in low elos, its a viable strat tho. people just go about their day being knocked around by the ball, while he is just there spinning and getting free stall value and ult charge. But high elo changes nothing because as you said, by his 3rd spin hes dead. It tackles the issue in low elo where people dont co-ordinate to focus him but changes nothing in high elo. So where’s the issue?
That’s why I don’t understand why people are against the change.
If cass/cree was a support, the anwser vs ball would probably be: is he supposed to just roll over and die? He needs to be able to defend himself and have a chance at fighting back.
It basically kills spin to win, which is fine imo.
What I’m not fine with is that it also gets rid of preemptive uses of grapple, like when you grapple, and wait for an enemy to peek.
It also means that if you fall of the map, and grapple, you’re basically screwed.
Also, you can’t grapple up on a high point, and then drop on the enemies when they walk through.
Yeah, it gets rid of spin2win, but it also gets rid of many other things that aren’t problems about ball.
Yes, it does the job, but it could’ve been done so much better.
One situation is, for example, first point Anubis. You can grapple the bridge, swing under it, and the momentum carries you in a circle that allows you to boop players standing on the high ground. It’s not as effective as it used to be when they nerfed his boop range, but it DOES cause mass disruption and can split bunched up teams. You may say “You won’t need it for six seconds!” Maybe not. But gaining ult charge for those rare instances where you swing more than six seconds is now gone.
I don’t think in general removing movement ability from a character that directly does damage, gains ult charge, and gets maximum mobility from using the ability is good balance. Take away any other high mobility character’s ability to move freely and it’s understood that that’s a major nerf. Same thing applies here, only difference is that Hammond is a tank and it’s “unfun” to deal with spin2win, which ain’t that strong anyways.
It especially doesn’t feel good being a nerf to a non-Rein tank since most elos punish you for not playing Rein. I don’t want to live in Rein jail, and every nerf to a non-Rein tank just solidifies his status as a must pick in low ranks.
Balance wise not a big deal for high level. But it removes an aspect of fun. Blizzard should stop removing fun from their game.
Ball main here.
I don’t dislike this particular nerf.
What is really bad is that the hero has been nerfed multiple times (5 times last year and now this) without a decent compensation buff besides instant shields cast (also nerfing shields HP), his knockback is 
, Lucio, Pharah, Brig have better boops than Ball, and his spawn rollouts are non existent.
This change was not needed at the moment (I could have seen it happen in OW2 since supposedly they’re removing CC for non tank heroes but Ana magically keeps her sleep) and they should revert grapple cooldown on respawn to at least let the hero “touch the point” which was part of his niche, now totally non existent, because low skilled players can’t hit a giant ball with one of the multiple +10 CC heroes to stun or screw up ball’s movement, a literal giant ball hitbox running on a predictable circle.
Also, there’s no visual cue or resource meter to how much time the grapple can be active, which is counter intuitive.
What really annoys most tank players complaining about this patch is that they pushed through completely unnecessary damage buffs to DPS heroes that were already strong, while other heroes are like Reaper and tanks will still explode.
Rein’s buff will do more damage to the tanking role in general because, duh, more damage to instantly explode, instead of a healthy buff, which could’ve easily been done by buffing shatter stun duration to 3 seconds.
So ball has been nerfed due to “stalling”, but then, where’s nerfs to heroes like Mei, Dva, Lucio for stalling? None, because they’re not needed at all.
And for getting out of spawn faster? Why does Lucio keep his speedboost whithout a cooldown, or Tracer blinks, and so on? It’s just completely silly.
They aren’t. They’re a very rightful nerf to the terribly - designed, low skill high reward Spin to Win play style.
I do agree that the Spawn grapple duration nerf could had been reverted as compensation, but this buff was absolutely necessary.
Also, just an observation: I’ve come across a few Hammond mains that (of course) bash the changes, because only a very small portion of Hammond payers play that way… Well, if that’s the case, then why the hell do you care if this nerf is so minor?
Infinite spin made the difference between bad and good Ball players. The more they spun the more predictable they became. Now bad players get away scot free
HAS NO INDICATOR WHEN IT BREAKS
Because this change is what Blizzard has been doing for the past year or so. Instead of saying “get good” they went “oh okay we’ll fix that for you”. And those who are bad at the game remain bad while high-skilled players get another spit in the face. TTK being as low is the best example of it.
because people who don’t actually play the game complain about it being a possibility and blizzard as a company prefers to cover whatever makes people unhappy
Im more upset it was a Nerf to the fun part of his kit than the actual strong part of his kit
The community complains when the devs make the majority of their changes around high-tier gameplay but when they serve a change made just for lower levels on a silver platter they reject it because it’s a tank nerf despite the fact that it’s not going to impact how good he is in the slightest, it’s just to make his stall less annoying.
Anything that solidifies the iron grip of Rein on the majority of ladder is bad.
Nice… now cheap stall tactics is gone from ball repertoire. Glad the devs still has the common sense to apply this change.
Catering to bad ball players so they could win using cheap method is even worse justification.
Yep. 6 seconds is quite long before it detaches. Only bad ball players will feel he is gutted.
I see nothing wrong with this change. When I next play OW and do some quickplay Lijiang Tower (garden/control centre) won’t have my ball spinning on the point instead of helping us lmao
Ball 6 seconds? ㅋㅋ.
Crazy Overwatch.
A competitive minded high ranked player is able to deal with any change in the game to stay at the top.
Because Spin to Win can be so easily countered anyways, so why take away yet ANOTHER ability???
Secondly…a Doomfist or Lucio, and even Pharah can hover on rooftops to set up a play. Ball can no longer pre setup a grapple to make a play or to stay and scout on high ground.
LOOLOLOOLOLOLOL, the person who has no record of playing ball on their account is giving a very specific opinion of his/hers. Tell us more please.
dude, look at recent Yeatle videos on Noobhunter and see a top 500 player being hard limited on his playstyle due to the recent change. SPIN TO WIN IS THE LEAST USEFUL USE OF GRAPPLE!!!