Doesn’t it increase the complexity of balancing an already complex game 1,000,000x?
I can kind of understand giving tanks, AND ONLY TANKS, a passive since they lost the most in the switch to Overwatch 2, but WTF does Moira get passive HP regen, on TOP of her lifesteal, and why does her immunity not effect when the passive kicks in? Fade should, at a minimum, pause the passive effect CD.
And take DPS. Why does Soldier, a hitscan that can pump out a dozen bullets in a second, apply the same debuff with a single hit, that a Hanzo or Venture dish out, at a fraction of the fire rate? How is that fair or balanced?
All other supports but mercy and zen have a self heal on cooldown, the don’t need a regen passive. Mercy now has her sympathetic recovery, so she doesn’t need the regen passive either anymore.
The dps passive reeled in the op burst heals of moira, ana, bap and kiri. But at the same time it made the supports with avarage healing suffer.
Because these devs often don’t know what they’re doing.
When the devs’ conclusion after seeing how the support passive impacts different heroes vastly differently is that role passives are great and they should implement another role passive, the only conclusion left is that they really, really don’t know what they’re doing.
I assume they’re throwing at the wall to see what sticks. I honestly think that’s an okay-approach in general. The problem is they don’t clean the piles that landed on the floor.
I’m not defending passives here, but I don’t think the example of Moira is a great one. If she’s lifestealing, she’s in combat and liable to take one (1) point of damage to stop the regen. If she’s out of combat self-regenning, she’s not benefiting from lifesteal and not fully contributing to the fight. She also pays a price for her survivability - she brings no utility to the table.
A quick aside before I say anything about the topic. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say Moira brings no utility to the table. Consistent damage helps kill opponents, and a dead opponent is providing no value to their team. There’s also her ability to pressure dive and harasser heroes like Tracer, Sombra, and Genji. High survivability relative to other supports has value when it’s good, as well. These may not be considered “utility” to the average member of the community, but OW is a shooter and thus its various aspects need to be evaluated under that lens.
Anyway, about passives. With OW being a shooter and the devs actively moving away from healbotting as a viable strategy, this means supports have to have some reasonable ability to, y’know, shoot people. And they can’t be wimpy pistoleers, they need decently strong damage dealing capability. However, since supports also provide immense value outside doing damage, this creates a situation where the dps would need to have drastically higher damage than a support. But since that’s not what the devs nor support players want, they needed to find a way to make dps stand out without just having them dish out insane numbers. In case you didn’t know, back before role lock was a thing high level players discovered that it was almost never optimal to bring dps in place of supports and tanks. And while role lock solved the issue of people just picking three tanks and three supports, it didn’t actually do anything to make dps less bad compared to the rest of the cast. So eventually, we got passives to help separate the roles into, well, roles. You could argue that the thing that separates dps from supports is that dps have burst damage abilities (afterall, that’s how dps were meant to cut through healing in the past), but that would restrict game design in a way that prevents supports from having burst damage abilities and dps from having no burst damage (see the struggles of Symmetra). The gist is, we got what we got because otherwise most dps would just be supports without support abilities and healing.
Utility’s a loose catch-all phrase for all the miscellaneous stuff that isn’t direct damage or healing. Her damage isn’t utility, it’s simply damage, which is a base part of any kit. Passing off her damage as utility renders the phrase meaningless.
That Genji or D.Va that survived because there wasn’t a Moira to provide that little bit of damage through deflect/matrix, that Tracer or Sombra having free reign over your backline, the opposing backline having zero pressure applied to it. It’s not some ult-cancelling ability, but when you examine them with the mindset that Moira is in a shooter it becomes utility. The ultimate utility is winning, afterall.
Calling damage-dealing “utility” defeats the very point of the phrase because it’s a catch-all term for everything that isn’t basic damage and healing. Bap provides utility through immortaility and his ult. He does not provide utility through his left click burst rifle or his right click healing greandes. Those are invaluable, but they are simply his damage and healing.
No, it’s not. That’s not what the phrase is used for.
If you make utility mean anything you want it to, the phrase means nothing at all.
They added the passive concept to help differentiate Overwatch 2 from Overwatch. It was a neat idea, but they still haven’t figured out that different characters in the same role need different passives because they play differently. There really needs to be subcategories in each role with different passives.
The ability to bypass deflect/matrix type abilities is succ’s utility, not its damage output. You’d otherwise do zero damage. And since OW is a shooter, confirming kills is the second most important thing in the game after fulfilling the win condition. The option to dive the opposing backline is utility. Being able to suppress high-mobility harassers is utility. Having these options is the utility. You can’t blindly apply mmo logic to a shooter.
No, that’s just damage dealing and/or playstyles. Utility would be something like speed boost or cleanse or antihealing. The ability for Lucio to dive a backline isn’t utility, it’s a playstyle. Lucio speed song, on the other hand, is utility. It’s in that pile of miscellenous stuff that provides value without being standard damage or healing. Lucio’s RMB is a damage dealing ability that also provides utility through the boop, but the easy damage isn’t part of the utility.
When people talk about Magic Missiles (a purely damaging spell) in DnD, they often mention its utility in the context of its ability to reliably finish off low-health targets due to its perfect accuracy and its ability to interrupt concentration with the combination of its aforementioned perfect accuracy and the fact that it hits multiple times, causing multiple concentration checks for just one action. Just because something doesn’t wear its utility on its sleeve doesn’t mean it doesn’t have utility.
If you say so, but I’ve never seen anyone use “utility” in gaming as anything other than a convenient term to describe non-standard elements of a character’s kit that are still important. Lifeweaver’s healing is reliable and long ranged, but those are merely attributes of his healing and not utility. His utility lies in the likes of life grip, platform, and tree.
LW’s healing doesn’t functionally do anything different compared to other supports. Moira’s succ is currently the only thing from the support slot that can ignore matrix/deflect, and is likely going to remain the only support primary that combines that with generous aiming requirements. One could say there’s utility in that.
at the wall to see what sticks. I honestly think that’s an okay-approach in general. The problem is they don’t clean the piles that landed on the floor.