He has the most mobility in the game, the highest health value in the game, which can go up even higher thanks to his shields. His grapple lasts forever for some reason. Don’t know why the devs thought that was a good idea. Now it’s used to cheese on control points and payloads for entire MINUTES in a single match. His ultimate lasts too long and debatably does too much damage.
All this on a tank, mind you.
They need to at the very least make it so that his grapple will break after holding onto it for x amount of seconds. I really don’t know how his current grapple got released into the game. It’s silly and abused in all ranks.
Quick disclaimer, I’m biased, I play Ball. Anyways,
I’ll give you that he does have insane mobility on a fairly short cooldown for the freedom it allows you. I’d almost say it’s like a more flexible Winston leap, where you can use it to engage a position, take a high ground, or retreat depending on the situation, though it isn’t instant and he can be stunned out of it. I think having the mobility he does is good for him since it allows him to reposition easily for whatever he needs to be doing, but I don’t think it would be the end of the world if he got a second added to grapple CD.
You’d be surprised how quickly that can go down if the Ball gets focused. You go from 900 to zero REAL quick if you mess up and/or get stunned, and even on good engagements sometimes the enemy outputs so much damage you walk away with double digit health. It’s kind of like how poor D.Va players often get bashed for feeding, since high mobility + high health + bad engagement = tons of ult charge for enemies. I’ve seen the suggestion of shields giving ult charge, which not only do I think would be inconsistent between other dark blue shield health, but also be pretty bad for Ball since that’s partially his means of denying enemy cooldowns value (other than drawing fire like he does regularly, but with shields they dont even get ult charge for it).
I assume it’s so you can hold your grapple in place while you wait for a good time to strike. I won’t act like shooting a stalling hamster is the easiest thing in the world, because even I have trouble with it sometimes, but they move in predictable circles. If you have a stun, you can knock him out of his grapple and make the job even easier.
I’m not sure if his ultimate is an issue, honestly. I’ll admit usually I have mines leftover after teamfights, so maybe they do last an oddly long amount of time, but they wouldn’t be very good zoning tools if they only lasted a few seconds. I imagine they last longer than Torb lava because mines are only a one-time detonation as opposed to a constant pool of lava. The high damage is to make sure they’re enough of a threat to keep people from walking through them. Imagine if Torb lava only did the amount of DoT that Ashe afterburn did. You could just walk past it. Ball does have the mine/slam combo, but most heroes have a means of escaping it, and the ones that don’t typically have other ways of dealing with Ball in general.
So they don’t want double barrier to be in the game, so they allow something blatantly stupid to exist? That doesn’t sound right. If they continue with that mentality then every “tank” in the game that they balance or release will no longer be a tank. The very essence of being a frontline for your team is no longer even in the definition of tanking. Now it’s becoming another selfish role people pick because tanks like Wrecking Ball exists. Nothing about him is “tank” other than his tenacity. He plays like a damage role. So why even put him in the tank category?
People think that dive is pure joy but they will realize that its not. Its messy fast and you cant do shi* when you play a character without a movement ability.
He doesn’t tank the same way that, say, a Reinhardt does, but he still tanks nonetheless. Rather than protecting an area with a barrier, giving your team space to work with, he plays an angle and poses a big enough threat to force the enemy team to focus on him rather than your team’s frontline, essentially forcing the enemy to decide whether they want to hold back your frontline or go deal with the hamster that’s spamming bullets into the backline from the high ground behind them. And if someone on the enemy team decides to go deal with the hamster, then that’s one less person the rest of your team has to deal with. Even better, if your hamster is annoying the healers so much that they’re turning around to focus on him (ESPECIALLY healers like Ana or Baptiste, who need to be focused on their healing), then the enemy tanks won’t be getting NEARLY as much healing.
I play every tank, and Hammie Ball is the only one I can consistently 1v6 with. The issue is the design makes nerfs difficult without excessively punishing the bottom 90% of Hammie players. Widow has the same issue with her design.
The problem with that is, now it’s giving incentive to use more, or add more CC to the game, which I and so many others complain about. Crowd control is slowly becoming a problem, if it isn’t a big enough one already. I stand by my statement to make it so that his grapple should break after some time.
I think it’s a smaller problem than his mobility. However when you add his mobility and his ultimate together it becomes a problem. Counter-Picking is ruining the game, and when i feel I have to switch to this or that hero in order to deal with Ball, it ruins any ounce of fun I’m trying to have.
He can be anywhere he wants to be, he has knockback and airborne cc. He has mines that deal not 120 like junkrat’s mines, but 130 because apparently he needs an extra 10 damage to kill off heroes with 250 health. And the mere fact that you are getting away from fights that you’ve been cc’d in is a testament to how stupid his tenacity is. Being able to get 1200 max health is no joke, and while I do admit it can go away rather quickly, and other damage hero that does the SAME job as wrecking ball, would die in that scenario. And yes, “But wrecking ball is a tank, not dps.” Then why does he play like one? It’s silly.
A tank shouldn’t be allowed to draw that much attention and have that much mobility. Plain and simple. 600/1200 health shouldn’t be able to annoy you and get away so easily. Only to do it over and over and over again.
The same reason bastion hasn’t. We don’t nerf heros on the basis that low rank players don’t have the skill and coordination to exploit balls clear and obvious weaknesses