Re-Balancing Defense Matrix

And? It spares 200HP on the shield and grants Zarya up to 40 charge without her needing to leave safety. They’re both abilities that benefit.

Zarya (my second most played tank btw inb4 it’s just a D.Va main who wants her hero pick to be on top… My hero pick is always on top because I play every tank) has the best tank ult in the game, blocks more damage, does more damage, is picked more, has a better winrate… But no it’s D.Va’s fault.

Zarya is also balanced for that matter

Assuming people always put their projectiles/bullets in the center of the shield., and not the large corners that wouldn’t be covered by the bubble.

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Junkrat - grenade size change reverted

Reason: Junkrat has been too inconsistent and buggy since this change, hampering his ability to deal with these kinds of comps

Mercy - heal back to 60hps

Reason: Mercy+Zen is the healer duo that enables spread out comps like double sniper, this duo needs one of them to be good at keeping up tanks. GOATs was one of multiple viable comps until the support patch.

Orisa: Cannot critical damage while in fortify, Halt made into a more consistent ability

Reason: Orisa is too easy to walk completely over, and should be part of a viable counter strategy against GOATs

Bastion: transformation speed increased

Reason: he is too vulnerable while transforming, his slow movement and giant hitbox is enough downsides without adding an overly transformation during which time he can do nothing.

Brigitte:
Whipshot range decreased by 5m
Inspire aura range decreased by 5m
Repair Pack Cooldown increased to 12 seconds
Shield Bash changes reverted

Zoning Brig out makes her more useless because she can’t just proc inspire against an enemy properly maintaining it’s distance. Repair Pack is almost like a pre-emptive rez on a support she’s guarding and should be more baitable.

Her inspire radius is also too big, so attempting to divert her attention does nothing. She never has to worry about which ally to heal, Lucio was a must pick in Season1 for the same reason because it means the entire team is having sustain damage reduced at all times. If she’s fighting on the front, this should make her healers more vulnerable and vice versa. If teams want to take advantage of that they’d have to bunch up much more closely making them more susceptible to heroes like Junkrat.

Lucio

Speed Boost: increased movement decreased to a 25% increase in speed.

Reason: Lucio’s speed boost has caused issues every time he’s been meta since launch. It makes it too easy for tank heavy lineup or deathball comps to speed past stuff that should have been pumping their brakes a bit for a long time.

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Have you ever tried to code? It’s not this easy, and almost certainly not what you expect because you don’t know what language it was written in, nor how it was written in the first place such that it can just “be replaced”

The problem is we don’t know how anything is programmed, how objects are represented. Rein’s shield for all we know might be programmed as another hero like in terms of properties of how the computer views it.

Like we see shield and hero, but the computer might see “2000 hp entity that acts the same as shields on other entities such as Zen/Zarya/Sym when hp reaches 0” Sure I am paraphrasing here, but logically that is what’s going on. It’s simply just attached to Rein, same as Zen shields are attached to Zen and what have you.

So, if the computer sees Rein’s shield as a similar object to Zen’s HP shields just, an object with a few other properties like how it can be put up/taken down and the recharge rate is different, then telling DM “these shields are okay, but these shields are not” is very complicated especially since they are inherited from the same object “shield”. Not only that but D.va already has the gold medal for “most buggy hero” in Overwatch, let’s not make her even more buggy.

However, if we were to say don’t block damage from each individual shield, that’d still be a little complicated, because like there’s so many different types and the more conditionals you have, the more opportunity for bugs there are. There’d have to be a major overhaul of how things are already programmed in the game imo.

D.Va’s ability to block damage is not a cornerstone of GOATs nor does GOATs need it to be effective. You can swap D.Va out for Roadhog and GOATs would still be very versatile.

GOATs is dependent upon its burst healers to keep it up. So you need to look at Ana and Moira.

Now the reason why you do not see as much Junkrat is because he got nerfed in his ability to direct hit which generated a number of hit registration bugs leading to him being played a lot less.

Pharah got changed in that her damage got refocused into direct hits, and nearly all the hitscan got buffed against her.

Bastion is still suffering as a tank counter because of the spread changes and removal of crits back in his rework. His accuracy and his reward for being accurate, crits, was why he had strong potential as a tank buster why he could chew through them so easily was taken away. Combine with his team dependence and its no wonder his pickrate became even more of a ghost then it was before that misguided rework.

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Yes, the server code I worked on was about 52,000 lines of code.

A bubble on a shielding rein in my experience almost always grants its full charge potential as long as he’s already in line of fire. People tend to shoot at the Reinhardt when they try to break barriers if they can.

this is some korean pro level stuff but she could turn sideways and cover most of it with dm

Okay, because people act dumb in quickplay and constantly feed, that’s how we should balance around that?

Is…Is this what we’re doing now? Not addressing how much code and time it would take to rework how Defense Matrix works and instead attacking me? And the time I took to write my posts?

Yeah, the language is another thing we’d need to figure out. Like, we won’t know how easy it is until we know the language and how they identify Rein’s shield vs. Zenyatta’s shields. Are they assigned to different objects? We don’t know.

Yeah, but with this concept, unless she is DMing and bodyblocking, it would all penetrate and do shield damage.

Bubbling a shielding rein for ez 40 charge in spam is ubiquitous. Let’s not pretend it isn’t

Thing is, we’re talking about an issue that primarily affects the top 15% of players.

Y’know…I think we’re all missing a point here. Even if DM stopped blocking damage to shields somehow, it wouldn’t change GOATS. DVa would just save her DM until after the barriers break. That’s it.

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The developers who worked on D.Va has described her code as a plate of spaghetti. That she is the most complex hero in the game in regards to coding and is also the easiest hero in the game to break, taking up the most man hours for testing for even the simplest of changes so that she does not crash servers (which she has in the past) much less the complex interactions.

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Ubiquitous doesn’t exclude them.
If this weren’t the case, Zarya wouldn’t synergize with rein as well in higher ranks. Which we know isn’t true.

However, we digress: the poke phase is expedited in GOATS because Lucio speed boosts the team on top of the enemy, which is why barrier busters like junkrat and pharah are ineffective at busting rein’s barrier before he gets on top of you. There’s no reason to nerf an interaction that takes place primarily in the poke phase because the poke phase is already truncated.

Yeah, but the primary problem with that was the switching from one player entity, to two player entities, then back to one.

Personally, I think nerfing a Support hero’s healing is the nuclear option. That’s the defining trait of the class. Nerfing their ultity, damage or mobility is usually a safer option

And they did a change that did not touch the coding of self destruct, eject, and baby d.va and still wound up breaking the servers so hard every time she was picked that they had to disable D.Va for a week so that the game remained playable while they fixed the error. It was supposed to be a simple under-the-hood change that turned out to be quite the massive problem.