Pharah is dead and needs changes

General Discussion
1

With the addition of Ashe, the Pharah splash dmg nerf, and the massive boosts to dps hitscan in the last several patches, i feel that Pharah is completely unplayable on PC.

Sure maybe she can still hold her own at silver and below, but once you get to a high enough rank that hitscans can actually aim, you have ZERO chance of survival unless you have a mercy 100% of the time.

This can be seen by the simple fact that their are very few Pharah mains above 4k, and maybe just a couple above 4.2k

Ashe just aggravates this problem even more. She is now able to snipe incredibly fast, has a great movement ability and her ult is invincible (I literally shot one today with 6 direct hit rockets only to watch my entire team still die to it). This is more health than Orisas shield and is WAY out of line for reasonable.

The recent Pharah rework completely ignored the major issue that pharah players have with her, which is Survivability. At this point her ult is a meme (“Press Q to respawn”) as she has no way to cancel it if she is in trouble and she turns into this GIANT squishy hitbox in the sky, and her rockets are too random to selectively kill the more dangerous targets. I’ve even flanked up behind a hanzo and pressed q just a couple meters away only to have him turn around and kill me before enough of my rockets randomly could hit him.

The always invisible Sombra is just an absolute train wreck for Pharah. I don’t know how we got to this state of thinking that making her invisible last for forever was a good idea… but it wasn’t. And the huge reduction to her hack time was just too much.

I play D’va a lot, but have to admit that she just completely eliminates Pharahs usefulness to the game. You can’t get in even remotely close or she will just dive at you full guns and rockets despite being able to tank your entire teams worth of damage then just walk away.

And then their is widow, once you get high enough in rank, you have to always worry that there is somebody on the other side of the map that can delete you with one well placed click. While this isn’t such a problem at low levels, as you gain up, the number of good widows grows substantially and the frequency of having a widow on a team that can easily one shot you is huge. It is just not fun playing against a hero that has almost no counter play.

Pharah’s rockets travel so slow that I might as well just mail them to the enemy. This also relates to the recent splash dmg nerf she got. It is almost impossible to predict enemy movement from more than 20 meters away and the enemy can see the rockets coming from that distance so they just side step and take little damage (only 16.25 at min). Also her rockets self dmg is completely ridiculous when you take into account that Junkrat takes zero dmg from his abilities. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be shooting at a winston/mei and they put a shield/wall right in front of you and you blow yourself up.

There is one thing that needs to be nerfed though. I think the pharmacy combo is still to strong. Especially when you get a harmony orb in addition to mercy. It is just too difficult to kill a Pharah that has that kind of pocket because the heals in this game are WAY too high. The feeling of hopelessness as I unload an entire clip into a Pharah, only to have her back to full health before my reload cycle is just stupid.

To summarize I want the Pharah match ups to feel more skill based like they used to be. She was not remotely over powered before all the hitscan buffs and was made even worse with her nerf. She needs a small buff (maybe increased rocket speed, or something to improve reliability) and needs a nerf to healing received from multiple sources (lets tone down Pharmercy). Just my two cents_emphasized text_.

2 Likes
2

I feel like she needs more aerial mobility options, with easier ways to shift left and right.

I also think she needs 50hp of armor since she is wearing an armored body suit…maybe not an ADDITIONAL 50hp, but at least convert 50 of her base health into armor.

10 Likes
3

I agree. I used to main Pharah, until they gutted her and gave her half the cast as counters. You’re never going to see change though. People will always feel she is OP, despite her projectiles moving about the same speed as Hanzo’s without headshots and doing half the damage, but the PharMercy is too OP.

I miss Pharah. You could use blast to quickly move around the map, flank and take out healers. Now, her knockbacks have been neutered, her damage slashed and every support can easily out heal her damage unless the Pharah is a sniper with rockets and if you can do that good aiming, just go Widow.

4

problem is the console population…

2 Likes
5

Community: please add more aim intensive heroes

Blizzard: okay

Community: why did you do that omg hitscans are oppressive to Pharah

3 Likes
6

I like this suggestion as well, perhaps some armor would be good. This would still allow for her to be within a reasonable place for Survivability, and would still allow for more skill based play against her too (If d’va can land those rockets while flying at her, then the armor is mitigated) but she doesn’t take as much dmg from the basic fire.

7

Converting 50 of the 200 hp into armor will be a good buff.

I also believe faster air movement speed and the ability to move while ult in would be big improvements.

Damage and velocities for rockets should remain untouched

1 Like
8

They’ve balanced around the console community specifically before by nerfing turrets on them. There’s no reason they couldn’t buff Pharah on PC specifically.

9

I actually like her recent changes. I love getting direct hits.

But it still didn’t really fix the issue we’re facing with Rocket Barrage being just as risky to use as Dead Eye, and the inability to be more evasive in mid-air besides the upward boost and releasing the jets entirely just to fall down. I really would like side-to-side movements.

10

The community did ask for more aim intensive heroes and Pharah is one of the most aim intensive heroes by far. What we got instead was major buffs to hitscan heros. Sure hitscan is harder than lock on heroes like Moira but these heroes (IMHO) are easier to play than prediction aim heroes because you actually hit what you are aiming at with no chance of the opponent dodging it.

11

Some changes can be kept on PC/Console only as they did with old Torb.

12

Or being eaten by D.Va.

13

I’m surprised by this because her recent changes made no change at all to her with respect to direct hits. I have to agree with Valkia’s assessment of her changes in that while the increase in fire rate is interesting it doesn’t really change anything because for her to be effective you have to get those direct hits. If you are taking the time to make sure your shots land then the fire rate makes no difference as you are probably taking more time than the old rate to aim.

The change just made it even more critical for a Pharah to land those direct hits cause misses now do less dmg.

I’ve noticed in the forums that there are quite a few players who are now all excited about using geometry to get into a good position and fight in close for the direct hits and then jumping back out. This is how higher level Pharahs always played her and is nothing new since the patches. Players who are just discovering this now don’t have a reference to go back on to realize that it is harder now. The changes really only helped players who hang back and spam rockets as fast as they can.

1 Like
14

Not all aim intensive heroes have to be hitscans

15

Pharah could probably use some Aerial Mobility like air dashes or something.

Also:

B.O.B. is an easy target. He has 1200 health, but he can get melted with little issue. Yesterday I called in B.O.B. and he got destroyed in half a second.

I don’t know how, but their team took down 1200 health in about 0.5 seconds. I’ll even be generous and say it was about 1 second. He went down so fast I couldn’t believe it.

B.O.B. is not invincible. He’s very susceptible to CC and is easily blocked with Barriers.

16

That is interesting, because he has more health than Orisa shield and I have never seen her shield go down in just 1 second. Maybe the other team hit it with multiple ults or something.

BOB asside I agree that some kind of Aerial dash would be nice.

17

Pharah is just way too dependent on Mercy. It’s a terrible way to balance things, Pharah should be a DPS capable of acting alone without needing constant pocket and Mercy shouldn’t be a little pocket angel.

18

The point is Barrage is one of the weakest Ult’s if not assisted by other Ult’s and makes Pharah die in about two seconds unless the other team is an idiot.

It’s not just hitscan that counter Pharah btw now. Moira, Mei, Zarya, Sym Sombra’s hack all have a very long range, two cancel for flight, one heals HP as she damages and the other two if charged can melt anyone in seconds. Yeah may not be much on their own but what it means is a good stable team comp the entire team can counter Pharah. What does she get? Weaker Hanzo arrows that are slower and can’t headshot, no real survivability and weak knockback.

19

Meaning, it’s just another thing to make Pharah even more dependent on Mercy.

20

Just an FYI, Hanzos arrows move at max 100m/s while pharahs rockets are 35m/s.