There is a bug with “Ping - In World” that has been present since launch, in which any aim input (mouse movement or aim stick deflection) while the ping binding is pressed causes the ping wheel to open, regardless of the “Ping Wheel Press Delay” setting. It is not only distracting for the ping wheel to open, it also messes with your aim (because the ping wheel freezes the camera angle while it’s open), and it often results in the selection of an arbitrary ping wheel ping instead of the contextual ping that was intended. Here is a demonstration, in which “Ping Wheel Press Delay” is set to the maximum of 1s:
The best workaround I have seen for this issue is to bind the specific pings you want to use (e.g. the “enemy” ping). However, there are some ping functions that are only available with “Ping - In World”. The player must have that bound if they want to intentionally use the ping wheel pings, ping the objective, confirm teammate pings, etc. (For some reason, the specific ping bindings still do some of the contextual ping functions, like “come to me for healing” or pinging friendly constructs. I don’t know if that’s intended, but it works for me for the time being, due to the paucity of controller inputs available.)
This presents a problem for console players in particular, because there are no consistently free inputs available for that second ping binding. One of the default bindings–the spray menu–has no gameplay function, so it can be sacrificed to bind the second ping, but it’s kind of a bummer to lose access to an entire cosmetic category. The vast majority of heroes do not have a weapon-swap, so that’s an empty input where a second ping could be bound, but not for Mercy, Torbjorn, or Lifeweaver. Weapon-swaps afford automatic background reloads, so a player could choose to give up the ability to manually reload and depend on timing the weapon-swaps instead, but hero swaps are tied to the reload binding, so then they would never be able to swap off of Mercy/Torb/Lifeweaver!
Personally, I resolved this issue on Mercy by giving up her Interact input. (I already gave up the spray menu to bind “I need help” for all heroes, which is difficult to do fast enough on the ping wheel when under fire.) For the most part, this works fine because I can use GA to follow someone who takes a teleporter. Torb just doesn’t have a “Ping - In World” binding, which is okay because he doesn’t have the same kind of vision and attention bandwidth to be pinging everything like Mercy. Edit: Looks like the Interact button will be needed on all heroes in S4 to make use of the new un-staggering spawn feature, so my Mercy solution won’t work anymore anyway.
But I’m worried about how this bug will affect my ability to play Lifeweaver. He has a weapon swap that looks to be more core to his kit than any other weapon swap we’ve had in Overwatch, and he needs Interact to be able to manage his own abilities. With his vertical mobility and easy-aim charge-up healing, it seems likely that he will also have good vision and bandwidth for making informative pings, so I want both ping bindings in as well as being able to easily call for help. I can’t do all of those on a controller without giving up some other gameplay-relevant binding, but if the “Ping - In World” behaved as advertised, I would only need one ping button.
