Do you have the mechanical skill to hit your targets while you are blinking around.
If was that easy, you would see a ton of Tracers dominating at the lower ranks…but you don’t. Why? Because she is not a forgiving Hero. She is a high-skill cap Hero.
It’s why she’s bottom of the barrel pick rate at lower-ranks but her pick-rate steady climbs the higher in rank you go.
If her kit was uber-forgiving, then low mechanical-skill players would be using her in the lower ranks to make up for their mistakes during matches.
I know some characters are supposed to be easier to play than others…
But seriously. Mei, Sombra, Bastion, Moira.
Blizzard clearly doesn’t know how to balance a game.
I don’t think the skill factor is something they can afford to ignore, though. You’re right that with so much variability, they have to pick one spot to balance if they want all characters to be equal at that spot. If you overlaid the mastery curves for each character (i.e. draw a graph of skill level against effectiveness), those curves can only all converge at one skill level.
The devs have been less consistent than that in where they create intersections, though, which can be an okay way of approaching it. Their approach makes it so there are a few “best” characters at each skill level, but they’re often different at different levels.
I kind of agree that they should choose one spot and stick with it, but that spot can’t be the top. Setting it at the top is good only for esports purposes, at the cost of the gameplay experience for nearly the entire player base. Setting it at a middle or low skill level means potentially fewer viable characters at the top, but a much more balanced play experience across the board.
literally pro players, even non tank mains have said along the following ‘if you think aim is what matters the most to make it up to high ranks or pro play, thats why you arent there’
I think your taking the word forgiving in the broadest possible sense. I said it in like last 5 post but I will say it again.
Being able to avoid being hit due to the design of a hero’s model is forgiving in the sense that you will take less damage.
Being able to disengage after a bad dive is forgiving in the sense that you don’t die and lose additional time.
It may seem small but it is an extremely powerful perk. Especially since their kits are so powerful.
But of course the ability to dodge and run doesn’t get you far but it is a fact that’s what makes them so hard to deal with. Their size and mobility
Heroes in similar roles still offer a different utility, and can be used in response to various team compositions. You wouldn’t pick Lucio, Mercy, Brigitte or Ana to counter Grav/Dragon, similarly you wouldn’t be very likely to pick Moira or Ana if you were concerned about a large number of barriers being present on the enemy team. You would probably skip Mercy for Moira if their Tracer, Genji or Doomfist was giving you trouble, and you’d probably skip Mercy for Moira or Ana if you had a tank-heavy team comp. You’d probably want to pick Brigitte if the enemy has a lot of poke-damage or if you have dive-heroes that know not to over-extend, but you’d probably skip Brigitte if the enemy had a lot of burst damage and mobility, or if your team wasn’t doing a good job at making space, or capitalizing on the openings you make.
There are too many factors at play to reduce it to “Just pick this easy hero”. If that was the case, then every game would be a mirror match of the least mechanically-demanding heroes and Overwatch would be boring. That’s why there is so much diversity, and that’s why team compositions are formed to complement and counter one another. If it does indeed come down to that then chances are either the enemy team’s players aren’t doing very well, or your team’s not doing a good job at working together.
Ana has Always had Nanoboost and Anti heal.
That barely saw any play from season 5 up until 11.
Preferably, i wouldn’t ever have to play Mercy at all if i mastered the more difficult options.
I moan and groan, but i’d rather cut myself than play Mercy tbh.
In that specific instance i’ll swap to Zen, the other high skill support.
I’m capable of dealing with those as Zen and Ana.
I’d honestly rather drink a bottle of bleach than lower myself into playing Mercy.
But for the team, yes. i will swap and cuck myself out into playing Mercy.
She shouldn’t be a necessity at any point in time when you’ve mastered the high skill supports.
I’ll Always skip Mercy over anything if possible.
Her gameplay is absolute horse
The game wants to be competitive. There is absolutely nothing competitive whatsoever about holding m1 without any further interaction aside from the occasional shift button press when an enemy gets too close.
I’ll swap to Lucio if it’s chip damage, and stay on Ana if you mean burst damage.
I don’t have any trouble with poke damage as i know how to position myself.
I disagree.
The game wants to be competitive. There should not be a place for the necessity of an easy character over the more difficult, skill intensive ones.
Not at the high skill brackets anyway.
Implying that cucking myself out into playing Mercy isn’t in any way ‘‘boring’’
Hell, she’s a must pick up until you get past the mid brackets with 0 competition from Ana. Why is it such a bad thing that i despise such a ungodly boring character that barely requires any skill to play. Why does she need to be strong at the high brackets too?
I want to play competitive Overwatch.
I dont want to play some boring game all about inclusion.
I want a contest of skill and teamwork.
Oh please… every meta up until now has been very static.
This mindset is what makes balance impossible. Skill demanding heroes shouldn’t work at any given rank because that would make them extremely unbalanced at the top tiers. This is even worse considering the high tiers is what’s broadcasted and constitutes the “public image” of the game.
If you can’t see how wide and diverse the roster is at the top (OWL, streamers, etc) the game becomes repetitive and it’s prone to losing its audience faster, which in turn might result in less people playing the game on the long run.
And besides, a hero might be F-tier in bronze through platinum, but be incredibly oppressive in GM, for example (S9 Tracer, for example). I don’t think the idea would be to make that any worse.
I can tell by how you decided to structure your response, by how you basically just said “i rathr kil myslf thn pla mrcy” over and over again, and the use of the phrase “cuck myself”, there are certain limits at play on one end of this conversation that disable it from ever actually being productive. Also the part where you basically just turned this into a “Mercy hate” talk. That doesn’t help.
I’m sorry, but i get very annoyed when people tell me that she should still be a strong pick after she’s been a must pick hero for over a year.
She’s overshadowed the others for too long, and i’m SICK of the character.
If i mastered both Mercy and Ana, Ana should be the stronger option.
Mercy has very few parts inside her kit that allows for mistakes.
Her skill floor is really low, and so is her skill ceiling.
We’ve already seen it in the past, utility doesn’t matter much.
One will Always be stronger, and overshadow the other.
And since that will Always be the case, i’d rather never, ever have it be Mercy again.
OP, what you’re advocating is institutionlized imbalance. Essentially, you don’t want the game to be balanced, and I wish people who think as you do would finally just come out and say it directly instead of hiding the fact behind numerous paragraphs.
Overwatch is a hero-based shooter. Balance in that context means that the heroes, not the players, are to be balanced against each other at their highest levels.
That would be the absolute death of this game.
Nobody but the top 1% could ever justify playing a more difficult character, if you were to balance a high skill character’s skill ceiling to be equal to easy characters.
The game would be devoid of skill.
And there’s nothing competitive about a game you’re meant to win.
And yet that’s already how it’s balanced - around OWL, with direct lines of communication between pro players and the balance team.
The idea seems to be that every character be viable at the highest level, and no character ever becomes “out-skilled,” and I can only support this direction. I agree with you that more difficult characters should remain viable at all ranks as well, but to me that means making parts of their kit more accessible to lower-ranked players, because the alternative is buffing them to the point where they outshine the rest of the roster at pro-level.
Skill should definitely be a factor in competitive - hence the name - but I do favor a non-linear improvement curve where improving your skills nets you less and less as you go up. The point of this is to keep the largest number of heroes viable at the largest number of ranks, and I see no other way to do so.
