I’m not as harsh on it as some. The QoL changes to Ram, Ball, and Kiriko are all good imo. The Sym and Torb changes are interesting, and seem to make both their gameplay more engaging. S76 buff seemed unnecessary (he is a rounded comfort pick, he doesn’t need to be especially great), but Sojourn did need a buff. Idk what to think about Zen nerf yet, but I did think he needed one.
It just seems like a lot got overlooked. Right now dps is incredibly homogeneous for the large hero pool it has. Tracer undeniably dominates T500+. Genji dominates every tier from Bronze to GM - and his extra ammo “accidental buff” wasn’t fixed for some reason (??). Hanzo still has no counter, so he’s still everywhere with players spamming one shots at every choke. S76 was already highly picked and decent, so now this might put him over the edge into a problem too. Plus any of those problem heroes + Mercy pocket, which makes it exponentially worse.
Not to mention the dps heroes who’s status is just clearly bad bc they just aren’t allowed to have much general, flexible value - many of them having their kits funneled into one hyper-specific niche that they still struggle with so they end up with low PR and/or low WR (Mei, Widow, Sombra, and Cass all have reliability issues even within their niche).
I like the changes, but surely other things are on the radar as well? Seems odd to just keep buffing the best and most picked dps while most the rest stagnate with minor tweaks here and there. Not to mention how the imbalance indirectly makes the problem with unfun tank gameplay even worse too.
I don’t know what it’s like for Syms since they got RMB damage buff and the situational vampiric effect on LMB, but Torb’s compensation buffs don’t make him more engaging to me, personally. Maybe the spread reduction on RMB will turn out to be a bigger deal than is apparent after one or two games, but I suspect it doesn’t change the fact that LMB is Torb’s bread and butter. Ammo going into Overload doesn’t really do much either since most of the time that I hit that button I’m going to have plenty of ammo to hand anyway.
Now, if they’d increased the projectile speed on LMB, then we’d be talking…
Both Genji and S76 are in this weird cycle where they’ll get buff, buff, buff, whoops that’s too much nerf back to square one, buff, buff, buff… etc. At this point I think it’s Fate herself who decides what happens to both characters and the devs have no control over the situation.
It feels like a Hanzo-esque technically-a-nerf-but-really-a-non-change to me.
If overbuff is to be believed, which I am unsure of as it’s seemed broken often in ow2. But he is among the lowest win rates at each rank, in the bottom 1/4. But this is nothing new for the hero, he is frequently there while people call him op, like most of ow1. And being popular would actually be bringing up his winrate since mirrored games would be 50%, much higher than he apparently has.
Cass I think is a lot better than his WR implies, but he does have one of the lowest dps WRs in comp. He pretty much always has, since he’s a flexible comfort pick when things go wrong, but I’m pretty sure it went down with the new nade. From my experience and what I’ve heard from others, the new nade is pretty inconsistent against high mobility. It has trouble tracking fast targets, is very obviously telegraphed, and is fairly easy to dodge using mobility, ironically.
That’s why I think his WR went down. People pick him against high mobility, but nade has a high failure rate on high mobility, and those high mobility heroes are just independently some of the strongest heroes in the game. So if nade fails, he probably will just die and, even if he lives, he isn’t going to get nearly as much value compared to theirs. So its looking like he’s still struggling in the high mobility countering niche.