Tanks take less headshot damage, d.va has a massive head hitbox, but her strongest counters don’t even have headshots, so the beam squad comes out faster.
wrecking ball is getting turbobuffed, but none of the buffs mitigate the effect of stuns on him, so now the sombra, cassidy, etc. swaps will come out even faster
Tanks take less knockback, but this doesn’t effect chainhook and is a buff to javelin spin. So hog into doomfist and orisa into rein are going to be even more common swap choices
The root cause of the tank problem is counterswapping, but they instead just keep gluing random passives on to the tanks hoping it will somehow help
Beam heroes do like <10dmg per tick. The armor revert means rather than doing 70% dmg, they are doing 50% dmg and Dva has some of the highest armor pools in the game.
This is a pretty substantial buff to her staying power against a great deal of heroes that would pelt her at range.
Sym goes from 60/120/180 dps to 30/70/130.
Zarya goes from 90-190 → 45-90 DPS against her armor.
This even affects Mei and Moira as well who will do 50 DPS and 30 DPS against Dva.
They didn’t clarify how beams will work against armor, but in OW1 they made them do like 30% less regardless of damage per tick. They’ll probably do the same here.
I don’t remember that interaction. I recall beam weapons were bugged against armor at some point due to tick rates causing them to do less dmg than expected. Most of the time it didn’t really matter for Dva because at some point they dramatically reduced her armor pool to like 200, so you didn’t have much armor to begin with. Piercing defense matrix was good enough. However, having a massive 375 armor pool now means you can spend much more time in armor.
They just gutted Orisa, fam. It’s not going to become MORE common. Unfortunately what IS going to become more common is Rammatra. I prefer Orisa because she does not completely circumvent my shield.
But whatever. Playing Reinhardt is a masochistic endeavor regardless. I am into the pain and humiliation.
I had to look it up to be sure, but this was fixed a long time ago. There was originally some discrepancies with the way beam tick damage worked against armor a long time ago and it was eventually patched. This was changed to a flat 20% reduction in damage for heroes like Winston, Zarya and Symmetra to make them more consistent.
Even knowing that now, having played Overwatch for many years – it has never been in D.vas best interest to front line against Zarya or Symmetra players with high charge rates. This is mostly due to the fact that you can’t block any of their incoming damage. I doubt they will revert this change and it will likely stay at a flat 20% reduction.