Patch Notes for October 21st Experimental Card w/ Video

Hey Andy here’s my feedback:

Junkrat: I like it, you are incentivized to use your passive by making bold plays that could lead to your death BUT you might take a few with you, his passive is so overlooked that I think it’s nice you get to use it strategically

McCree: His ult ramps up way too fast now, it’d be interesting if instead he’d didn’t get slowed during deadeye

Moira: good change for healing orb, not so good for damage orb, I do like that the randomness of the orb is somewhat removed

Torbjorn: feels the same (though if I may add, I’ve always disliked his shotgun… rivet gun is more than enough)

After playing the experimental card for a couple of games these are the things that stood out to me the most:

McCree: To begin with did not need any buffs considering he’s already a very strong pick in almost every situation across all ranks. the buff itself is nice but if we’re gonna buff him why not take away the 225HP buff that’s keeping him a top contender in the meta.

Torbjörn: Generally a very welcome buff, his primary fire outshines his secondary fire by a lot and I feel as this should help with that.

Junkrat: If you’re looking to buff Junkrat you should just nerf Soldier as he’s one of the main reasons why Junk doesn’t see a lot of play anymore. That being said, he now feels worse for Junkrat players that like to hit skillshots and he also feels absurdly bad to play against as a Tank, I played a few Hog games and I was getting deleted if I didn’t have my heal up or constantly played around corners because the damage amplification from discord orb along with the 150 damage nades were just melting me.

Moira: I think she needs a little more but this is definitely a step in the right direction, it’s 100% gonna help her teamfight because the orbs will stick to players easier causing more healing/damage output.

Overall I’m pretty disappointed to see McCree get buffs when characters like Reaper, Genji and Doomfist are being neglected, not to mention that they’re the heroes who suffer from McCree the most. Doomfist is probably the biggest loser of this patch because Junkrat and McCree now just make him useless in close combat.

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Thanks! I would love to see that falloff change reverted, or this whole Junkrat change taken to the drawing board for review. It just feels like he can’t do anything other than act like a poor Reaper now. I feel like he takes skills to play now with his changes, and I get more reward from shooting the floor and having Tracer trip over the grenade than trying to go for air shots, ranged shots, turrets, or really anything that is outside Reaper’s range. When Junkrat is struggling to break a stationary Torb turret, it feels like something has gone horribly wrong.

Okay then, how about I give this a whirl.

Comments: The goal here is to reduce the “spam” aspect of a grenade ricocheting halfway across the map, that feels very unpredictable and random. And an unplanned attack, feels like an unearned attack. This is what makes it feel “unfair” or distressing to die to. (i.e. similar concept with the infuriating aspect of dying to a stray Moira orb). With the above changes, even though you may get hit by richochets, it’s going to be more and more certain that you got hit, and when you had the opportunity to dodge. Additionally it gives greater skill expression to skilled/veteran Junkrat players, by making it more reliable to land direct hit shots. With older players remembering how his projectile size used to be 0.3m.



That said, an alternative approach, would be the way the TF2 Demoman Grenade Launcher deals with grenade launcher spam, where the grenade can no longer explode on contact at all after a bounce. Or in this case, pretty much exactly what the current patch is doing, but have the reduced damage tied to bounces, instead of distance.

For example:

Comments: The goal here is to reduce the “spam” aspect of a grenade ricocheting halfway across the map, that feels very unpredictable and random. And an unplanned attack, feels like an unearned attack. This is what makes it feel “unfair” or distressing to die to. (i.e. similar concept with the infuriating aspect of dying to a stray Moira orb). With the above changes, even though you may get hit by richochets, it’s going to be more and more certain that you got hit, and when you had the opportunity to dodge. Additionally it gives greater skill expression to skilled/veteran Junkrat players, by making it more reliable to land direct hit shots. With older players remembering how his projectile size used to be 0.3m.

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I’ll be honest, as a tank main, I feel frustrated with this patch.

The Rat and Torb changes both give those heroes more tools to burst down tanks quickly. With rat particularly, him being able to chunk half of a tank’s health in 2 shots (without even having to headshot) feels pretty awful, not gonna lie.

It’s frustrating for me that you guys keep saying you’re not trying to push the game towards deathmatch and that tanks will feel powerful, and then to push out changes like this where DPS get straight buffs that make tanks die quicker.

If the plan is to make tanks weaker holistically and DPS stronger, I really do wish you’d just tell us.

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While I do certainly appreciate your creativity and intent, this is the least useful kind of feedback.

I addressed this in another thread, so I’ll let my previous words do their work;

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Didn’t he address the problem though in the “comments” he provided?

I feel like grey has a pretty good understanding! He has put hundreds of hours into these ideas he’s put up. I get what you’re trying to say though, you don’t want people just throwing out ideas and hoping they’ll work, but this is clearly not the case for greyfalcon.

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Are they really though?

My gosh. Tanking in Overwatch is literally painful.
No offense to the team intended here but MYYYYYYYYYYYY GOSH. Way too much damage.

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Honestly I am likely to skip this PTR.

It covers the basics that was likely needed.

But I feel a lot was hold back for this PTR.

no one in this forum does though, we’re not devs and we don’t have all the data they have, not to mention most of us approach these problems subjectively so our own bias and the forum’s general peer pressure can influence our ideas

Just remember that the community is one of the pillars that devs take in account when making changes, the feedback needs to be quantified and throwing out ideas just clutters the general consensus that we’re trying to get across, for example:

a change can feel bad, good or meh, andy would count the amount of good, bad and meh and majority would be the feedback he’d ultimately pass on, he can’t take 3 million ideas and pass that on, devs would look at him with concern at that point lol

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Honestly would be better just to add a slight lore drop at this point.

Like a poster or something.

The devs do not have perfect understanding either and it is crystal clear with this recent balance patch.

I am not saying greyfalcon is perfect, but he puts a lot of thought into his ideas, so brushing it off as useless feedback is not only rude, but arrogant as well. They’re once again acting as if they’re above the community in terms of balancing. We saw this with OW2 testing. The pros said zarya was trash, while the dev team said she felt too strong.

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none of that matters really, plus andy wasn’t being rude at all, this is something that needed to be said, feedback needs to be clear in order to be contextualized, a wall of text isn’t clear at all

you can dislike the devs as much as you want but ultimately it’s their job and they do take feedback in account when it’s clear and concise

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Armchair Game Design isn’t useful feedback.

The devs want to know:

  1. What did you not like?

  2. Why?

  3. What did you like?

  4. Why?

That’s it.

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I’m just struggling to understand the goal of these changes as a whole. What is their real objective? Is there a meta they’re supposed to break or are they supposed to help increase specific hero playtime? Torb is a decent pick already and the cowboy is one of the best DPS in the game, so I can’t understand making them stronger when there are other DPS that feel weaker to play.

The cowboy’s buffs especially feel awful. The devs acknowledge the fact that the changes affect his already positive matchup against Doomfist and Ball, and they still think they should be in live? Why exactly?

As a Doom main I look at the change and see that my hero is straight up useless if the patch goes live because people already pick the cowboy and make it a lot harder for me to play Doom. I don’t know, feels like making Doom useless is a goal of the devs by buffing three characters that are strong or soft counters and potentially moving him to tank.

For Junkrat, I think making his shots do 150 damage is a bit absurd too. He kills Tracer in one shot, which I know will be hard, but then he shreds already weakened shields even more. With 30% damage boost it goes up to 195 and with 50% he one-shots 200hps with direct hits, and his concussion mine he’s just going to do so much damage. And thanks to the falloff, skilled Junkrat players that can hit ranged shots are heavily nerfed in that department while short ranged shield break gets an insane buff.

The Moira change is nice, and she needs help certainly, but I don’t think she’s going to feel right until she’s reworked into having some sort of utility. She doesn’t feel strong enough to run in most higher ranked games because she lacks utility, but changes like this help just a bit.

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Roadhog’s weapon have falloff, and none of the fire modes are hitscan. I think they should have had removed his falloff or make his primary and his secondary after detonation hitscan to make him more consistent before they gave him some other buffs. Though either change would probably not break him now either looking at how he seems to be doing.

Somehow I don’t think we are getting anymore tonight.

Welp, going to brew me a shake or something.

(Listening to Critical role campaign 3 that began a few hours ago.)

I just hope the air roll goes through this time. If I recall correctly I cried last time it didn’t make it to live

Because this is like the third time they have tried to wheel out this McCree rolls in midair thing. Somebody on staff reallllllllly wants this. REALLY wants it. Because it keeps coming back. Even though they keep having to admit it was stupid and pulling it out it keeps coming back. It’s like dealing with a kid who won’t stop screaming that they want cookies only the kid is in charge so dinner is cancelled and everyone IS going to have cookies eventually. Some characters don’t seem to have any advocates on staff and play perennial whipping children and others are golden boys who constantly get showered with gifts and excused from the same penalties other characters get to the point that even supposed attempts to nerf them sometimes wind up as buffs (See Hanzo’s Storm Arrow and Lunge additions).

I’ve let myself go to an ugly place here but seeing this change continually pushed for and one of my characters loses one of my favorite aspects in OW2 (Brig, Shield Bash’s interrupt utility, absolutely love stuffing ults) is frustrating. Trying to look on the bright side in a way I think it’s hilarious that some person on staff keeps suggesting this, even if it keeps getting shot down. I admire his chutzpah if not his blind devotion.

Anyhow, for the I don’t know how many times really by this point I will tell the same joke.

Now McCree is: THE AMERICAN NINJA.

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There’s a lot I’d like to talk about but I’ll try to keep it short. If you could relay it the dev’s I’d be really appreciative. This is purely about the junkrat changes.

From a character design point of view. He’s becoming a close range specialists which is fine but he doesn’t have the HP, sustain, defensive abilities or safe mobility like the other close range heroes to get him into that range. I’m unsure if the trade off for massive damage up close is worth it. Sym is an example of this but she has 225hp and can teleport to flanks and enclosed areas to avoid hitscan. I feel like junkrat needs something to mitigate hitscan dominance if I’m being forced to cover distance.

The distance traveled is tracked by how far the grenade travels. Because an arc is longer than a straight line it makes his 15m fall off feel more like 13-14m. So ricochets around corners or something underneath/above you will add distance and increase falloff damage. The easiest way to see this is if you shoot straight up, you’ll do minimum damage when it comes back down. It also punishes slow rollers where you deliberately put a grenade on the ground, bounces have arcs which easily add to the distance traveled.

Oddly enough this makes taking high ground as him extremely disadvantageous which he is known for currently. High ground on kings row almost guarantees minimal damage. This clearest example of this is eichenwalde point 2. If you defend on top of the castle all damage will be 78 per shot if they’re on the low ground.

The biggest issue is that 15-25m fall off his break even point is 18.1m. Nearly every defensive point in OW is farther than this. Most maps have a control point that is longer/wider than 18m which is a net loss for him. I’m not sure if 78 damage was on purpose but you cannot land a combo outside 25m now. DPS heroes survive with 2hp and doesn’t kill if they’re trapped more than 18m away.

Overall this change lowers his options and creativity. I’m no longer rewarded for high ground or good ricochets. The change is so extreme it feels more like a rework than anything else. I have to play close range or I do laughable damage on difficult shots. Not to mention any airshots are heavily mitigated as they are all usually farther away than 18m. In the end I’m being forced to flank or face tank and hope my suppose save me. I can’t deal with damage or hitscan with ricochets because it adds too much distance to his shots.

I think most of this would be fixed if the falloff damage started at 25/30m instead of 15.

I’ve streamed and one tricked junkrat since season one, I’ve been through it thick and thin with him. I think this would be the most difficult change he’s faced since launch.

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