What's the worst change the balancing team made

There are SO many to choose from. I honestly wish I could ever land a job I can half-heartedly ‘care about’ and still not get fired or not paid.
I’m not saying balancing is easy. But I’m also not saying the current balancing team is doing a remotely good job either. And even that was an understatement.

What’s the worst change they’ve done?
In current season, giving the DPS passive -30% healing reduction makes no sense to me - not because -25% were fine, but because the passive overall makes no sense to me. Just nerf the problems individually, why go so far as to make the whole role suffer just so you don’t need to touch your favourites?
Now, the healing numbers constantly fluctuate, and supports with already weak healing got nerfed because… they couldn’t be bothered to nerf burst healing individually?
The balancing team makes it far too easy for themselves, and with that change, they’ve shown us they want to keep doing that. Generally, everything out of Season 9 should be reverted…

6 Likes

october 4th 2022

9 Likes

The season 9 changes.

Hp, dps passive and bullets.

Walk all of that back and then nerf supports properly hero by hero.

Joke is that ana’s healing through a 30% passive is 57hp per bullet.
It’s still higher than the 55 hps that mercy had before season 9.

And people said she needs to have higher healing due to being “skillful”. She’s still perfectly fine, impactful in the game with good abilities.
Ana and many other supports need good nerfs to either hps or ability numbers. Or less nerfs but to both hps and abilities.

16 Likes

Genji is still not nerfed, Ana anti is still untouched, snipers are still overtuned.

3 Likes

Season 9 and it isn’t close. Dps balance has never recovered.

12 Likes

The Sombra and Hog rework patch. That killed so much of my enthusiasm that I am surprised I am still around. I am truly a cockroach of epic proportions. They took out two of my characters in a single blow and made me hate playing against both of them. Such an egregious net negative. Only my Wakanda heritage has saved me from seeing the game from a different point of view…

4 Likes

I could say the october 2020 patch when they buffed brig bap cass for no reason, but I feel like that’s been overdone so I’m gonna go with the patches when they nerfed doom and sym during double shield.

I had already known the dev team was incompetent but soon as I saw them with my own two eyes, nerf two heroes that were literally only seeing playtime due to the double shield meta making everything else unplayable. I knew the game was cooked.

As for overwatch 2, easily season 9. It’s the hypocrisy with it, or ignorance? Not sure which word to use. This is the same dev team that in the dev blog about 5v5 vs 6v6, one of the things they listed as a negative with 6v6 was long drawn out fights (which was a problem they themselves created with all the sustain added, but they forgot to mention that ofc).

So tell me how it makes sense to then in 5v5, buff everyone’s health… so now the game is having sustain problems again where nothing dies unless it’s getting pounded with burst damage and one shots. The same dev team who said that, is the same one who decided to create MORE sustain problems. Which all this proves as that:

  1. Yes, they are actually incompetent.
  2. They learned absolutely nothing from the past game. Yet at the same time are somehow able to list that same problem of the last game???
7 Likes

Makes even less sense when they go and buff certain supports at the same time to counter the nerf (and certain tank healing abilities)

3 Likes

Incoherent. The word you’re looking for is incoherent.

We had been stuck in multiple high sustain seasons so instead of addressing the handful of problematic supports they changed the entire game.

They said burst was too high so increased health.

By doing so they nerfed the breakpoints of the least prevalent dps, projectiles, while leaving the worst burst offenders in hitscans unchanged.

They then increased bullet sizes, further buffing hitscans.

To counterbalance the increased health they then added a passive that disproportionately helps hitscans but barely exists for projectiles.

Totally incoherent.

12 Likes

Like I’ve always said, if overwatch has taught me one thing. If you want job security, work for the balancing department on a video game (or at least for overwatch). You can be as god awful at your job as you want to be and never get fired due to that inability to do your job.

The fact that they still haven’t realized that season 9 only made every single thing worse, is hilarious to me. No one can convince me that these people play their own game. No one can convince me that the blizzard dev team doesn’t just look at a stat sheet and balance based on that. No one can convince me that the overwatch dev team understands even the basic fundamentals to the game.

Because they’ve consistently proven that they don’t.

8 Likes

Made certain projectile heroes require onetricking to be viable.

Nothing killed hero variety more than S9.

8 Likes

Season 9 changes really ruined the game. Which was sad, cause I thought season 8 was pretty good.

5 Likes

Such as Genji. The only flexing a Genji player would do is to get off Genji once he faces one of his various counters. It’s not fair.

2 Likes

The entirety of season 9 if I was trying to be objective. For me personally though, I’ll never forgive the devs for how they gutted Sombra’s skill expression with that Virus rework.

2 Likes

I’m not a stellar Genji, so all it takes for me to switch off of him are stat checks. I wish it was Moira I would go up against!

Hanzo is terrible, but at least I can cut through all this HP and burst healing.

2 Likes

Hard to say every patch has random buffs to already OP heroes, I can’t remember the last patch when every change was good, it’s really random

Yes, everyone complains about each patch.
But the most deadly was Overwatch 2. It’s what drove away the most players.

4 Likes

Yar, if they just had the current balance iteration with OW1 instead of 6 months between patches it would have been so much better, instead of letting the game stagnate while working on PvE that still got canned in the end.

3 Likes

Considering how the game evolved, stagnation seems a better alternative.

I bought this game long ago.
I would not buy it nowadays.

1 Like

overwatch 2 5vs5 role passives bigger hitboxes hp increase perks

1 Like