Why can't you just nerf Sigma's damage?

General Discussion
1

Instead of nerfing the tanking abilities of the tanks maybe you should try nerfing their damage.
Sigma’s barrier has been nerfed so many times and it changed nothing about him. And it won’t change anything this time. It only forces him even more to play like a DPS because he can’t protect his team anymore.

Same for hammond. He is a tank. He should be able to eat a lot of damage. Especially without a barrier. Why not nerfing the range of Piledriver instead? Again this 25 shields won’t change anything because he can do his job as good as before.

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2

Because they are trying to convert DPS players into Tank players.
And nerfing damage would be counter productive to that.

That said, I think the Sigma changes are dumb, and they should have focused on making DoubleBarrier as a whole vulnerable to Dive.

3

Being a big meat shield doesn’t entice anyone to pick up tanks you know. Why would someone choose to paint a target on their back in exchange for doing less damage?

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4

Maybe because sigma doesn’t actually do as much damage in regular situations as you seem to think, and most/all of his numerical damage comes from the 50%/maxhp damage his ultimate deals?

55 x 2 orbs x 0.6667 shots per second = 73 dps

I mean… Winston vs. a single target is the only tank that actually deals less damage per second.

…Even mercy does more dps with her pistol?

5

Wrecking Ball doesn’t take damage too well, even if he can hide his critical hit box.

It’s only 8 meters of range, that’s a shorter distance than Tracer’s effective range and he can only do it every 9 seconds.

Wrecking Ball’s damage is fairly low, overall. He’s more about disruption than he is about anything else.

That’s not a good argument.

Tanks need to be able to be threatening enough to attract attention, but it’s been fairly obvious that Sigma shreds most targets with one attack and covers an enormous amount of space with that same attack. He can still be threatening, but without the need to cover so much space or deal so much damage that it shreds more than half the health of most targets in the game.

It’s not damage over time - while a useful metric for averages - you don’t use this in a moment-to-moment game. The issue is 55x2 is up to 110 damage across 6 meters of space. That enormous amount of coverage for a Tank and more than 50% of the most of the roster’s health pool gone.

6

That’s a great argument.

Devs got 5-10 million people walking in the door with OW2.
In addition to the current playerbase.

If they don’t get a handle on queue times, they are going to lose a lot of players they otherwise would have kept.

And trying to appeal to RPG/MOBA players from a different game genre, isn’t going to fix queue times.

And those RPG/MOBA minded players could all quit the game, and it wouldn’t even begin to compare to the player loss of not addressing queue times.

7

No it doesn’t. That’s only direct impacts?

The most TOTAL splash damage he can do is 5 players x 30 damage x 2 x 0.667 = 200 dps

or 30 x 2 x 0.6667 = 40 dps per player

And in the same 1.5 seconds winston can do almost twice as much damage across an area the exact same size.

8

Thing is Sigma’s dmg isn’t even that good… Unless your enemy is all bunched together and you get a lot of splash dmg (which is mostly trash dmg that is easily healed) Sigma isn’t really doing much. Remember he has no dmg ability beyond 20m other than his rock, and struggles to hit things up close.

Most the DMG stat from sigma comes form his ultimate, doing half dmg of every thing you hit over inflates his numbers. Much like Zen’s Trans makes it look like Zen does a lot of healing. The shield change is pathetic…

They claim they want you to be more committed to shield placement but it’s still a very wonky shield to place. It doesn’t appear where you put it, it moves forward and you have to time it perfectly. Add to that it’s 700hp of trash that goes down in half a second.

The 3 seconds of recall (they say 2.5 but the timer says 3…) is so long you might as well let it get destroyed. The recharge time is about the same. It basically defeats the purpose of having a deployed barrier. With that 3 second CD it might as well been like Orisa’s barrier and be a normal ability on CD.

9

5 (heroes) x 30 damage = 150 damage + 55x2 = 260 damage.
5 x 9 = 45 damage + 55x2 = 155.

If Sigma is doing damage to six targets, in one shot. That’s how much damage he’ll do. That’s the range.

In the case of Winston;

1.5 seconds x 60 damage = 90 damage x 6 heroes = 540 damage.

Now here’s the clincher and why Winston gets a higher number:

Winston’s effective range is 6 meters.
Sigma’s effective range is 22 meters.

10

Because its not that good. It’s a lot of trash damage. Playing inside his AOE explosive range cranks his damage way down, but hitscan like playing literally at the perfect range for his primary to explode for EZ damage.

11

Nobody is saying Winston shouldn’t have a higher number.

This is completely discounting the fact that no one will ever hit 100% of hyperspheres, or even land perfectly placed 3 meter radius explosions.

But… nobody says Winston does “too much damage”.

Yet people say Sigma does “too much damage”.

And Winston does MORE damage than Sigma.

Do you see why this logic is faulty?

12

Winston does not deal more damage than Sigma. Sigma has way more range than him and more damage abilities overall.

It’s very easy to stay out of a 6 meters range.

I felt like most people are annoyed of hammond because of his CC. That’s why I was just taking this as an example.
And it’s a 8 meters radius around him so it covers a lot of space.

13

The risk isn’t justified.

Sigma gets a ton of defensive utility, from barriers to Kinetic Grasp, and a tremendous amount of disruption with Accretion and and Gravitic Flux. Additionally his coverage on his ricocheting basic fire puts a ton of pressure on opposing targets which makes it much easier to for Sigma’s team to clean them up, while maintain relative safety.

The barrier adjustments should make Sigma a bit more vulnerable, but this may be the wrong avenue to take, when Sigma’s damage and coverage continue to be incredibly powerful for him.

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14

Yeah, sure. Wrecking Ball is typically more disruptive than anything else, and it is difficult to pin him down. Piledriver is disruptive, but I don’t think that’s really the problem when it’s more like “we can’t catch him and punish him for it”. The changes to the shield should help, but I think the issue is more likely to be his speed and how incredibly fast he is.

15

Uh, Math?
So, yes. He does.

Reinhardt can do quite a bit more damage than either of them, by the way.

85 damage x 1.04 swings/second x 6 players = 531 damage per second

Let’s be specific since the real issue isn’t damage, it’s BURST DAMAGE, and RANGE.

The PROBLEM is that Sigma is the only tank who is capable of burst damage at any range beyond 10 meters.

If he wasn’t the only tank capable of RANGED BURST DAMAGE, it clearly wouldn’t be a numerical issue whatsoever.

The SOLUTION is not “nerf sigma’s damage” but to re-evaluate why every other tank is restricted to melee range or purely sustained single-target (i.e. useless vs. healing) damage.

16

LoL is an excessively large game with a huge fan base. OW just isn’t trying to appeal to them.

17

The shield changes are why I dropped Sigma in the first place, you think an even less fun shield is going to persuade dps? Nah.

18

I think Plat and below has a lot more poking battles than higher tiers, and that shooting constantly is better than sitting there like a statue with Rein.

For the record, I want stronger Sigma barriers, and to maintain his firepower.
But to make him diveable.

19

This is true, but that has nothing to do with how stupid these changes are to encourage dps players to play tank.

20

How? Nerfing the rock?