Increases Reaper’s movement speed to 7.1 meters/second (Lucio’s movement speed on the ground with Crossfade set to speed).
• Looks slightly menacing.

Wraith Form, from what I can tell, is supposed to be a disengage ability. The problem is that it isn’t exactly difficult or risky to follow a fleeing target moving slightly faster than you that is unable to affect or be affected by you for three seconds. The chaser can see Reaper, and they know how long it takes for Wraith Form to end; they can easily set up a kill by simply waiting. The ability is predictable.

- Death co- aaaand he’s dead.
Shadowstep. Here’s a tip for using it:
Don’t.

Here is a list of things that Shadowstep is useful for:

Shadowstep is probably the most useless ability in the game right now. Try to use it to engage? Dead. Try to use it as a disengage tool? Dead. Try to get a height advantage to drop down on your enemies? They heard you, and now you’re dead. The only thing it is remotely useful for is walking back from spawn (possibly after dying because you used Shadowstep) and using it to move closer to the fight quicker. Although I’m not even sure if it could be considered “useful” there either, as it literally shaves 1.86 seconds off the walk when used at maximum range.

- Die!
His ult is basically that.

In seriousness though, Death Blossom is a discount Rocket Barrage. Death Blossom deals 170 damage/second over a similarly-sized area, while Rocket Barrage fires 30 rockets/second, each dealing 40 damage. Both ultimates turn the users into pinatas, but Pharah is the scariest and least vulnerable of the two. She can position herself so that she is harder to hit while ulting; Reaper cannot, and as a consequence of this, Death Blossom usually sounds like this:

“DIE D-HMM… AUGH!”

That usually is the case regardless as to whether or not Reaper caught his targets by surprise, because unlike Pharah, he is right in in the enemy’s face.

Who likes math?
Here are the relevant stats for Pharah regarding how fast she gains her ultimate:
14381 damage/game.
4.81 ult kills/game.
1850 charge required for a full ultimate.

Here are the relevant stats for Reaper regarding how fast he gains his ultimate:
12910 damage/game.
5.41 ult kills/game.
1850 charge required for a full ultimate.
Reaper does have self-healing, but he does not gain ult charge from it. I playtested this in custom games to verify.

I will be subtracting 200 damage for every ult kill these two heroes have (anyone getting flashbacks to my “The Recent Complaints About Mercy” threads?).
Pharah ult charge/game: 13419.
Reaper ult charge/game: 11828.
Pharah ults/game ignoring usage delay: 7.25.
Reaper ults/game ignoring usage delay: 6.39.

So not only does Pharah have the better ult of these two heroes, but she also has hers more often than Reaper has his.
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9.1 - Solutions for Reaper:
Build 1:
Call this build what you want; shadow build, smoke build, shroud build, vanish build… Whatever. It has a recurring theme to it.

Hellfire Shotguns:

• Number of pellets/shot reduced from 20 to 10.
• Damage of each pellet increased from 7 to 14.

This increases the effectiveness of Reaper’s shotguns against armor, which previously made him irrelevant. With this change, Reaper will deal the same 140 damage against unarmored targets, but now deals 90 damage/shot against armored targets rather than 70.

Wraith Form:

• Movement speed while active increased from 7.1 meters/second to 8.5 meters/second.
• Reaper becomes invisible and undetectable to enemies for the first 1 second of Wraith Form.
• A smoke effect with a 5 meter radius is left at the location from which Reaper activated Wraith Form. This cloud of smoke heavily impedes visibility through it.
• Players inside the cloud of smoke have their vision range reduced to 3 meters.
• The smoke effect decays over 3 seconds before disappearing entirely. As it decays, visibility is gradually restored.

This will make Wraith Form function like an actual disengage ability, as it no longer telegraphs Reaper’s location to potential pursuers. This also opens up the opportunity to use it as a disruption ability, allowing for a unique initiation.

Shadowstep:

• Cast time reduced from 2.5 seconds to .5 seconds.
• Duration reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds.

This makes Shadowstep less of a press-to-die button, opening more opportunities to use it, but its 1.5 second duration makes it ineffective for teleporting into the enemy team to press Q.

Unless of course, the enemy team happens to be comprised of six potatoes with headsets.

Death Blossom:

• Creates the same smoke effect as Wraith Form, but over an 8 meter radius rather than a 5 meter radius.
• The smoke cloud now follows Reaper.

This sets some confusion into the opposing team as Reaper uses Death Blossom, making it a more effective ultimate, yet not unfair to play against. If the players see Reaper coming, they can stop his ultimate. If Reaper catches them by surprise, he keeps that advantage rather than being Flashbanged by a McCree who did a quick 180.

Personality:

• Edginess increased by 38%.

I was told by a Reaper main that this is very important.

Variant 1:
Wraith Form does not create a cloud of smoke, but any players who are both looking at Reaper (looking at or close to him, not out of the corner of the screen) and are within 10 meters of him have their vision range reduced to 3 meters for 1.5 seconds.

Variant 2:
Wraith Form does not leave a cloud of smoke behind, but Reaper is now invisible and undetectable for the first 2.5 seconds of Wraith Form.

Build 2:
Hellfire Shotguns

• Alternate fire added. Upon use, Reaper fires a single shell from one of his shotguns.
• This shell deals 100 damage when it comes out of the barrel, but its damage quickly drops off to 50 between 7 and 15 meters.
• Each shotgun loads one of these shells, it’s ammunition capacity being independent from Reaper’s primary fire ammo capacity. If Reaper wants to fire more than two in a short period, he will have to reload before firing a third and fourth.

This gives Reaper a good anti-armor utility, while still limiting his overall damage output. Because of the high damage falloff, Reaper will not be able to easily two-shot 200 HP enemies from middle to long range. In the areas in which he is capable of two-hitting enemies with his alternate fire, his primary fire would serve just as well. The independent ammo capacities (8 for primary, 2 for secondary) adds more depth to managing reloads.

As for its name, assuming it needs one? I don’t know. Stygian Round? Rending shell? I’m sure the developers would be creative enough to come up with something… But uh, don’t get the balance team involved in naming an ability. They would probably screw that up too.

Wraith Form:

• Visuals changed. No longer looks like a ghostly figure, but more like a person-sized cloud of black smoke.
• Now functions like D.Va’s Boosters but without colliders or damage. Activating Wraith Form now makes Reaper fly in the direction he is looking. He can adjust his trajectory by changing the direction he is looking.
• Movement speed increased from 7.1 meters/second to 10 meters/second (roughly the average movement speed of a true Lucio main).
• Can be cancelled by using Wraith Form a second time.

This makes Wraith Form much more flexible overall. It can now be used to engage, disengage, or reposition to a desired location. If the player really wants to, they can fly 30 meters above the enemy to fall down on top of them, shotguns blazing.

Shadowstep:

• Removed.

With the improvements to Wraith Form, Shadowstep has become obsolete and redundant on top of its uselessness. In this case it is better to replace with a different ability.

New Ability - Dark Embrace:
It was important for the name to be edgy.

• Reaper targets a single enemy (targeting visual is similar to that of Zenyatta’s Discord Orb) and deals an additional 50% damage to them for the next 2 seconds when activated.
• 12 second cooldown.
• Cannot be targeted through enemy barriers.
• 25 meter range.
• If Reaper gets the killing blow on his target before the two-second duration ends, the ability’s cooldown is set to 0.

Replacement ability for Shadowstep that grants more offensive potential to Reaper. If used well, Reaper can chain kills with this new ability.

Personality:

• Edginess increased by 38%.

See Build 1 for the justification.

Build 3:
Mix and match things from Builds 1 and 2.
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– Break –

[Rico-2593]

Um… yeah, but I need a TL;DR please

[Titanium-1686]

10.0 - Mei-be We Should Do Something:
How many people did I just make cringe?
I hate Mei too. That said, there is no denying that she is in a terrible spot right now.

- Mei, an anti-mobility hero, does not counter mobility.
If Mei was actually half-decent at her job, Dive compositions would have never become so dominant. Mei’s Endothermic Blaster does a good job of stopping heroes who lack mobility, but it does nothing to inhibit movement abilities; a Tracer can just blink out of range if Mei begins to freeze her. Combine this with the fact that Mei is most effective in 1v1 scenarios, and Dive either craps on Mei or ignores her outright. Combine this with her Ice Wall and her Cryo-Freeze, and Mei is basically only effective when stalling the second objective on 2CP maps.
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10.1 - Mei-king Progress:
Time for create some Mei-hem?
Mei we begin?

Kill me.

Build 1:
Endothermic Blaster:

• Now shoots in a cone AoE, the frost stream spreading out as it gets further from its origin.
• The damage and effectiveness of Mei’s freeze remains constant throughout this area.

This increases Mei’s effectiveness against of groups of enemies, making her stronger in teamfights.

Icicle

• Damage reduced from 75 to 55.
• Enemies hit by Mei’s Icicle are unable to use movement abilities for 2 seconds.

This reduces Mei’s overall damage output, but brings the utility of punishing mobility heroes. Mei can use this on single target in order to more easily freeze them with her primary fire (freezing takes 1.5 seconds), or she can switch between disabling multiple targets to give her team an advantage.

Clarification as to which abilities are disabled by Mei’s Icicle:

• Blink.
• Recall.
• Jump Jets.
• Amp it Up (speed only).
• Guardian Angel.
• Swift-Strike.
• Wraith Form.
• Thermoptic Camo.
• Translocate (activation, not device placement).
• Jump Pack.
• Boosters.
• Sprint.
• Grapple.
• Fade.
• Combat Roll.
• Concussion Mine (activation, not device placement).
• Rising Uppercut.
• Seismic Slam.

Cryo-Freeze:

• Staying in Cryo-Freeze for 1.5 seconds reloads Mei’s weapon.
• Duration reduced to 3 seconds.
• Healing rate while in Cryo-Freeze increased from 37.5/second to 50/second.

The goal with these changes is to make Mei more active in teamfights rather than being used as a stall character. Her healing over the duration of Cryo-Freeze has been unchanged, but the duration has been reduced by 1 second to reduce the stall potential of the ability. Her increased healing rate helps to put her back into the fight faster.

Blizzard:

• Once Snowball (the drone Mei throws to activate her ultimate) has left Mei’s hand, stuns, sleeps, hacks, death, or any form of disabling ability on Mei does not prevent her ultimate from activating.

I find it hilariously stupid that this hasn’t been done yet. Who the hell decided that stunning Mei after her ultimate already became autonomous would prevent it from activating was a good idea?

Overall, these changes will make Mei less effective at getting kills by herself, but more effective at reinforcing her team’s frontline and enabling her allies.

Variant 1:
The duration it takes for Blizzard to freeze enemies within it is reduced to 1 second. However, Mei can no longer accelerate this process by using her primary fire.

This makes Blizzard more effective when functioning alone, but comes with the cost that Mei cannot accelerate freezing process with her primary fire anymore.

Variant 2:
While standing inside the AoE of Blizzard, Mei’s weapon has infinite ammunition.

This allows Mei to use Blizzard not only offensively or to zone enemies out of a location but also defensively to better hold a position.

Variant 3:
Variants 1 and 2 together.
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11.0 - Junkrat Things:
Junkrat was recently nerfed in the form of damage falloff on his Concussion Mines. This did a great job of… not much, really? It just made him a little more clunky and ruined his Steel Trap + Concussion Mine combo. Junkrat can still kill a player by using two mines, which was one of the main concerns to begin with, correct? The other one was how fast Rip-Tire charged, and it still charges just as fast. Doing some quick math, Junkrat can charge an average of 9.88 ultimates/game ignoring usage delay. For reference, Pharah’s number for that same metric is 7.25.

So we have a nerf that doesn’t really do anything except make Junkrat a little more clunky… I’m seeing a trend here…

Anyway, the point is that this nerf didn’t do what it was supposed to. I know the following build has already been proposed countless times, but because the developers seem to allergic to quick, easy, and effective solutions, I’ll be throwing this in their face again in the event that they manage to read to page 72 of this post (hi!).

Build 1:
Concussion Mine:

• Falloff damage removed.
• Damage reduced to 80.

Steel Trap:

• Damage increased to 120.

Rip-Tire:

• Charge requirement increased from 1575 to 1750.

And with those changes, we have:

• Reduced the effectiveness of the double-mine combo.
• Maintained the trap+mine combo.
• Made Rip-Tire less common.
• Maintained the effectiveness of the primary fire+mine combo.

Weeeee!
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12.0 - Sombra’s Issues:
Out of all heroes we will be discussing in this post, Sombra is in by far the weirdest. Looking at her winrates on Overbuff…
https://www.overbuff.com/heroes
Sombra overall has the worst winrate in the game. Look at Bronze. She’s at the very bottom. Now look at Silver. Still at the very bottom. Now Gold. Still the very bottom.

Now look at Grandmaster. She’s… 13th from the top? Above Genji and Winston, and just below Tracer; all of whom are dominant because of Dive?

This isn’t explained as easily as Torbjorn and Symmetra’s winrates are. Torbjorn and Symmetra both have high winrates throughout all skill tiers because in games that they perform well, the player continues to play as them, while in other losing scenarios they are often blamed by their team if things go south, so they switch off. Sombra doesn’t have a constant winrate throughout the ranks, though, so that explanation isn’t applicable to her. What’s causing this weird winrate difference, then?

- Sombra is terrible when playing with uncoordinated teams and/or on most maps in the game, but devastating in other cases.
I’ll give you an example: Temple of Anubis in GM. Most GM teams are well-coordinated. A Sombra, on either attack or defense, is devastating to the opposing team in this scenario on both objectives. There are two reasons for this:

• Hacked health-packs.
• EMP.

One leads to the other.

On the first objective, a Sombra will hack the large health-pack off to the right side of the defensive line when facing the choke (left side if you are on offense). That alone is devastating to the opposing team, regardless as to whether or not they are attacking or defending. Most initiations begin with the attacking team moving to the left to hit the defensive line from the side, and that room with the healthpack and the two doorways into it are typically where the most intense fighting takes place. Because of how much damage is flung around in GM, each team needs every bit of healing it can get, and denying the enemy team that large health-pack while using it as a boon to your own team is huge. As most of the fighting for the first point happens there, Sombra gets EMP in… maybe 20 seconds. So now she’s made her team beefier, deprived her enemies of a resource, and now she’s ready to press Q while everyone else is still working on 50% charge.

Likewise, this same situation plays out on the second objective, but with the health-pack beneath the bridge. In Grandmaster, players know exactly how to take advantage of these positions, and they coordinate to grant Sombra more ultimate charge, the healers often leaving allies who are not taking too much damage to grab her health-packs.

However, no matter how coordinated the team is, Sombra still isn’t a good pick on certain maps; Hanamura, for example. Why is this?

Health-pack locations. On Temple of Anubis, the health-packs are smack dab in the middle of the battlefield. On Hanamura, players need to go out of their way to get one, isolating themselves from the fight to do so. Sombra is dependant on two things to be effective:

• Team coordination.
• Health-pack locations.
  The problem is that it’s rare to get each of these in ranks below Masters, much less both at the same time; hence the winrate fluctuation.

If we want to put Sombra in a better state, we need to make her less dependant on her health-packs, and turn her into more of a consistent disruption hero.
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12.1 - Solutions for Sombra:
Build 1:
Machine-Pistol:

• Lowest damage after falloff increased from 2.4 to 4.

I’m going to be blunt about this; I am trying to buff Sombra in lower tiers without increasing her power in higher tiers. Because lower tiers are not as good as higher tier players at getting in close and utilizing her Machine-Pistol to its full potential while high-tier players are, I am suggesting a reduction in the severity of her damage falloff. This will make her more useful in lower tiers where players are not fully adapted to using her but will leave higher tiers mostly unaffected.

Hack:

• Is no longer cancelled by any amount of damage; now requires that at least 10 damage is dealt to Sombra over the duration of Hack’s cast time in order to interrupt the ability.
• Now has a .1 second cast time against non-player constructs (turrets).

This prevents stray shots fired by certain heroes (stares at D.Va) halfway across the map from preventing Hack from being used, but intentional fire, even if poorly aimed, should still be able to interrupt Hack before it completes its cast time. This makes Sombra less clunky, but still leaves a large window for counterplay.

Thermoptic Camo:

• Now Functions on a resource meter. This resource meter can be active for 6 seconds before being depleted (same duration as current Sombra).
• Regenerates from depleted to full over 6 seconds after a .5 second delay from decloaking (either from running out of resource or making an action that decloaks her).
• Being hit while Thermoptic Camo is active decloaks Sombra and puts the ability on a 2 second cooldown. The resource regeneration delay is extended to 2 seconds as well.
• Sombra’s movement speed increase begins immediately upon activation rather than waiting .7 seconds to activate.
• Delay between stealth deactivation and ability usage (attacks, hack, etc.) reduced from .7 seconds to .4 seconds.

The goal of these changes is to make Sombra’s Thermoptic Camo ability more flexible in teamfights while also granting a slight increase in uptime of the ability. Putting the ability on a resource meter makes it less of a one-and-done engagement ability and more of a combat resource to manage. The instant speed increase and the destealth delay reduction are to make the ability more effective mid-fight and to reduce the clunky feel of waiting for it to actually activate/deactivate after pressing the key.

Translocator:

• When a Translocator is still active, pressing and holding the key to use it for 1 second will deactivate it rather than teleporting Sombra to it.
• Deactivating a Translocator puts the ability on its 4 second cooldown.

This gives more options to Sombra, allowing her to replace a Translocator at a different location if she decides that she no longer needs the active one.

Variant 1:
Instead of reducing the severity of the damage dropoff on Sombra’s Machine Pistol, her damage falloff range is extended from 15-25 meters to 20-27 meters.

Just another way of achieving the same goal.
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13.0 - Hanzo’s Issues:

- Hanzo is terrible.
I mean as far as playability. He’s a terrible person too, but that’s not what I’m referring to currently.

Hanzo has a universally low winrate; his highest winrate barely exceeds 48% in Diamond and Grandmaster, giving him the lowest winrates out of all heroes in any rank above Platinum.

Hanzo doesn’t even have a niche to fill. He’s just plain bad.

- Scattur!
Honestly, I have no problem with playing against this ability. It’s one of the few abilities that consistently makes me laugh upon dying to it, purely because of how stupid the ability is. To quote one of my favorite YouTubers (again), I have learned to “embrace the bull[sandwich! ]”, to the point where the occasional death to it doesn’t bother me. I would rather die to a random Scatter Arrow from halfway across the map that wasn’t even meant for me than to Tracer or Genji for the 12,000th time; at least I get a laugh from the Scatter Arrow kill.

That said, I know a lot of people do have problems with this ability, so I will be addressing them.

As it currently stands, Hanzo’s Scatter Arrow can deal up to 450 damage when fully charged. Because all 6 arrows split from the launched arrow upon first impact, Scatter Arrow is often used as a method to instantly kill enemies by shooting at the floor in front of them. Being killed by this method often leaves the player feeling rather cheated, especially if they are playing heroes with high health pools who should be able to survive such abilities; Orisa comes to mind. Scatter Arrow feels unfair to play against (I hate that argument, and it’s probably obvious as to why if you check my main from when I still played).

The other problem with this ability, or rather, with Hanzo as a whole, is that he is awfully dependant upon Scatter Arrow to be useful in some scenarios. This is why many people dislike the ability, but are okay with letting it slide because Hanzo overall is pretty garbage at the moment. With this in mind, the goal of any changes to Hanzo should be to shift power away from Scatter Arrow or to otherwise make it less annoying to play against while overall increasing the power of Hanzo through buffs to other areas of his kit.
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13.1 - Solutions for Hanzo:
Build 1:
Scatter Arrow:

• Removed as a basic ability.

Dragonstrike:

• Removed from Hanzo’s ultimate and is now his E ability.
• Size of the ultimate reduced by 50%.
• 30 second cooldown.
• Cast time removed.

New Ultimate: The Dragon Consumes You:

• Sets Dragonstrike’s cooldown to 0 upon activation.
• Dragonstrike has a 10 second cooldown for the duration of the ultimate.
• 20 second duration.
• Hanzo’s movement speed is increased to 10 meters/second.
• All of Hanzo’s attacks while The Dragon Consumes You is active are Scatter Arrows.

…

Now that I have made you laugh, cry, or crap yourself in fear, I think I need to make something clear to the developers:

^ A joke. Do NOT take Build 1 seriously; it not meant to be taken seriously. See Build 2 for some non-cynical suggestions.

Build 2:
Scatter Arrow:

• Spread from initial impact (when the one arrows splits into six) increased by 30%.

This makes it more difficult to one-shot heroes with Scatter Arrow by shooting at their feet, but still leaves the possibility of it happening. This is a nerf to Scatter arrow, but hopefully it will be counterbalanced by changes to Hanzo’s Storm Bow…

Storm Bow:

• Alternate fire added (although it’s not really a fire): Add/remove arrows. By using Hanzo’s alternate fire, Hanzo adds a single arrow to his Storm Bow.
• Maximum of three arrows loaded at once. Using alternate fire while three arrows are loaded resets the number of arrows to 1.
• Damage of each arrow is reduced when multiple arrows are loaded. Each arrow deals 90 damage when 2 arrows are loaded, 80 damage when three are loaded.
• Arrows must be added or removed before drawing back on the bow.
• Adding an arrow or removing two arrows (1-2-3-1 cycle when pressing E) takes .3 seconds.
• When 2 arrows are nocked, the crosshair splits to show two separate locations for the arrows to land, each location horizontal from the normal crosshair location. When 3 arrows are nocked, the new crosshairs form an equilateral triangle around the original crosshair location. This triangle has one of its faces pointing down, so an angle is pointing straight up.
• The exact distance from the origin (the normal crosshair location) each arrow will land when multiple are nocked is a 1 meter spread from the origin over 16 meters traveled.
• This effect does not stack with Sonic or Scatter Arrows.

I have lots of explaining to do…

First, the reason I am enabling hanzo to shoot multiple arrows at once is to give him an edge in close-quarters combat. With three arrows nocked, Hanzo can deal 240 non-critical damage in a single shot on the condition that his target is either very close or has a large hitbox. This will help to make certain heroes (Winston, for example) think twice before jumping on Hanzo. Shooting multiple arrows at once can be useful over long range if the enemy team is grouped without barriers, but the spread on his arrows leaves arrow stacking ineffective in 1v1 long-ranged combat; therefore, firing one arrow at a time will be best us of his bow in those scenarios.

Above, I say that Hanzo’s arrow spread when multiple arrows are nocked is 1 meter for every 16 meters traveled. Note that this spread is not erratic like most spread weapons (shotguns and automatic weapons); there are multiple crosshairs indicating exactly where each arrow will land when fired, and the crosshair locations are consistent. To get an idea of how big this spread is, follow these steps (it’s what we did to decide what the spread should be):

• Go into the practice range and select Hanzo.
• Walk to where there is a single Training Bot who is standing alone beside the cliff. This one does not move and has nothing shooting at it. There are distance markings on the ground.
• Walk all the way back to the 0 meter marker. Center yourself on the line and your crosshair on the Training Bot’s eye, which is now 40 meters away.
• Get a piece of scotch tape and make a pull-tab on it by folding part of it back into itself. Then, place it horizontally over the crosshair on your screen.
• Using a pencil, mark on the tape where the furthermost boundaries of that firing range are, indicated by the yellow outline on the floor. If you have done this correctly, you should now have a piece of tape over your crosshairs without about an inch between the two markings.
• You may leave that piece of tape on your screen. Enlist the help of a friend and create a custom game for you to test the spread of two nocked arrows, which now indicated by the markings on the tape.

Don’t sue me if you didn’t make a pull-tab as I instructed and now have a piece of tape stuck to your screen.

You might notice through testing that it is difficult to land two headshots at once with this spread unless at very close range. That was the goal.

https://i.imgur.com/HefzvRz.gif

Variant 1:
Rather than a flat increase to Scatter Arrow’s spread, this will change the way Scatter arrow functions. It no longer splits into 6 arrows upon initial impact, but it now splits into 3 arrows which then split into 3 again in the next bounce. This creates 9 arrows. Each of these 9 arrows can bounce once before becoming inactive. If one of the initial 3 sub-arrows hits a target, it does not split. The first arrow, however, does split if it hits a target.

This makes Scatter Arrow less effective for insta-killing targets, but more effective at hitting enemies in enclosed spaces or for flushing them out of cover.
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14.0 - Roadhog Stuff:
This problem was brought to my attention by someone on the previous thread. I originally put it in the “Other Miscellaneous Things” section, but I decided that it deserved a section of its own.

Roadhog is evidently running into consistency issues with his Chain Hook. Upon connecting to targets, it appears to be failing the line of sight checks before reeling the target in when it should be passing them. This results in targets being left alone when they should be getting pulled towards Roadhog. For an Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2KfZxIK8Nc&t=28s
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15.0 - Lu-ci-yo!:
This was kind of a spontaneous idea that I had, but I figured I would throw it up here.

What if the effectiveness of Lucio’s Sound Barrier scaled with how high off the ground Lucio decided to “Break it down!” from?

For example, if I were to play Lucio and ult at ground level, my allies would gain 300 or so temporary shields. However, if I were to ult after wall-riding to and jumping off the top of Lijiang Tower, my allies and I would become unkillable for the next 37 hours.

Okay, that last bit was slightly hyperbolic, but still…

Anyway, there is a good reason for this: It justifies the fact that Lucio loses his ultimate completely if stunned or killed between cast and activation, adding more reward for more risk. More time spent casting means more shields for that cast.

16.0 - Matchmaking:
The problems that I see people most frequently complaining about are smurfs, throwers, toxicity, and group matchmaking. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, as there isn’t much of a need to, and I will do the explaining after I suggest changes to the matchmaking system.

General Competitive Changes:

• Player statistics no longer play a role in determining SR gains or losses. This applies for the entire system, not just Diamond+.
• Player statistics are still recorded, but not for the purpose of selecting gains/losses.

This aims to disincentivize throwing throughout the entire SR system, as players can no longer pad their stats to get greater SR gains to compensate for losses. Players will now focus on doing things that will increase their chances of winning rather than cutting their losses with stat padding.

Competitive Placement Matches:

• Players now have a “Ghost SR” visible to them and only them while taking placement matches. This number represents roughly where the game thinks the player belongs during placements. The player fights with and against players of similar Ghost SRs during placements.
• Winning matches will only cause the Ghost SR to increase, and losing matches will only cause the Ghost SR to decrease.
• Statistics from the previous season are used in this process, acting as a sort of multiplier; if the player had high stats relative to the average player at their rank, placements would give the player more Ghost SR gains on wins and take fewer on losses. If the player performed worse than average for their rank, they lose more Ghost SR on losses and gain less on wins.
• At the end of placements, the player’s Ghost SR disappears and is replaced by real SR.

This keeps players focused on winning in both placements and during the mid-season, but also helps to accelerate the process of placing players who are underperforming/overperforming in more appropriate skill tiers. The Ghost SR is mainly to keep the player from being completely blind throughout their placements, and allows them to set and work towards goals while playing their first 10 matches of the season.

Group Matchmaking:

• Now has its separate set of MMR, referred to as “GMMR” or “group matchmaking rating”
• GMMR is used to determine how “casual” or “serious” a group is, and then matches groups together/against each other based upon that in conjunction to their MMR and SR.
• A player’s GMMR is determined by their MMR and that player’s GMMR from previous groups, along with how well they perform in the current group.
• GMMR is far more fluid than normal MMR, changing within a few games depending upon how well the team plays.
• Applies in both Quickplay and Competitive play.

The goal is to make being in a group of friends less painful, as often what would happen is that a group of friends would queue together just looking to have fun and then get placed against a team that is far more coordinated than their own, leading to constant stomps in the opposing team’s favor. This also occurred with groups of people who simply decided to hit the “Stay as group” button at the end of a match, and this helps to prevent the same from happening to those players as well. Because GMMR is much more fluid than MMR, a few bad games will lead to the system quickly correcting itself and creating more evenly matched games for that group.
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17.0 - Report System:
Before I suggest changes, I want to go over some things.

Before I played Overwatch, I was an avid Minecraft player. I often played on various Minecraft servers, participating in various minigames contained in each. However, despite the sometimes stunning quality of these minigames, no game was without its flaws. Most games had some form of exploiters, players who exploited bugs to gain unfair advantages, and hackers, players who had third-party programs running like flight, speed, ghost-walk, or aimbots to grant unfair advantages. Some servers had A LOT of these players, to the point where it was impossible to go more than three games without running into one. The other, more well-established ones, however, had significantly fewer of these players, and were also a lot more civil when it came to talking in-game.

Comparing this to Overwatch, those well-established servers (Mineplex and Hypixel come to mind) did not have as good of a hold on hackers and exploiters as Overwatch does, but they had a far better hold on discussions and toxicity than Overwatch does. Why was this?

Those well-established servers had their own set of forums, each with a section designated specifically for reports. In those report sections, there were subcategories for exploits, hacks, and abusive chat.

Reports were not taken based on volume. They were taken based on evidence. Not everyone had access to recording software; however, everyone had access to screenshots. There was a key built into Minecraft itself and by pressing a single button (I believe it was F1), Minecraft saved a picture of what was happening on the screen to a folder. Because the method for recording evidence was universally obtained, and actions were based upon proof, it was incredibly easy to report abusive chat. Therefore, toxicity remained at a minimum on these servers.

An example of how well the reporting system for these servers worked:
One evening on Mineplex, I ran into a player who was using fly/speed hacks. Because I had recording software readily available, I recorded the entire act, and then proceeded to log into the Mineplex forums to report the player.

Each report on the Mineplex forums had a specific format that needed to be followed to help streamline the process of looking through the reports. I do not remember the exact format, but it went something like this:

• Name of the player.
• Minigame or lobby in which the violation was committed (because some areas permitted flying and such, as they did not interfere with the game’s playability).
• Violation committed.
• Evidence.
  There were limitations as to what the evidence could be. For chat violations, screenshots would suffice. For hacks and exploits, videos were required, but they needed to have timestamps of the violations if they were longer than 3 minutes.

I created a report ticket following all of these guidelines and submitted it. I went to bed shortly afterwards.

The next day, before logging into Minecraft, I checked my Email. There I found a message from Mineplex Support thanking me for the report and stating that the player in question had been actioned.

This system was almost perfect; it never resulted in unwarranted punishments, it was quick to respond to legitimate reports, and it did a fantastic job of keeping the servers clean for the most part. The one flaw it had was that despite its functionality, it lacked a single key piece; most players didn’t have recording software.

On the other hand, Blizzard doesn’t take evidence-based reports. They wait for reports to accumulate in volume before investigating, and even their investigations seem… questionable to say the least. They do a great job of keeping their games clean from hacks (I have yet to see an aimbot in Overwatch outside of the literal auto-aim ults), likely because Blizzard actively updates their games to patch out hacks, but toxicity and throwing? Not so much.

What I propose is a hybrid between the two systems. In one section, we keep the current system of investigations based on the volume of reports. In the other section, we have a subforum specifically for reporting inappropriate behavior using evidence.

The flaw in the Minecraft server reporting system can be fixed by creating a built-in recording system for the purpose of recording offenses. We already have the basis for this; the highlight system. If a recording function can be used for something cosmetic, why can’t it be utilized for practical reasons too?

It’s not like Mineplex’s report system was difficult or terribly expensive to maintain either; all Minecraft Servers at the time survived purely off of donations from their players, and most of these servers had a playerbase no larger than a couple hundred-thousand. They did not receive profits when copies of Minecraft were sold; those went to Mojang and later Microsoft after the latter company bought Minecraft.

I’m fairly certain that if servers who live off the donations of a couple hundred-thousand fans can keep their chats clean, then Blizzard, a company with a supposed Overwatch fanbase of 30 million and over a billion dollars in game-selling profits along with the ongoing reaping of profits from microtransactions, can keep theirs clean too. They just need to actually move to do so.
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18.0 - Developer/Forum Communication:
This is a relatively short section, but I think it needs to be said.

Players here on the forums have no idea as to whether or not their posts are being read by anyone with authority. Case in point: The previous few megathreads on Mercy. Just about every megathread up until the previous one seems to have gone ignored, and the only thing indicating that the developers are reading the current thread is a post by Jeff Kaplan on page 77:

”Thanks to everyone for taking the time to write up thoughtful feedback here. We’re reading the responses daily.”

Of course, this helps to lift confidence, but it’s a pretty general and vague message.

Fast forward to February 7th, and this message appears:

”We have no plans to revert Mercy. We also feel like she’s not in a horrible place or unplayable.

It’s still to be determined if she is exactly where she should be because it has been too soon and the dust needs to settle. Her playtime in QP and Comp is still incredibly high. Her winrate is still above 50% but more in line with what we’d expect.

But I’d like to put the notion that Mercy is going to be reverted to rest.

Also, we don’t agree with the statement that all supports are weak. Support heroes are extremely powerful and impactful in OW.”

It’s not necessarily the message that Mercy isn’t going to be reverted that is upsetting; it’s the fact that as far as we can tell, despite them supposedly reading the messages daily, they still have no idea what our concerns are. The primary concern expressed is that Mercy isn’t fun to play. The developers are replying with “We think she’s viable”, leading us to believe that no, they aren’t reading the messages; they just say that they are to calm us down a smidge.

That’s the impression, anyway. If that truly is not the case, I have a suggestion to prove that assumption wrong: Add a “Read by developer” marker to forum posts that have been seen by individuals with authority on the subject. This does not include moderators that have read through the post, as they likely have no authority when it comes to balancing/future content/cosmetics.

This would show us exactly what posts are and are not being read and would help to dispel any ambiguity on the subject.
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19.0 - Other Miscellaneous Things:
This is mostly just a bonus section where I slap up things not covered elsewhere. A lot of these will be things friends of mine have requested that seem reasonable.

Mystery Heroes:

• Dying as one hero transfers half of the player’s current ultimate charge to their next hero when they respawn.

Basically, if I die with 100% charge as Pharah, I would respawn as say… Reinhardt with 50%. If I die as Zenyatta with 20%, I respawn as Torbjorn with 10%.

The given reason for this (“given” because this was not my idea; I hardly play Mystery Heroes) is that it would make comebacks for feasible. Completely losing a fully-charged ultimate is disheartening if the objective is being contested.

LFG/Clan System:
We need one. This alone, even without the updated report system, would do a lot to reduce toxicity. Players who want to be members of tailored teams can be without needing a lot of friends to play with, and hopefully, make more friends in doing so.

I know the developers have expressed interest in making this happen, but it seems as though they are taking their sweet time in doing so, if they are at all.
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Hi!
You have reached the end of my megapost! Congratulations! Unless you’re just down here because you are looking for a TL:DR. Unfortunately for you, because I’m lazy and TL:DRs are not my style for posts like these (or really any of my posts, ever), there isn’t a TL:DR.

I await the inevitable why-no-too-long-didn’t-read-edition complaints, which I will answer with a copy/paste of this and the above paragraphs. Because again, I’m lazy.

[Vex-11371]

Lol, it’s like your reply was stuck in the middle of a busy highway.

[Potatogirl-11213]

The 99000 character limit… it’s been broken. Who is supposed to read this?

[Titanium-1686]

Who is supposed to write this?

[Tarshaid-2922]

Well, can’t say I didn’t call for it. Almost wondered what you were up to, Titanium.

[Potatogirl-11213]

What are we going to do with you titanium…

[AngelicTea-2471]

Seriously how do you have the time to create this??? I’ve only just started reading it, and the quality is definitely as amazing as the quantity but wow. I wish I had the time and patience to write something this long tho :3

[Rico-2593]

Now I need two TL;DRs!

[Zefiris-1841]

Luckily, if they opt to delete their post, it’ll be removed completely in 24 hours!

[Zefiris-1841]

It’s like the “wall of no” over on the WoW forums, it’s something that accumulates over time and before you know it, you wonder how it grew so big.

[AngelicTea-2471]

(PS: I sent this to my friend and his phone crashed due to the length of the post xD)

[Potatogirl-11213]

Yeah I think this is a sign that some things just aren’t meant to be real…

[Titanium-1686]

What are we going to do with you titanium…

I guess the real question is what did the old forums do with me while they were still up?

Seriously how do you have the time to create this??? I’ve only just started reading it, and the quality is definitely as amazing as the quantity but wow. I wish I had the time and patience to write something this long tho :3

Probably the fact that I have nothing better to do. So rather than doing stupid/illegal things like other individuals my age, I spend hours on end writing massive posts for the Overwatch forums.

[dad-13801]

wow my head hurts now

[WallyWalrick-1459]

Just re-adding this from the original post …

Earthshatter:

Number of projectiles over Earthshatter’s AoE is increased from 5 to 15.
This will make Earthshatter more consistent with its animation.

I’ve done hours of testing of the mechanic and I’m not sure increasing the projectiles to 15 will help enough…at least not by itself.
One of the issues is that the projectiles start from the center of Reinhardt’s model, not from the hammer location. So if your hammer goes past a shield, Earthshatter is still blocked because you are behind it, or through a doorway, next to a wall, the projectiles are still blocked.

Another issue is that Earthshatter works on some payloads but not all, this happened because of the vertical nerf. Would be good if it was consistent between maps.

[Titanium-1686]

I’m not sure how that could be done without changing the height of Earthshatter (which might lead to Pharahs being Earthshattered out of the air) or the height of the payload itself.

[WallyWalrick-1459]

It probably only needs a 0.1-0.2 metre increase…or add a trigger that earthshatters through a payload stun all on it.
Earthshatter just needs a mechanical rewrite unfortunately

[Titanium-1686]

or add a trigger that earthshatters through a payload stun all on it.

We’d need to deal with exceptions to that (barriers), which could make it unnecessarily complicated.

Earthshatter just needs a mechanical rewrite unfortunately

That’s pretty accurate.