By themselves, both characters are more or less balanced. What we need are easy reliable counters to this combo itself. We need options for tanks and supports who don’t have solid hitscan players to rely on. We need what Rammatra’s E was advertised as: something that grounds the two of them and forces them to play where other heroes have a chance of killing them. We need an ability that punishes heroes for staying so far away from other heroes’ effective range. We need an ability that punishes heroes for staying connected at the hip like they do.
Hypergravity Shot - Fires a hitscan shot that grounds the target, preventing them from vertical movement for a few seconds, and deals damage based on their height from the ground. If the target was already on the ground, slows the target for a couple seconds.
Detainment Field - After a brief delay, creates a spherical barrier around an enemy that rapidly loses health based on distance to the caster. The user’s location is revealed during the delay.
Agony Chains - After selecting an enemy, they are chained to the closest ally for 6 seconds. Both targets will take damage and be gradually slowed if they do not maintain distance from each other for the duration of the ability.
Just spitballing some ideas, but abilities like these would go a long way to shutting down Pharmercy’s dominance, without having to pray for good hitscan every game.
Nah, Pharah is totally not balanced with her ability to fly infinitely and with 0 damage falloff(even Widow has pretty strict falloff now, but not Pharah). It doesn’t mean she is broken, it’s just 95% of heroes can do anything to Pharah at all. Even at hitscans you can only kill her with perfect aim(3-4 shots in a row on Cass, sometimes even higher)). Heroes like Tracer, Genji and Reaper are basically forced to swap or just ignore Pharah. This is not a good balance.
You can’t remove her flight or her rockets without removing the character altogether. The characters who can’t shoot Pharah already can ignore her and focus her teammates, the problem is when Pharmercy comes in and becomes a flying raidboss that you can’t ignore. We need options to deal with that combo. The good news for you is that options that deal with that combo, tend to counter Pharah by herself too (in the case of two of my suggestions).
Pharah does need a tone down but the biggest problem is Mercy just pushes heroes past their break points. Unfortunately the Mercy mains are so vocal she’ll never be fixed
Nah, I agree with Swift. Pharah has the same big issue Widow has/had, she wants to exist outside of most of the cast’s range and the ones that can be a more direct threat only require a mild playstyle shift to be played around. Just play more around rooftops when they start running hitscans and you can probably still reap rewards.
I wouldn’t say she needs nerfs though, I’d go for a powershift, slower flying rockets, more mobility, some form of self recoverable hp, a light nerf to damage or potentially mag size, less airtime, lowered self damage, Barrage overhaul.
While your ideas definitely would work at least on paper, buffing Ravenous Vortex’s height would at least be a massive start (Blizz exaggerating abilities again), they’re treating the symptoms not the underlying issue. It’s adding Kiriko to keep Anti-Heals in check just shifted to keep Pharah and maybe Mercy and Echo in check. Continually adding x to keep y in check is an unhealthy gameplay development loop.
I respect your opinion, I just don’t personally see Pharah by herself being as toxic of a playstyle as something like Widow. Pharah is annoying as hell, but less oppressive than a Widow who could just constantly oneshot you from 300ft away on some maps. I’d be interested in hearing how Pharah players would feel about a rework that would have her tradeoff her constant airtime for other buffs to her kit, but I doubt they’d be receptive.
I’ll declare my bias now and say that I’ve enjoyed Ram a lot recently. Alright, here goes.
I think this to myself every time I’m on tank and I run into that combo. Even if we still win by pressuring the other support and forcing Mercy to choose between pocketing Pharah and having her team fold, it doesn’t feel great to not have many options as a tank to deal with Pharmercy directly. Not all of us want to play D.Va and even if we did, have you ever run across a Zarya plus Pharmercy? I have little playtime on D.Va and my noob butt would have a hard time making that work.
The trouble as I see it is for buffing Vortex is that as far as I can tell, Ram is actually regarded as being seriously good right now. I’m going to guess that they have little interest in making him stronger still.
But… maybe… maybe they could do something along the lines of making Vortex placeable (instead of a grenade) and have no height limit, inflicting a new Grounded debuff that prevents jumping or flight for X seconds even if they do leave the zone, reducing Nemesis run speed somewhat, and bumping up the cost of ult to Grav/Flux levels? Would that be a reasonable trade? If not, then what else would need to change?
Yep. Exactly this. We’re starved for options that can actually do anything about this combo. D. Va helps, but she doesn’t do nearly enough. She’s just the only tank with a hope of touching them.
And yes, Rammatra is probably the strongest tank in the game right now. I doubt anyone else would be effected by vortex’s range being extended, but I don’t see them buffing him anytime soon without some rebalancing. It’s still unreliable to use it against Pharmercy because of how hard it is to actually get them to fly into it, sadly.
Honestly od say pharah with a pocket is much worse than widow, widow st leaat has to hit her shots, pharah just spams chokes and random places then gets kills
That’s why I said “Pharah by herself”, and why I’m advocating for abilities that specifically would effect Pharmercy more than a Pharah without a Mercy pocket. Pharah by herself is annoying but manageable. Pharmercy is one of the most easy value oppressive combos in the game that requires your team to put in a lot more effort to shut it down. We need some simple “don’t play Pharmercy” counterplay in the game for tanks/supports.
Why can’t you guys handle unique mechanics? I see so many of you guys begging for the game to have less individuality, and more homogeny, but why? Would you rather every character was a Soldier 76 clone?