Damage potential (direct and or indirect) has been increased on almost every single hero in the game regardless of ‘class’.
At launch a common support combo Mercy, Zen would top out at a consistent 80hps combined and now every new support’s potential can match that and they have an additional burst option in their pocket… support duo’s in current OW can output more than 3x that initial 80hps with the use of CDs.
Almost every single hero either has more abilities or additional mechanics attached to those abilities, with all new heroes’ layouts being stacked. There’s considerably more abilities in a single game of OW now on average than at launch.
How would you describe all of this if not ‘power creep’?
Basically, all of the changes I’m alluding to, the general relentless spam and abilities such as Halt, TnT, biotic orb have created so many implications to what used to be considered optimal gameplay or what you might consider the ‘core experience’ that everyone basically has to hug corners and their tanks and or supports at all times.
We get to peak in 600ms increments if we don’t have a shield and if the enemy has Halt, TnT, hook etc. probably don’t even do that, wait for the rest of your team to get a clue and try to accomplish something… and don’t even bother taking to the high ground because it’s going to take you longer to get to that position than it’ll take the enemy to spam you back into the loving FoV of your supports.
Almost everyone has adopted to some homogenized quasi-deathball strategy no matter the heroes they’re playing. If you look at the winrates almost every hero at the top is good in close quarters, on the point/objective due to either their sustain, consistency or a combination of both… heroes like McCree have never been stronger and yet overwhelming statistics show him to be one of the least effective heroes in the game. Do you not think there’s underlying reasons for this?
The game has become too feast or famine, either a DPS or tank eats someone in the 500ms they have to bust a move or they’re shut down with a simple, almost foolproof press of a button. You cranked whack a mole upto 11 and voided the warranty.
Overwatch is in it’s ‘WoTLK’ phase right now, power crept to it’s absolute limit… can’t pre-heal your tank fast enough.
I’m struggling to understand how you don’t see that we’re on our last DBZ saga, we were pushing 9000 years ago and there’s no limit break or new Super Saiyan form that can save Overwatch’s gameplay from itself.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is health pools and the game kinda needs the ‘Cata’ treatment… increase health pools and decrease the upper limits of healing potential (and maybe damage negation) so that base TTK/D (the average time a player lives once engaged without any sort of intervention) goes up a bit while while the overall average TTK remains roughly the same.
You’d need to adjust most heroes due to new damage breakpoints etc. but in the end it’ll be worth it… it’ll alleviate this ‘spiky’ WoTLK gameplay and you’ll have more design space for seemingly outrageous new abilities/mechanics that aren’t suffocating. This seems preferable to decreasing the numbers on everything across the board to the same effect, so players don’t have to relearn the damage of each hero.