Devs state they purposely release ow2 hero’s on the strong side of balanced to attract new mains to that hero, which I have absolutely no problem with.
I’m a tank player, high dps supports mean nothing to me.
And then I think about brig, who as of August 2020 received 19 nerfs over a 2 year period since her launch.
Now that’s just insane, so what was the community complaining about that beforehand that required this response?
Dive meta
They needed to make a counter to Dive WITHOUT nerfing Tracer, Genji, or Winston because people would cry and lose their minds of they actually got nerfed properly
to give you everything stats wise,
Her health was at 200, effectively giving her 250 HP because of the +50 armor. her shield had 600 health, regenerated at 100 per second, had a 3 second cooldown, had a much wider cone degree making stunning players easier.
shield bash stunning enemies for 0.9 seconds, going through shields, dealing 50 damage, and it being on a 5 second cooldown. repair pack being 1 charge but healing ally’s for 150 health instantly, if the 150 heals them all the way it gives them 75 armor for 6 seconds or until burnt through.
rally building up incredibly fast, give 150 armor to yourself and allies and it would not go away unless you swapped, they swapped, or an enemy damages the armor away, the rally armor being bugged basically granting even the smallest armor on somebody a 45% or more damage reduction to everything.
she was basically the jack of all trades hero, she could do everything and anything at once and could even outduel a reinhardt. her high dps like damage, her high healing, her high utility, her insane ultimate, her AoE healing and her frustrating CC, made her a literal brute to go against.
the devs released her like this so she could counter the 1-2+ year long dive meta. which when she entered brought a new meta which was GOATS and completely killed dive through the entirety of 2018 until mid-late 2019
She was complaint about constantly being too strong since her release into OW2 where she actually felt fair to play against. Especially by high rank players. Back than when I only played VS AI and don’t even watch content creators, I already knew how busted she was.
It was that many low rank/qp players were unable to play her properly during the later part of OW1, unless it was in her bsuted state in the earlier release of of hers. So many cry she was too weak. It took those players into late OW2 season to finally learn how to play her properly.
PS: I didn’t bother watch content creator/streamers until OW2 when I started playing Comp.
Your guess is as good as mine. Brig and moth mercy became major red flags for me in regards to the developers capacity to understand how the game was played, and what they were willing to do about glaring issues.
It didn’t help that brig was, to be blunt- an utterly brain dead hero that was so easy to play at a high level that a lobotomized monkey could climb to GM with her.
We literally saw multiple players noting they’d always been gold or plat or whatever- and then one tricked the hero to literal Gm.
Low-skill forum users and support players wanted an easy-mode answer to dive.
Thats all. It was a pretty small vocal minority, as it usually is on forums.
hahah people will cry? who? everyone was asking for some smalls nerfs to DIVE or buff defensive heros. they take the worst way and create a single hero to counter a full composition xd and with low effort haha
Blizz said they were thinking of nerfing the problem Dive heroes, but were told many times by the pros/ higher level players that the COULDN’T do that
Do you really think people would have accepted Tracer and Genji nerfs anyways?
And they would have had to buff defensive heroes to the same levels as launch Brig anyways
They had no other options
Buff like 6 heroes, nerf heroes they weren’t allowed to, or launch Brig as she was
There was no winning
who? no one was asking for a single hero to counter a full dive comp.
I don’t know, depends who you ask the defintion of counter to. Some people would tell you especially then that a “counter” shouldn’t require skill. That said no, people weren’t specifically asking for it in that way, but Moira was added pre-Brig born from similar complaints, and Moira didn’t cut it, so I guess Blizzard thought to go a step beyond.
But Blizzard does have a tendency to “hear one thing” from the community and do something extreme. They are not only like bad parents giving children what they asked, but they don’t even give it properly.
Because the community and Blizz themselves were too immature to realize that skill-power ratio is what defines the maximum power a character can possess and you can’t counter skill without any skill.
The dive heroes couldn’t be nerfed because they were the highest skill heroes by a large margin. The solution was always to increase the skill requirement of other heroes → not all of them, but many of them had no place in a modern Overwatch.
Instead they doubled down in bad design and counter-mentality to please people who don’t want to get better. Thus ushering the worst era of Overwatch of all time.
stop defending blizzard.
The 1% convinced the sheep (the bulk of the playerbase), that she was op. Shutting down the weebs, and lgbq’s champion was icing on the cake.
two mistakes by the devs for this game
first brigitte to counter the heroes that were overpowered THAT THEY were afraid to nerf
then they implemented ROLE QUEUE. that was bigger than brig in my opinion
third mistake:
stubbordness… the legendary kind. instead of admitting to their mistakes they piled on more… 5v5 … nerfing heroes to suit 5v5. ROLE PASSIVES… the stubbornness is legendary. they did the same thing in world of warcraft
The problem with Brig is she was more or less a fine hero on release. The problem lied more with synergy, hence the Goat meta.
She provided reliable AoE healing to a larger area than Lucio, and at release her armor packs well gave armor. On top of which she got Rally pretty much every fight and the armor left could linger after the ult ran out…
Simply put the synergy between Lucio and Brig was pretty insane, two forms of AoE healing really changed things imo. It’s also why I highly doubt any other AoE healer ever be put in the game without massive restrictions like Illari’s pylon’s low health and static position.
LOL
ROLE QUEUE is not a mistake… with role oueue on theory the game should be a lot easier to balance… but this team balance is soo bad xd
Role que was an admissions of defeat after something like a solid year of no updates so they could focus on game balance and bugs… I believe it was the 2018 year or so.
After they failed to balance the game and added role que, they further failed to balance the game and came up with 5v5. More than anything else it’s a bad sign when a company has to remove game features instead of add them because they can’t balance their 7+ year old game.
still throughout all the design choices the saving grace of the game is the aesthetic and art design. top notch quality
fan made content including the NSFW department. this is what is keeping the game alive. memorable characters, bold, smexy and the lore is pretty good when it wants to be. a lot of the cinematics make me tear up and im a grown man.
of course its subjective. some people dont care for that but the game is still pretty large to this day and has A LOT of fans. something the haters can never understand
Basically people were a lot less tryhard back then so it didn’t really matter. Yeah the goats composition was powerful for a long time, but the thing is this is what the average comp game looked like at the bottom of the ladder
So actually running goats outside of a full stack team was pretty much impossible
Have to agree, fan support made OW what it is. That said it seems to be on the decline. OW had amazing fan music and the like in the past. I think Ashe however was the last new hero to really get a lot of fan support.
If you compare Baptiste, Sojourn, etc to say
I was gonna post the link… but I some how lost the right to post YT links? I thought basically every one had that lol or did the blizzard forums restrict that further?
i think so. i mean i love role queue as well but it doesnt work in the long run in game design. mmorpgs have proven this. no one really wants to be a tank who soaks damage and just sits there or be a healbot
they shouldnt have had roles by design in the first place. maybe hints and elements of a tank healer but they should have made it more traditional dps. something like how valorant has done. they have heroes as well as healing/tank aspects but not to the extreme like a mmo or moba
i think if they would have nerfed healing and tank and gave those classes more dps or made everyone similar to dps the game would have thrived. w/o a “role queue”
you have to remember the devs came from an mmo. this was there first fps game or they wanted to make an mmo in the first place (overwatch was meant to be an mmo called titan but changed at last minute to be a tf2 clone). so i guess that was there intention. to craft it more to an mmo but you would think how hard it was to find tanks and healers in world of warcraft they would have strayed away from it