There was a time when Sym and Torb were near the top in terms of win rates in GM, but most GM players didn’t want to see them on their team, and some would even report them, and some GM Sym/Torb mains did get banned for that.
Not saying Soldier and Genji are at that level, obviously not. Just saying that win rates alone don’t say much. We need more stats from you guys.
This! Exactly This! Is this hard to understand or just pure pride from the devs?
They just like to balance around absolutes, and that is path to the dark side.
I think I’d agree with almost everything you said, I think genji and soldier are fine – in fact, i think soldier is very underrated currently. Also, sometimes a particular hero isn’t necessarily bad, but the heroes that people say are “meta” facilitate more value from that hero (ex - orisa/hog meta); soldier is good but would be better with a mercy on his team than other supports imo.
Most comp games there is 1 person who plays off meta and everyone blames them instead of trying out a new comp or new heroes (that they would probably prefer to play over meta, let’s be honest). Instead, people stick to hardcore meta even when it doesn’t work the best for the situation like running bap with an off-meta dive tank. Both have the right to play these heroes, but both are equally to “blame” for the outcome of the game. For example, if you aren’t getting optimal value from bap with your tanks you “should swap” just as much as the tank that isn’t getting optimal value playing with a bap.
The difference between an off-meta player who can swap to be more optimal and a one-trick is that the one-trick is optimal on whatever hero they play since any other hero (meta or not) will be a lower skill level than the rank they are at.
When I lose a game one-tricking mercy, I also look at myself for improvement (even if some games a particularly player is more to blame than me), but the point is it is a little bit of everyone’s fault for winning or losing.
Gotta love the doublestandard of “widow and hanzo are fine at the top level despite murdering everyone easily” and “sombra and symm are fine at the top level because stevoo and fitzy can still maybe win occasionally with their garbage heros”
Yes pick rates are definitely important to consider when trying to interpret win rates. The win rates I’m looking at are from un-mirrored competitive ladder stats (specifically for PC players on patch 1.43 at the GM+ MMR range), meaning games where the hero is not being actively played on both teams.
We don’t balance solely off of stats anyway but they help inform us when something could be really out of whack or can give us a slightly more unbiased lens when trying to identify the root causes of gameplay issues.
Stats don’t do a great job of telling us subjective things like how fun something is, player feedback does. We can try to infer a little bit of that from pick rate but there are too many competing factors.
The most common feedback I’ve been reading recently is that Baptiste and Mei are very overpowered (there are some upcoming changes to these two as well) and Genji/Soldier are clearly the weakest heroes.
When I looked into the current patch stats, Mei and Genji are both very middle of the pack for GM where I would normally expect players to adhere more closely to the meta.
There’s only about 8 heroes with higher pick rates than Mei/Genji. Soldier pick rate is low, coming in at slightly less than half of Genji’s and is on par with Ashe for both pick/win rate.
One of the perceived strongest and one of the perceived weakest heroes have nearly identical pick rate and win rate. I found this personally very interesting and wanted to share.
My post above was intending to get people to consider that this data, while not absolute or conclusive of anything on its own, may suggest off-meta heroes are much more viable on the competitive ladder than players tend to expect, even at the highest levels. Professional play is likely another story.
Then you literally need no one to play support. Get rid of the role
what about hanzo pickrate and winrate ? some changes are planned for him right ?
First - thanks for not being gunshy to post again 
Second: Could you balance based on TIER? For example Reapers life steal 50% in higher ranks but more like 40 or 35 in lower ranks?
That would lead to so many bugs and problems
I am a support main, BUT doing some quick maths, If you get naded by a Friendly Ana (aoe heal), thats 100hp, if you also have a Baptiste, his shift is 30hp/sec for 5 seconds. Anas nade lasts 4 seconds. So 100 instant heal, add the increased healing with Baps shift, that’s 280hp in 4 sec, plus another 30hp since Baps shift lasts 5 seconds. 310hp in 5 seconds, and that’s not even accounting for Bap spamming right click. With certain comps, the AOE healing they can output is kinda insane,
Sounds like Ice Wall is finally get nerfed. I keep saying 400 Health is too much per a wall. Nope, people in game matches or the OW Community said I was wrong.
It’s the hard truth, it too much Health to break an Ice Wall in time and as a support main. She usually kills the tank or whoever is behind the wall before I can break one wall and sometimes people on my team simply don’t break the wall at all unless they are GM level players.
What about symmetra? TP cooldown nerf and overall nerf to her entire kit completely destroyed this hero. She was nerfed to the ground because she was good for 2 weeks in double shield meta.
You misued the word ‘objectively’. You mean ‘subjectively’.
Changes to hanzo have already been confirmed
Easy to execute-creep needs to go down.
This is the single most important sentence any dev needs to read. The root of almost every problem with the game is how much power a player can get with too little effort/skill.
Except it gets very complicated, when two players have to put effort together.
That can be easily noticed with supports: if teammate is good, they don’t need supports. If teammate is bad, supports can’t make them good, and is pointless yet again.
Or with tanks: if your shield protects GM level players, they are likely to handle everything, before enemy makes noticeable dent on your shield. If not, most likely your shield would break and you will die, before anything is accomplished.
where ? (20 characters)
Thanks for replying again, it’s always great to have a dev talking in the forums and helping clear things up 
Now take in account hanzo damage