It’s actually been a more than a year now and that’s not even considering the fact that he was teased alongside Cassidy as one of the “2 DPS reworks” they had planned without directly name dropping.
It’s ironic because he’s proportionally weaker than almost everyone else with the health changes.
I also think the spread changes only marginally improved his ability to lifesteal, since it’s impact only improved his range by 1m within 10m.
His skyrocketing success rate was definitely because of Dive comps and Juno release.
Unironically bad design. It would make more sense for him to apply LESS anti healing as a unique trade off for Reaper. I don’t think that’d hurt him too much because he’s supposed to damage past healing (on paper) anyway.
This is exactly what they said. Because his tp buffs put him in a good place they stopped working on the rework. It’s just not needed anymore. He was just meta last season!
Way I figure, if the TP changes were all that was needed, they took their sweet time doing that too. But it can’t have been just that to put him in a good spot. Team comp aside, and he is very reliant on it, it’s the pellet size and spread buffs since S9. While yes he required more pellets to kill people, he was still hitting more on average.
Bigger pellets meant more hits.
Tighter spread meant more hits.
And since his life steal is dependent on his damage, which got 2 indirect buffs, that meant he was healing more as well.
But they tried to write off his overperformance as his life steal being too high thanks to the HP buffs. But even that is a contradiction if you consider the fact he’s literally the only character with a passive that’s directly countered by an entire role passive that they just buffed, which is bad design no matter how you look at it, then combine that with the bullet size nerf everyone got, which is another indirect nerf, however minor, to his damage per shot/ passive.
Maybe at first when his passive was reworked, he was too strong. 50% was huge when you consider he had OHK potential even if it required him to force feed you the barrel of his gun. It’s almost never that he’s too strong, it’s team comps or indirect buffs to his killing potential, which has indirectly taken MULTIPLE hits in the past 2 patches. The DPS passive buff, the bullet size nerfs, and the nerf to his passive, which ever so slightly was indirectly nerfed again because of the size changes.
I’d say even if he is doing well, the bad design mentioned here alone is grounds for a rework, unless they want to start reverting nerfs that have stayed for potentially years and are no longer justified as per the reasons given at the time, or they want to buff him to compensate for the fact he’s one of those characters that 1 nerf (which more often than not is to his guns) usually carries 2-3 others with it unlike every other character.
“Uuummm… The guy… The robed one… The one with the things… Like… Rifles, but they fire a lot at once… And he yells something like ‘bye, bye, bye’ as his super…”