The hypocrisy of "skill"?

General Discussion
344

“Skill” never was about aiming. Aiming is a means to balance the core and simple concept I’m going to talk about now.

Effort/ Investement / Risk versus Rewards.

The reason why people use the shortcut of “character that needs to aim are skillfull” is because learn to aim is an investment of your time. An effort that allow to unlock the potential of the hero. But aiming is not the only investment you can make.

The Winston case:
You can pick Winston day one, and have a fairly good understanding of what to do with the character. However actually doing your job well and surviving requires a lot of precision in the movement, the position and foresight.

  • You miss dive, you get punished.
  • You cut line of sight from your healer you get punished.
  • You fight the wrong fight, you get punished.
  • You jump to far, you get punished.
  • Not far enough, the target goes away.

You have to put thoughs into your play and invest some time to learn key concept and optimal dive angles. You have to learn to precisely jump. Anni-cancel. Actually making kills with primal rage. Being aware enough of your surrondings to not break line of sight from healer, while breaking line of sight from the ennemies.
Reinhart is the same when you think about it. he has the same rewards versus investment attached to it.

The Brigitte case:

Everyone hates Brigitte because she requirs no, to very little effort / investment / risk and still have one of the biggest impact / reward in the game.

Lest’s take your arguments:

I would be OK with this if you had a choice about “going into” Brigitte range. When a GOAT is going onto the point, you have to contest and go into her range at some point. You can only chill at range for that long.

Actually I do not know. All Brigitte play the same to me. The game plan is super straight forward. Protect the back line. Flail ASAP to get heal going on. Coordinate with Rein for the shatter combo.

Again the problem with Brigitte is that she “passively” counter character like Tracer. Rally put 100 armor to everyone with no time constraint. Meaning a Tracer will roughly need 1 to 2 second more on a target to kill them. This is more than enough to get peeling from anybody else or for that Zen to find a headshot. therefore Brigitte counters Tracer while not even be here actively trying. No effort, massive reward.

Again, the whole kit of Brigitte is 0 effort, 0 risk, 0 investment but still to this day she has one of the biggest winrate out of all characters. 0 effort = 0 aim needed, 0 risk because none of her skills actually put her in danger. Example bashing a Rein to combo a shatter is enterly risk free, yet has the same killing potential as a nano blade maybe more. 0 investment because your positioning is dictated by your teammates. near the support, or slightly behind the Rein.

0,0,0 and yet Max reward.

She does have counters on paper, but in perspective of how the game is working and how GOAT is working the best counter is a stronger GOAT. You have to come to range and nothing survive GOAT in range better than another GOAT. In short the best counter to Brigitte is another Brigitte.

345

And that’s exactly what my post was about.

I won’t react to the rest of your post, I take it you somewhat disagree and I respect that. One thing tho:

This is simply wrong in my opinion. If she was this, she’d be an absolute must pick by now. She’s not, not even in the support category (Ana is in higher ranks). If she was this, she shouldn’t be a hero in the game, yet she is (and I hope she will stay).

Meibe players could learn to punish her for her mistakes just like you can punish a Winston who missed a dive? Perhaps a Brig that misses shield bash should be dead in the upcoming 7 seconds? Just a thought. You know, the same as when you focus a Tracer because you call out she just used Recall and all her blinks. She should be dead then.

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346

The fact is that people seem to want skill from their counters all the time.
Because god forbid being outplayed by a cheesy mechanic that you know exists, and for which there is definitely counterplay but you’re too stubborn to actually do that counterplay.

Maybe… just maybe… if you do not possess the skill required to kill a no-skill hero, then it means you are lacking skill. Simple as that.
Just because you play a high-skilled hero does not mean you actually have higher skill.

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347

Well said. It is a little bit of a paradox that some players seem to think that if they play a “high-skill” hero they are entitled to an instant win, no matter how poorly they perform.

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348

Actually we expect to win if we perform better than the enemy team.
Easy heroes are the ones that allow you to win no matter how poorly you perform.

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349

And it’s a good thing that is something which is not how the game is balanced, with having counter alternatives to every hero as we do now.

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350

That was true about post rework Mercy and she was absolutely everywhere. Yet Brig… where is she? No Brigitte has a good kit, that much is true. But she is easily broken. Don’t go into melee range and she is half the hero. And with Ashe coming she will suffer greatly.

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351

Goat comp. The only reason Brig is not in every game is because everyone hates Goat comp. God bless us!!

Again, you do not really have a choice. though I agree it does work “on paper”.

That remain to be seen. Maybe Ashe could open some possibilities of combo to counter goat (hence Brigitte). But she is not going to counter goat as brig counter dive all by herself.

352

But those counters need to be all heroes with similar skill requirement, otherwise the game is not actually balanced.

353

Cognitive dissonance is strong. We all know Brigitte is pretty easy. Stop denying facts and accept the reality as it is.

354

The cognitive dissonance, misused as terminology in this case, is not nearly as strong as the Alleged Certainty Fallacy.

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355

Mercy is easy to climb ranks with right now? We have the same game version?

356

Okay folks, imagine if someone wrote to the NFL with this complaint:

“It’s imbalanced that linebackers are allowed to sack the quarterback. Quarterbacks require huge amounts of skill, decision making, and positioning, AND can run the ball or make tackles themselves. Linebackers just need to run forward and knock people over. They have way too much impact for the amount of effort they put in. #deletelinebackers”

That would be silly, because quarterbacks have one job (an important job!) and the line positions on both sides have a different job (also an important job). Quarterbacks make the star plays, but “be the guy who makes the opponents’ quarterback miserable” is a necessary, defined, and important role on the team. One which the quarterback might even struggle at if he was suddenly forced to play in their stead.

In basketball, every player has a more-or-less equal job, with some subtle differences, so everyone needs to be pretty good at dribbling, passing, catching, evading other players, and shooting baskets. In football, the teams have wildly varying jobs, and not everyone needs to be awesome at every single thing that needs to be done on the field—everyone just needs to be awesome at the job that they, themselves have.

In an asymmetrical team of heroes like Overwatch, the ease of the hero is irrelevant. The important part is if that hero has a job that is needed, if they are effective at, and if have reasonable counterplay options.

Brigitte may well need some more tuning, but she should not be a wet noodle just because she’s “easy”. There needs to be real and reliable counterplay to her, but it should never be that the enemy team can just ignore her presence because “skill”.

I also wanted to comment on the chestnut: “If you can get value out of a low-skill hero, why play a high-skill hero”. This is a very flawed perspective, because the answer is simply, those heroes do different things, even within similar roles. Junkrat can out-DPS Widowmaker by a LOT, but she can drop people with a single shot through a tiny vantage point exactly when she means to, and he can’t. You pick Junkrat to break shields or spam a choke; you pick Widow to assassinate key targets. Moira does substantially more healing than Ana does, despite being much easier to pick up, but you still pick Ana for her massive amounts of utility, and Moira when you need to drown your team in AoE healing. Zarya and D.Va are both off-tanks, but they aren’t interchangeable; you have to choose which one you run for different reasons to accomplish different tasks, regardless of how easy they are to play.

Brigitte only “takes” away from DPS in that there are only six slots on a team, and she can’t usually succeed if she’s the only off-tank or healer. She’s kind of garbage at DPS as a whole, but she’s great at her job, which is to make your team’s formation scary to push into (or be rolled over by). Her ease of play has nothing to do with whether or not she should be effective at her job, which was a job that no other hero could really effectively do (otherwise the meta wouldn’t have changed when she was introduced).

There’s no “EZ mode” Brigitte who just has to do W+M1, and then a “hard mode” tanky healer with CC, who has to do an elaborate combo to execute the stun, has a hitscan peashooter that does 0 damage unless it’s a headshot, and healing that requires you to run circles around your teammate until the heal charges up. There’s just Brigitte. Nobody else can do her role, which is part of why she’s been bordering on being a must-pick.

There’s no “EZ mode” long-distance assassin with homing bullets and then “hard mode” Widowmaker; there’s just Widowmaker.

Even as much as Hanzo, McCree, and Soldier always get compared with each other as mid-range damage dealers, they have different drawbacks, strengths, and mechanics, which means that if you’re equally competent on them, you will run different ones depending on what you’re synergizing with and trying to counter.

Shoot, even Tracer and Genji are pretty middle-of-the-road on paper in terms of raw output, but they have always been valuable picks because of their ability to quickly get in the backline and disrupt the enemy team. They are useful because of their abilities, not just their potential to directly frag.

All of the easy heroes have dramatic limitations (short range, or low DPS, or slow-moving attacks, or big hitboxes, etc.). All of the hard heroes have a lot of versatility that rewards creative play and mastery of their kit (which is why, for instance, a Tracer can kite and kill a Brigitte if she’s given enough space to).

As long as there are high-mobilty heroes in the game, there will be heroes with anti-mobility qualities in the game, and those heroes will necessarily have easy mechanics because mobility is itself a counter to mechanically-demanding heroes. (This is why McCree has always had a rough go against Tracer and Genji, despite flashbang’s value against them, and why Winston was the only hero that even sort of countered Genji before Moira was introduced.)

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357

Not easier than Rein or Lucio. And no, we don’t “all” know something, which is your own opinion.

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358

I am not your honey and i don’t care when you started to play mercy the fact is that she could revive a whole team and that it was mandatory to kill her before the fight which was insane. Furthermore my mental health is very important to me and as i want to keep it sane i’ll never read one of the mercy thread written by whiny mercy main sad that their OP hero is not mandatory in every game anymore.

359

Again, you’re the guy who said that Symm 2.0 was “too rewarding” because she had auto-lock.

Balance is NOT what you want.

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360

I’ll be honest, after plat it’s almost impossible to tell. And I’m not even against Brigitte being in the game.

361

Sym was weak, especially compared to other no aim heroes.
But hey, she got reworked, and now she is better than ever.
So should Brigitte be reworked so that she takes aim too.

362

That explains why her pickrate fell even lower than before, does it?

More proof that balance isn’t what you want.

363

Well, that’s not my fault. :woman_shrugging:
I play Sym more, but I can’t force other people to play her, to increase her pick rate.