Overwatch

Nice to see pharah so low, was tired of getting fucking raped by her every game.

Good to see people taking a break on mercy too

I think depending on the level of play Pharah is still viable. The problem starts to manifest a bit more when you are versus a good McCree who doesn't miss.

I've been trying to still play Pharah and it's just painful, and that's right in the 50ish area. Like, sometimes can still do well on the damage charts, but it's just not fun because of how fast you die every time. I've been switching to McCree myself and with 2 hours played of him (most of that since the patch mind you) I'm getting gold for damage/eliminations basically every match. But here's the thing: he's strong, but in a terrible place right now. He's strong for all the wrong reasons and is honestly not that great to play. FtH is absolute garbage, you do more damage with flashbang -> headshot -> bodyshot with LMB than FtH, and have 4 bullets left over to shoot anyone else from close to pretty far away. His ultimate is more versatile and safer to use than Pharahs. He has the same health. His long-range damage is only lower if people aren't able to dodge really far-range rockets (so Torb turrets basically).

Zenyatta is in a similar position. Everyone wanted them to just add 25 health to Zen, yet they added twice that AND added two huge buffs to his ultimate because who the fuck knows why. And now he's pushed out Mercy, the supposed quintessential healer, as the best healer. Most McCree players seemed to want a slight range falloff buff and FtH to do like 5 more damage per shot, but instead they give McCree a no-scope sniper rifle and may as well have removed FtH entirely (I honestly should unbind it from his controls, every time I've pushed it it's been an accident or a bad idea).

D.Va comparatively seems to have been a pretty good buff, although I personally would like to see the Defense Matrix bar refill slightly slower. All the other tanks seeing comparatively close play and she's the new hotness so may not even need any tweaking there.

There's some characters that are probably almost never going to be good in pro play, like Symmetra and Torb, although Symmetra could probably use a big overhaul of some sort. If team sizes were bigger she'd be very playable, but with 6 slots you just don't have room for her. Bastion was niche and actually would have been good in this new tankier, less mobile meta EXCEPT D.Va completely shuts him down, so that's kind of a problem.

What really gets me though, is how Blizzard has been able to consistently maintain this "Blizzard can't balance" schtick across multiple games and years and years and years of gaming. It's like their 2 guys who understood how numbers interact worked on Starcraft and only Starcraft and were never to be seen again.

Edit: It's not just McCree that makes Pharah's life hell. Zenyatta has always been good against her because she tends to just eat potshots from the enemy team in the air anyway and Zen's E makes those HURT, not to mention his balls hurt like a bitch too and aren't much harder to land on a flyer than McCree's bullets. D.Va also has been known to make Pharah hate existence. So you have 3 massively buffed heroes that all hate Pharah all on every team and then the occasional S76 or Ana to boot and yea, it's basically why bother. The only time I can play her now is if the matchmaker wildly fucks up or the enemy team is just doing something weird.

Amzin_sl said:

What really gets me though, is how Blizzard has been able to consistently maintain this "Blizzard can't balance" schtick across multiple games and years and years and years of gaming. It's like their 2 guys who understood how numbers interact worked on Starcraft and only Starcraft and were never to be seen again.

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Thats not really a fair comparison. Starcraft you can more easily balance mathematically (they have formulas to rate the "goodness" of a unit) because there is no skill or RNG involved. If a marine is fighting versus a Zergling he will never miss the only region for skill is in the micro aspects and the unit's mobility is taken into account for it's rating. It is also a 1v1 game so you can more easily limit the interactions. NvN Starcraft is notoriously imbalanced and they make no attempt to balance it.

However the patch that got pushed live felt like the "extreme knee jerk over-reaction" buffs but Blizzard never went back and mid-pointed some of the changes they did. It just got pushed live with the most retarded overbuffs they could do.

My team Zarya, Pharah, Mercy, DVA, Soldier 76. So I went Zen because I always liked him and all the heals come in handy. Holy shit the bitching was insane at my choice, but I didn't switch and proceeded to kick ass and save Zarya because they pair very well. Then our Mercy was likely the worst healer in the history of overwatch(never boosted, not a single rez whole game), this one dude was so angry and hateful I had to log after the win. If he was like that when we won I can't imagine what he would have been like if we lost.

Competition mode is not for me.

You'll get idiots. I honestly don't understand their objections to a Zenyatta in that situation even if Zen wasn't overtuned at the moment. Honestly if its obvious someone on your team isn't worth the air they're breathing just completely ignore them. You can't have thin skin and also play competitive MP games.

People that bitch about zenyatta just dont understand how good he is. Even before this patch his damage and healing was really good, you just had to really hang back

Tenks_sl said:

You'll get idiots. I honestly don't understand their objections to a Zenyatta in that situation even if Zen wasn't overtuned at the moment. Honestly if its obvious someone on your team isn't worth the air they're breathing just completely ignore them. You can't have thin skin and also play competitive MP games.

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Sorry for the confusion, my point is I don't care as much as everyone else in that mode.

Tenks_sl said:

Thats not really a fair comparison. Starcraft you can more easily balance mathematically (they have formulas to rate the "goodness" of a unit) because there is no skill or RNG involved. If a marine is fighting versus a Zergling he will never miss the only region for skill is in the micro aspects and the unit's mobility is taken into account for it's rating. It is also a 1v1 game so you can more easily limit the interactions. NvN Starcraft is notoriously imbalanced and they make no attempt to balance it.

However the patch that got pushed live felt like the "extreme knee jerk over-reaction" buffs but Blizzard never went back and mid-pointed some of the changes they did. It just got pushed live with the most retarded overbuffs they could do.

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There IS a lot of skill that goes into the interaction of units in Starcraft, though. Movespeed, attack speed, damage-per-shot, all matter a lot when you're microing units hither and thither. It's a different KIND of skill than Overwatch, but it still matters. Overwatch has a lot of moving parts but compared to a lot of gamesit's not that complicated, by design in fact. You know a characters max DPS, you can easily find their average DPS, every character has roughly the same move speed, you have a pretty solid foundation to the game for balancing around, they just aren't trying. Knee-jerk reaction is exactly what the balance changes were and that means either people AREN'T LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS or people are letting feels cloud their judgement, both of which are inexcusable for a balance team.

It was on test for a couple weeks and presumably in internal testing for some time before that and there was plenty of feedback and concerns about it and it was all ignored, again a red flag for a balance team. And now supposedly all the concerned players were right and the people ignoring them were wrong. And to be fair, a balance team is usually small, internal playtesters are a small group, but the massive feedback from PTR is supposed to account for that yet the only significant change from when the patch hit PTR to live was Ana got 2 extra bullets in her clip and S76 nerf got reverted, maybe (I don't actually know because I didn't play him enough to abuse his recoil in the first place).

You know why it was a shit balance idea? Because it was really obviously a shit balance idea. Some games have so many things going on that you just cannot reasonably avoid broken shit (like D&D and most RPGs really). Overwatch is not one of those games. Skill has a cap in OW and they tend to balance around that cap.

I think you're looking at some things in a vacuum and possibly why it shows why McCree is so hard to balance. A hero like McCree has no spread. This means if someone is playing 100% perfectly his DPS is now effectively doubled compared to someone who is only landing body shots. How do you assign what that is worth? Maybe Blizzard's internal playtesters are actually quite poor at the game which is why they thought the McCree change was fine.

Now you also have to put into the mix Zenyatta. McCree by himself in the current patch may not be wildly broken if not for his interaction with Discord. Now he can do long-range headshots on a marked target and one-shot them without really too much counter play.

I'm calling this out because now you can't simply assign values to heroes in a vacuum because this game by it's nature relies upon interactions. Like I said maybe McCree isn't 100% busted but with the rise of Zenyatta at the same time is exposed a clear flaw in the balancing. Maybe individually neither are brokenly OP (I'd argue both are maybe just overtuned) but combined they throw the balancing way off.

I'm confirming that mcree is gay right now. Boring but a must play. Stand back and left click, maybe fall asleep on the flashbang button to kill genji once in a while.

I was just thinking that it is kind of funny that McCree just shits on Pharah so badly because she'd actually be really decent in this meta if not for sniper McCree. 76 got nerfed so one of her natural counters is worse at his job. The meta is double support heavy and she can very easily kill 200 HP supports. She'd have less tanks to deal with eating up a bunch of her rockets. I think she'd do quite well. But then McCree looks at her and plucks her from the sky and its all over.

I wonder if maybe we'll see a rise of Widowmaker to try and deal with Zenyatta and McCree. The patch is still pretty young so not like the entire thing is figured out.

If a guy with a 357 magnum or whatever he's using can shoot someone in the sky floating around why should he not do great damage? It's a high powered gun and the heroes aren't that far away. I know the game is fantasty but I always thought if someone can hit someone as Mcree they should be punished. It's not like he can spray and pray.

But you can see those interactions. Those interactions are clear on paper and in game. I'm mediocre at best on McCree (I canusuallyget a headshot when I flashbang someone... usually) and he still clearly is too strong despite having a skill that should never be used. They specifically called out McCree's damage when they reverted Mercy's boost buff, yet didn't actually consider changing McCree himself or Discord? Besides that I'm rarely hitting discord targets because god knows where MY Zenyatta is

I'm not talking about balancing in a vacuum. If you tried to balance in a vacuum you could say literally any numbers and they'd make sense. That's why I mentioned they have a solid core to balance around: The foundations of the game are great. Honestly the McCree buff only made sense by ignoring a whole bunch of the game in the process. The interactions and potentials of any single change are largely obvious to see and predict. The fact that they are choosing to ignore that clear visibility they've designed into the game is incredibly frustrating as someone who takes great pride in balancing things I have control over, and I'm 100% amateur at it.

If it was everyone vs. me maybe I would acknowledge that I'm just being belligerent but I have data and high-level players backing me up and the OW balance team has... all that but ignore it. Again, they LITERALLY nerfed McCree's damage falloff not that long agobecause it was a problem. And that was without Zenyatta being played much at all. If a ton of the game had been reworked since that change, than maybe it could have been justified, except barely ANYTHING has changed. So they revert a nerf 100% and it's a problem again. Big surprise.

It's just inexcusable. I would say maybe they know something we don't, some magical internal data that only they have that shows that this would be OK, but considering there's vastly more data on the live servers that seems impossibly unlikely.

Edit:

Noodleface_sl said:

If a guy with a 357 magnum or whatever he's using can shoot someone in the sky floating around why should he not do great damage? It's a high powered gun and the heroes aren't that far away. I know the game is fantasty but I always thought if someone can hit someone as Mcree they should be punished. It's not like he can spray and pray.

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Because it's a game and gameplay should always come first over logic.

Also widow already had been made a little more niche by her body shot nerf and she's pretty unwieldy in almost all the places Zen/McCree are strongest in (mid-sized and smaller spaces) AND she's not great with D.Va matrixing on the back line or just flying at her all the time either. Plus Widow, just like Pharah, can eat a Discord orb and pot shots and get chunked out instantly if she isn't ambushing well enough.

Noodleface_sl said:

If a guy with a 357 magnum or whatever he's using can shoot someone in the sky floating around why should he not do great damage? It's a high powered gun and the heroes aren't that far away. I know the game is fantasty but I always thought if someone can hit someone as Mcree they should be punished. It's not like he can spray and pray.

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He kind of is spray and pray, though. Obviously he doesn't have a fully automatic weapon but since there is no spread or recoil you just hold down LMB and eventually you'll land your shots. As you get better you'll track and time your shots more but at mediocre levels of play you can just spray and pray.

Maybe actually a decent nerf to him would just be to add some recoil to his weapon

I feel this patch should have been on PTR for at least a week longer if not more. They did their major balance changes, let it sit on PTR for a week, and then did some minor tweaks and shipped it to live without anymore PTR testing. On top of it they added Ana at the same time. How are they going to get good numbers from doing so much at once? Just adding Ana alone is going to change up the numbers a bit and skew everything. Reinhardt alone became a powerhouse because of Ana.

The changes and Ana should have came out at separate times and this patch should have sat on PTR longer than it did. It really surprised me at how they rushed this out to live.

I think D.Va is fine now not perfect. She is where she needs to be at least. The Zeynetta ultimate change still baffles me. They need to revert it back to the speed to what it was. Giving him the speed buff and adding so much health made zero sense. It should be one or the other. They have zero clue on what to do with McCree. They are just throwing shit against the wall with him and hoping it somehow balances him.

Yeah 2 rounds per second is not bolt action. Does anyone do function based damage falloff?

Noodleface_sl said:

If a guy with a 357 magnum or whatever he's using can shoot someone in the sky floating around why should he not do great damage? It's a high powered gun and the heroes aren't that far away. I know the game is fantasty but I always thought if someone can hit someone as Mcree they should be punished. It's not like he can spray and pray.

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Then why is the guy with a rifle doing less damage than the the guy with a revolver? It's completely nonsensical.

I also cannot hit moving targets with Zenyatta's balls. They have a fucked up acceleration profile or something and he's got some weird recoil mechanic I just cannot seem to adapt to. I love my DMRs in other games, but his balls just don't seem consistent to me. I can hit a flying Pharah about 1 in 10.

Tenks_sl said:

You can't have thin skin and also play competitive MP games.

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Yup -- if you even feel the slightest bit of emotional tilt from your teammates, mute them all and just focus on playing well. Or, just ignore the troublemaker and try to rally your team with some basic calls.

Valderen_sl said:

At what rank do people start being able to deal with bastions and torb's turret? I thought is was just my very low rank below 40 that had this problem, but I got to 45 this weekend and it's still a problem.

I had to kill the bastion in 3 of our attempt as Mercy for us to be able to take Point A in Numbani.

My twitch skills are average at best, but my understanding of the game is pretty solid, I know the maps, flanking routes etc. I have a good grasp of strategies, classes and how to counter them. At this level though there are so many people who have zero grasp of the game, the maps, strategies, or how to counter some classes...it's so frustrating.

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I've hovered around rank 55 since competitive launched. I find that level is about the tipping point for teams being able to deal with bastion/turrets competently and consistently.

Below that, teams get completely shredded as soon as they encounter the bastion, its a dice roll as to whether they bash their head against the wall for the next 5 minutes, or pull together the coordination necessary to overcome it. After 55 or so its no longer a show stopper, as soon as everyone knows what's up people adapt their composition/tactics pretty quick and it becomes a non-issue.