He is definitely underpowered. For all intents and purposes, I consider him to be a weak alternative to Hanzo.
I think the greatest thing holding him back is shadowstep. With Reaper, you have the advantage against tanks if you can get close, but with shadowstep it feels almost impossible to get close to the enemy often times.
If I use shadowstep correctly them I will end up 25+ m away from the enemy, but walking up behind them gives me away because of how slow he wals and how loud he is. The best option currently for making contact with the enemy is to either play with a Lucio and speed boost in, or stay in your backline and protect your supports.
It boils down to this:
- If you want a tank buster then choose Hanzo
- If you want an assassin then choose Genji
- If you want to get up in people’s face and blast them then choose Tracer
Currently, I would say that Reaper suffers a lack of reason to choose him over obviously superior choices.
There are a few situations where Reaper is the preferred choice, however:
- When fighting Doomfist
- When fighting D.Va
- When fighting Winston
- Orisa (though, Hanzo and Junkrat are equally viable qgsubst her)
What I consider the greatest slap in the face is that Reaper players have been asking for greater consistency from his shotgun for a very long time, but now TORBJORN of all characters will get a better shotgun than Reaper! The character with a long range option, close rabge option and flanker option will get a superior shotgun to the character that only has shotguns as an offensive option!
That said, I’m hoping that Blizzard has either already seen how ridiculous the new Torbjorn is compared to Reaper, or they will see how crazy the match up is and they will buff him in the next six months.
If you want to know what I think shadowstep should be then here you go:
Bottom line- is he viable? Yes.
Is he the optimal choice in most games. No. For the most part, he is kind of an obsoletecharacter.
I’ll use the following analogy:
In WWII a lot of countries used bolt-action rifles. In the modern world, armies everywhere use select-fire rifles that can shoot in full-auto. Could you still use a bolt action battle rifle on the modern battlefield and be effective? Yes. Is it the preferred choice when you could have a full auto rifle? No.
In that analogy, Reaper is the obsolete bolt-action rifle and Hanzo/Genji are the state of the art select-fire rifles.
Ironically, if you main Reaper, then chances are you’re doing it for the aesthetic. We would all hate to admit, we’re all basically hipsters. We are all hand grinding our coffee, starching our collars, using suspenders and putting on our velvet ties while Genji, Hanzo and Tracer players are all embracing the modern conveniences readily available to us.
One day, hopefully we won’t be edgy hipsters, and just edgelords.