They say, giving NO reasons why it is either impractical, or any of the problems it would create.
I don’t like the idea of making every hero a generalist. I also don’t like the idea of forcefully removing the identity of a hero in the name of balance. I like playing niche heroes cuz they are a challenge. I may be in the minority when I say that I actually enjoy Bastion’s current state, I just want him to feel better instead of being better.
Also OW being the way that it is, you can’t just make everyone a generalist. This is not Valorant or CS:GO. Every hero is supposed to be different. Now on to his idea, it is not a bad idea and I would be open to try it.
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Sorry this got long, I’ve had a few drinks so lack the brainpower to be concise right now XD
To you maybe but not too all of us. Even if bastion sees next to now use he see’s some, that’s thousands of hours of innovative gameplay across the community that doesn’t exist elsewhere. That’s a good thing he brings then even if it’s bad in comp, plus every once in a while it actually works or is worth doing. I’ll take that.
Not inherently against hero pools however, there are some staples of the game that are kind of important to balance and how the game runs, taking them out isn’t great as we saw with hero pools last time.
I’d add jumping back to Ashe what I’d want out of hero pools is some more double ups on staples kits, like mid-long hitscan or mobility flanker. That way if one is meta it can be removed from the pool without us losing a core role, rather we just have to use a different hero to fill it and maybe that change opens up some options elsewhere. That for me would be a good argument for hero pools as we can saturate roles more freely and get heroes with subtle differences without fearing one becoming ever present or a buff war as they all creep over each other (see McCree, Ash, Widow, Hanzo & 76 since hero pools went away)
Plus some of those niche heroes have really oppressive mechanics like Sombra. Now that’s fine as she is niche and doesn’t show up that often but in hero pools the oppressive niche guys may turn up a bit too much. While I fully get the desire to see all heroes get their time in the sun, you can have too much of a good thing. Best case here is whenever Mei gets anywhere near good the community aren’t exactly thrilled about it, some heroes are better of niche.
Like I’ve been arguing here we shouldn’t see Bastion as a failure and I stand by that. However have you ever seen Bastion mirror matches, or get 3 matches in a row fighting him? It get’s old pretty fast, even if your winning. He’s fun, he spices things up but I don’t want to see him too often. Think of him, Sombra and Sym as your crazy drunk uncle, it’s fun to check in from time to time, but you know when it’s time to say goodbye for a while.
Weird swap here but lets talk Goats, running 3-3 and just plowing through guys (phrasing) was great, it was really fun like Slambulance before it. Problem was it was legitimately good and turned up often, including being the top meta in the game for like a year so everyone hated it. It got so bad the devs had to change the rules so it couldn’t happen anymore. Now I think they had to do it, but I actually miss it now, not as the top meta but as a fun little side option that popped up every now and then. I guess what I’m saying is something are better niche.
It should be obvious, no? You want to play Symmetra, so the solution is to lock out every hero that performs well against Symmetra, or eliminate the opponent’s ability to switch heroes once they realize you are playing Symmetra, or changing every map to favor Symmetra, or changing every hero to reduce efficacy against Symmetra, etc.
These aren’t serious solutions to perceived balance issues, and they aren’t worthy of serious consideration.
Except that isn’t how it works, you CANT do that.
You have NO ability to influence the other teams pool. You can change your pool. Not their one.
Right, but that is a thing they choose to do. - it also is the point of this.
They absolutely are. especially in this case as it achieves the same goal without running into he same issues as other hero ban systems
Then that’s even less of a “solution”. You just force your team to pick around your selection. The other team is able to do whatever they want. All you end up with is a loss and 5 people really angry with you. And Symmetra is niche after it all. It’s like this is just a thing that happens in game design, and not able to be avoided.
Anyway, that’s the end of my interest in continuing this discussion with you. You may have the final word. I will probably not read it.
Sound like overwatch now.
Which is what happens now, like you are saying someone who refuses to swap is a problem which isn’t ANY different from now.
It doesn’t stop them swapping. Your complaint is irrelevant.
And this is why I don’t take you seriously, you are all “nope” but can’t even talk their way though a thing.
Hero pools is an interesting idea but I am not sure if they would improve the viability of some under performing heroes. The issue with niche heroes goes beyond being hard countered. They have a harder time producing the same value you can get playing some of the dominating dps. Unless for some unknown reason the enemy team decides not to have a hit scan hero in their hero pool.
I am not in favor of making these heroes even more bland in an effort to make them generalist. I do want them to be more viable but it also depends how homogenized they become to achieve that goal.
right, and this is one of the better ways to avoid that fate.
It DOES but removing that part of it would help somewhat.
Very interesting and it’s difficult to disagree with the reasoning…I cant decide if I agree with the solution or not though. Or if it would even work unless we made each players hero pool very small.
It’s certainly far less unreasonable than blanket hero bans since it doesn’t remove player choice. I guess I wouldnt be against it being thrown onto experimental just to see what happens.
Although there would be a flood of tears from the usual vocal group. Too many players aren’t used to ever dealing with a huge chunk of the roster on a level playing field and instead have relied on switching to a hard counter to invalidate them with zero effort. Even if it only happened occasionally, the tears would be never ending.
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Yeah, this is 100% my view on it.
I’d like to see it at least trialed. I think there is a lot going for it. It SURE as hell doesn’t have the problem which sunk the last set (When Mercy was banned, the Mercy mains just stopped playing for a week)
I think your arguments here are actually masked by subjectivity rather than one from logic or objectivity. Because it objectively and honestly doesn’t make sense to to base your argument on the notion that “reaper is too strong” despite objectively being an underperforming hero and more niche than soldier rn and also on the notion that soldier should be closer to the “specialised hitscan counterparts” in which most of whom are actually the top of the dps foodchain rn.
like the standard you’re applying is basically going “these few heroes can be strong/fine, but these select few hero can stay trash”. like that’s not balance at all.
And specifically to what you said about reaper compared to sym and junk, when pretty much the rest of the cast is far more consistent than those 2 heroes (and also others in that dumpster tier tbqh), it should be more of a sign that the problem is actually in the kits of those heroes rather than trying to bring other heroes down to their level.
balance is hard and a perfect equal balance may never be reachable, but that’s not an excuse to completely abandoning effort into reaching it.
like scientists, engineers, architects, mathemaicians, etc. won’t ever get a 100% accurate value for pi, but they sure as hell use a sufficiently accurate enough approximation for it when they need to compute things involving it.
the way balance is right now for those heroes simply isn’t sufficient. the argument of “she’s sucked forever but she’s still being played” is very disingenuous because it completely ignores how many sym players that have left or just completely switched mains, or even the very common scenario of being completely dissatisfied with the gameplay despite playing her (esp when we consider the fact how this game lacks competition and lacking in how there’s a sym equiv in other games tbh).
That is because hitscans are on the whole in a very very strong place. 76 despite likely being the weakest of them is probably in the top 3rdish of heroes in the game and yeah is better in the meta than a Reaper.
However if you were to need a hitscan, 76 would likely be low on your list and there’s only a few times he’d be optimal over say McCree. If you need a short range, high dmg, brawler Reaper is the list. Maybe on a few point’s you’d consider the Junk (Control Center or Anubis basically) but otherwise it’s no contest. Junk’s not even bad, totally useable kit that’s really good at what it’s specialized to do and it doesn’t matter as Reaper is just built better.
I would bring them close together by nerfing them, probably quite hard.
This is a poor example, when I was at school you could just use 3.14 and it was close enough most of the time. A decent if incomplete value of Pi is actually quite easy.
The balance though the baseline is really difficult. Think of it more like a expert painting say a Jackson Pollock (who famously would make 1 error and destroy the failed painting to start over). Seems messy but actually it’s all perfectly weighed and measured to harmonize into a single cohesive work. Really that’s each hero so balance needs to do that times about 30 without ever making an error or start again, plus do it again for each map and redo it all every time a new hero is launched. Yeah that will never happen, lower the goal posts and do something actually achiveable.
You can see this in the game as the devs have tried this on a small scale with hitscans. Since around hero pools there have been endless tweaks and changes here and there to try and make it so all are viable rather than one being best and they’ve spent like a year on it, so what are the results? Well they all have crept so high they need nerfs regardless of if it worked; Widow is still amazing unless your bad with her so no change there; 76 is still the worst of the bunch despite being arguably OP; Hanzo is still included as one despite not being hitscan and is OP; Baptise has good enough dmg still to be counted even though he’s a support; Ash is where she was at the start of half McCree-half Widow but not as good as either and McCree is clearly the definitive best who needs mega nerfs. In other words total failure, reset the clock a year and we’d likely be in a better place. That’s what to expect when you try the impossible. Instead the goal should be, make sure none is stupid OP and all have a bit of uniqueness to them. Get to that point for everyone and maybe you could start pushing the boat out a little further.
I think your forgetting a few thing’s I said here, obviously I said Sym has a problematic kit, tbh problematic design like what is her identity now? I suspect she needs another big rework unfortunately.
I also said lets keep it to 3 examples for simplicity and then kept it short. I wasn’t going for a long winded examination of each of the 3 and obviously, I don’t think Junk has an exactly ideal kit, it’s good but inconsistent. However it is good enough that he should be fighting Reaper for the spot more than he does. To further complicate this you have Torb who has a foot in the brawler camp with his Overload and alt fire and is overtuned so he likely is 2nd best in it despite it being only half of what he does. That tells you yes Sym and Junk are weak sure, but also maybe just maybe Reaper’s kit is too versatile across the role and Torb’s got too broad a kit.
I’ll make this simple, I find it annoying when people say X hero is weak so buff them and it feels like they haven’t looked at anything else in the game and don’t seem to get how complicated balance is or that nerfs are often a better tool. Best example is people calling for Mercy nerfs when Bap was at his best as she was weaker so needed buffs. Yeah it was clear to anyone he was OP, she was fine.
You think Sym’s weak and needs buffs okay what? Her kit is a mess that doesn’t make any sense, she has the 2nd highest DPS in the game outside ults but cannot use it, she has an alt fire which is for… I honestly don’t know what it’s for. She’s so good vs sheild people stop using them which ends up countering her more than them sometimes. Her turrets provide slow still but now she doesn’t but they don’t get the ramp up but she does. Her ult was her L shift that got changed from a different L shift with the same name and her new L shift is half her old ult which used to be the full ult but then got half the first L shift added but that got taken away again. Just structuring that sentence gave me a headache and I probably got it wrong.
The issue she has is the kit is a mess that needs to change as this hero was built as a support, failed as a support (by my definition and yours) and it’s been a messy scramble ever since that consistently failed both our definitions of good design. Hell her best use right now is the teleporter and she doesn’t even need to be there beyond that. Like this hero for me seems a lost cause which is a shame but also shouldn’t really be news to anyone after rework 3 failed. Honestly it’s so bad I think the devs trying to fix it would be a waste of resources that could go to heroes with a future, it’s that bad. If anything take the name and the player model and ditch all the actual gameplay, start over with a blank sheet as what we have doesn’t work.
Edit: To be clear I sympathize with Sym main’s, you’ve had a rough ride and I wish you could be better served, but every bit of history and detail we have with the hero tells us that’s not going to happen. Current her while a total mess is likely still the best she’s been for balance and it’s a disaster. I’m sorry just as I’m sorry for someone who dropped a glass that shattered everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to try and glue the thing back together as you will only fail.
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hence why the logic of your previous post doesn’t make sense. you yourself recognise that to be balanced and for the health of the game, the gap in power levels between heroes is actually very wide and should be narrowed down. it doesn’t make sense at all to widen it by doing something like making reaper worse and buffing soldier to compete with the top tier dps as you were saying before, let alone using that logic to try and justify why we shouldn’t have “strength in niche proportional to how narrow that niche is”.
like again, if there are various other heroes that can do just as well if not better in the same area but can also be more applicable in others, why would anyone want to learn or play or stick around for the niche hero?
- you can work with larger units o more critical contexts and then the error suddenly becomes very important
- the logic applies to various other important constants, functions, or other mathematical constructs that are much harder to compute. nth prime number anyone?
- heck you’re relying on the logic of being “sufficiently close” but like I was saying before, we’re nowhere near being sufficiently close. and again, being “hard to achieve” is not an excuse to give up on getting “sufficiently close”.
which leads onto my next point:
and no, they legit haven’t done everything competently in their efforts to “make everything viable”. heck the very clear evidence of that is legit sym’s balance history:
- underpeforming for like >2yrs prior to infinite tp nerf/sigma patch largely due to poor numerical balancing, but was indeed more flexible and had much higher uptime compared to old sym
- infinite tp nerf came which spiked up down time on her core uptime tool (tp) drammatically ruining her gameplay and uptime since she’s now much more reliant on team pocketting for uptime (unlike a vast majority of heroes that can reasonably independently get uptime)
- proceeds to FURTHER nerf about everything else in her kit for a meta that favoured her but wasn’t brought out by her and was already on her way out of the meta irrespective of such nerfs and also despite the fact at how she was already underperforming prior to double shield comps existing
- provides 1 compensatory buff of +25hp shield health but doesn’t actually compensate for all the nerfs + further indirect nerfs with how armor works.
- and because often her only avenue for uptime is team pocketting, all the tank powershifts and nerfs to kill double shield and static comps were all further indirect nerfs on sym
if they were being competent with them trying out changes,
- infinite tp wouldn’t have happened (at least with not the current cd mechanic) so she wouldn’t be overdependent on team pocketing for uptime
- high key it doesn’t take a genius to see that for a shorter effective ranged hero with low sustain (sym), nerfing their mobility tool (tp) in spiking up its down time dramatically is a terrible and huge nerf.
- a lot of the nerfs on her kit during double shield shouldn’t have happened, or at least been reverted or much better compensated for rn.
she’s an aggressive zoner that can flex as a midrange harasser and a flanker. and depending on what constitutes as a rework for you, no, she doesn’t really need a large one to get her into a viable state that isn’t oppressive either.
I also wouldn’t say the design failed when blatantly it’s the balancing of the design as I alluded to earlier, i.e. things before infinite tp were pretty good for sym 3.0 in terms of her gameplay, but was simply numerically poorly balanced. like if tracer suddenly got a nerfed by having her blink charges serially start their cds only when recall goes on cd, would you call the inherent design of tracer as “failed”? no, it was legit that nerf that killed her.
so what does sym need? well design-wise much of the groundwork is already there, it’s more about pulling through with it.
- tp cd mechanic to be more akin to old 3.0 finite tp cd e.g. cd starts on placement and pauses halfway until it’s destroyed
- considering how much higher cast frequency old 3.0 finite tp had compared to current and how much more fluid and dynamic it was, we legit already have a benchmark higher than the above change that we’ve empirically seen being not oppressive and not OP.
- shave off like 0.25 from tp deployment time, compensate this with a reduction of placement range
- orbs being entirely renumbered to be an aimable midranged burst weapon fire.
- the purpose of orbs is legit to be her staple and ranged weapon fire because no matter what we do for her primary, her primary fire will always be situational as long as it’s a shorter ranged sustain damage beam and sym is a non-tank considering how the game has been setup to have teams spend much more time further apart than up close to each other.
- level 1 primary to have higher than the pathetic 60dps. have something like 80dps instead.
all of these changes let sym be able to reasonably get uptime for herself just like every other hero, as well as keeping her own uniqueness. and all of the above already have clear benchmarks to compare with in order to derive numbers that can meet those goals without being OP or oppressive (or in the primary lvl 1 dps change’s case, is simply very limited in how much benefit it’d give that’d it almost seems like a qol change).
- tp having a better cd mechanic lets her switch between individual use vs sacrificing her uptime tool for team utility much better and let her adapt better to the situation (whether to flank, poke, go zone, or whatever)
- whichever job of flank, poke or zoning, is entirely dependent on how the sym player combines her weapon fire with abilities, which other heroes ether have less scope of jobs or less opportunities to do so or just aren’t as involved in how they change jobs.
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(Some) People are going to hate me for saying this on this point:
Hero swapping isn't about making a choice, its about never needing to commit to one. Just like in D3 (which is being changed in D4) there needs to be harsher consequences for decisions in Overwatch - specifically the hero you choose.
This is why OQ is ultimately a worse game mode - and why the games really aren’t as complex. Granted, RQ is much the same since any character pick within a role is fairly open (well for DPS at least), but the fix of the overall structure provides a fair degree of limitations. OQ truly means no commitment to anything, as literally you can swap at any time to anything.
5)Disallow the swapping of heroes. Maybe its time to see why locking a hero is required in most other games. It increases diversity, gives purpose to niche roles and allows for some surprise and deception. While surprise and deception sound bad its actually great for games and makes for some of the most exciting times.
I favor this actually, because it would make players think and evaluate their choices more relative to their teammates.
So do we fully move away from niche heroes? Possibly, this is what has happened to Reaper , Mei , Bastion , Junkrat, Sym and Torb to a degree. To move their design anymore could remove their identity but would grant us the hero diversity that we want. At this point heroes would feel awfully similar so it's a bit of a hollow victory for the sake of 'diversity'. The fact is that it doesn't matter how well balanced they are at the highest level there would still be skill ceilings and tier lists so there will always be a 'correct' choice that's out of the players control.
I am in favor of this to a degree, since it makes with Hero Locks the door wider for designs that are “niche” but tuned a bit more in a generalist direction. Torb is oh so very close to being viable, but falls just short. Sym OTOH is still too slow but Torb shows what is possible with care. Blizz just seems to do one or two rounds on a character then seems to just stop for long periods, which doesn’t ever really solve the problem.
People will hate the idea of locks - I understand why. It does have the downside that it would heavily promote one-tricks who would utterly refuse to even consider something else (which they mostly do anyhow). OTOH, it might bring in more characters from the edge if Blizzard could tune them a bit more. I don’t have a lot of confidence in this based on past experience.
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I think it’s a bad idea and adding more restrictions to a game that is supposed to be about free swapping and choice is just not good. 2-2-2 was bad enough.
I feel like hero pools is just yet another band-aid fix on the proverbial gunshot wound that OW is hemmoraging from.
I mean he makes a very strong point - is a game where free swapping actually good? It doesn’t appear to be and seems to be replete with problems and rather than simply declare it “bad”, how about actually replying to why he says that it would be good?
I prefer freedom of choice over all. And I think that yes, a game where free swapping exists is better than one where your options are limited. More options in a situation are usually better.
Did you even read what he wrote? I am not sure you did. I mean you are expressing sentiments, he is giving arguments about where total freedom doesn’t work. Heck, it doesn’t work in anything in reality, constraints are always necessary for better outcomes.
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I did, I’m just disagreeing with him.
I don’t want anything that results in “disallow the swapping of heroes” or “only allow players to pick a couple heroes that they’re allowed to swap between” in his words.
The game needs more hands-on balance but restricting players ability to swap between heroes is not it. If restricting player choice helped the game, then 2-2-2 would have fixed more than it broke - which it didn’t.