Tips for Hammond/WB players

General Discussion
1

After the newest patch the following has been affected (after much testing last night)

• Blender tech against tanks doesn’t work against Roadhog/Dva or Rein anymore due to their high healthpool and the new time limit on grapple

•Multi-rebound tech gets it rough

• Illios windmill swing on Well has much stricter timing, start it too early and you’ll be dropped by the windmill as it carries you so try and grab it higher (or use up more setup time to get to higher ground)

• No more rooftop hangs and some hiding spots in protruding geometry that required low, through-wall grapples are gone. Too many for me to find them all but some to note are in Anubis, Gibraltar, and Rialto

• No more chandelier Ball, don’t try and hang in high up ceilings for extended periods (this also means no chandelier ball in spawn)

• If you fall off/get booped off the map and catch yourself with the grappling hook, it’s possible you do not make it back because you can’t build up enough momentum to make it back up to the ledge in six seconds, depending on what angle you grapple in (which is most of them unless you get a diagonal one that gives you an arc)

• Be more reactive on boops, not being able to set up boops any more means you always need to correct your aim after grappling since you are grappling in the moment and not preemptively and can’t set up a comfortable trajectory beforehand, keep this in mind especially for uncomfortable boops such as the short one in Rialto or small high grounds so you don’t hit a wall. Much harder in general.

•Make use of consecutive wall jumps while stalling now that spinning is gone, it actually helps a lot to extend your lifetime a little bit. Also hold piledrive as much as humanly possible, since now you have a time limit before a Brig or Lucio boops you off the cart or objective and it’s easier to stop yourself with pd.

I’m sure there’s more tech that’s been affected but these are some things I’ve noticed. Good luck

21 Likes
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Woah who would’ve thought
More Hammond high skill precise tech getting gutted :0

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“tHiS onLy afFEcTs LoW ElO bAlLs”

~person that has never played ball ever

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yep thats why ball nerf is the worst change in the patch

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Oh don’t forget the RIP previous year’s techs.

  • When they nerfed double booping, they also removed drop booping and some rebounds.
  • Also piledrives don’t work anymore on low grounds.
  • Using enemies to jump over them into a minefield combo is now extremely hard.
  • Some rebounds are just not doable now.
  • And booping distance 25% nerf makes his boop even worse than Lucio, Brig and Pharah (it still blows my mind that a freaking flying hero keeps one of the most broken boops in the game)
  • Not to forget SPAWN ROLLOUTS. RIP SPAWN ROLLOUTS.
  • And with only 6 seconds of grapple, you have to be extremely precise for some rollouts too, or you will just feed.
  • Not to forget that now we can’t minefield specific corridors to attach mines to ceilings and kill jumping / flying heroes.
  • Shields were nerfed in exchange for an instant cast time… That we still don’t have on the freaking ultimate.
  • Last but not least… RIP Power Stance
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This kind of plays won’t be doable anymore, too

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I’d be ok with this nerf if it had a visual cue and they brought back spawn rollouts.
Other than that, probably the worst changes in this patch are Hanzo, Cass and Rein, extremely unhealthy for the game specially the tanking role will suffer even more.
Only good change Moira’s buff and still it doesn’t make her that much better anyways. It’s just a Moira fade jump tech on easy mode.

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Still can’t believe they did it. Just proves that nobody wants to counter in this game. Always gotta keep playing one hero the entire match. Can’t be bothered to go Reinhardt, Sigma, Roadhog, Orisa, Mcree, Brig, Ana, Lucio, Doomfist, Junkrat, Mei, Reaper, or god forbid Sombra.

So few counters to the funny spin.

5 Likes
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You know who has better boops than Wrecking Ball? Almost every hero with knockback abilities.

Pharah, Lucio, Brig, Doomfist, Winston when Ulting, Ashe Coach Gun, Reinhart charge knockback, DVA’s knockback, Whole Hog, Junkrat Mines.

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you taking the time to write all of this seems to be the way players should react to a change so kudos to you, that being said, what if the cooldown for grapple started when you hook successfully? (timer and cd would coincide so as soon as the line breaks you could grapple again, perhaps with a micro downtime) would having to re-grapple allow you to do accomplish a few more of these?

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While this wouldn’t reinstate most of the good old techniques… this WOULD introduce a bunch more chaotic AF ball playstyles. If you think spin to win was bad… imagine forever stickyball swinging in 8 different arcs all around the point.

So… while I would love it for the opportunities it offers… I don’t think they’d go for it.

1 Like
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well you wouldn’t be able to re grapple if you don’t go for the full timer, you’re still bound to cooldown, meaning, you hook somewhere, cd starts, you roll in and release in 1 second but you’re still on cooldown, you gotta wait 5 seconds still

but if you hook, roll for 6 seconds and get disconnected then you can hook again, possibly on the same spot or a different one which would make you spin in a different arc as you said… but let’s be honest here, how many spots can you grapple from to effectively stall? furthermore, can you even grapple successfully while moving at high speed? that’s a pretty high skill ceiling I think

if anything they could give ball an offset of 1 second, 6 seconds timer, 7 second cooldown or something like that. Not trying to be stubborn here just wondering how the path would look for ball if this was the solution they took, I definitely appreciate the feedback!