Hello! Another look at some of the biggest problems with Overwatch. Yesterday I took the time to write up on Brigitte-
Today I am looking at another one of the game’s most prevalent problems, Doomfist.
When Doomfist was released (on PTR) he was somewhat gamebreaking, with a Rocket Punch hitbox nearing the size of Orisa’s shield (and this isn’t even really an exaggeration). Nobody wanted to play against something with such a undefendable one shot ability, so the hitbox was reduced before Doomfist hit live. Doomfist on live, put simply, was a joke. He was an F tier hero without the appeal of cheese that Sym, Torb, and Bastion enable. So he couldn’t be played in serious comps or cheese comps. He was just downright useless, with more counters in the game than any other hero.
Doomfist remained in this crappy, throw pick state for the rest of 2017. Then, when Blizzard announced the removal of Hanzo’s Scatter Arrow, they also announced a plan to give balance changes to a number of F tier heroes, among them Hanzo (as just mentioned), Sym, Torb, Mei, Sombra, and Doomfist. The first round of buffs came to the latter three.
Mei got some bug fixes and Sombra got huge buffs to hack (which initiated a short lived Sombra meta, but that’s a story for another day). Doomfist’s change was re purposing his primary fire. The max non critical damage stayed at 66 but the number of pellets per shot was changed from 6 to 11, and the damage from 11 to 6. This was a minor change, but it made his primary more forgiving. Then, at the end of the same month, his primary recieved another buff, bringing the reload time per shot from 0.8 to 0.65, allowing him to do more overall DPS.
With this, and a number of bug fixes, Doomfist was able to play well as a sleeper pick during the Grav-Dragon meta. He remained in the same state, as an in and out character, until June 26, 2018, patch 1.25.
Doomfist
-The Best Defense
Shield gain increased to 35 from 30 for normal abilities
-Meteor Strike
Movement speed during ult increased from 150% to 200%
After this patch was when crap hit the fan. Doomfist now has a top 5 winrate with a higher pickrate than the other 4. A hero that used to be well designed because of a presence of counters, suddenly couldn’t be countered easily. Sombra, Widow, Tracer, and even Orisa struggle to take down experienced Doomfist players. Why is he in such an overtuned state now? And why did I find it necessary to give you a history lesson in Doomfist?
The problem- risk and reward.
Doomfist is a character designed around this concept, a character who had to get in the faces of the enemy to deal meaningful damage. He has the potential to dominate the enemy but if he misses abilities he will most likely feed. He is supposed to be a really high risk, really high reward hero.
When he first released, he was really high risk, medium at best reward hero. The OG Live Doomfist couldn’t get any work done without dying, and he would be lucky to get 1 to 2 picks when going in. He was a throw pick because he didn’t bring anything to his team, he just put them at a disadvantage each team fight most of the time.
The Doomfist February to June was the best state we will ever see for him- he was what he should be, high risk, high reward. The ability to deal damage with primary should he miss his abilities and his synergy with Zarya, who was a borderline must-pick at the time, combined with still being punished for overextending when things were on cooldown, made him a fun hero for those that played him while also making him a fair and careful matchup for his opponents.
The current Doomfist is medium risk, really high reward. Getting five more shields per ability doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is essentially why Doom becomes so unkillable, when he has an extra buffer before his team’s healing can come to him, bringing his health back up and letting him get off another round of his abilities, letting more healing come, making him ready for the next round, and so on. And the presence of extra movement speed in ult might not seem like a big deal, but it gives to Doomfist a chance to either go halfway across the map to a mega the enemy can’t fight him at or pick and choose targets, giving him not only an almost guranteed kill on certain heroes but more importantly, his biggest source of shields on his passive, letting him continue to wreak more havoc.
This is also a character, mind you, with a one shot ability- something that Blizzard said they were not a fan of when they gave Hog his sledgehammer- that is on a cooldown almost half of hook, with twice the hitbox of hook (probably more) and god knows how much more than Hanzo or Widow’s shots. The presence of the ability was fine because of how it could be jumped on when missed when Doomfist didn’t have so many “extra lives” because of his other abilities.
A Doomfist, unfocused, becomes a tool that clobbers the teams healers, makes the tanks unable to play the game, and forces the other DPS to focus their damage onto a single target.
A Doomfist focused, is someone that gets lots of heals, be it Ana, Zen, Moira, Brigitte, Zen, or Lucio, lives through the enemy focus and still gets meaningful picks and damage out.
And this has all come, not to mention, at the biggest buff of all- time. Bad Doomfists- yeah, they’re going to lose because they go in and feed due to their minimal knowledge of the hero. It is still possible that they get big picks with the forgiving ability that is rocket punch, but they’re neither going to be consistent nor be able to pick up the hero with no practice and soar to GM.
Good Doomfists, however, should know that as their character, they cannot be stopped. They have spent the time finding Doom’s high skill cap- and now can take full and utter advantage of it. They make sure to get pocketed, they get the worth of all their abilities, they never die, they team kill the enemy again and again following an ult, and it is their presence that wins the game. They screw their counters that used to be able to check Doomfist and make it so they don’t have to switch to less of a juggernaut. For good Doomfists, they have extremely high reward, really low risk. They have the problem that the juggernaut champions of LoL have- champs like Garen, Nasus, and Darius- who go in and kill without dying.
The reason that this post is titled the Rise and Fall of Doomfist is not because Doomfist was good and now he’s bad, I’d think if you read the post you would understand that’s clearly not what it’s about, but because Doomfist rose to relevance while still being a balanced pick in February 2018 but then became a much more powerful, ruthless and destructive pick in his current state. He rose as a balanced and fun member of the hero cast- and fell as something whose potential is utterly disgusting.
That is why Doomfist is such a problem. His current state skips the concept of risk and reward- one of the most important concepts of damage heroes in Overwatch. The announced nerfs for him on Surefour’s stream do not do what they need to do. I do appreciate being able to move while in Uppercut, that gives Doomfist less utter dominance over me during my air time, but his passive is still too powerful and it disrupts balance way too much.
Doomfist is a problem that needs to be solved.
Thank you.