Pretty much everything from GOATS to Overwatch 2. Blizzard went out of their way to try and curtail a strategy predominantly used by higher-level players, despite it not turning up in regular Quick Play matches all that often. And yet we saw repeated buffs to Damage heroes, repeated nerfs to individual Tanks, repeated nerfs to Armour, etc.
There’s also the Symmetra rework (the second one, where she went to Damage). The character was almost entirely balanced around highly-skilled players with strict coordination, and was quite potent in that role. For your average pubbie team, though, Teleporter may as well not have existed. Arguably, it’s still not terribly useful now because nobody ever uses it.
A majority of redesigns of late have aimed to lower the skill floor for less popular heroes, rather than address their deficiencies in high level play. The latest iteration of Sombra is arguably a lot weaker than she was before due to eliminating a lot of strats, but it made her much more approachable for people who didn’t main her. The same goes for Hog - not much of a shift in raw power, but a simplification of his kit which makes him less useless in the hands of less skilled players (like me).
Balancing around the game’s best players may be “objectively better”, but the player experience of it is subjective, and most players don’t have that perspective.
mercy and ana would make it roughly 200 or so, im not sure about the actual numbers, but it made it a oneshot for anything that was a squishy.
you have to consider the fact that in low elo nothing will be balanced, therefore everything in the right hands is OP, the same cannot and will not go for high elo where it is the best players vs best players.
right but sym is still great in low elo so your point?
hog is so much better than he used to be, they even had to partially nerf him in the mid patch. as for sombra, shes the exception, shes a pain in the rear for both high and low elo, theres nothing that will fix bad hero design except a rework that makes it more fair to play against.
but i think sombra is generally far more fun to play with a higher skill ceiling, so i dont get where you are coming from.
Why cant low elo be better balanced? The issue I have is when something isnt a problem at high elo but IS a problem at low - for example, the reaper that walks at the tank or the Moira that walks at the Genji.
I feel statistical balance isn’t as much of a priority as fun. OW feels balanced around making sure the person shooting is having fun to the stressful detriment of the person being shot. By this i mean sombra is fun to play, but being killed by her just feels terrible and hopeless as a support. I dont like feeling helpless, so i’m sure low level players dont either, and new players are the guys the devs need to hang around so they can make money.
the thing is, they dont play their game.
even though reaper is awful, hes still great in lower elos, but because they adjusted some numbers and made him 50% winrate in low elo, in their eyes its balanced.
rather than giving him some buffs that are only accessible to higher elos, they would keep him at his current state than take risks with good decision making behind it.
like they could literally increase his fall off, decrease his spread, give him a skill shot, buff his tp to be more modern, and reaper at high elo is fixed and still great at low elo without being OP as hell.
like the devs and most people dont even consider alternatives whatsoever.
they ALL need to go outside of the ppl that make the shorts…but even then…those are getting worse and worse so mite as well get rid of everyone and start again.
Yeah, i can see that as being the problem. There’s way more data available nowadays than ever before in games. Interpreting data is a skill - it should be used to identify problems, not to dictate actions.
I somehow get the feeling that the devs have been driven by their bosses to show the game is getting better through meaningless stats rather than making the game more fun.
Sorry not sorry. The balance decisions the devs have been making lately have been infuriating to the point that I have basically stopped playing the game.
Everyone screams fire them. But nobody follows up with who to hire. You can’t guarantee anything better comes from terminating all the balance devs. They’d have to be replaced that’ll take time and then we’re just stuck with no balance changes and whatever we sit at. It could be great it could be mauga. Firing people with no hire is a massive waste of time. Training isn’t cheap either. And a whole new team would lack direction too. Not all answers are make them lose a job.
im not gonna lie, literally ANY pro player would do a better job, even some streamers like flats would do an infinitely better job.
people who KNOW the game and its core design, generally anyone who has the game knowledge of atleast a GM player
its so funny though that even though Geoff had some balancing issues, at least he balanced the game a lot better than this card game man does. Idk why blizzard thought it was a good idea to put a man who works on a card game in charge of balancing.
the fact that this game took a huge hit ever since him and a new team came along should be a sign that blizzard should reconsider. but oh wait, thats the smart thing and we know companies don’t operate on what’s smart for the integrity of a game, but moreso to take more money from you from the wonderful BP!
Is the balance team just talking? I feel the qualifications for it are a little different. I don’t know. But as much as I like flats paying someone just to talk seems wasteful. They already get his opinions through his content.
counters are rather soft, it’s not a hard shut down if the enemy plays hanzo into your torb.
Or Zarya into your Orisa.
Especially when you can for the most part ignore the tank 1v1, and just focus fire the enemy supports or focus on shutting down a win condition. Like shuting down a nano blade from actually killing people.
Stuns are primarily a tank tool, Ana’s sleep isn’t something that consitent hits. As it’s a small projectile that can very much be blocked/eaten/deflected ignored by orisa/mauga.
And requires you to effectively cut a tank off from his team, and considerable bit of focus fire for such to actually lead into a kill on anything that isn’t a 200hp hero.
The old balance team under Geoff used to constantly remind us that stats without context are meaningless at best, and harmful at worst when misinterpreted.
Winrate, for example. Totally useless in a game like this with free swapping and mirroring outside of extreme examples. For instance, what winrate would the strongest hero in the game tend to have? 50%. Not 100. But when looking at winrate alone you’d say “hey 50% thats balanced.”
I don’t need to explain why that’s so wrong, but the current dev team doesn’t seem to understand that at all. And it has led to them buffing strong heroes (Sojourn) and nerfing weak ones (Symmetra) and it’s bloody frustrating.