Here is some of the facts people are not considering.
First of all. The increased rate of fire can look good on paper when you factor ONLY the numbers of damage itself. Especially if you are accurate.
However, a factor that many people are not considering is her projectile speed. Due to her current projectile speed of 35m most Pharah’s that aim for accuracy and trully impactful damage do not fire at her live rate of fire of 0.9. They take their time to gather the information and results of their previous shot.
Depending on the range at which you are firing at your target the results of your previous shot are likely to not have occurred yet or just barely resolved roughly 0.2 seconds prior. Which means it benefits a Pharah player to wait until that shot is resolved before deciding her next.
Example: I fire a shot at a below 120hp target from her optimal range for lead time and survival. Which is at roughly the 25m range. This gives the projectile roughly 0.65 seconds to reach the target. Which results in a 0.25 decision window for the next shot at the 0.9 recovery rate. Most Pharah’s don’t have this kind of reaction speed and in fact wait a little past the window to ensure the right play.
Now change the recovery rate to her new found 0.7 and you now have only 0.05 seconds to decide your next action at that range. What are your options? Pre-fire the next shot, move on to the next target and hope your first shot was good enough to finish them off, or finally close the distance so that you know SOONER then 0.65 that the target was hit.
Option one encourages spam over accuracy. Not only that but if the target is killed by the first shot you have wasted 16.6% of your clip on empty air. Which is huge on a 6 shot clip with a reload time of 1 second.
Option two risks you missing the shot on the target and allowing a weakened opponent to escape and/or get healed and continue to fight you.
Option three reduces your survival considerably.
Want us to have a faster fire rate and encourage better accuracy? Fine. These changes do not do this on there own. Want to fix that? Give Pharah a faster projectile speed that matches her new fire rate so that Pharah can get the information she needs in proper timing so she can maintain a feasible engagement range and make decisions in a REASONABLE amount of time between shots.
Otherwise this is a flat nerf for accurate Pharah players.