I’ve actually heard the perfect response to this in an unrelated post.
The issues with snipers is that they completely erase a character from full health to zero, thus negating the ability for a healer to recover any damage whatsoever. This has no impact on how much healing any healer can do as it become irrelevant once a player goes from full health to zero.
In a game where 1/3 players are expected to recover missing damage the ability for one role to negate that from going from full to zero is the problem. One-shot kills has always been the problem in this game.
Have you ever checked how wide orb really is? You can miss Tracer by her entire character width and still land 120 damage at any range. Sym orb spam is unrivaled for denying corner peeking, they block vision and they hit around corners.
The first meta when Ana came out was Beyblade. Sure, then both of them got nerfed but having bionade indirectly buffed every AoE heal ingame giving everyone the false feeling of other AoE heals are broken. Bionade with pockets wasnt that broken but Ana-Lúcio, Ana-Bap and Ana-Brig were must pick combos in the past.
Hanzo surely needed rework for the consistency because of the Scatter but Storm Arrow was a bad idea. And why give a sniper wallhack?
Widow… When a DPS can maintain space better than a tank its really a big problem. And once again, why give a sniper wallhack?
Sustain couldnt prevent one shots though. Overheals did. But they decided that Sym and Brig are unhealthy for the game. I mean, if you want to delete overheals, delete the one shots as well. You took off the weight from one side of the balance. The other instantly took over.
And i say it again, Ashe was a bad idea for the game. Designing a character just because the design team liked her design. We’ve got Widow in a cowgirl cosplay. Scope, rifle, AoE damage over time E, mobility LShift. The ult is the only different thing and thank god its not a wallhack again.
We’ve just had a period where the support line-up was Ana and Mercy, with a bit of Zen sprinkled in. You seem A-OK with those characters. And yet we still saw snipers dominate.
So are you sure Moira, Bap and Brig are actually problems and it’s not that snipers are simply too good?
so if orb projectile size + aoe splash is supposed to compensate for sniper-like charge time (which it obvs doesn’t btw), explain why they’re mathematically unreasonably slow making them inherently unrealistic to land in most ranges (i.e. low effective range) while also holding a damage threshold of pharah rockets and junkrat bombs on them. Especially when the latter 2 have faster fire rates, pretty much the same aoe radius if not longer and even better projectile speed (pharah) to be aimed too.
it simply doesn’t add up. if a weapon is supposed to be spammed, you wouldn’t set a fire rate that’d make it terrible to spam with.
when it’s 1 shot per 1.25s and there’s >=25m between shots, you’re overselling the vision blocking and the “corner peek denying” massively. esp when you consider both pharah and junkrat projectiles:
pharah can be more aim and spammed more due to faster fire rate and faster projectiles which can cover a corner better.
pharah rockets have 0.5m longer aoe radius to splash damage around a corner better
pharah has better angles to deny the corner itself rather than just peeks
junkrat can rebound bombs around corners to just deny the corner itself rather than just denying peeks and can do so without LoS
junkrat has higher fire rate to cover a larger area at once for this esp when his bombs linger + have the same aoe radius
This is false. Symmetra’s orbs can be launched at a higher rate than Junkrat’s frags and Pharah’s rockets.
Spacial control and threatening space. Suppressive fire.
Junkrat suppression and spacial control differs from Symmetra’s in that Sentry also has Sentries to cover space. Junkrat has a trap and concussion mines which is a little more concentrated/targeted and this is where the similarity between Sentries and traps and mines can be compared.
Pharah is not an accurate comparison because Pharah operates in a completely different way than Symmetra.
This is incredibly disingenious comparisons on how abilities work. It’s like saying that Cyber-Agility of Genji has five different features, which is both untrue and not conducive to intelligent and rational discussion.
Ana’s Biotic Grenade has two features, it can heal and boost healing and it can do damage with a debuff. That’s it.
One of the problems with Ana’s Biotic Grenade is that the healing buff or debuff has too much value for such a low cooldown; and it, currently, being the only major counter effect to healing. Either Ana loses the ability to boost healing with Biotic Grenade or (more reasonable) Biotic Grenade’s healing debuff is removed and given to a new support. Given that every Support has some form of self-healing, it is reasonable for Ana to lose the healing debuff and maintain the healing buff as well the ability to self-heal. Value would be retained, partially, but the need to increase the cooldown wouldn’t need to happen.
Regardless, Ana isn’t in a position where she’s overtly concerning, yet. But as more Supports are introduced she’ll become more and more of a problem.
It is irrelevant. Not every hero gets an alternative fire, not every hero gets a passive, not every hero gets an “E” ability (see: Bastion).
Waiting for that quote from Blizzard that specifically states that they buffed her to keep up with Ana. Cause this isn’t proof.
They are not the only characters that can do this.
Any one-shot kill in Overwatch requires a headshot critical. Since everyone loves to use an inaccurate third-party site for measurements, we can see that Widowmaker has 18% critical hit rate with an average accuracy of 46%. That means less half of her shots are going to hit and less than half her shots are going to critically hit for a one-shot kill.
You’re looking at a 1 in 6 chance of a one-shot kill. That’s an incredibly low average for a sniper in an FPS game.
correction, they can die, but they it takes such a long string of perfect accuracy that healing is mostly negating to get that kill, giving them way more time to get extra peel from tanks or just kill the person attacking them in the first place
Even using your math, Widow’s Sniper charges in .75 seconds so even if she only ends up getting a one shot kill on 1/12 of those that’s still an instant kill ever 9 seconds While doing over half a non-tank character’s health another 5 times during that 9 second window. Meanwhile Mercy’s rez is on a 30 second cooldown and she heals at a rate of 50 per second so 450 healing compared to 600 damage plus an instant-kill in that time frame. And an skilled or lucky widow can land those head shots much more often than that. Of course there’s a lot more minutia than that to what all is going on. It’s not an issue of how often it can happen, it’s an issue of that it does happen. To paraphrase what a dev said in Warcraft Battlegrounds about a 5 minute cooldown ability: If there was an ability that instantly killed someone even if it was on a 30 day cool down it would still feel cheap every time you got killed by it.
So… we get to a meta where sustain is lower than in any other meta in Overwatch, and it’s dominated by snipers. Roll back time and look over the past few years all the way back in Dive, another fairly low-sustain comp, and we still had snipers overtaking sustain damage. In fact, if I think about the periods in which snipers weren’t flat out one of the best DPS options, they were sustain-heavy periods like GOATS (top DPS options were Sombra and Mei), Double Barrier (Mei, Reaper, Doomfist), and Triple Tank (Soldier, briefly Reaper for Beyblade). Meanwhile, in sustain-lite comps (Dive, Double Sniper, recent Hog meta), Widowmaker and other snipers have been very dominant. The only real exception is Dive 1.0, and Widowmaker was still on the up-and-up during that time (just not meta yet).
So, just from a casual examination of the historical correlation between levels of sustain and who is dominating the DPS roster, it seems like this whole argument that “snipers are only top dog because of sustain, and if you want them to go away, you have to nerf sustain” is abjectly false. Like, it’s quite nearly the opposite of that.
And, really, it’s probably that burst damage, especially from snipers, is simply too good compared to sustain regardless of healing. It’s like OP themself said–snipers take on little of the risk, but get “100x” the reward. Just my thought, but a hero who takes little risk really shouldn’t be getting a lot of reward, should they?
My biggest problem is that non sniper heroes often have to use their entire kit or play perfectly while taking risks to secure a kill.
Why bother playing heroes like Genji when Widow / Ashe can get kills from safe positions with a more reliable weapon (Because hitscan is just better than projectiles).
Like I play a lot of Echo, I basically have to use my whole kit to get kills.
In what universe is it not? No barriers, no DM, no strong AoE healing (or really much AoE healing at all). Mercy had a weaker Rez and Healing than she did in Dive, Ana’s healing is weaker at healing than any meta featuring her since she got nerfed post-Triple Tank. Perhaps it’d have been better to say “sustain is lower relative to damage than any other meta,” but it also happens to be objectively one of the, if not the, lowest sustain meta in the game’s history.
Even if you want to be pedantic and try to argue that “uhm acktchually Dive 1.0 was lower sustain,” it’s still one of the lowest and in no way undermines my point. But, even then, Dive 1.0 had Winston, better DM DVa, and doubled up defense ults with Lucio still providing decent healing (on par with Ana now), so it’s not exactly a home run argument.
Apparently, sustain DPS have a big disadvantage from the overall HPS directly. Their final DPS output is lowered from that. But the Burst heroes, especially one shotting heroes, have no disadvantage from that to kill an enemy. The balance details between DPS and HPS are neglected and there is only a coin flip to live or to die.
Burst damage itself is a big advantage even if they can’t kill a full HP enemy. Say, when an enemy can delete 80% of your full HP instantly, this is still far more threatening than sustain DPS, even if the DPS of burst heroes are lower.
Moreover, not only AoE healing is an issue. The problem is, healing is too easy. Easy healing causes too much stability that sustain DPS can’t pass through. Why should so many healing abilities be “automatic” or have bigger hitboxes?
The current OW is like healers can and should maintain nearly full HP of teams, but even if so, someone dies instantly. But I think a more healthy system is like, somewhat higher raw TTK overall, and as the combat continues, the overall team HP should be lower and lower(the lowering speed and the variance would be higher when the team is worse), and the snipers better shoot someone already has lower HP than shoot just anyone, and eventually someone dies. This is better for sustain DPS and for healers too, IMO. Worse for snipers, but they are still a real threat in this system.
Actually they were designed so that Tracer and Genji no longer slaughtered the entire backline because - as even Blizz admitted - they refused to nerf them since they are too popular.
Because healing inherently is reactive, which gives shooter first move. As you can’t heal damage, that wasn’t applied yet. You are expected to target supports first, so no healing would take place.
Widowmaker takes .3 seconds to scope in and .9 seconds to fully charge, and then .5 seconds after a shot recovery before charging up again. Thus, the time it takes for Widowmaker to make a fully charged shot is 1.4 seconds. This is consistent with all one-shot abilities like Rocket Punch, Hanzo’s fully-charged shots.
So, by looking at your numbers, you’re way off. Including Mercy’s numbers, you’re still off (Mercy now heals at 55 per second).
There are ways to create a loss or death that feels fair and then there are ways that death can feel unfair. One only needs to look carefully at how games do it. You make can a comparison between games like Dark Souls and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which one’s deaths feel fair in that game compared to the other?
The paraphrased quote above is a remark about how Blizzard’s game designers resigned themselves to not properly addressing how instant-death could feel cheap or how Blizzard would design or balance an ability built around that. Not every ability, perk, effect or bonus needs a specific balance or counter-weight.
