Introduction
I’ve been playing OW since a month or two after release, and I’ve got around 1000 hours on Ball. I’m always drawn to weird / niche heroes, so Ball was a natural fit for me. I also play a load of other heroes across support & dps, so I’m not a one-trick.
I am also hopeful that Bliz will consult Ball players, as previous changes like the grapple fine-tuning were ultimately really great, but only after multiple iterations of listening to feedback 
– watching players like Chazm & Stryder play Ball is just nuts; I don’t want to lose the peak skill potential.
What I’m not asking for
I appreciate the general playerbase often dislikes playing against Ball, so I don’t want to suggest anything that diminishes the enemy’s sense of agency when countering Ball.
I am also against adding things like CC immunity to Ball’s kit. The community would generally not approve of such a change, in my opinion. I do think there is a wider discussion to be had around layered soft CC, but I’m not going to do that here.
So, here we go: what would I like to see?
In short, I want to see Ball stick with his core identity without adding anything too controversial.
So, what can we do for him that won’t be a cop out / cause other players to get upset while also retaining the fun of playing Ball?
At a high level:
- Make ball a bigger threat to tanks, either through boops or slightly increased damage
- Make some Quality of Life changes to reduce bodyblocking (BB)
- Make some Quality of Life changes to make fireball more resilient to random, tiny knockbacks like melee etc.
Here are my detailed suggestions:
1> Restore regular boop displacement vs. other tanks. Displacement is Ball’s thing, and the tank passive means he has borderline zero utility against tanks. Other tanks can do a huge amount of damage vs. ball, whereas ball usually tickles them. Restoring boop displacement means tanks have to be more careful about their positioning.
2> Either that, or change ball’s weapon to do more damage TO TANKS ONLY via upping the damage and the weapon spread so that it’s similar in power vs. squishies, but actually hurts tanks to the point where they can’t ignore it. If you’re not a hero with a larger hitbox, you will be unaffected. Bliz have shown they can do this, e.g. hog’s recent scrap gun changes mean he is a threat to both squishies and tanks, but doesn’t have one-shot power.
3> If ball is in ball form rolling without fireball and moving, grappling, piledriving etc. he moves through the enemy, or they are moved back slightly. This means ball doesn’t get BB or his piledrives ruined by accident, and the ball is in control of choosing when to use ball form to counter BB.
4> If ball is in crab form, BB works as it is for both sides – they can BB you, and you BB them. I would like blocking in crab form to remain, as A) it would keep cool tech like fireball-cancel jumping off enemy heads in the game B) you can simply move to ball form if you want to escape C) enemies can always just hit crouch and walk through you as it is anyway, so they’re not losing anything. Basically, it gives you options as ball, retains the tech and for other nuances it remains as-is
5> If ball is in ball form with fireball, it functions largely as it does now, but small/random forces like melees, Rein hammer swings and tiny knockbacks should not take ball out of fireball.
I’m not asking for CC immunity, I’m asking that random trash damage does not knock Ball out of his flow. Each ability should have a force associated with it, and if any single ability is below the required force to cancel fireball, it has no effect on Ball’s movement.
It’s frustrating to lose your main mobility CD and die because of a random effect that wasn’t even meant for you. This should also be the case for a handful of things like Doomfist’s Seismic slam slow effect, IMO, but I know some folk will disagree.
6> If you get hit by an actual aimed cooldown like brig whipshot, shield bash, doom punch or a regular stun / large knockback, fair’s fair, cancel fireball as normal. I am not asking for CC immunity / permanent fireball, just that trash damage/abilities don’t knock ball out of fireball.
So basically, practically everything that’s aimed & on purpose and an actual CD will still ruin stop Ball’s fireball.
7> I read this elsewhere so can’t take credit for it, but constantly reload ammo when in ball form. Right now, ball form is the most effective way to reload at times (no headshot damage, better mobility), but it comes with a severe downside – it relies on not mis-timing it.
If you leave ball form a fraction of a second too early before the reload completes, you get nothing from it. It’s easy to mis-time because the reload sound is very subtle, and OW is chaotic.
This would be a great buff as it’s one fewer thing to manage, it has situational benefit (confirming kills when you only need a partial reload) and it’s a nice Quality of Life change that makes things flow better.
8> Minefield needs either reworked, or some major tweaks. It is an incredibly situational ult; it’s probably the weakest tank ult unless you’re mining an objective in OT, and there are other tanks that have ults that do that and so much more. The only time I can get kills with mines is OT or by booping careless enemies into them after the fact. I rarely get mine kills from a ult/piledriver combo because they spread too thinly and heroes have endless abilities to survive them.
9> As a general point, Ball gets wrecked by layered CC. Other tanks tend to be cleansed/pulled/healed while hacked, trapped or slept, but Ball operates in areas where his supports cannot help. A wider CC reduction could help (e.g. the most BS interaction in the entire game is throwing a junkrat trap on a sleeping enemy – insta-death).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that a single sleep often kills Ball, and sleep is easy to hit (especially due to lag compensation). This has been getting worse as time goes on.
10> Sombra’s hack just gets way too much easy value on Ball. A single hack from invis, sugar cube & a few seconds of Sombra’s gun takes zero effort from the Sombra, and is enough to take >50% of Balls’ health and remove him from the fight.
It’s one of these unfortunate interactions, because no other tank gets dumpstered this badly by it. She’s invisible, can cast it faster than you can usually react, and it basically means you can’t engage for this period. By the time you run, heal up and return, she can do the same thing again.
I believe the key thing that makes Sombra horrible to play against comes from a few key interactions:
-
Sombra can hack immediately after taking damage. A common frustration is predicting where the Sombra will be & rolling through her with Fireball to decloak her, and she can hack me faster than I can get out of ball form, acquire her & shoot. My opinion is simply that there should be a small penalty to Sombra: if she takes damage, it should add a small (1s) delay before she can cast hack. That would open up a lot of outplay potential as Ball without making Sombra feel too clunky.
-
Sombra can hack from stealth faster than you can humanly react, even if you’re scouting. You have no shield or ability to stop hack, so you can either try to shoot the Sombra (difficult, and if you’re in ball form when the hack begins, it’s not feasible to exit ball form & shoot in time) or hide via Line of Sighting the hack (frequently impossible because due to favour the shooter / lag compensation: you will get hacked around corners on your screen).
-
You cannot really play around hack. You cannot bait it in a meaningful sense. If Sombra uses hack on a teammate, the 6s CD is too short to do something before she can hack you. Similarly, the 8s grace period after you’ve been hacked is also broadly meaningless in terms of Ball’s gameplay loop. I used to swing high into the air to bait, get hacked in midair and land safely on high ground, then engage afterwards, but it feels like a waste of time doing this now. If Sombra misses, she re-cloaks after 3.5s and you just wasted your grapple & element of surprise. If she hacks you, she re-cloaks and has her hack up again 4.5s later. There’s no meaningful grace period to do anything, especially if she’s safely AFKing in the middle of her team.
11> If this is all still not enough, Make his spawn grapple CD 3 seconds. Or make his grapple disconnect timer a bit longer (spin to win is garbage in OW2, but a longer-lasting grapple is still useful for setting up boops or re-using grapples). Or start looking at the specific hero / ability interactions that uniquely dumpster Ball and give him a little resilience, but not too much.
Lots of underperforming heroes have had QoL & number buffs without making them OP or changing their core identity.
That’s a decent set of changes, and won’t (or shouldn’t) cause rage from enemy players like CC immunity suggestions I’ve seen elsewhere. It should also be on the simpler side to implement vs. a complete/drastic rework, and it’ll please the dedicated Ballers.
If literally every change in this post made it into the game, enemies can still CC Ball into oblivion and use their get-out-of-jail abilities to stop Ball killing anything. I’m pretty sure Bliz could do all of the above and Ball’s still going to be a C-tier tank at best, but it’ll at least make him more rewarding and less frustrating for the small army of Ballers.
If Bliz do all of this and he still struggles, then they could look at more drastic rework measures / wider game issues.