Season 7 Patch Notes thoughts

General Discussion
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The Orisa change feels unimpactful. I will have to play against it, but I don’t see it fixing any of the issues I have with her. She gets extra HP and damage reduction, then she can javelin spin, and javelin anyone away or into a corner to get kills.

Potential Orisa nerfs (pick one): Can be headshot in fortify.
Javelin spin either eats damage, or knock backs enemies. Not both
No over-health from fortify
CC immunity on a shorter cooldown with less/ damage reduction (30%)

The Ram buff seems unneeded. He already has massive uptime in Nemesis form. However I would be fine with the change if the punches could be blocked by shields.

Ball change; Looks good

Zayra Change; seems fair to me

Cassiday; Still is Niche, but I don’t mind the roll. It is a cool interaction. However between the 225hp, roll, and ult damage reduction, man is getting awfully tanky for my liking.

Mei; Still not a fan of the instant slow, it feels bad to play against. But this version is better than the ramp up.

Sombra; looks interesting, will need to play

Torb; a fair nerf

Brig; I also play brig. This seems very unnecessary. This favors me, but seems like a bad buff. I would prefer if they instead slightly buffed her shield hp to 275. 80 is a dangerous break point which will lead to even more squishies exploding.

Illari; seems fair to me. Although I would have preferred Pylon to either remove shield health, or be 100 hp.

Overall; I am pessimistic about this patch. Season 6 was my least favorite meta to play in. (Although sniper meta zen was pretty bad too). And these changes to not address the core issues I have with the game. Playing Tank if you don’t have overtuned cooldowns means you are deleted because the game is meant to deal with those tanks. Tanks are annoying to kill when they can constantly get just a bit more HP. Orisa getting HP+ damage reduction. Same for Ram. Same for Zarya Bubble. There is no counter play outside of ‘track the cooldown’ or deal large burst damage.

If the ‘transformation’ tanks are so tanky, and there is not a will to nerf healing + dps numbers, then I feel tanks with no abelites to heal themselves (Rien, Winston, Dva) should at least get a small hp increase (25hp for example)

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The changes just confirm that Blizzard doesn’t look at skill expression and fun. The buffs they gave are mostly for characters that are unfun to play against; the nerfs are very small or on the wrong characters. Many characters that are troublesome don’t get looked at in the first place.

They don’t care about the health of the game. I’m convinced now. These might be the worst season start patch notes they ever put out. There is so much wrong and so little right…

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its honestly way worse then that.

they dont balance with their brain, they balance with a spreadsheet.

they have openly admitted to using statistic’s for balancing, now they claim to use other things but it would appear that they heavily weight things based on the statistic’s.

throw in some incompetency and you get -5% nerf to fortify to one of the tankiest…tanks in the game.

and a small nerf to illari’s heal beam…instead of to her plyon’s hp.

this is the problem with blizzards philosophy of keeping a heroes “identity” the same no matter what.

this means for instance you cant just nerf and remove widow or hanzo’s 1 shot because they are “snipers” and that goes against their identity.

it means you cant remove rez from mercy, despite the fact most top 500 mercy’s would rather get a new ability they can actually use in match instead of one they might use 2-3 times per a 10minute match.

the pylon is likely what they consider to be a core part of illari’s identity just as fortify is probably core too orisa. so these abilities either never get touched or they only get nerfed in ways that dont effect the ability that much.

for instance if you wanted to nerf orisa’s sustain youd just add a few seconds to her fortify CD so she cant as easily rotate her CDs to block dmg. instead they reduced the effectiveness of it by dropping it from 50 to 45%.

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Orisa buff will change very little and only Illari got a nerf in supports, so basically get ready for more of the same