With Rally nerfed, the bugs with her armor generation nerfed, her repair pack not being an instant heal, and the 2 tanks lock in competitive, I believe it’s time to revisit Armor as a mechanic. I think there’s a lot to be said on why it should or shouldn’t be reverted to -5.
A couple quick thoughts:
Armor with the way it’s designed, should on paper be good against sustained damage and shotguns. However the devs have clearly tried to tune it to be weaker against these damage sources, which makes no sense. I believe the original vision for Armor was the correct one. Tanks should be resistant to weapons that fire a lot of weak shots either in quick succession or all at once. They should not be resistant to burst damage such as rockets and grenades.
The argument by the devs is such: They believe shotguns should be good against characters with large hitboxes. I feel this is misguided, and giving such forgiveness to something with a low aim requirement goes against what many want the game to be, full of skill-based interactions. You should be rewarded for getting up close and hitting a small target with a shotgun at point blank, but to reward someone for firing a shotgun at a large hitbox from mid range seems a little backwards.
In a locked 2-2-2 system, the armor nerfs hurt main tanks more than anybody, and create a power imbalance where off-tanks and any DPS are able to shred the tank like it’s paper. With Brig having received the necessary nerfs to remove the issue of her armor generation combined with her self-healing or aoe healing, and the locked system preventing 3-3 compositions, I think it’s time we had the armor nerf reverted.
All the tanks have become fragile since the armor nerf. It wasn’t really needed in the first place. They should’ve just decreased the amount of armor Brig can dish out. Instead of nerfing it all together.
It makes perfect sense. Sustained damage heroes are trash throw picks, which means that armor only hurts the heroes who are already bad and does nothing against the heroes who are good.
If you want a logical solution: delete armor completely and replace it with more HP, or simply give armor a new damage mitigation value like 33% and have it apply to sustained and burst equally.
I suggested these things last year and still believe they’re appropriate now. Armor was an inherently bad idea, and Blizzard has been struggling to reduce its impact for months now.
Possibly. I feel like a lot of nerfs could be reverted in this 2-2-2 model. Lucio’s speed boost for example.
They can even rework how armor works in the game too to help balance it. I always felt that armor should be stronger but have direct weaknesses – mostly to fire skills. Rein’s firestrike, Torb’s primary fire, Brig’s dynamite – a distinction like this could lead to a support that can buff allies with a burn dot/fire ammo that could be more beneficial on sustain heroes like Soldier (reapplying stacks of burns per bullet) over burst heroes. Would also help give Torb a better place vs just going Hanzo.
Either way, I don’t think Blizz will revert any of their changes unless a new issue arises.
How high does armour get to now? Keep in mind she just burnt all her single target healing on armour that may not actually block anything, and she can’t rely on inspire as much now that her shield is 200. Doesn’t really seem like a good strat… Be better just to keep applying it to the Tracer/Genji when you get LoS in the enemy’s backline.
It’s so strange that all the nerfs piled onto rally were so ineffective because they screwed up the way the armour stacks and yet they don’t roll back any of the other changes when the biggest part of Brigs rally damage mitigation was a bug… Hopefully they’re just waiting till the dust settles to before making any changes.