I think it could be an interesting mechanic if sustained fire heroes interfered with mobility abilities and would give sustained DPS a reason to exist alongside burst. Since mobile heroes have the ability to engage on their terms, it creates a better play/counter-play dynamic as well as making positioning skill more important for both players.
So for example, if you are having a Soldier vs Soldier duel, and both of them area landing shots, neither is able to sprint away until the reload cycle. If Tracer engages Sombra, her blinks would be unavailable as long as Sombra is landing shots, but Sombra couldn’t translocate away if Tracer is hitting her either.
This actually buffs Sombra and Bastion a bit more than heroes like Soldier and Tracer due to the size of their magazines/fire rate (>3 seconds for Sombra and Bastion and <2.7 seconds for Soldier and Tracer). Given these are heroes that are historically weak, this works out well.
For Mei, Sym, and Zarya this could be an effective way to keep mobile players in range while rewarding good positioning for both players as mobile characters have the option to stay out of range, keep cover nearby, or juke. However, for Mei we need to be careful. We could actually rework Mei’s freeze gun to not slow at all until the freeze happens, then it functions as it always has without or simply have it be the exception to negating mobility since it already has a slow debuff.
If Lucio is wall-riding or Genji/Hanzo is wall-climbing, then getting hit with a stream of bullets could knock them off the wall… though I’d actually prefer for explosive type weapons to do this instead. For example, if Pharah or Soldier lands a rocket near a wall-riding or climbing hero, they should fall. If this were in place, I would not allow sustain fire to disable wall cling abilities.
Given Doomfist’s win-rate in GM, I’d say yes. We could definitely use a huge rebalancing regarding Shields and Mobility and Sustain/Burst heroes in general. This is simply a specific suggestion in one area to a global rebalance for 2/2/2.
Immobility on a hero is a pretty glaring weakness, team bunkering with endless health and shield sustain is the current solution to that weakness.
Bunker is the counter-play we’ve arrived at due to both Burst and Mobility being so strong. GOATS was the answer to the same question before 2/2/2 hit. We can nerf shields and sustain, but we need to address burst and mobility heroes dominating if we do.
Burst is currently preferred over sustained because of how strong barriers currently are and the amount of spike healing that’s going around now.
Once an opening pops up in either you really want to be able to apply as much damage as possible in that window before a barrier or burst healing is applied to save the target.
Sustained damage is more for applying pressure, but there’s a lot of tools/abilities out there currently that negates or greatly diminishes this effect and gives it little to no purpose.
Bunker came about when GOATS was taken away by RL 2/2/2. GOATS was the answer to the sniper meta (burst) as well as dive (mobility). Bunker allows you to survive mobility and burst due to being clumped together behind a wall of shields/damage mitigation, immortality, and bulk healing instead of being spread out which are easy targets for burst and mobility heroes.
I agree that it’s the reason against sniper meta. And if you haven’t noticed snipers don’t tend to move much unless they get rushed at close range by highly mobile heroes…
You might as well delete mobility. Also, there would be no counter to bunker because dive comp would be non-existent.
Soldier and Tracer are already weak so why nerf them more? Especially for Tracer because this change pretty much delete her from the game. A Tracer with no blinks is so easy to kill given that almost everything one shots her.
Doomfist is only dps hero that can reliably go through barriers. It’s not his fault. The main fault lies with Sigma and Orisa both having very good and reliable shield abilities.
Tracer is rewarded for managing her space and blinks to avoid fire, but this can make her pretty oppressive to deal with when a certain skill floor is reached. The same goes for Genji and Doomfist. All the hyper-mobile heroes need to not feel oppressive at the high end. They’re out of meta now, but are likely to see their time in the sun again.
Hopefully we can arrive at a state in the game where picking certain heroes aren’t automatically called “throw picks”. Hyper mobility, burst damage, and the issue of endless shields on top of endless healing is the cause of certain heroes being “throw picks”. These three things need addressed… but I believe the reliance on “bunker” tactics came about because of hyper-mobility and burst damage. So if we address those then we can nerf “bunker” tactics.
As long Orisa + Sigma remains meta, then bunker double shield comp remains meta. Soldier will never come back because of this meta.
Also there’s so many things to deal with dive heroes now. Knowing Dive is really hard to pull off even in higher levels, there’s no balance for the risk and reward ration for them.
Don’t worry, I’ve got issues with Sigma and Orisa too. I actually like playing Tracer, but I recognize that a high accuracy and being effective with blinks makes her infuriating to fight. I’ve literally had players simply stop moving and just let me kill them because they gave up trying to fight back.
I’d change ALL tank shields so that NONE are deployable. All shields MUST be carried by the tank, like Rein does. Orisa and Sigma still get the benefit of firing while shielding so it differentiates them from Rein. I’d allow Sigma a “cast” of the shield, but it would be in and back out in one motion as a VERY temporary block OR force him to be immobile for the duration of the cast.
There would be minimum damage or time-on-target thresholds for the effect to proc. But yes, Dva (currently very weak!) would have this as an advantage to her kit versus the likes of Rein and Sigma. It would give players a good reason to run Dva as a back-line protector instead of just a fat DPS or dive tank (with no dive meta).