pharah is fine, you just need people to look up. i love wrecking the pharmercy as dva, i literally wait till mercy GAs, then i boost into her face and rocket/shoot at point blank range. she instadies and now pharah is free pickings, same deal once my rockets are off cooldown.
one thing though, while i say look up, i do notice that actually some teams throw the game by ALL looking up at all times. if i’m flying up and both dps are looking up and our healers are looking up, what happens to our rein facing their rein and maybe a reaper? he instadies and so do we. never dedicate more than one DPS to looking up, you need pressure on the frontline, especially if you have a dva because if there is no pressure there she has to apply it/peel for her rein instead of flying up to kill pharmercy.
like tracer, a lot of people don’t realize that pharah also gets value from causing enemy teams to play chaotically, out of position, and wrong. you have no idea how often i’ve almost saved one of our healers but they were too zoned out and didn’t realize that tracer was tricking them into pulling back, away from our team and especially away from my DM range.
Shoot I had a game yesterday where the Sombra om my team was farming Pharamercy until they switched. So its not like Widow is the only counter. Echo also works as good counter.
I’m just using Mcree in a hypothetical i’m not talking about a literal scenario.
https:// i.imgur .com/QsGBTnb.png
This is just over 30m
I’m not playing “at range” or “sniping across the map” I’m playing the objective in this hypothetical scenario.
The map has bad sight lines for Widow to get any value aside from the Pharah. I have to be on the high grounds around the objective to be able to help my team making it insta death for me when I inevitably get jumped on. The Pharah is still getting more value out of the pick than my counter pick.
I could go Solider and do 5 damage
Mcree 21 damage
Ashe - Around 55 damage a shot at that range - 1.54 shots per second. Even if I hit them every shot a mercy healing is 55 a second so I’m being out healed. All headshots and no misses and I might kill her, except the pharah can 2 tap me.
You don’t seem to understand the problem. The only hitscans that likely will do full damage to her in the DPS roles are Widow and Ashe. Aim is not the problem for McCree and 76, the problem is lack of damage. You can hit all 6 shots as McCree and a pocketed Pharah will not even have to fly out of LoS because the damage isn’t lethal because she can play outside of its range.
Maybe because she’s the textbook definition of boring? Tap space for 8 seconds, press lshift rince and repeat while mindlessly spamming rockets in someone’s general direction isn’t exactly what I’d call a hero that has a lot of fans.
What boring heroes have been meta because of how good they are and not because they synergise well with an actual broken character(Orisa and Sigma for example.).
People are going to mostly play the characters they enjoy unless you really just want to grind as much SR as possible. When there is meta changes to specific aiming styles such as an Ashe buff you might get a bunch of cree mains swapping to Ashe etc.
Not many hitscan mains are going to swap over to play projectile if they aren’t very good at projectile or they don’t find it interesting.
However, even Dafran has swapped over to Pharah/Echo because he can’t climb on hitscan.
That’s quite a loaded question because boring is subjective. I’ll play along though.
Mercy 2.0 was constantly complained about as boring yet maintained a 100% pickrate.
Brig/Goats were constantly complained about as boring yet were meta in high ranks. Her pickrate fluctuated a lot with balance changes, as should be expected.
Post double mine Junk had a massive pickrate spike in high ranks despite being very unpopular due to his low skill perception. After his nerf, he instantly dropped to below 1%.
Before getting nuked Sym too saw a large spike in pickrate. Many players, similar to with Junkrat, would rather lose than play her. After her nerf, she dropped to below 1%.
The better question is can we name any overpowered hero who didn’t see even a little increase in pickrate as people realised their strength? I can’t think of any.
Why do pickrates change massively whenever there are meaningful balance patches? Surely if people just play the hero they enjoy the most the change would be minimal The truth is that there are a large number of players who only play whichever heroes are hard meta. They cause the pickrate fluctuations.
Regardless the claim in the OP was that Pharah is the “go to dps” and the pickrates show that to be false.
I cut it off because I didn’t consider it relevant. I’ll reply though since you reasked. Why didn’t all the projectile mains switch to Pharah? Or does this argument only apply when it’s an overperforming hitscan as a way to excuse it?
When you need to start using “offense” stats to make changes sound more impressive than they actually are you’re going to struggle.
Lets take a look at the last 3 months worth of Pharahs pickrate data overall and for GM.
Overall:
GM:
As you can see overall there has been essentially no change.
In GM her pickrate is more variable. If we take the increase from 3 months ago to now it’s an increase of…0.65%. You call that a spike? That is the predicted “must pick Pharah” meta that the forums panicked would come from the fall off nerf? Seriously?
That’s not the sign of a hero dominating the meta or a sign of “the go to hero” as was claimed in the OP. We’re talking about a hero with a 1.3-1.5% pickrate here. That’s below average.
I can compare Junkrat and Sym to Pharah, which I did. Her pickrate increased by 0.65% in GM and essentially zero overall. She isn’t even particularly unpopular.
The truth is that there are a large number of players who only play whichever heroes are hard meta. They cause the pickrate fluctuations.
