The kind of Experimental Card I hope for

General Discussion
1

Genji

Shuriken damage: 30
Right-click attack interval: 0.75 sec
Ammo: 24

Why? 30 damage is the threshold that really matters, this has way more substantial impact in securing kills than a 0.68sec attack interval. Then with dash damage and a quick-melee between each right-click you only need to land a total of 4 hits on a 200HP opponent. Look at Necros’ play, he’s struggling because even at 0.68 sec attack interval he’s not landing enough shuriken, he’s dealing dash damage, dealing quickmelee damage, but too often only 2 shuriken hit per right click.
30 damage was bad but that was also in combination with a fast attack rate. This is trading a fast time to kill for a far less risky combo as Genji’s risk is huge, if he can’t get a kill then he’s stuck with no dash reset to escape.

McCree

Flashbang radius: 1m
Fan hammer spread: 8 (+23%)

This keeps all of McCree’s goodies including his 225HP health but means he has to work for it. Not only does flash not reach as far but is harder to use at extremely close range as if the projectile misses and flies past them then if they’re within 6m they’ll be too close.

To compensate for the wider spread of fan-hammer you need to get so close that the flashbang will “airburst” unless you land a direct hit, so if you want a flash + fan you now need to land a direct hit with flashbang.

Bastion

Sentry transformation: 0.5sec (halved)
Spread reduction: 0.66 sec (halved)
Sentry ammo: 250

Bastion just needs to be a lot more responsive, so many things knock Bastion out of sentry now that 1.0 sec transformation into sentry is so slow and in contradiction with how transforming from sentry to recon is 0.5 sec. The spread starting wide is a nice idea as opponents have time to react but it gives them too much time to react, it gives them time to shoot back and destroy sentry rather than use escape/immunity abilities.

Hanzo

Arrow max velocity: 125m/s
Arrow max damage: 120
Storm arrows: 4

That extra 5 damage only substantially impacts 2 heroes: Reaper and Mei. It doesn’t affect Torb as his armour reduces a headshot to 245 damage. But able to insta-kill either of those close range characters is not balanced, it’s part of what’s holding them back from contention. Primary + storm arrows would now do a total of 400 damage so can still frag Zarya/Sig/Sentry.

Reaper

Wraith Form: fly

The April 1 ExC was on the right track, this allowed Reaper to do something Tracer couldn’t do: vertical escape. Being able to escape to high ground is key to his survivability and hanging out on high ground he can drop in and use a high falling speed to quickly close within shotgun range. He could even deal with flying enemies by flying up above them and drop past them shooting at them.

Roadhog

Pellet damage: 6 (150 damage per shot)
Hook pull-in distance: 2m

Hook is the skill component of Hog’s kit, it should have the reward, not the right click spam.

Hog’s hook used to pull anyone hit by hook close enough to land all pellets of primary fire (2m) then it was pushed back that small-hitbox opponents would have too many pellets miss. The devs seem to have forgotten about this nerf to his combo and now they decide he’s not doing so well they up his damage instead of reverting the nerf they made years ago. They only slightly reverted it in 2020 (sept-26), they should have fully reverted it instead of buffing damage.

5 Likes
2

I quite like the Hanzo changes. I always see people saying his Storm arrow can nerfed for a primary buff. But I just think that’d make him too consistent. Making it so Mei Reaper Doom and Torb are more likely to survive after the tiniest bit of poke or no poke would be huge if they can get close to him. I think it’s a fair trade off.

The only issues I have would potentially be Bastion. Being able to transform into Sentry in 0.5s is really quick and it doesn’t just increase his damage but hide his critbox and give damage reduction. I think something might have to be nerfed to stop him just walking over to a spot, almost instantly transforming and deleting people. I think you’ve tried to do this with his spread but I’m not sure it’s sufficient.

And then McCree. I don’t like the flashbang nerf. The radius is big because it’s supposed to be an effective anti flank tool, without it’s radius it wouldn’t catch Genji’s and Doom’s in the air and would rarely catch these more mobile dps. I’d much prefer a FTH damage reduction so he isn’t tank busting and either a stun cooldown increase to compensate his 225hp or a reload revert so he has less uptime.

2 Likes
3

Half a second is a long time in overwatch.

A whole second is an eternity.

And that’s on top of the time to kill, the spread is still starting at the equivalent of 2m wide at only 20m. To help you visualise how bad that spread is, Hog’s primary fire at 7m is 2m wide.

It should be good as you’re making yourself a really easy target.

But it’s not close to instant deletion.

I’d like to expand on this reasoning, my problem is how the radius doesn’t matter with Tracer as her blink distance means she escapes the flashbang radius whether it’s 1m or 3m. She moves a fixed distance instantly.

This means Tracer has quite a favourable matchup with McCree.

Genji however is just outmatched, a 3m radius is just so large that deflect is too easily bypassed. McCree can actually aim at the ground and if close enough to Genji the 3m radius flash will pass through deflect and stun-cancel deflect.

It wouldn’t EASILY catch them, it would still be possible but McCree would really have to aim.
They couldn’t just aim roughly in their general direction and easily have a 6m wide hitbox intersect with their hitbox:

A 2m wide hitbox would be enough that a good McCree who has the skills to pay the bills can still counter flankers.

Even with 45 damage it wouldn’t be low enough due to the 25 damage of flashbang:

25 + 50 + 50 + 50 + 50 = 225 damage

25 + 45 + 45 + 45 + 45 = 205 damage

So ironically, lowering FtH damage wouldn’t help Genji, it would only help McCree more in mirror matchups.

it’s the same with the 250 damage threshold:

25 + 50 + 50 + 50 + 50 + 50 = 275 damage

25 + 45 + 45 + 45 + 45 + 45 = 250 damage

Same number of hits to kill.

4

That’s what Reaper needs, that “meme” buff was is redemtpion :pleading_face:

5

This makes much more sense

As for this I think it doesn’t quite work at 1m. 2m wide isn’t very big and flashbang travels a set distance. I think if you were to nerf the radius nerfing it to 2m radius would be far better.

I know because I don’t mind if it kills squishies. His FTH combo should kill squishies. The main issue is that it does over half a tanks health then he can right click again or roll and right click again to bust a tank. at 45 damage it makes 30 damage difference per use which adds up. (although not to as much as I thought)

it actually isn’t because when you stun there is 0.3s reovery. This means you have 0.5s to to fire your fth. With 0.13s recovery you can only fire 4 bullets, so 250hp heroes can survive and react. Or they can engage after McCree has fired a couple of bullets before engagine. I think it makes a quite a bit of difference in these match-ups.

6

No. We are not having this conversation again. Hog needs burst damage, not to be a hook bot only, but do damage outside of hook as well.

7

Why is 300 damage in 0.85 sec (the interval between each shot) not enough burst damage?

McCree’s right click deals 300 damage in 0.65 sec (the time from 1st to 6th shot) so it’s up there with the highest burst damage in the game. It’s definitely way more damage than Tracer which is 240 damage in 1.0sec.

Even with 6 damage pellets Hog can delete every barrier in the game with a single mag dump other than Rein’s barrier.

That is true (0.35 sec recovery to be precise) but there’s a slight wrinkle: the timer for the 0.35 sec recovery time begins the instant you throw flashbang but flashbang doesn’t instantly explode, it travels 7m and explodes THEN the 0.8 sec timer for stun starts.

So you have about 0.23 sec + 0.8 sec stun and 1.03 sec later the stun will have worn off.

The 0.35 sec recovery from flashbang then has 0.65 sec fire time, the 6th shot of fan the hammer is fired at exactly 1.00sec on the timer (assuming McCree holds down right click after throwing flash to shoot ASAP).

This is why TINY changes in flashbang stun duration have a huge impact.

0.23 sec is a VERY difficult reaction time and McCree can exploit how quick-melee animation looks almost identical to the beginning of the flashbang animation so you’re so easily baited into wasting ice-block/Wraith and having to cancel it and continue without a counter or wall/escape.

That itself has a cost you have to wait and McCree has really good reloading options of either a quick regular reload or a combat roll reload.

1 Like
8

I think McCree is just tricky. There’s so many routes to nerf him but none seem to cover all the issues people have with his kit because the issues seem to varied.
If anything I personally still want to see FTH and reload nerfed so he can’t bust tanks. And a cooldown increase on flash to keep it’s dive potential but leave his window of opportunity to be more open since he is harder to kill with 225hp.

1 Like
9

Bastion to sentry can be done midair shaving off animation wise, but not inversely. It does make sense, even if you don’t see it that way.

10

I actually like that NGL.

1 Like
11

Because this is hypothetical damage, not consistent.

McCree’s right click is much easier to land than Roadhog landing all pellets on the head.

12

Everyone has consistency problems including fan-the-hammer which in this ExC would have the same spread as Hog’s primary fire.

Hog wouldn’t have unfair consistency for the damage output.

Other tanks are more consistent like Winston’s primary but at the cost of damage.

This isn’t comparing headshot damage, this is bodyshot damage.

McCree’s right click cannot deal extra damage if bullets hit the head.

I didn’t even count how hog’s pellets that hit the head would do double damage.

And it’s not that hard for Hog’s right click to land almost all pellets as a headshot at just beyond 8m.

The animation is of course the same duration, it only shaves a bit of time off the travel time when moving from one location to another.

It’s like Widow’s jump scoping, she benefits from that with a 0.33 sec time to scope in, with a duration as long as 1.0 sec you get diminishing returns.

13

No, what made genji over the top was the spread and ult charge never being touched. Mainly the fast charging ult was the huge problem for june genji and the spread with his increased dps making it relatively more forgiving to instakill targets was far fetched.

Also…

Genji has been underperforming/underpowered for several months now. Why in the blue hell do we have to give compensation nerfs? A hero is blatantly struggling so why cant we just idk… just buff him?

They nerfed his ult charge a while ago while buffing his fire rate. Good idea they have going, but the trade off isnt fair yet. Just give him the flat out 29dmg shuriken and test it from there. it helps out some breakpoints while not allowing too many breakpoints like 30dmg shurikens.

14

Well the ult HAS now been touched and the spread has not been reverted but Genji is in a bad place.

Faster attack rate was the wrong buff, this is now the SECOND TIME they have tried just increasing Genji’s attack rate, they did nearly the exact same thing back in April of 2020.

If we then also implement higher damage shuriken with faster attack rate then history will TRULY be repeating itself, as we will be EXACTLY back to the state where Genji was unequivocally OP.

The one thing we haven’t tried is ONLY a damage increase.

He’s not struggling everywhere, he’s struggling only in the very highest ranks.

And it’s because he just cannot hit those key damage thresholds.

30 damage let’s him hit ALL the important damage thresholds without needing 100% accuracy.

No because it doesn’t help with Genji’s counters, he can’t hit those damage thresholds and when he DOES then suddenly that attack rate will be too fast.

15

I support McCree nerfs, the Bastion ones are a bit questionable… but obviously Bastion needs something. I’m in favor of trying it and seeing if it makes him viable without overtaking everything

Making it so Hanzo no longer one shots Mei and Reaper with primary is a good change IMO. I very much support this.

Reaper being able to fly like in the cinematic seems cool, I like that one.

And Hog… I don’t know what his hook pull in distance is, so I don’t feel like I’m qualified to make judgment on the hog suggestions.

I like all of these, at the very least to try and see how it goes

1 Like
16

I’d honestly nerf genji spread instead

Just so he doesn’t have an ez to spam shotgun

17

This won’t affect the most complained about type of Bastion where sentry just sets up in one place and won’t move no matter what and mows down a whole team.

I can give the full history:

2016 May to 2017 Feb
After being hit by hook and pulled in you’d be pulled in to 2m away from hog but this was when hog had 225 damage per shot but a much wider spread.

2017 Feb to 2020 Sept
The hook deposited a hooked target 3.5m in front of Hog, a significantly farther distance with Hog’s spread which is 1m wide at 3.5m, for most squishy heroes this means a lot of pellets inherently miss.

2020 Sept to now.
The distance slightly reduced from 3.5m to 3.0m which shows the distance can be changed but it was such a small half measure.

1 Like
18

That’s because the main issue people have with him is that he’s powerful. His design as a whole isn’t particularly an issue, it’s not like heroes like Doomfist or Hanzo where there’s an obvious output people dislike.

If McCree weren’t meta and wasn’t overtuned people would go back to tolerating him pretty quickly I’d imagine.

19

I actually like most of these.

I mean makes him better if you can land your shots while making him less spammy.

2 Likes
20

Fully support this one although I don’t see the appeal in nerfing his ammo, I don’t think it is so problematic, I find myself reloading often already, I feel like deflect is much more problematic to deal with as an opponent, maybe nerf it to 1.5s, just seems like a more meaningful nerf that will not just make him feel more clunky when playing.

Hard agree here, although I feel like 1m might be too small, it would require in-game testing, if it’s too small maybe change it to 1.5m or something.

Pretty good to be fair, in my opinion, I think that 0.66s may be a bit too fast, I feel like 0.75s would make a bit more sense, also I think that he needs some reduction to the delay with his healing, it just feels clunky, the more I play him the more I find it annoying, so many situations where I could have killed someone if it didn’t have such a long delay.

Yeah pretty good, although I don’t see the need to reduce the max damage of the arrows, I get that it helps Mei and Reaper, but it’s not like he hard counters them that they really need help against him, it would just feel weird to hit a headshot nad not get a kill, a bit like what happens with Torb now, I would honestly keep the damage the same by reduce the storm arrows count to 3 instead.

I think it would need some sort of limit, like 5m-7.5m max of vertical height maybe.

I guess this is fine, although I still think that hog needs something to make him more of a tank and less of a fat dps.

Overall those are really good changes, some very small issues I have with it, but I would much rather have it instead of what we have now.

2 Likes