Hi folks,
Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences with the recent Experimental Card. Your constructive feedback was helpful in communicating concerns to the Hero Balance and Design folks. We’re going to take that feedback, process it, and will try out some additional changes in a future update.
In the interest of transparency, below you’ll find the topline executive summary that we sent to both the Hero Balance and Design team, and Team 4 leadership (along with a much more detailed report that they can dig into for additional details). Please note: we’re sharing this summary as it was presented to T4, which removes hyperbole and personal biases as much as possible
- Feedback from Tank players has been highly critical of this Experimental Card. General sentiment is that the increase in damage for Torb, Cassidy, and especially Junkrat are highly detrimental to their play experience with some pointing to this as further evidence of tanks being low in priority for the dev team.
- There is broad consensus among early feedback that the buffs to Junkrat are too strong in this Experimental card. Experienced Junkrat players have stated that “we significantly lowered his skill ceiling, making him more rewarding to Less-experienced players."
- Multiple forum threads and various subreddit posts mention that Cassidy feels too strong now than he can use Combat Roll to evade abilities like Doomfist’s Upcut and Wrecking Ball’s Piledriver.
- Early general feedback around the Moira Biotic Orb change is positive, with some minor concern over loss of skill-expression due to the decreased velocity of the Orb speed.
- The community team has noticed a trend of confusion as to the purpose of the Experimental Card. We will be looking for opportunities to clarify the purpose of ExC’s with the broader community, with a goal of creating a clear understanding among players.
Your continued constructive conversation continues to be the fuel that drives these reports. Thanks for participating in the various discussions last week.
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Much appreciated! Keep up the good work.
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If cree should rotate his camera intensely, why can’t ball or doom do the same during their abilities which is basically cc? They both have a huge advantage scripted in MOBA mechanics and there is no individual counterplay. Ball and doom have too much burst damage and self-sustain to consider cree counterplay in experimental as a problem. Either reduce cc or let cree be at least some sort of a counter of uncounterable stuff like wb and df. The ball is a hitscan tank btw, so I see no problem something is escaping his PD, lead your shots, use aiming skills better as BAll, same as the cree is forced to do vs doom. You can’t miss head or you die, and you need to hit 2 in a row and you are ccd. The amount of effort is needed to do PD or doom stuff compared to aim is irrelevant. Aiming as a mechanic is always harder than using MOBA elements, cause MOBA is consistent.
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The madmen actually put this in an official summary.
Cassidy also has a stun the size of the sun and a secondary fire that you cant miss. he already has a pretty good match up against WB and Doom, mid air roll made him outright superior against both
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This is the update we needed, thank you so much for this post
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This is so reassuring. Yall had a great Reddit AMA and it felt like the Devs and the community were getting closer to being on the same page… but this recent Experimental Card really tore all that newfound understanding apart.
I’m really glad to hear that feedback is being communicated to the rest of the Devs in some way, thankyou.
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Thank you very much for sharing this. It actually means a lot.
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" * There is broad consensus among early feedback that the buffs to Junkrat are too strong in this Experimental card. Experienced Junkrat players have stated that “we significantly lowered his skill ceiling, making him more rewarding to Less-experienced players."
ehhhhh I dont know about that take, still on the side of this only made junk better on junk maps, and its absolutely silly to say it raised his skill floor imo.
this patch was a little bleh, cole for sure didnt need anything, other then that I was ok with everything else.
You did a great job summarizing the community’s sentiments about different changes to heroes. It’s refreshing to see it written out like this.
I suspect this is due to a general lack of changes from experimental to live. The community largely feels ignored when changes that have been received negatively went through with little or no changes. I understand that sometimes it’s necessary though.
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Finally some actual communication. Keep it up please
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So did none of the changes go through? Good.
Now remove Baps lamp and make the game fun for everyone again! The ability is busted and broken beyond reason, please understand this.
Edit: 500 posts ayy
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Oh my god I love this style of post, thank you for this information!
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Well that is just false. They nerfed his splash damage and buffed his direct hit right? Which means junk rat players who can land direct hits will get more value. I would assume “experienced junk players” would be able to land more direct hits, or are they just gods of spam?
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From what I’ve seen andy has been doing a really good job explaining intent in general. Communication and updates are good but those are just community notes, they won’t necessarily drive developer decisions.
Thank you for this! It’s a quite good summary of the posts. I am glad to hear that the exc changes will be iterated on
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Oh wow! Im amazed that you got all the feedback this time
Good job
Really like seeing this summarized feedback - lets the community know the devs are listening.
One criticism not related to the changes themselves is they seem like odd priorities given the other issues with the game, notably:
- Bap being a “must pick” (today’s stream Samito showed the leaderboard for support players… Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap all the way down) - Immortal Field is still way too strong.
- Hog feeling unpunishable due to breather
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I like the fact that you mentioned what you told the devs our thoughts were on the experimental in this post. I hope this community gets the chance to provide useful feedback in future experimental cards in hopes of making OW fun. I hope you continue to provide updates like this on future experimental cards as well.