Disclaimer I admit this is a hot take even for me who 60% of his post are bait. I will argue but I will not say that I am correct.
The purpose of this post is to ask the question, “if a hero has a high win rate, are they still balanced?”.
On to the post;
Violet is I believe seen to be the best player of all time, at the least he is seen as a great support player.
After brigs massive nerfs in ow1, Violet showed an entirely new playstyle in standing back and whip shotting everything.
I argue that whip shotting is not op, which also means that I argue that brigs high win rate as played by Violet was not op.
Ahh yeah I thought this would be a longer post but maybe not.
Thanks.
Generally, high win rate + high pick rate are problematic. It shows a hero is not only success winning games, but they are doing it on a large scale.
Heroes which are seldom pick, but have a high win rate are often due to a counterpick effect where they are specialized to be good in certain situations. When those situations aren’t present, they aren’t picked.
Brig is in a good state where you have the option to deal with divey or highly aggressive heroes in limited doses. You can swap to her on occasion. However, has a clear weakness in our current spammy environment unless people swap off spam to go a little bit more divey.
As played in early ow, as most players who played her obviously had no Shame(even though she was fun) developed a frontline playstyle.
A frontline mini tank with mini tank HP pool and most importantly a shield was free lunch for symmetra, but obviously the defensive dps in ow1 had massive bias in the community against playing them.
You can still do the same thing with Brigitte, but the format has changed slightly. Brig has gained new found mobility and self reliance upon gaining passive regen and 5sec double length shield bash.
Using shield bash purely for mobility is no longer as penalizing due to the -2sec and its more viable from double distance. The combination of whip shot + 180 shield bash away is difficult to punish provided your shield bash distance is to a near by corner. The idea is that the damage you inflict, the knockback you get, the distance you get, and the inspire you proc generates is good value.
Its much easier to off angle on brig fishing for whip shots due to the fast recovery of inspire, support passive, shield/whipshot/shield bash all taking <5seconds to fully recover. It takes a hero 4sec to walk ~20m the length of whipshot to even challenge you. Since you have shield, you can use that resource to distract enemies away from the center behind your tank on an offangle.
By the very nature of brig, you are a support. People want to kill you. They want to shoot at supports. Hey look me! However, provided you take the bulk of that on shield, land your whip shot getting inspire for heals, dmg, and such you can play a tank. Distracting, soaking up damage, and removing cooldowns from people to burn on shield. You can get a ton of value on Brig by offangling even though you arent’ killing anything. You just need to hit whip shots not die and you pretty much get to frontline in a way.
She wasn’t too overpowered just prior to her triple pack rework, but before and after that she could be a little silly. I like where she’s ended up, although I do miss the ability to give other people armour.
Heres an even hotter take. Launch brig was only op because of bugs. The armor stacking and bashing through shields were bugs. 1 repair pack on a mid sized cd and otherwise relying on frontlining to get inspire was not only balanced but borderline underpowered. Theres a reason she only saw play as a 3rd support and never in 2/2/2 but years of streamer rage have tainted peoples opinion and its pointless discussing it
Maybe im mistaken about that being a bug. It was long ago but I still stick by what I said. Get rid of rally armor stack and bash through shield and you have a support that can only be described as mid. Again she never saw play as a 2nd support, inly 3rd as goats
If you get the unmirrored rate for each map where people play that hero without switching then average that out you’ll get a winrate that will reflect hero balance but you’d still need to normalize that data somewhat with play time on those maps.
This is really out of context doesn’t show if brig is op.
Depends on the rest of brigs kit, only nothing is op but anything can be tweaked to change the overall balance of a hero.
I’d say brig is either balanced or underpowered right now her problem is she is good in her niche and any changes can’t make that any better because of how oppressive she is.
as a brig main, i see no issue with claiming brig isn’t OP in any circumstance.
brig isn’t a full tank… she -can- be a pointbreak if sym, moira, or bastion isn’t involved, but she absolutely is a full healer. half my issue trying to get out of low ranks is the skiddish tanks that won’t break points… so i tell the other healer to focus on me for a few seconds so i can survive being pointbreak…
no source, but i can confirm that they fixed it… i can’t hit rein or dva through their shield/matrix anymore…
my favorite era of playing brig… was so dissapointed when they just made her healthpacks regular healing and took away half of her natural armor…
but… she beats rein as long as she approches from the side, pretty much every time… if she gets 2 hits in before he sees her, she outheals his damage and wins that 1v1.