The Big Problems With Brigitte

Hello!

Good… whateverthetimeisforyou!
Im making this post to revisit kind of the issue of Brigitte, or possibly the lack of them so far.
I am kind of making this off the top of my head, so pardon if i do make any mistakes.
thank you for titanium for inspiring me to make this

BUT!
This is going to be my first proper big post, with multiple points so im going to divide it in different sections.
And you can find the sections right in this, if you want to skip through some of them:

Sections

Pickrate

Healer Kits

Damage

Healing

Conclusion

thank you to the html tutorial Dr4gon97, couldntve done this without you

So without further ado, lets get into the post!

Pickrate

I see why people think that this is true, because everyone seems to jump in whenever they see hate on the goats comp. Since its the meta at the very moment, and the most prominent picks people associate with goats would probably be Reinhardt, and Brigitte. but they couldnt be more wrong about it. From the past week the pickrates for healers specifically go as follows:

Pickrate percentages

numbers taken from all ranks combined, not a specific rank, this point applies to all the statistics i provide throughout the post.
  1. Ana-10.51%
  2. Moira-6.87%
  3. Lucio-5.68%
  4. Mercy-5.33%
  5. Zenyatta-4.47%
  6. Brigitte-2.22%

So in general Brigitte is the lowest picked healer in the entire game at the very moment, even with the power of goats pushing her, why is this?

Aside from the fact that brig cant defend herself from anyone from long range except with a shield thats destroyed fairly easy by the likes of mccree, hanzo, widow, and even genji to an extent. Theres nothing much a brigitte can really do against them except hide, and try to flail them away, there are a lot of reasons as to why Brig doesnt fit in goats that well anymore.

For Brigittes case, the low pickrate might be because her kit doesnt fit goats that well anymore, as other heroes like Zen and Moira take up her place in the goats comp aside of ana, or lucio even though she does have her stun, and shield, theres one thing that differentiates Brig from every other healer, can you catch it from this?

Healer Kits

  • Ana
    • Sleep Dart
    • Biotic Rifle
    • Biotic Grenade
  • Moira
    • Biotig Grasp
    • Biotic Orb
    • Fade
  • Zenyatta
    • Orb Of Destruction
    • Orb Of Harmony
    • Orb Of Discord
  • Lucio
    • Sonic Amplifier
    • Crossfade
    • Amp It Up
Then if you compare all of those to Brigittes kit
  • Brigitte
    • Rocket Flail
    • Repair Pack
    • Whip Shot
    • Barrier Shield
    • Shield Bash

Although Brigitte has the most items in her kit, she still doesnt have all the qualities that work that well in a goats comp.
For one, every other healer has a consistent long range heal, or movement to get close to the teammates that need healing.

  • Moira has Fade,
  • Lucio has wall ride and speed boost,
  • Zen has orbs,
  • Ana can snipe heal.
  • Mercy can just fly to them.

While Brig does have her Repair pack, she has no consistent healing, or movement abilities to be sustained as a proper healer.

Maybe thats not the issue you have with Brig, maybe you think she does too much damage, even after the nerfs she has gotten lets look at the damage statistics for brigitte and the other healers next to eachother.

Damage

Damage(avg) Ana Mercy Zenyatta Lucio Brigitte Moira
Hero Damage 4,317 455 9,855 6,808 5,941 6,724
Eliminations 11,99 1,77 17,87 16,84 18,55 24,26

Thats odd, brig has less damage than most of the other healers by average, and has only a tad bit more eliminations by average than Zen, or Lucio, and is still beaten by Moira

But maybe some of the hate is that she does more damage than a lot of the dps heroes perhaps?
lets check those statistics as well then, just to be sure
Im gonna take the 5 of the most popular dps heroes by pickrate% at the very moment, and compare them to Brigitte.

Damage(avg) Genji Mccree Ashe Hanzo Widow Brigitte
Hero Damage 12,873 13,136 15,934 16,196 9,659 5,941
Eliminations 25,42 23,44 24,22 24,26 21,62 18,55

Hmm thats even odder, it seems that shes not more powerful than any of the most popular dps heroes either, or even that close, not even getting half of the damage of most of the dps heroes, and getting far less eliminations by average.

But maybe, just maybe the damage and eliminations against heroes people complain about could be against tanks, lets, just for fun, compare the statistics with the 5 most popular tanks as well.

Damage(avg) Rein Zarya D.va Roadhog Winston Brigitte
Hero Damage 10,871 13,843 14,181 13,852 8,906 5,941
Eliminations 19,35 24,98 26,61 22,26 24,52 18,55

Well, all the tanks are also better than Brig, so she doesnt out damage any of the popular heroes outside of Ana, and Mercy, and even gets less elims than Rein, the one hero that is seen in lower ranks up to gold as the statue who just holds up his shield.

So, both damage, and kits, are against Brig, when put next to other heroes.
Well maybe as she is still seen as a healer, we could look at the statistics

Healing

Healing(avg) Ana Moira Lucio Zenyatta Brigitte Mercy
9,693 11,589 9,328 7,437 8,488 11,201

So by default, Brig also heals less than average, only being better than zen, whose healing is a bit poor because of the primary healing source being so slow.

Although she does give armor next to healing, but that can hardly be counted in, as the armor is very much temporary, even in her ult from now on when the next PTR patch goes live, so even her ultimate armor wouldnt be forever.

So her healing is also below average, just like basically every part of her kit.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Brigitte is not an OP hero in the slightest, and for the additional argument that someone is going to make, that she has a good winrate. That is very much true, but so do heroes like Torb, Symm, Bastion, etc, other heroes with seemingly low pickrates, as theyre only picked in niche situations where it should work to win.

So this post is for everyone who comments about brigitte being “overpowered” or “unfair” because of goats, or in general, youll see very clearly, that she is not.

And just how a fellow forum dweller here would say,

And here to the post that inspired me

Thank you for reading, and hope this helped :stuck_out_tongue:
also if some of the aspects look off, im still learning the HTML of the forums, and trying to fix this post as fast as possible

45 Likes

Well, given that we know dive has left viability and goats is the only viable meta, and in that time the main changes were Ana/Lucio’s buffs and the release of the hero designed purely to diminish dive… this probably means that numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.

Brigitte is built to counter dive, and given that nobody runs dive at all anymore one would expect Brig to do less well. It’s still a problem until dive is viable in some form, though.

Either that or Ana and maybe Lucio need nerfs, which is probably also true.

10 Likes

you can have your 56% win rate when your pick rate goes down to well below 1% or you can accept as many nerfs until your win rate is much closer to 50% like the majority of the roster.
sincerely, rational overwatch players.

46 Likes

Tell me then, considering the things i talk about in this post, what nerfs does she need?

1 Like

Brig isn’t OP, she’s just had like 9 consecutive nerfs over this past year.

^ this.

^ and this.


Brig is not OP because she heals too much or does more damage than Genji.

While I agree she is being neutered, she risks losing all viability because her kit ONLY excels in GOATS and nothing else.

If GOATS dies, then brig might be f-tier. This is why she needs a rework. She was a complete unnecessary answer to Dive, and she hurt every non-Dive hero just as much as any dive hero did.

So in reality, Brig was OP, and now she is on the brink of unplayable because her kit was solely designed around OHKing Tracer, a feat NO other hero could do, and she was designed to counter dive as a whole.

THATS what broke her, not any of her stats. It’s time you people learned that.

3 Likes

I am posting the stats on the post for a reason, if i didnt, people wouldve made the same argument at them asking me to provide some form of proof to it, so i decided to start with it so those people couldnt get ahead. since a lot of people do say “she does too much damage, and she does too much healing shes too strong” this is more of a post to make people see it better.

As i said in the post, brig is a niche pick, that fits only in goats now, hence the high winrate

3 Likes

Brig is far too weak to be a threat in any realm now. I used to see her and begin to plot her downfall - y’know…something like a hero that took some finesse and skill to defeat in a 1v1 that I usually catch her in. Now?

“There’s a Brig. I’m gonna go kill her and flank the rest.”

They got what they wanted and now she’s been spayed. I can’t use the term neutered because thats not how it works. If you let her do her job as opposed to killing her, she deserves her high winrate. But thats just it - you can kill her now without worrying about her destroying you when you try.

But now where’s the fun? Making things too easy for the ones that complain the most is becoming annoying.

7 Likes

No. That thread completely missed the point of hide and rez.

Hide and rez wasn’t a problem because it happened every game, it was a problem when it happened.

No one, be it Mercy main or hide-and-rez abuser, is going to come out and say that they abused hide and rez.

So while the format is good, both of you just went shopping for stats that you could easily use to argue and stayed away from the core problems that needed to be disproven, or rather attempted to be disproven.

Either way, the damage has been done. Mass-res isn’t coming back and Brig has been a problem for the past year. Don’t @ me.

thats not what i mean by it, the way the post was constructed and put out in the way it was, inspired me

GOOD.

THis post was not made to argue a point, but rather to explain a point of view, with statistics that go along the arguments i provide, and nothing more, and nothing less. i dont try for this post to be all inclusive, but do provide me with more proof/statistics that go along the post, and ill be sure to add them in!

3 Likes

Because there was an underlying context.

Saying she does too much damage is like saying Tracer heals herself too much with recall.

That complaint stemmed from how she could do 155 damage instantly for zero risk. After that, 2 maces could kill any 200 HP hero. THAT was the source for her damage.

BUT funny enough, that complaint hasn’t been normalized since her 50 -> 5 SB damage nerf.

You ignored the context of what it meant, as I also explained in my previous reply with your inspiration.

That post is a fantastic example of how numbers alone don’t work.

I was playing tons of Mercy throughout the time she was meta with mass res. I hid to res constantly. Whenever I wasn’t Mercy, being told to intentionally die on the point was not rare, and not doing it would make the team upset with you.

Maybe they were just playing in different ranks or regions to me, but it just proves that numbers alone don’t tell the whole story because the reality remains the reality.

5 Likes

The current meta favors brigitte.

People don’t play the heroes who have an easy time dealing with her.

Still.
If the meta was changed, the play style of brig would also change.
This would automatically bring her healing up.

With so many Private profiles, pages like overbuff do not provide reliable data.

2 Likes

i like brig i really do but her rally is weird, it’s essentially a weaker smaller radius mercy valkyrie heal beam that can stack up a little but it doesn’t diminish the value of singular high damage sources but it does a great job against small damage sources as it both increases in effective healing with the armor and if she procs inspire it negates some damage while her allies get some underlying healing to it aswell, giving a slight respite for her healing to catch up.

the biggest reason for why she is obnoxious to people is that she got an aoe attack like reinhardt and winston and a personal shield and whenever she hits she slowly regen her health while being able to hide behind her shield increasing her potential healthpool by a lot more.

to simplify it, she’s like moira but got a way to negate one-shots with her barrier and got an aoe attack that isn’t cooldown based.

is she bad? is she good? i’d say she’s circumstantially both depending on the situation. she just synergizes really well with brawl comps as it allows her to procc inspire more consistently and she can get in and deal aoe damage more often.

But aside from that, i am not talking about her before her nerfs. im talking about this day, where people are still complaining about her damage, to an extent, i would far rather have 1 big post about explaining the statistics behind the complaint, rather than 1 post complaining about the dmg she does every day on the forums.

Its the only data we do have available, so its best we take what we can.

2 Likes

A point of view is a point.

Which isn’t a problem, it’s how you neglected the main cause for concern.

I could make a thread saying Bastion needs nerfs because he can do 450 DPS which is the most out of any hero, but it’s all of his quirks that make him f-tier.

I’ve nailed this point into the ground already, but your flaw with your counterarguments is that you ignored the context of the original arguments.

a point of view is the way one perceives the point, not the point itself

Which to again, i can quote myself to

I only know so much, and but i wanted to make the post, with the limited knowledge i do have, hence of my reply to you.

side note, i wont be able to reply for the next hour or so, so if you have anything just stack them up ill try to reply to them to the best of my ability

1 Like

And that’s why OP didn’t make this thread the period at the end of this discussion.

Brig didn’t do too much damage because her problem was her 155 damage combo that took no risk, put any 200 HP squishy on deaths doorstep, and it was solely unintentional because it was designed that way to counter Tracer.

A appreciate stats, but the context is always what matters more, and some people neglect that, be it on purpose or because it was out of their scope of vision (whhch I think happened to OP).

Like I said, I haven’t seen this complaint used since her SB damage nerf.

Mostly I just see the basic auto-responses like delete Brig, etc.

Which is fine, but there are 2 groups, the valid group that said she had too much damage (via SB) and those just spewing it without doing research.

You simply disproved the latter , and not the former.

Overbuff isn’t 100% reliable, but it is still accurate enough to use.

Otherwise an encyclopedia is not useable because some of the information in them gets redacted or updated. Just because a source is not 100% accurate does not mean it’s not worth using. This is why encyclopedias and textbooks constantly get revised and have new volumes created.

The degree to which it’s correct is what defines the source to be accepted or not.

Bug overbuff is less than 5% inaccurate, so it’s data is still valid to use.

1 Like