Why do they keep nerfing Echo?

[DvaDiff-1921]

Echo is busted.

[KevinAteNine-1753]

Ya I knooow . I was just reacting to someone saying the nerf was for OWL.

[Poothy-1215]

Yeah I get why you think that, but do yalll not realize it was exploitative popping off that many D.va bombs? It’s not like it’s impossible to get multiple now, but at least now it’s actually somewhat a challenge. Seems more like a bug fix than a nerf to me, and either way, it’s a pretty minimal change for Echo, there’s so many heroes she can duplicate aside from D.va

[Yin-1797]

@Scylaceus-1123

It’s worth keeping in mind that Sombra can hack Echo during her ultimate and while she doesn’t do much, she’s very good at mitigating the damage potential Echo can do during her ultimate

Also Sombra can shut down DVA pretty well which does allow other tanks to be run which also means Echo can’t do as much damage with her ultimate

Sombra is very, very powerful, to the point she’s kinda broken in Overwatch in much the same way that Tanks can be. Her ability to Hack or EMP (especially EMP) doesn’t really have any sort of counterplay. Sombra herself, doesn’t do much else beyond that, by herself and that’s what I mean when talking about a Sombra vs. Echo engagement.

Now in team functions, Sombra is killer. Hence the reason for the banning. Yes, she can make Echo’s life a total nightmare, but she does this to everyone and in highly coordinated teams, like the OWL, this makes her extremely strong. Blizzard hasn’t really come up with any sort counterplay to EMP yet.

@Scylaceus-1123

It’s all very hard to say though, we can theorise all we want but without the hero bans being removed we can’t see how it plays out, but things definitely were much more balanced before hero bans

Not really. Certain compositions were being played specifically to counter others. Tracer is great for Reinhardt plays to a certain degree, Zarya can cover, and Tracer herself is checked by McCree which mitigates it somewhat. Ban Tracer, and Reinhardt is more powerful and capable of being more aggressive. Ban Reinhardt, and Zarya is a little less effective. She works well with D.va, but not so much with Winston, Sigma or Orisa. She can work well with Roadhog, but Roadhog doesn’t play well against Reaper. So Zarya gets less used.

And by knowing this, you can kinda see why certain things aren’t really balanced that well especially with Tanks at the moment. As well as why bans are happening with specific characters.

@Scylaceus-1123

I do think the Echo HP nerf was unjustified though (at the time, it was a good change overall but other things needed to be nerfed first), the DVA change is completely fine

It’s more to do with the fact that OW’s engine doesn’t really allow for much flexibility with D.va or Echo when it comes to how they perform their ultimates or with how D.va plays between Pilot and Mech. So the change was probably a long time coming, but couldn’t happen right away without some optimizations first. Overwatch 2’s engine should be a little bit more solid and they’ll be able to tweak Echo more accurately.

[Romeo-22591]

yes she is strong and she will be even better after hitscan nerf

[Dem0ST-2555]

@Yin-1797

She was better than McCree for a time, certainly, but she’s not dominating any kind of metagame picks without certain banning of specific characters or counterplay.

For a while Echo, Zen & Tracer took turns at beating Cree. In fact there was a point when all 3 at the same time were better than Cree imo, and it wasn’t even close.

You’re right that Echo wasn’t dominating, metal ranks thought she wasn’t good enough (nothing new there) but she didn’t click for most players; except the few at the very top. That were happily melting tanks & squishy alike from 20m. She was burst killing everyone, consistently. The character itself was busted but the playerbase was lagging way behind.

I’m pretty sure I made some posts about it around the time, but she was the final straw for me and that’s when I stopped playing.