I think it’s a bit of both, balance being a huge part of it.
Lots of people have always hated Hogs ability to delete anyone but Tanks from the game
So they nerfed his burst & buffed his damage over time. Solves the one shotting issue in a lot of situations but keeps his damage threatening assuming you can land your shots
I figure Hog puts Dive Tanks in check, and he still serves a good purpose of “My Team’s Teamwork sucks, guess I’ll do it myself and go Hog”.
I will say that all this bickering about pick rates when nobody has any clear answers other than their feelings and OWL stats / T500 leaderboards serves as evidence yet again that we need an actual official API.
Regardless of his actual balance numbers- no tank should be balanced around an easy 100-0 gimmick.
How characters feel to play against is just as, if not more important than actual balance.
If he was under performing with it (unless we have actual rank break downs, we’re speculating where and why he was “underperforming”), it’s all the more reason he needs to be reworked. That just says he’s weak with a mechanic that players hate dealing with.
Yea, I think he still counters Ramattra too in addition to Ball/Winston/Doom. Hook is still a great utility ability to reposition an enemy for a kill or to interrupt.
Do you actually think roadhog was net-buffed? Or even that it was net neutral? Genuine question.
Because roadhog was “underperforming” as a whole hero, and by my (and I think, honestly most reasonable people’s) estimation, he is now worse.
The devs literally said it wasn’t a balance issue. Watch the source material. They said it was because people didn’t like playing against him.
Funny how someone will make a topic and ppl will go
“stats don’t matter dummy/Overbuff is useless/scoreboard is useless etc”
then we will turn right around and go
“everyone’s experience fighting hero x doesn’t matter, because look at these important statistics”
Definitely not net buffed. He was hard nerfed in regards to burst. However, his damage over time has actually increased with these recent changes. Most importantly, he still counters the same Tanks he’s meant to counter, and is still capable of one shotting squishies in certain circumstances.
He’s worse in regards to one shotting after Hook, but he can still deal a lot of damage and chunk players with his gun. Assuming you can hit your shots he deals more damage over time now.
People not liking playing against him and reworking how his damage is dealt for balance reasons are not mutually exclusive. I’m curious to see if there are any changes to him once this “rework” adding utility eventually comes along.
Also this.
statistics dont really mean anything
if more people are playing more games on a hero, their winrate is going to be influenced by a massive range of skill tiers, but if a hero’s pickrate is lower, this means only the most skilled onetricks are actually playing the character and thus their winrate will appear higher
want to know who has the highest winrates? brigitte, symmetra, torbjorn, sigma, and even reinhardt
does this mean that all of these heroes are better than orisa, sojourn, ana, and kiriko?
hell no, i can assure you a raw analysis of cooldown rotations, damage output, sustain, and team fight value will tell you that winrates mean nothing
roadhog was pretty balanced in a 6v6 setting where his hook had a decent amount of counterplay, but now that there is only one tank to oppose the hog, he has free range to walk around the map and go for cheese kills on the enemy backline
well not anymore, hog players have to actually position themselves intelligently in order to get value out of their character, just like the rest of us (except orisa lmao she needs to be gutted)
sigh we’re better than this guys…
Winrate means nothing compared to pick rate.
If a hero is strong, they will be played a lot in higher ranks.
Makes no sense for a weak hero to have a high pickrate in a rank where only the best and most powerful heroes are played.
is this when they gigabuffed orisa and specifically said it was to deal with how big of a problem hog was?
This logic doesn’t make any sense. If you’re one of “only the most skilled onetricks”, you’ll win until you end up competing against people that are better than you as generalists and your “onetrick advantage” equalizes out. e.g. if you’re a gold-rank player overall but you’re exceptionally good as sym, you’ll just fight plat players instead.
What those characters actually are is situational. They’re either easily hard-countered or only good in certain comps, so people tend to swap out of them when they’re losing. This of course inflates their win rates.
You sure he wasn’t underperforming because Orisa just rolls him and is as meta?
no one cares. his stun combo kill on an 8 second cooldown was garbage.
Win rate =/= overpowered. Most of the overpowered heroes will be closer to 50% win rate since they’re picked almost all the time. It’s the pick rate and other stats that matter.
The devs have said numerous times that they use “unmirrored win rates,” which is basically “the win rate you have when you’re NOT playing against the same hero as you are.”
So the whole “moves towards 50%” thing doesn’t apply with the win rates they look at.
They are the only objective measure for how well a hero is doing. Literally every other measure is subjective.
Look at the notes from the beta. The heroes who were overperforming in win rate were also very popular (the only real exception being Symmetra, whose sample sizes were SO small that it was hard to draw accurate data). When Blizzard publishes their stats (which show unmirrored and role-adjusted rates), they don’t match up to what you’re saying at all.
And this right here tells me that “game balance” isn’t actually one of your concerns.
I didn’t say anything about mirrored.
Hog was bloated, his win rate was lower because he had such a high pick rate, which means he’s far more likely to have closer to 50% no matter what. I’m sure what started his decline was the massive influx of Orisa in the game to counter him, but another hero being overpowered doesn’t mean Hog wasn’t. If they nerfed Orisa but not Hog, then Hog would be at the top of everything in the Tank role.
No, it doesn’t. You don’t understand how statistics work.
The “he’s likely to move towards 50% argument” ONLY works if the game is taking into account mirrored picks (situations which force a 50/50 win rate arbitrarily). When the devs just look at unmirrored win rates, then the effect that having a higher pick rate has is it increases the confidence interval on the pick rate (in other words, pick rates become more reliable because of a larger sample size to draw from).
When using overbuff, which doesn’t sift out mirrored win rates, yes, having a high pick rate pulls people artificially towards a 50% win rate. But when looking at unmirrored win rates, this is NOT the case.
He wasn’t overperforming, even BEFORE they gigabuffed Orisa. So no. That doesn’t line up.
Incidentally, as a guy who is “good at guessing Roadhog changes”.
The ship has sailed already. Let it go.
Put your energies into “Okay fine, if this is the way we are headed, then this is how you make it better”.