"Perks are mainly about creating new things for your heroes to do, increasing situational viability, and giving you more agency over your in-match experience.
For that goal of increasing the amount of situations in which a hero can be viable"
This is a quote from the director’s take. I laugh at it because it does seem like they have this philosophy of what they want perks to be… but then it doesn’t actually apply to a lot of the heroes.
Just doom as an example:
It doesn’t create new things for him to do. 4/4 of his perks are related to just punchbotting. So same old shtick.
It doesn’t increase situational viability, because although he can parry some CC, but he still gets screwed over by multiple instances of CC which happens in most matches you try to play doom in. And which let’s be honest… it’s a sleep dart counter, that’s it. Hack goes through it, flash can be used around it / just thrown at the floor, rein charge ignores it, sig rock ignores it, hog hook ignores it, every displacement CC ignores it. All this has reminded me is that there is a LOT of unblockable CC. So same old shtick.
There’s also the slog of trying to get to that LVL 3 so you can even HAVE the CC counter option which then that whole “situational viability” thing kicks in after you’ve already probably tossed the match for the past 3-5 minutes trying to get there playing against CC without it. Hell, I’d say power matrix is honestly a good thing more because of the 20% extra empowerment charg and LESS because of the CC funny enough. And it’s a benefit that isn’t even listed under the perk description.
And it doesn’t increase agency, because you’re still locked into punchbotting, with zero out because the rest of his abilities are garbage and they didn’t take the time with perks and use them as a way to bolster the rest of his kit but instead used that effort to just… bolster the already single strong part of his kit and kinda just ignored everything else.
All roads lead right back into the same exact hero he was pre-percs. Do a bunch of nothing until you get empowered punch and spam the hell out of it but now more effective at doing that because of power matrix. Nothing new, nothing creative, nothing unique… just the same exact hero as before.