So after enough games; and observations I’ve pretty much come to a couple of conclusions on what’s going on with Vendetta.
In short, Vendetta can rack up a lot of deaths, but still keep pace with the rest of the team’s damage totals, if not completely exceed them. It’s not unusual to see Vendetta with 10+ deaths, and still have 10k or more damage after 7 or 8 minutes.
Primarily, this is the result of Onslaught’s built-in Haste effect, and the area-effect damage inherent in Vendetta’s primary fire and Overhead Slash. 130 damage is unusual for any area-effect ability in the game (most of them are tied to cooldowns), and most abilities that do 130 damage are explosive with fall-off damage on the extreme ends.
This typically does not apply to certain ultimates, like Genji’s Dragonblade which cleaves for 110 damage per swing on a 6-second duration. Vendetta blows past this with 5 stacks of Onslaught, and goes even faster with 8 seconds and a 40% Haste effect via Relentless Perk. So the result is that she is ALWAYS doing Genji’s ultimate-level damage and cleaves while also having more effective health and speed than Genji would in Dragonblade form.
Moreover, Soaring Slice is on a 6-second cooldown comparatively to Genji’s Swiftstrike cooldown of 9 seconds (with a possible refresh on kills); it is much easier to close-the-gap with Soaring Slice than Swiftstrike, and Onslaught is also boosting her movement speed to 7 meters per second at maximum stacks. Just slightly slower than Soldier’s Sprint.
FWIW, Genji’s movement speed boost under Dragonblade is 30%, and matches up with Vendetta’s movement at 5 Onslaught stacks.
So when you’re observing Vendetta in play, you are literally seeing a permanent Dragonblade-form Genji. Only now, they can close the gap on you more frequently than Genji could, and they have ranged abilities with Projected Edge. Nanoboost Vendetta and you got something even stronger than Genji’s “Nanoblade”.
Put it simply, Vendetta’s balance is way off, and it doesn’t seem like she went through proper internal QA testing here.
Blizzard will probably bring in the balancing patch in two weeks, (Jan 6th); if not next week. And there’s likely to be a few changes coming in for Vendetta, and here’s where I think they’ll tackle.
- Onslaught stacks go from 5% to 3% per stack
- Overhead Strike no longer pierces through targets
- Soaring Slice cooldown increased from 6 to 8 seconds.
- Onslaught Perk Relentless stack percentage is reduced to 3% per stack (if not removed completely).
Outside that, damage reductions might be necessary. Overhead Strike cannot remain in its current form. Nor can she remain with that current Haste effect. Primary fire might need another damage reduction.
Whirlwind Dash is unclear. Upfront damage is usually better in Overwatch due to lethality demands, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to move the initial 80 damage towards her Perk, or increase the base cooldown; if not a direct damage reduction at the base level.
As is (and it shouldn’t be surprising) Vendetta’s numbers are way off from the typically tight damage-output balancing of Overwatch 2. She is so far out of tune, I’m seriously wondering how they allowed her to release like this. Maybe it had something to do with her former recovery timings; but I doubt it, as the numbers don’t really make sense with viewed in critical detail. She has no reload times, can cleave multiple targets for full damage, can critically hit multiple targets in one Overhead Strike, and she’s basically running around as Dragonblade-form Genji at all times.
I’m not sure how they overlooked this if she had been in development for a solid year; the numbers are completely out-of-tune.
