My memory must be bad because I remember the whole point of increasing HP and adding the dps passive was to try and make the TTK more consistent. Pre-Season 9 many were frustrated over how strong burst dmg and healing was. It felt as if either nothing died or everything exploded instantly. Fast forward to now and it feels like we’re in the same spot. Every season we’ve been getting micro buffs to healing. The dps passive was changed several times as well as adding more survivability to tanks. Several heroes got HP nerfs to allow for more one shots.
Why are we here again? I thought the entire point of Season 9 was to avoid this? Now we’re at the point again where one shots run rampant and nothing dies unless you dump 50 gazillion dmg into it . Man I’m glad Marvel Rivals comes out soon. We need a break from this lol
I love making JQ eat 3 full Soldier 76 mags (and by eat I mean headshots) and have her health drop to 40% only, while she can just get 1 knife combo and delete me and regenerate back.
I’m beginning to think they just thought the general accuracy was too low and made everything else up just to push through the hitbox changes.
Like that’s the only part that hasn’t really been walked back, there were some adjustments, but it was basically one patch of some changes and we were “good”, the DPS Passive, healing and increased healthpools are still semi-regularly getting tweaks and the big OHK they disabled with it is back.
It really feels like a whole lot of nothing was accomplished besides boosting some players accuracy.
Burst (heal or DPS) is still king, and it’s still not very fun to turn a corner and evaporate.
Heck I’ve had Kingmaker games today where my healthbar is just gone like instantly and I’m the King. I don’t think another 50 or more HP should be nigh unnoticed, but even if they aren’t running Widow or Hanzo and hitting those dinks it sometimes feels like that bar is too small. But then they run like Soj, Mei, and I can kinda facetank and that doesn’t really feel right either.
Healing in general is still trending downwards, not up.
Tank resilience has improved and health and armor has increased.
Only heroes with strong mobility that were over 200 health and weren’t tanks. Most of them being Supports.
The point of season 9 was to reduce the frequency of one-shots, and burst-damage, and it did. Non-Tank heroes don’t die after a “double-tap”.
But it seems players still fail to understand that Overwatch, and it’s damage-role are glass cannons and burst damage dealers (most of them anyway) and that the game is intended to have some level of frenetic pacing. Most players seem to forget, that even though health was buffed, so was making shots easier to land and giving the Damage-role some level of relevance (which it still struggles with).
It was not a perfect patch, nor was it ever intended to be. Remember that this game went through a very long development process to get the damage numbers fine-tuned prior to the release of Overwatch 1, and they still had to reduce those numbers across the board (thus, everyone who continued to complain that powercreep in terms of damage output was flat out wrong as OWC proved).
3 full rounds of 30 shots each is 1700 damage, more than triple Junker Queen’s health and even more than that in headshots. I somehow doubt you last 10 seconds to put that much damage into her and not have her die or that you survived that long.
Fairly good bet that accuracy numbers were probably too low back in OW1, but they didn’t do anything about it because of the open format probably created a lot of statistical noise and raised the general averages a bit. And this compounded when Role Queue was involved introducing two large tanks into the mainstay teams.
When OW2 released and Blizzard revealed that there was a left-ward shift from a mostly Gold/Plat playerbase to a mostly Silver playerbase, evidence could easily be pointed to the fact that many players have difficulty understanding the fundamentals of the game, or just not able to land shots. Even Blizzard revealed that many competitive pros tended have to trouble landing shots in Overwatch on the competitive end, and it seemed like that Blizzard had enough data that players from CoD were more likely to land shots in CoD than in OW (or that many CoD fans played Overwatch and couldn’t replicate that same accuracy or success).
Recent data from players also seem to indicate that Overwatch 2 players are getting better and the majority are moving rightward into Gold/Plat ranks again. Which means that, yeah, the changes probably did have an effect at improving the general playerbase in landing shots.
Eh, I haven’t had problems keeping my team alive in Kingmakers, and, much like QP, I’m still running in Supports who refuse to heal their team, even if they’re Kings. I was a King Damage-role hero and I still couldn’t get healing, or any cooperative support from the Tanks or Supports. So, I don’t think the general gameplay is the problem, but the playerbase’s general ignorance and lack of understanding is.
Game needs tutorials.
Hey, party games become serious competitive games with weird complex rules and exceptions. See Super Smash Bros. Melee. Rather just play Ultimate, instead, much simpler to understand, and a bigger competitive roster.
25-30m is not close. I don’t want to constantly run backwards just because she shouts and marches forward, I try to mow her down. Apparently I’m supposed to sprint back as a coward, instead of shooting back and walking at the same time
Many of those changes are aimed at reducing damage spikes in combat. I won’t get into all of it here (we’re working on a standalone post to be published closer to the start of that season), but for the sake of the current discussion, I’d like to talk about one aspect of it. In Season 9, both Tank and Damage heroes will get a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive. This should give non-Support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves. It should also take some of the pressure off Support players to keep everyone alive since individual players now have more control of their own health pool. In Overwatch, there is a constant tug of war between the power of a team and the power of an individual hero or player. A change like this shifts that balance a bit. This is something that we are constantly evaluating. We still want Overwatch to be defined by team strategy and mechanics, but we feel this can be pulled back a bit now and possibly more in the future.
Beyond the Competitive Rework, Season 9 features major changes to the fundamentals of Overwatch 2 gameplay that affect every hero. We’ve heard the community feedback around some gameplay pain points, and developed changes to the core gameplay with these goals in mind:
Deliver a more consistent feel to firing and landing your shots on your opponents.
Lessen the impacts of burst damage to allow for greater counterplay.
Adjust where in-game healing and damage are effective to reduce stagnant team fights.
All of these changes have been designed to work in combination to balance each other out, and we’re excited for you to get in the game and experience them all at once.
their explanation of it (from 2 blogs)…ill let you decide if they managed to do that
In my eyes I always figured at least part of it was intended to sort of bridge the gap between low ranks and high ranks, mechanics-wise. Since Overwatch has a lot more mobility than most shooters on the roster, making shots more forgiving would increase the game’s accessibility to newcomers, and contrary to popular belief, the chnages do not let a Bronze player outduel a GM just because bullets are slightly bigger.
Considering that hero perception across different ranks also factors into balance I think that bringing the skill floor up a little bit makes it easier to balance those heroes without them ruining lower ranks - e.g. if low ranks can’t hit Pharah, they can’t buff her or she’ll be oppressive in those ranks, but if she’s easier to hit, they can give her some tools to help her in higher ranks where she struggles (Pretend Pharah is bad in Gm rn I don’t remember what the DPS leaderboard looks like aside from lots of Tracer) and low ranks won’t feel those buffs as hard.
Interestingly, as bad as the Kingmaker mode is, it proves that the biggest problem is the tank passive. Tanks still don’t feel fair there given they still have their other obnoxious scaling such as damage increases, endless resources etc, but they feel a damn sight closer to being fair than we have currently.
The fact that burst damage was going to beocme more dominant with the S9 changes was painfully obvious to begin with.
This combined with the DPS passive was obviously going to be a problem that meant more need to rely on burst healing since it neutered lower throughput consistent healing completely. Hence, it simply made the situation worse and many of us called that in an instant - it’s clear they didn’t consider the consequences of their changes and that ever since then they still haven’t.
Heck, the 5v5 announcement had them scrambling and spitballing ideas on the fly for how to balance tanks for 5v5 when it was pointed out, live, that there’d be problems there for the solo tanks. It’s hilarious to look back on just how clueless they were with some veteran devs just looking like they hated saying the move to 5v5 was a positive at the time.
Yeah bro JQ doesn’t kill from 25-30 meters. Your story is a load of bull. I severely doubt you only landed headshots like you claimed. And even if you did, you had that much time to be shooting at a different target and actually get value
You’re not a bot right, so you understand that people over-exaggerate what they say, especially online.
Yes I don’t hit all headshots, and the range is probably smaller, but I’m not in kissing range with JQ. I wrote this post after having a clash game where I was putting a lot of clips into JQ and her health just wouldn’t drop much.
And no I’m not going to be shooting someone else when there’s a tank running at my face?
The headshot passive for tanks is making it extremely unrewarding for S76
You’re not really getting what season 9 actually did.
All it achieved was to hard nerf the underperforming projectile dps by butchering their breakpoints while leaving the worst offenders who actually needed and still do need ttk nerfs in ranged hitscans completely untouched. Season 9 instead hard buffed every single one of them with inflated projectile sizes as well as the dps passive that disproportionately rewards them since it’s always applied due to their consistency.
The entire patch was incoherent. The issue was 2 or 3 supports being way out of line and needing significant nerfs/changes to get out of jail free abilities alongside hitscans needing an overall ttk increase. Instead, we killed projectile heroes who were barely relevant and left everything else untouched/buffed while adding a dps passive like that even begins to address why things weren’t dying outside of burst. The reason you’re seeing so many reverts is because the patch broke what little balance there was in the game and even now hitscans are still outrageously overtuned along with some supports with them.
It’s the same situation all over again but now overall dps balance is worse along with tanks being raidbosses for some reason.
. Man I’m glad Marvel Rivals comes out soon. We need a break from this lol
