A million times this.
Oh man, or using concussive to bump them out of cover and pre-firing their landing spot. This was peak feelgood. I resonate with this whole post.
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Ah, drat! I never quite got the hang of conking people into it, my reads were still a bit off on that. I think it’s more my lack of skill with conc and less my lack of intuiting trajectories; I’ve probably gotten about 15% of the boop kills I shoul’ve.
GA-ing Mercies in close range, or flying Junkrats at 20 meters? Oh man, I got GOOD at nailing those. I probably had hit rate of 70% on those targets. It felt REALLY good. I wouldn’t even shoot the rats at the parabolic apex, I’d usually nail them mid-way on the trip down where they can’t DI out of anything.
I can still do it, but I don’t know, it doesn’t feel the same. I’m still making prediction shots, but I can’t SEE both paths on a collision course before the explosion goes off.
Morning bump for visibility.
there is still the good old “stop the payload” voiceline when your team is the one pushing… thats been there almost a year
Can’t forget the voice lines… Those are super important…
you are either speaking of an infinitesimal minority of pharahs or, again, you just think we’re stupid
it was only ever a “vulnerable” position if you switched to the half of the roster that deleted her from the game as opposed to the other half where it was the other way round
pharah can still “scale” any surface she wants, she still has the best vertical mobility in the game- it’s just that, again, she can’t permanently hug the skybox anymore
back up to the top.
where’s the devs at?
Posting a Fareeha quote is not a substitute for making your own argument. I could pull a YZNSA quote stating the opposite, and we’d just be fighting each other with the quotes of content creators instead of actually considering our own standing.
For someone with over 70k posts like yourself mr Falcon, this is low effort. At least present your own view. Fareeha saying something does not make it valid nor true.
Some people like the changes, some people dislike them. That’s not what matters. What matters is the reasoning behind the opinions being voiced.
Pharah HAS lost her identity in most ways. So much about how she used to be played has been flipped upside down, for good and for bad. Some heroes have had their identities been cast out entirely, and then replaced with something else, something less nuanced. Torb is a good example, current day Symmetra too, and Bastion. And now Pharah. Doesn’t mean she’s bad, just means her identity is lost, or at least to a large degree is missing what it used to have.
And it may have elements forming a new identity, but that will have to be seen over the next couple of months because anyone claiming they have found that identity already are hard coping.
Well I did.
3 months ago.
Where the post also suggests 20% less midcombat healing, a Tank/DPS regen passive with a 5sec activation delay, changing projectile sizes, and a focus on reducing burst damage.
I also wrote this over a year ago.
Pharah was rarely good in top 500 pro play, and if anything was someone that acted more like a counter to pick to specific subsections of the player base. Such as to play around doom in 5v5, or to avoid interacting with most tanks in general outside of their barriers.
Right now, she is more or less just sky tracer.
And that is a solid playstyle to have.
Well also, outside of YSNA. (Who has their own issues with public perception issues).
Do the devs see any meaningful social media backlash to the changes, from high tier influencers?
Now add in how other influencers either like playing change, or enjoy not having the character be so frustrating.
Realistically Top500 doesn’t really matter, at all, unless it’s a social media issue. Since 0.1% of the player population doesn’t meaningfully affect playerbase growth or retention rates. So if they lose 0.01% of players over this. Why care? If they gain significantly more than that.
But people got too entitled to the idea that Bobby Kotick’s hard pandering to OWL, and the ladder experience of OWL players, would continue after both Kotick and OWL are gone.
Blizzard Accountants and Microsoft Shareholders don’t care about how good a player is at clicking heads in a videogame. They care about how many players and how many dollars it generates on a Quarterly basis.
So if your opinion is the opposite of “More Players” or “More Dollars”, then the devs could probably care less.
While I understand the sentiment in the rest of your post, this is a bit of a stretch. Kotick only cared about money, and generally sought to tank Overwatch when his OWL experiment fell flat on its face. There’s no connection between seeking revenue from the OWL and balance changes (except maybe dive??). That being said, it’s very common for game developers to seek insight from gameplay by people that are the most experienced which will pretty much always be high echelon players. However, if you’re implying that the advice given by those players is exclusively accepted that’s inaccurate; it never works that way, and is used primarily to probe for edge cases in a new implementation because competitively minded players are going to be the best testers. Given you’ve made the mod you referenced, you’re familiar with the intended use case vs the actual use case argument devs have to face.
Yes and No, that’s were the game will break in odd ways. And create the “perceived meta”, which will be commonly be mimicked in lower tiers of play.
It’s part of the reason why you will have say so many Ana’s when she is so easy to punish and mess up with her winconditions.
Is because she is deemed a meta threat in tiers she actually has a solid advantage against other players.
Best way to fix or change that is by making small adjustments around those higher ends of play, that see little to no effect on the lower ranks.
So you think it’s a “coincidence”, that for 3 years starting immediately after Kotick took control, that the meta just happened to be slower more sedintary compositions that nearly the entire time that Kotick was in charge.
And how they constantly struggled with camera angles for eSports viewing, even going so far as to make that premium option to buy the ability through Amazon to do your own camera angles.
And that the OWL teams and their wealthy owners had no influence on balance.
Despite OW2 PVP Beta announcement happening immediately after all the OWL teams met in a group conference with Blizzard upper management. So that there was an OW2 patch ready to go for OWL 2022.
And I clearly remember that, since I jumped on that rumor before that meeting, and posted this 2 weeks before the meeting.
[OW2] Balance Design Blueprint
I don’t think there’s a coincidence, I just think that people didn’t enjoy goats, and didn’t enjoy how oppressive dive was. People liked watching it, so if a fast-paced meta boosted viewership and Kotick had any influence it would’ve stayed around. Point being, the meta wouldn’t have become double barrier or whatever it was by OW1 end; I think that was a consequence of design oversight and lack of balancing changes more than anything.
After OWL started to flop Kotick wanted to tank the whole game, considering that the last remaining old guard were a part of ‘team 4’. Once Kaplan left this game took a drastic turn for the worst.
I don’t like Kotick, and I’ve said a lot of hate-filled things about him behind closed doors that I won’t repeat here, but I doubt he had any hand in tweaking hero abilities. What he did was gut the team down to inexperienced interns, low budget, and MBA managers with as much software experience as Word and Excel will allow them to have. I still feel this way about the team, and I don’t think Microsoft’s acquisition will do anything to improve Blizzard or Overwatch in a meaningful fashipn within the next 3 years.
Well I might as well post an update after trying to get used to new pharah. Some good some bad.
- Jet Dash - pretty fun mobility tool for both chasing down enemies and escaping/being hard to hit.
- Rocket jump is basically necessary now to maintain any decent air time. But they should get rid of some of the low ceilings because that basically ruins everything.
- Roof camping still kind of works if you feather the boosters well.
- Situations where you use Jump jet but then have to land quickly are incredibly annoying and a huge contributer to her clunky feeling. You’re stuck being ground pharah for 1/4 of a minute.
- Having to land for hover jet fuel still feels unnatural and I think tweaking the amount of fuel or regen rate is a much better solution. Maybe some way to keep her in the air more often at lower altitude.
*Boop - why did they need to reduce the range on this… totally unnecessary.
*Mercy - I still find mercy pockets just as helpful as before, don’t know why everyone is claiming otherwise.
Conclusion: Devs need to work on making the fuel limitation feel natural because standing on the ground waiting for jump jet to come back for 14 sec, using it and having to immediately drop for some reason or another or because you hit a tiny lamp post or something, then having to wait another 14 sec feels really… really REALLY stupid. Otherwise, the changes aren’t bad… just different.
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we’ll find out tuesday if she is in the top 500. maybe, i cant remember is she was before except for that YMCA (https://youtu.be/CS9OO0S5w2k?si=Y6hlJ74pI71BuT8A) guy. i am curious heh…
personally… i kinda love the rework but i have never been a hardcore pharah main but i LOVE the faster rockets and i am playing her how i use to play her never really flew in the sky anyways. i had some pretty good games but yea lol im just some average noob
It’s not about people not being able to hit Pharah, it’s the lack of interaction for non hitscan heroes
She forced hitscan pick(s), and the problem was exacerbated with a Mercy. Now you’re not forced to swap off projectiles the second the Pharah abusers inevitably swap when you don’t have a hitscan
In losing her infinite flight, she gained more horizontal mobility, faster rockets, more rocket jumping potential and easier to land projectiles
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Typically a player isn’t forced to swap to something to deal with another player doing well. There are two strategies
- Win as a team
- Win as a solo
When a player tries to hard counter it’s a solo win mentality.
This one player, they’re the source of our problems. Queue players swapping to Bastion for Reinhardt, Reaper for Roadhog.
The lack of interaction statement would hold water if it wasn’t completely possible and overwhelmingly easy to simply mitigate the hero instead of actively trying to go out of one’s way to simulate a clay pigeon game.
Point being, couldn’t this argument be made for all picks centered around debuffs being tanked by the existence of Kiriko’s bath water? What about anti-heal eliminating all interactivity from Mercy?
It’s ambiguous at best. A better DPS will always facilitate a swap from the team they’re against, regardless of what they’ve picked, but generally isn’t a hard requirement if that player is already doing well with what they have. The game isn’t designed to be played with every match being vanilla Reinhardt/Soldier. There’s CS:GO if someone is looking for that level of predictability.