I honestly don’t understand why people think going back to the old armor is a good idea. Besides just being way more complicated, it just buffs burst damage which is exactly what we don’t want more of!
Widow, Hanzo, Torb, Pharah, Junkrat, Ashe, Kiriko, Zen… These things are all getting giga-buffed against armor.
And Tracer, Sombra, Reaper, D.Va, Mauga, Ramattra, Ball, Lifeweaver are all getting giga-nerfed against armor.
There’s a spreadsheet showing the changes.
Instead of a global burst damage buff maybe we could just nerf meta heroes like Tracer a little more. Instead we make heroes like Reaper and Lifeweaver even more useless, buff Kiriko, and ironically actually ruin some tanks like D.Va in a tank patch. This is part of why OW1 balance was so screwed! Having armor do flat reduction was a good change for OW2. We’re going backwards!
I think they did that because (if they were to buff the current armor reduction to like 40% for all heroes), burst would do 0 damage against tank. Ashe does 75 in the body, 150 in the head, -25% thats 112.5 damage, and -40% armor damage reduction that’s 67.5, even lower than her regular body shot damage.
And assuming they would’ve left it untouched at at 30% that’s still 79 damage, which is ridiculous.
I don’t think they needed to buff armor to 40% or anything. If they made this headshot change, but only for white health and not armor health it would be great.
The armor changes though are just going to cause things to get burst down even faster which is what they are supposedly trying to prevent.
Winston is going to be OP. But that’s because his weapon ignores armor, he has very little armor, and the headshot thing benefits him the most of almost any tank.
That doesn’t mean that the armor change is a good one.
Keep in mind the only burst dmg being buffed is projectiles that don’t crit like pharah rocket or junk nades. Combined with the 25% HS reduction passive stuff like widow or soj HS deals pretty much the same dmg.
That spreadsheet doesn’t take the HS reduction into account.
I don’t know whether going back to the old version of armour is the play, but my main cause of cautious optimism is just the notion that they seem open to the idea of adding survivability to tanks while keeping healing in check. I’m hoping that the dampening of headshots on tanks works out well enough.
Yeah I have no idea how these changes will effect balance. But I think these changes are the tank version of the S9 patch. Their aiming to make the overall TTK feel more consistent. They accomplished that in S9 for dps/support but we had no idea how balance would be effected. Overall I think it was a good change. We’ll probably see a similar thing with tanks and hopefully they will be able to keep that consistent feeling while addressing some of the weaker/stronger heroes.
The overall changes basically buffs Rein and Winston a lot. Since shotgun/rapidfire Tanks used to wreck them. Also Winston Tesla ignores armor entirely.
Also Rein/Winston are heavily reliant on getting near to opponents and staying there. Which means knockback changes benefit them a lot.
Overall, I think the devs are aiming for making the Tank role be “Tierlisted” on the basis of how fun they are to play-as and play-against.
With Rein/Winston being high on that list, for both the player and opponent.
I mean bastion is weaker but what that means is instead of 252dps he does 210. Also btw, ana does 65 damage instead of 49. So most supports will do MORE damage and the tank busters that do a million damage now only do 750k you know? It also doesn’t change bastion or reaper’s damage to winston’s SHIELD
Those heroes are currently “too strong” against winston now they’ll only just be “strong”
How do we make bastion weaker against tanks without making him useless against everything else? Or mauga?
That wouldn’t even be close to enough. Give her the Winton treatment and let her have armor piercing rounds. Then we’re talking. Also, give her 25 damage on boop.
That would be enough. Because D.Va is the most popular and most fun tank if we actually tier list it like you say then she should never drop below A-tier ever.
Torbjorn doesn’t have burst. Ashe doesn’t have burst, Kiriko doesn’t have burst. None of these are seeing any major increases.
Pharah doesn’t have burst, but will see a minor increase in damage. Incapable of critical hits.
None of these heroes are burst-oriented. Additionally, there’s no real changes for Mauga, D.va. Ramattra, or Lifeweaver.
No they aren’t.
What the heck are you talking about? Winston’s got more armored health than regular health. He will see no changes to his damage, nothing the armor system does affects at all, except for his secondary fire.
Just because the damage is over 100 doesn’t make it burst damage.
A five percent increase is barely more than single digits for most heroes.
It should be useful for heroes like Junker Queen, Roadhog, and a few others.
What will be interesting is how much more resilient pilot D.va will be. A headshot from Sojourn’s Railgun won’t kill her.
No, it won’t.
The biggest change for Reinhardt will be that his hammer will actually do more damage on other tanks. All of his abilities will.
D.va’s not going to need buffs. She does 2 damage per pellet, when reduced by 30% it brings it down to 1 damage, the changes aren’t going to be be drastic enough to affect her at all.
Probably no changes here to damage to over time effects. There was a last minute change to the old armor system that reduced DOTS by 30%. No guarantee that it’ll come back with the change, though.
Only Ana has a damage over time, all others are still affect by the armor system, and won’t see any major changes.
Zenyatta’s Discord has some special mentions, but this is more of a particular change, that warrants another discussion.
Not going to happen when D.va has 156 damage per second, making her damage per second higher than many Damage-role heroes and on par with a fully-charged Zarya.
Almost all of them do more than 17 damage per bullet except lifeweaver and they all see a damage increase to armor compared to 30% armor of somewhere around 20%. The only exception is lw who loses damage and lucio who barely gains anything. If you only hit headshots, it’s roughly the same as current patch but in general tanks will probably be taking more damage from supports (and most heroes actually).
Yes, including beams, though Ana’s damage had an exception so it only got -5 at some point. I think dynamite also got changed so it was just -5 too though I don’t know the full list. We will have to wait for specific im just assuming they’re gonna make it work like it did in ow1 fully.
Because Flankers and Hitscan have been dominating the meta ever since they changed the way armor works, by reverting it, it allows burst dps like Junkrat to be more viable and make heroes like tracer not melt tank(which she shouldn’t).
I’m all for these changes. They make certain tanks like Reinhardt better, while D. Va & Ramm might do less damage with their primary fire against armor, they’re gonna have a lot more sustainability.
My only gripe is that I think with these armor changes, they should’ve also tuned damage resistance towards beam weapons.
