I’m sure that we’ve all seen the many complaints about hero balance here on the forums, but with the recent increase in complaints about Sombra who is statistically nowhere near OP I started to wonder if balance is really what people are frustrated with. Almost all of these heroes who are OP, but not statistically OP seem to fit into one of a few categories that people find “unfun”. I put together a list of things that seem to make people consider a hero unfun to play against. Feel free to add your own.
Getting killed by someone you didn’t know you were fighting
This applies to spam, snipers, and hyper mobile heroes. This is one of the big reasons people don’t like playing against snipers especially Hanzo who has nearly silent arrows that can make kills seem random. It also applies to flankers seemingly appearing from nowhere and spontaneously dealing massive damage. Bastion can also create this effect in some scenarios. This one got much worse when the falloff was drastically reduced for several heroes many patches ago. Usually this is described as a hero feeling random.
An ability directly removes all counterplay in a fight
This is the primary reason for complaints about abilities like Shield Bash, Flashbang, and Hack. Stuns directly remove all counterplay by actually preventing you from controlling your character. They’re typically part of a combo that leads to unavoidable death. Hack doesn’t lead to unavoidable death for every hero, but depending on the hero it effectively prevents them from participating in the fight until it wears off. EMP can also create uncounterable ult combos. Usually, people call these heroes unfun to play against, but still call it a balance issue instead of a design issue.
Passive survivability
This one isn’t always super obvious. Some of them like Reaper, Moira, Brig, and Doomfist clearly fit into this category with their damage mitigation passives, but this also effects Mercy and Tracer. The key frustration that comes from this one is that these heroes consistently erase your progress as you fight and can only be beat by dealing more damage than they can consistently mitigate.
Mercy doesn’t create this effect by winning fights herself, but she has the ability to apply it to anyone she wants at any time while her passive provides a similar effect for herself. Tracer mitigates damage by avoiding it and recalling removes all of the progress in a fight, creating the same effect. Bastion can also fit this, but it’s actually his passive subtly increasing his effective healing by 20% and his team taking advantage of it that creates the effect.
These heroes can feel unstoppable if either a player’s aim or character choice prevents them from dealing sufficient damage. This is typically what people are actually talking about when they refer to a hero as “low skill” in relation to hero balance. To clarify, the goal of balance is to make every hero equally effective in their own way. It has nothing to do with the effort required from the player to do so.
The only counterplay to a hero is not encountering them
This is another reason why people don’t like snipers and one of the frustrations with Earthshatter. The key to this one is that you can clearly see what the enemy is about to do, but there’s literally nothing you can do about it. Earthshatter going around the payload made this really common with Reinhardt. This happens with snipers when your team’s shield goes down. This was also what made Doomfist so frustrating when his abilities locked you in place until you reached the ground. This can also be part of the frustration related to stuns and plays a large part in the complaints about Genji’s ultimate. Generally these heroes are described as oppressive.
The interesting thing I noticed about all of these categories is that they all involve certain situations lacking counterplay, but aren’t necessarily related to balance at all. Even though some heroes not having counterplay for certain situations is frustrating it doesn’t mean that a hero is statistically OP. This is also how Zenyatta can be meta for the majority of the game’s existence, but not be considered OP by people.
He always takes atleast 2 shots to kill people by himself and applies the visual effects of his Orb of Discord to clearly indicate that Zenyatta is trying to attack you. None of his abilities prevent you from fighting back with everything you have. He only starts to regenerate his health if he’s been out of combat for a long time, so it shouldn’t start erasing your progress in the middle of a fight. His Orb of Harmony has negligible healing that can easily be dealt with. He also isn’t very mobile and his orbs are projectiles that can be dodged, so you aren’t guaranteed to die if you encounter him without anywhere else to go.
The point of this thread isn’t that fitting into one of these categories makes a hero OP, but instead that bad balance is blamed for a lot of things that aren’t actually related to balance. If we can recognize whether an issue is actually related to balance we can suggest changes that will actually fix the problem instead of questionable bandaid fixes like nerfing frustrating heroes until they become tolerable, because they aren’t picked anymore. Maybe then the developers will actually read what we post here.
tl;dr
Read the bold words in the post. When people complain about balance without the support of statistics they’re usually complaining about one of these things and not balance. Their complaints are still valid, but calling them a balance problem pressures the development team into making the wrong kinds of changes.