One things for certain is that Overwatch will continue with changes every season with mass buffs and nerfs. I believe it’s more OWL motivated to mix up the meta. But I don’t think it’s balanced but it will never be so.
The game has gotten more nerfs than buffs. Loss aversion plays a part in this. It feels twice as worse to lose something than to gain a singular something.
Most characters reworks have been utter failures, balance changes feel like theres no data or weight to them, only nerfs. When a hero gets a buff, they get like 3 overtuned buffs that make them incredibly OP (Look at Hanzo).
This pattern repeats for almost 3 years, which is why most people including me and several others, have given up on the idea of good balance.
it’s true the game is a lot more balanced than when it was first launched (remember no damage falloff tracer?) but the game is 3 years old now everyone has got sufficiently good at the heroes they play so if they buff a hero in tiny way it changes how that character is played and how you’re supposed to play against them i.e. mccree’s latest buff before the buff you could decide not to play around flash bang (still was a risky play) and hope that he’d miss but now you have to assume if he gets a stun on you you’re going to die
try playing mercy without getting harassed!
there are 2 reasons imo 1) the fatigue from playing a lot of overwatch some people have 2000+hrs on the game and 2) recently balance changes have been focused on the top of the ladder and some heroes might be balanced at gm but they are very powerful at gold or plat (remember old bastion? kinda like that not exactly though…)
Really my only issue is Widowmaker, literally worst hero design ive ever seen
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Reaper is not a little strong.
He is A LOT OF OP. 50% life steal makes him a nightmare up close. All he has to do is drop into the middle of a team and it’s Team Kill time.
spam a-d-crouch 60% of the time it works every time!
My opinion:
Balance isn’t terrible, but for tank/support there are so few choices and they are required that the game fizzles out quickly to have balanced teams. Hard to keep that model with so few content updates each year.
I’d still rather have a Mercy on my team than any other healer unless we’re running multi-tank.
Damage boost and the ability to pocket a dps makes Mercy a great pick almost all the time.
i wish everyone was like you, boo!
There’s a lot of knuckleheads out there. I always laugh at anyone who complains about a Mercy pick.
I’m just like, “Yeah, if Ana plays 100% perfectly, they can be more effective than Mercy. Do you really think a stranger on the internet playing in the middle ranks who is more comfortable on Mercy is going to play Ana perfectly?”
My issues with balance are this:
- Too much CC, and it’s too powerful.
- Too many one-hit kills, or insta-kill combos.
- Flavor-of-the-month nerf/buff/rework cycles are used in place of balance.
- Devs make adjustments with their ideas for changing the meta in mind.
- Devs have favorites on the roster, and it shows in how nerfs/buffs are applied.
- Specialists aren’t better at what they do than generalists, making them obsolete.
- Tanks are strong because healing is absurdly powerful.
- Overall power creep is getting out of hand. The low TTK is why tanks now play such a prominent role in gameplay.
- Adjustments seem to come in sets, with long gaps between them. You can make updates more often if you tweak fewer things at a time.
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Most people think balance means a completely horizontal line, where every hero is equally useful and viable. In other words, people expect the impossible.
But that’s a negative about making a hero based shooter; players become attached to the characters and balance becomes more of a political thought, where all heroes deserve to have “fair rights” in balance.
I think there is currently a power creep and a healing creep, so I can’t call the game balanced in its current state.
A thick-lensed pair of the ol nostalgia goggles.
your mentality when going into a game plays a big part in winning if 2 people on your team are arguing you’ve lost the game already back when i used to play comp i’d insta mute everything if someone started harassing me because if i didn’t we’d lose for sure! but harassment towards mercy mains still remains and it’s much worse now and sometimes words do upset you… i quit comp because we had a game that everyone harassed me and i felt horrible and the next day i muted everything and just played i went from 3400 to 3080 their words got to me and i couldn’t do what i was doing the day before without any problems…
also we didn’t even lose that game we tied!
(i did placements on season 7 because my friend wanted to duo)
I thought the balance was fine until they deleted Doomfist and left him there, then they made Reaper into the mess he is now.
I just don’t feel that strongly about it. He still is countered by a lot.
I’ve had my fair share of games with Reapers destroying things, but now that it’s been a while people aren’t playing him as much and we’re also getting better at fighting him. Kind of like D.Va’s rockets, lots of people hated them at first but now lots of D.Va players love them. I think Reaper is in a similar spot, where he feels OP at first, but now we’re getting used to it. But I still think he’s a little strong.
D.Va’s rockets required nerfs to both her boop damage and the rocket damage, because she was deleting Squishies way, way too fast.
Because it isn’t balanced well as it needs to be more.
Certain heroes are either over or underpowered in certain brackets.
A power creep lead to a healing creep which led to GOATS
Whenever a hero is overpowered, Blizzard nerfs them into the ground until they are useless just look at Mercy, Doomfist and Brig.
The changes/buffs they make to heroes don’t always make them stronger and instead just make things worse. Just look at Reaper. His lifesteal buffs makes him a pain for inexperience players but anyone who is a little bit component will just stay out of his range, stun him or whatever.
1 Like
But fixing balance at a rank level would require different balance levels from one rank to the next. There can’t be uniform balance across the board if we’re balancing from the narrow perspective of the rank at which we ourselves play at. If you tone down a hero that feels overpowered at gold rank, that hero just becomes even more underpowered at diamond rank.
Curious, do people actually want balance points to be different in this game from one rank to the next? When you climb the ladder into a new rank, don’t you want the numbers at your new rank to be the same as the rank you just climbed out of? Personally I feel it’s MUCH better for the state of the game for balance to be consistent from bronze to GM, and I really don’t think that’s a wholly unpopular opinion. Am I wrong?