So I wanted to talk a little about this issue because it’s affected both paladins and overwatch and it’s not a trivial problem or the developers would have fixed it already.
In both overwatch and paladins, rapid fire weapons are currently bottom tier.
However, the main reason for this is that getting kills in a game with healing is about burst damage rather than damage per second.
having the burst to get a kill in a 1v1 with an enemy dps is more important than who dealt more damage in the last 3 duels total. In fact, the soldier/viktor (paladins) player may have actually had better aim and completely outperformed the sniper player in terms of aim, yet be completely destroyed because his damage is getting healed up.
Overbuff has the best soldier 76 player at 6% crit rate, so I will do my calculations base on that.
in paladins, at 6% head shot rate, viktor deals 1330 damage per second, meaning he kills the squishies in 1.65 seconds in paladins without grenade(can be lower for lower hp ones and a bit higher for some as well)
In overwatch at 6% headshot rate, soldier 76 gets 181dps and kills a 200 hp target in 1.1 sec without his rockets.
However, the reality is that both games have been dominated by long range instakill characters.
If you peek a corner and kill in .2 sec, continuous damage isn’t relevant, especially in a game with healing.
Both the overwatch and the paladins dev teams have tried to balance snipers by lowering their overall dps by giving them scope time, charge time, and the like.
However, the issue is that if you have already scoped and charged, your first shot is immediate.
Secondly, they balanced widow, hanzo, kinessa, and strix to be playable and fun for bad players. What do I mean by bad players you ask? I mean players that miss their first shot the majority of the time. Rather than giving them a significant lag time after missing a shot, their dps over time is still fine.
at 15% crit rate, widowmaker has 150 dps on average. Not shabby at all for a char that missed her first shot.
But what’s worse is that she can scope and preaim the first shot and basically have no charge time for it, this means that in .75 sec, she has the potential to deal 960 damage per second.
and that is why snipers are overpowered in both overwatch and paladins.
It’s not just an issue of snipers. In paladins there are many other burst style characters that fire every 1-1.5 sec.
The dps of those chars tends to be around 1100 a sec, while the soldier style char (viktor) has 1300 plus. However, despite this, Viktor is trash tier because his damage is consistent and over time, while the other chars effectively have 2200 dps within the first sec of combat, especially at high ranks where people can hit, and immediately disengage if they miss. Or poke corners.
My main point with this article as you’re seeing is that:
1: continuous damage chars need damage buffs across the board by about 20-30% to improve them at higher ranks.
Yet if you do this they will most likely destroy game balance by destroying both shields and tanks way too fast.
Thus, my suggestion is that continuous fire damage be a damage type and that shields and tanks continue to take the pre-buff damage values of the weapon.
Meanwhile by buffing the damage values vs dps, these weapon types would become far more viable at higher levels.
I also recommend the removal or reduction of damage falloff. soldier/mccree/viktor/tyra need more range if they are going to compete with other chars without damage falloff.
- My second major suggestion is that snipers/burst chars should suffer larger downtime on each missed shot. 2 headshots in a row with a widow/hanzo is not something that is hard to do. My aim isn’t even top 10% yet I do that regularly vs dodging opponents (especially tanks).
Getting 4 times the damage per second that the game was balanced around within a single second is op. giving them reduced damage vs tanks or giving tanks crit damage reduction would help a lot towards balancing the snipers.
anyway my purpose of this post is not so much to force the dev team in a particular direction as to point out why snipers are a problem in the game right now, and why continuous fire dps have been notoriously trash in both games for so long.