Perks are an interesting way to balance heroes

General Discussion
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Perks overall are a interesting system. They’ve pretty massively reduced the counterswapping I’ve seen as there’s an actual detriment to it now. There’s some tuning issues, some good heroes got good perks and some bad heroes got dumpster perks, widening the gap between the two

And while currently they’re just base kit + extra stuff, when bans come through and some characters inevitably get perma’d, they offer an interesting way of balancing problematic aspects of heroes kits.

Currently it’s mostly the inverse of that where it largely buffs characters strengths in what they’re already pretty good at, with some examples being that Genji’s Swift Strike major increases his ability to chain kills (giving him a lot of extra reach during Dragonblade) or Cassidy getting reduced Roll CD when he crits (which lets him reload faster for more crits for more rolls and so on), or actually giving characters utility/strengths where they desperately needed it, like projectile speed for Junk or AntiHeal on Moiras orb.

But what if for when those problematic characters that end up perma-banned, they weren’t just extra stuff. What if the problematic aspects of their kits, their no-CD OHK’s, their anti-heals, their whatevers were locked behind the perk system meaning that you DIDN’T have them right out the gate?

For example, what if Widowmakers Crits instead of doing 300 damage, did 200 + 100 Bleed over X seconds, but her major perk instantly dealt that damage, restoring her OHK?

Or if Ana had a more frontloaded Nade with more damage/healing, BUT her perk traded that for the anti-heal debuff that currently makes her hated to play into?

Or if Kiriko’s Suzu could cleanse OR provide an immunity, but not both?

Perks give a pretty interesting way to take and add power back into the character at different stages of the game and after playing with them, I like them way more than I was expecting.

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I think also it helps with the perception of playing your own hero and getting rewarded mid game, not to mention that people will play differently with different perks. Some think it makes the game harder to balance, but I think its easier, because you dont need to turn the hero completely or rework them. It gives them more knobs to turn when balancing and thats a good thing.

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I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not keen on that idea at all. I think it’s bad enough that majors only come online after five minutes or so, sometimes allowing very little time to actually play with the darn things. I’ve had games of QP where absolutely nobody got a single major. I’ve seen a bunch of games where people only get to scoop up a major at the tail end of C; I had a Junkertown game yesterday where the enemy Orisa got to fire off all of a few barriers before it ended.

Perks already feel like a damp squib to me because most of the match already feels like season fourteen anyway. To then push even further into that, where we’re playing weaker versions of our characters and then maybe unlock perks to get back to normal? I’m not on board for that. Perks are supposed to inject fun into the game, not remove it.

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Absolutely. Getting your perks early feels REALLY good, especially into your mirror and having options for adjusting your playstyle based on who you’re fighting vs your preferred playstyle.

Ashe major perks are a pretty good example, with her Viper Sting passive rewarding her for consistently shots giving more damage and better sustain, very good into beefy targets like Tanks, but her Airburst passive making TNT bigger and giving ammo when it throws, helping her against more agile targets.

100%. Overwatch’s biggest problem with kit design was that the only real levers you had for ability power in a lot of case was buffing/nerfing the cooldown and numbers of abilities.

You can use a ton of abilities or parts of a kit (like Widow OHK, Anti-Heal, Mercy Res) right out the gate so it makes the early game of OW feel super swingy where you play a Widow for 30-60s and either win point because she gets a couple picks or she does nothing and then you play the actual game of Overwatch.

I used Kiriko as an example here because Suzu as a cleanse is absolutely worthless into many matchups so Blizzard have made it so it can heal and provides an immunity ontop of that making it a fairly powerful abilities into all matchups and infuriating into matchups where cleanse is relevant (like JQ).

Perks allow Blizzard to split up the ability into a slightly stronger cleanse than it currently is or a slightly more reliable generalist tool, but not both.

It also allows them to add a timegate to how quickly you want those powerful abilities to come online. Like I think tuningwise, if you WANT a character to be strong in the early game, you just give them bad perks. Every character will be tuned around their perks, so having bad perks means that their baseline kit can be stronger.

And then like how ultimates have varying charge-rates based on individual heroes, you +/- charge rate for these perks as necessary. Maybe in the above case, Kiriko can get her minor online very quickly once she knows that she needs cleanse or a more generalist tool, or maybe Sojourn gets hers slower since they make her powerful ult even more powerful.

I think this is a tuning issue rather than a design issue TBH. If perks are being acquired too slowly (or quickly) its pretty trivial to increase (or decrease) the rate at which they charge, either on a hero, role even gamewide level.

I think this mindset will fade with time. You’ve already accepted that some characters have WAY better guns because their ultimate kinda stinks, or some characters have much weaker guns because their ultimate is REALLY good, or any number of trade offs that happen when you pick hero A over hero B.

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Well even if I hate some heroes kit (Ana) I don’t think it’s a good idea to hide it behind perks, for me Ana should be able to efficient at the very start even if I think her kit too strong in OW2.

HOWEVER we can do the other way around : Ana (and some specific heroes) can start with a very strong kit but will have less interesting perks (mostly Tank/Support)

While some start with meh kit but end up with powerful perks (mostly DPS).

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I think it’s going to make balance worse

There’s no way they’re going to be able to keep power levels relatively even across the hero roster. Some heroes are simply going to benefit a lot more from them than others, or some of the perks are going to simply be way better than others, and the gaps are only going to grow.

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I think perks are crutches for less able to keep up with real purists of overwatch who shun this system :triumph: :muscle: :joy:

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I don’t see why it would fade with time. Characters becoming more boring or hamstrung versions of themselves isn’t really something that goes away. The fact remains that a player has to earn the real version of their character by playing a gimped version.

The way that power budget is spread out among a character is a constant. Tracer’s Pulse Bomb isn’t much to write home about but that’s okay, since she’s fun in the neutral game. But let’s take a perk-as-balance-lever approach to her: Tracer now only gets one Blink while maidenless, two Blinks once she unlocks a minor perk and goes back up to three Blinks once she gets a major.

Let’s just say for argument’s sake that that is perfectly balanced. It doesn’t matter. It’s a bad idea because it makes Tracer boring until she gets a major five minutes into the game, if she ever gets to unlock a major at all.

It’ll also make Tracer feel bad because what you’re striving towards over the course of the match isn’t something new and exciting, it’s what she’s been able to do until now from the very start of the match. The big draw of perks is that they bring something new and exciting to the table. This approach would be the opposite of that.

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i make it simple , perks are bad , they are so BAD>

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Why would it not? Do you play Ana and get disappointed that she doesn’t have a speed boost on Nano anymore? Or play against Dva and try and deadzone her matrix? Play around single mine Junk? Scatter Arrow on Hanzo?

There’s been a million and one changes to any hero, some small, some major, that I bet if you looked through patch notes from 2020 you’d be like “huh, forgot that was a thing”.

Why would this be any different.

It’s not though. Tracer has a GREAT baseline kit but a pretty weak ultimate. Genji has a fairly mediocre baseline kit but is balanced around having an incredibly strong ultimate. Moira has no utility (until you get her anti-heal orb at least) because she has very good defensives and incredibly throughput. Zen has poor defensives but extremely powerful utility and an extremely powerful ultimate.

Different characters are strong at different points in the game, whether thats due to map geography, how their kit works, the balance of power between their ult and baseline kit and so on.

Everything is a trade off, perks would be no different.

I dunno, I’ve gotten my major perk long before overtime on the first point has gone out. It’s not really different to ultimates. Sometimes it takes ages to build an ultimate, sometimes you get it in the first fight.

Eventually perks are going to stop being shiny and new and they’re just going to be a thing that exists, like role passives or whatever. You’re going to stop thinking of a major perk as a “shiny new tool” and just something thats a part of a characters kit a couple minutes into the game.

I’m mostly thinking of this system in the future seasons, like in S16 when we get bans and certain characters get sent to the shadow realm because you can’t really tune their kits with raw numbers.

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Like overwatch 2 :joy: a thing that just exists and gets owned by rival clones of mid tier doing half of what ow used to be,

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Re: how would this be different: because I’d be playing a crappy version of a character before getting to a decent character every single match, with the possibility of not even getting to the decent version of the character.

If they took the damage reduction element of Nano out and had a major perk that re-enabled it, it would be rather difficult to forget!

I guess I phrased it poorly since I’m not disputing that different characters have their power budgets spread out differently. What I was trying to express is that perks are different from power budgets being skewed towards/against ultimates because regardless of the character, each character is meant to be fun as a package from the get-go. Select character, have fun, whether you’re Tracer or Genji.

Stripping fun elements from perkless characters is not like that at all. If perks were selected straight away then sure, by all means build in drawbacks along the lines of Junkrat’s perks. But they aren’t, so please don’t.

Perks will always stick out more than ultimates because ultimates come and go. Taking fun elements of characters and expecting them to “earn” those back isn’t something that would wear off. It would eternally suck.

There’s already some of this present. I really like Orisa’s barrier, and I don’t like Orisa’s spin. I played a fair amount of Orisa in OW1 but dropped her shortly into OW2. Am I playing Orisa again now that she can get her barrier back with a perk? No. I’m not going to do chores to make a character that’s boring to me, fun. I’m instead going to play characters that get upgrades, but are perfectly fun in their perkless state.

I don’t want other characters to be put through the same process.