This is an off the cuff thought process I’ve had for a while and I’m not quite technical enough to go into the deep details and numbers on it.
However as food for thought for devs and the community alike, I raise you this topic.
Some of the issues with the with a lot of the meta heroes at the moment, especially some of the more later hero releases (even though thats been years now), is that some heroes have multiple sources of ult generation that stack on top of each other, meaning their ult generation is insane.
The worst culprit for this is Baptiste, especially the launch version of Bap, not so much these days but it’s still the case.
In a composition like brawl, you can pretty much assume that after a first fight, the Baptiste on either side should have from 80% to full ultimate. In circumstantial situations this can happen on other heroes like Rein, however the Rein would have to do considerable more DPS to achieve that type of ult charge, without costing his own life or the teams, where as Bap does three things.
Shoots both sides of his weapon and amps heals. This provides 3 sources of ult generation in one go.
Echo is the same for this, you can land all stickies on a tank for example and shoot that tank. The initial sticky damage, the firing damage and the bubble explosion provide three instances of ult generation at the same time.
Moira was similar, she was heavily nerfed however and with recent patches she’s sort of been given some of this power back. The ability to throw an orb that passively gains ult charge on top of damage and healing interchangably meant on release she generated ult at insane rates. Currently, she’s in a good spot though.
Compare this to the other release supports, Zen - Lucio - Mercy who generally have a slightly harder time generating ultimates.
Zen needs to maintain good positioning, LOS of the team whilst provising healing and damage without dying.
Lucio only gains ult charge for healing and damage, however most people run Lucio for speed. Otherwise you would run any other support. He gains nothing for speeding except for ‘hopefully’ enabling the team to aggress on the enemies hard.
Mercy does gain a decent amount of ult charge, however this is generally isolated to one single target, like Zen.
Compare this to Bap and Moira who heal multiple people at once and are able to gain ult much faster. Not to mention generally the healing is the more consistent way of gaining ult over the damage boosting as that tends to rely on your team landing shots which again, you would rather run something else for most comps.
Brig also stacks damage with two other sources of HOT with pack and inspire. She generally has been nerfed a lot though and in a good place in regards to building Rally.
Ana I feel is fine personally, however she can sometimes feel a little more of a weaker choice, when you factor in immortality field. With her healing (outside of nade) generally being single target focus but more than other heroes, she fits into a comfortable middle ground for me.
This isn’t to remove the clear utlity that supports provide other than mass healing, however .
My suggestion and feedback to the devs and community is this:
Generally to gain some form of consistency amongst heroes and remove the reliance on building fast ultimate charges in OW, making it extremely ult dependant.
We should either have some form of soft cap on ult charge generation of multiple sources. Including other abilities such as Orisa ult, combined with other damage boosting. As damage = ult charge and all damage boosting stacks in OW.
OR
We address the specific troublesome heroes and make adjustments to some numbers. For example, if we remove ult charge from the initial impact of stickies then Echo will build ult less frequently but also will reward more accurate sticky placement. You can keep the ticking sounds as that’s a feel good element that provides a mental reward.
Baptiste is harder to do for me, it would require more numbers tweaking. Unless we remove the ability to hold down damage and healing together, although more niche in scenarios.
Anyway, this is my tired rambling after discussions with friends.
Wondered what people thought.
Cheers!