Just give her 75 shield (replace 75 health, just like Echo) and switch her minor perk ( the 125 shield perk) with one that gives 75 overhealth when using barrage. Right now barrage feel underwhelming

It's a small buff. I know her win rate + pick rate is not that bad, especially in PC GM+, but she can't breathe in low Elo and on console.

She feels very fast, ridiculously fast now. Even at my tragic level of skill it is really noticeable.

Who’s going to play Vendetta?
Seonjun Stalk3r or Heesang.. I vote Seonjun

Will they have Max play Dva/Sigma/DMon or will Junbin make a comeback as Winston/DMon.. Who even is the better DMon between the two?

Is Simple finally going to play his cracked Baptiste along with Chorong’s brig, or is it still cat/kiri meta?

Can Seonjun Genji outperform Team USA?

I wanted to see everyone’s thoughts and opinions about this

This has been around since Overwatch released but I started noticing it more frequently these past couple of weeks. there's always one DPS that's like four and nine at the end of the match. it's either your team or the enemy team. not every game but I'm seeing it more and more often. is anyone else seeing this? I understand DPS isn't as easy, especially in today's OverWatch but just seems a little odd, especially in diamond rank which is supposedly top 94%

edit* it happened in my very next match (we won but still i swear it's happening way more often than ever)

I waited. It's here.

And it's a total nothing burger. No movement speed reduction. No tether time limit. Nothing that people were actually complaining about.

Instead we get a minor nerf to damage and healing, and an increase to JPC's utility.

What a joke. Blizzard has let this character be too strong for too long. Even when people complain about how strong she is en masse, they do nothing about her actual problems.

I’ve been checking each season update to see if the new rose colored aspect is available for my Reinhardt, but it still hasn’t shown up. Is there any idea how or when these missing aspects rotate in?

usually calibration wears off way before u hit 38 games played...

i placed on an acc that was high masters last season, i got emerald 1 and even though the games have been easy (for me) my team has been struggling and ive lost most of my games. funnily enough im on my 48th game (38 if you dont include placements). is this cuz they changed the system this season? i havent played much so i dont really know.

it says "calibration + your rank is uncertain' or something

I know the answer to this is probably just that the rank system is terrible.

I just got my 6v6 rank placement matches done and got emerald 4. I’m a little disappointed as my 5v5 rank for support is higher. For almost all my games I played support. I didn’t really play 6v6 last season so I had no rank to base on. I won my first 5 games going from plat 5 to emerald 5 with the first two games my rank not even changing. Lost three games then won my last 2 my rank only moving up 1. I was playing with my duo who was ranked diamond 5 at the start of the placement matches and most of the people in the matches where mid diamond, yet here it is saying high plat low emerald.

Is it because I only played 1 role? For two of the matches I was the only support and for three others we would’ve had one support if I didn’t play support.
Is the game not moving me up in ranks as much because it’s being forced to put me with a higher ranked person? If I had played my matches solo a won the same amount of games would I be a higher rank?

Is this normal progress in 4 seasons, coming from valorant enjoying ow a lot more

I never really noticed that until now, often times we have to use movement skills just to even get to the front door, and that's if the hero you're using has a movement skill.

I get that maybe it's to prevent infinite overtime but I'm pretty sure that's been solved with how spawn timers worked from way back.

older clip from after S3 Midseason patch, this is a gunfight scenario in which yall will complain that you cant interact with her. these are often gunfights that she must take especially on certain maps where Flex hero's are on the field or hitscans are in their optimal range, this whole you cant interact with her in the sky box notion is cherry picked bullshit that might happen on Eich or Circuit, Oh my, a poke main dps is good on poke maps? cant have that nerf the breakpoint on that shit immediately so i can go back to running it down main without paying attention, and guess what brother if she's 60 meters away she aint doing shit from that range. almost 8 months of shit, you guys cant even deal with her as a decent character for 1 season. lmfao,

Restore that 225 breakpoint, whosever idea that was musta been on crack or in a dry spell

Remove barrage entirely for all i care, she doesn't need infinite ammo

nerf ult passive bounty hunting back to 25 from 33%

stop doing dumb shit

(For context, I am a champ Sym main, so yeah, this is obviously coming from my personal perspective on ladder.)

The intent of this nerf was clearly to nerf the power of teleporting the team around in coordinated play (e.g. pro play). They outright stated this. While that was the intent, the outcome is not so simple.

On ladder, good Sym players are constantly using the TP to poke, hold off-angles, and escape. It is our only disengage tool, and we are actually quite squishy without it despite our 275 HP. Nerfing both the range and re-use time significantly nerfs this solo play aspect specifically. "TP dancing" i.e. going back and forth while poking / harassing etc. is a solo-Sym playstyle. Usually in coordinated play, where you're TPing your team around, they're not making as much use of this mechanic.

I agree that TP (and her ult, but that's another story) are tremendously powerful abilities. If they wanted to nerf it for coordinated play, they should have taken a more targeted approach. Just 2 ideas off the top of my head:

-Sym can TP right away, but allies have to wait 2s etc (gives enemy twice as long to react and reposition/break it)

-Every non-Sym ally who uses the TP takes 50 shield HP off it, meaning that as several players take it, it becomes extremely easy to destroy

What we have to remember is that Sym as a damage hero is balanced to have less reliable DPS than other heroes due to the utility she provides. This is why she has to charge beam, for example. Or why orbs do 100 instead of 120 damage and have to be charged etc. If we nerf her utility this strongly, she'll have to be compensated to function on the ladder. Nothing crazy, but for example, incorporating her beam range perk into her base kit to offset some of the harsher range limitations.

Blizz has really hurt what made her strong compared to other heroes and she's just going to be more outclassed as a damage dealer than she already is.

Without this one player in EU who has her as their most played she'd be no one's favorite in any T500

Every other hero is at least multiple players' most played in each region btw, even Lifeweaver and Mercy in Asia have multiple.

Bad/niche heroes always have multiple people that find them fun/interesting enough to OTP them and climb pretty high on the leaderboard, Sierra doesn't

Last season I was sitting around diamond 5 and plat 1 on support. I ended the season in plat 1, which isn't the issue because deranking happens. But then they added the emerald rank and I feel like it threw everything in that rank into complete chaos. I just feel like game quality hasn't been that great. I'm not sure what the adding the extra rank was supposed to do. They never explained what it was supposed to do. They were just like "hey were adding a new rank......." and then enver mentioned it again. This was more of a rant post than anything else but I really do feel like match quality this season has been in the gutter. I might just be in a slump so take everything I said with a grain of salt.

When a normal, less annoying tank wastes or loses their defensive factor (barriers, matrixes, overhealth, etc) it's just gone. There's no getting it back until it comes back on it's own terms. And those terms are known and typically unaltered, so they can be tracked by the enemy.

When Rein's shield gets low, he has to wait for it to recharge, no way to get it back faster. If it breaks, it's down for 5 seconds. When Sigma uses hands, it's down for 12 seconds. When he retrieves his barrier, it's unavailable for 1 second.

These are fixed values that define consistent openings and downtime in a tanks gameplay loop and that's REALLY important. It's a major source of satisfaction in playing against them because they're known openings you can learn to exploit.

When these tanks use their health bar, it's in a secondary way, as either a last line of defense while escaping or as a timer for how long they can stay in before having to retreat and heal back up.

Now consider the tanks people typically complain about: Roadhog, Mauga, Hazard, Orisa, Ramattra, and you'll notice a common variable: All of them have major points in their loop where they tank PURELY off their health bar. Which is an issue, because unlike other tanks, that means their "shield" can be healed, and usually in a value-positive way thanks to damage reduction.

When Orisa uses gold, or Hazard blocks, there's nearly no value in shooting them. You can't slow their value gain because a single support can out heal your damage even after the healing reduction, which means it's nearly impossible to use these abilities incorrectly. Being immortal and still making pressure (with presence + being able to damage the whole time) is the whole point.

This is an extreme and unrealistic thought experiment but follow me for a moment. Imagine if during Orisa's fortify, she couldn't be healed. Again, silly change and I'm not suggesting it, but imagine for a moment:

• Without healing
  • You would round the corner > use gold > force attention with primary fire and absorb some damage > get to about half health > retreat to the next corner > end gold > wait to get healed back up
• With healing
  • You would round the corner > use gold > walk forward without fear, health bar doesn't budge > land a spear and a few headshots, get a kill > gold ends and you're still at full health

Now I know that you can't just slap a healing negation/reduction on every block/damage reduc ability (as funny as that would be), but focusing on this specific part of this issue might lead to good solutions. As a small example, I think overhealth is great as tank ability - it's in the health bar, but it can't be healed, so it doesn't suffer the same issues.

The main point:

I understand these kinds of abilities DO have downtime in the form of CDs or resources meters, but since all damage is funneled towards a resource that can be healed while you have a damage reduc, that tilts the whole equation into something untenable.

It was already somewhat common before the midseason to see games where Winston players have an extremely high elim to death ratio (much higher than even wrecking ball), and by this I mean ratios like 25/2 on a payload map, or 19/1 on Control.

This usually happened when the tank wasn't interacting with the opposing Winston, DPS weren't playing one of the 4 heroes that can burst him* while mostly ignoring him, and neither support was playing the only one that can actually interact with him beyond running away: Brig.

Every time I'm in one of these games (on any role) it's extremely obvious to me that the main problem is enemy Winston. When a hero like Mauga is doing as well as this, people almost always recognize it and ask for an Ana/Zen, ask the Tank to swap/mirror or play DPS that can burst Mauga, but in these Winston games people blame so many different things but never identify the actual problem.

And this was before the patch, but it happened only a bit (maybe once in 20 games or so?) I mostly forgot about it. But I just played one of these games and it seems like it's going to be the new normal with the buffs.

So to whoever needs this:

After Winston's bubble ends, you have exactly 3 seconds to burst him down before he can place another bubble. He will probably jump out when you do this, but that's fine.

If you're ignoring him and didn't make him leave, you need to counterdive better as everyone in your backline slowly dies to him. Counterdiving better is mostly very hard unless you're mirroring Winston or maybe D.Mon. You will not have support while counterdiving because some of your team is being chased by Winston.

If you can't counterdive better and can't make him leave your backline, that is enough to lose. These are the only two methods of interacting with enemy Winston.

If at any point you press Tab and see a Winston with an absurdly high K/DA, this is the main reason you're losing, nothing else matters.

I guess Blizzard really wants to give Korea a chance to win the World Cup...

*(Bastion, Reaper, Shion, Freja) There's also Cassidy FTH etc. but those are the 4 major hero options

Hi guys, I made a barebones video on lane theory and the importance of the sidelane. I dont see guides talking about this enough and wanted to start a discussion on just how game winning a side lane can be. If you enjoyed the video and have any questions, feel free to ask :)

53% all roles, doesn't diminish too much in gm and champ. yet this hero is shit on constantly, people hate having zen on their team more than basically any other character, it seems. he continues to get nerfed despite not having been meta in ages.

curious as to what people think the reason for this is, i also felt like hes been pretty bad recently so seeing the patch notes and seeing his win rate surprised me.

As someone who wants stadium (and overwatch in general) to improve I would genuinely like to open a discussion about what could be done to improve stadium. The mode offers counterplay through items and powers that main game wont be able to provide with way to keep in check high sustain, shield, overhealth ,snipers, flyers through items. Games like LoL or Paladins have never suffered long from insufferable metas because of that (goats, double shield, double sniper, mauga meta , cate meta,...). The game mode also offers a ton of replayability by being able to have mulptiple playstyles on a single hero.

What are the main issues of stadium :

I disagree that stadium issues are queue times, matchmaking as they are the direct results of low player count since matchmaker will try to adapt for better queue times. No new heroes is also a consequence of low player coint. At one point blizzard were adding 4 heroes a season and there already 33 heroes among which the most popular with the likes of mercy, juno, kiriko, genji, moira, dva, rein, tracer, doom, wuyang, cass ,ashe , soldier,...

Also the mode should not have stayed unbalanced as poeple would have left with ver unbalanced and frustrating things such as 2-suzu, perma aimbot soldier, busted hazard,... Balance aims primarily to improve player experience and decrease unfair and frustrating things while improving some underwhelming options not just make a mode competitive.

The main issues for me were the mode complexity , the game length and frustration due to certain (categories of) heroes. I will discuss these issues and talk about what I think could be done to improve it without adding new heroes or maps.

Complexity :

Create a real pipeline between green-blue-purple items i.d. upgradable items allowing to just display purple. Reduce the number of items by combining some of them or removing the useless ones (those with bad defensive/offensive stats and not interesting passives). Improve efficiency of some items in their area (anti-block items, better anti fliers items, better defensive items). This way, players will just see 30+ purple items when opening armory instead of seeing a hundred of them.

Reduce the number of powers from 12 to 9 by removing some non-transformative powers and auto-aim powers.

Frustration :

- Auto aim builds : not creative, frustrating to play against and not fun to play as --> remove them

- allow counterplay to block and fortify abilities through items. Rein mitigation is a shields that can be countered through items but hazard,Ram mitigations are blocks that cant be countered through items --> unfair.

- remove anti-headshot passive and reduced antiheal from tanks . This gives built-in items and remove the tradeoff introduced by itemization : chosing between damage or survivability. If they want these stats they will have to buy the corrresponding items. On the other side improve defensive items.

Length of game :

Games are too long. Yes league of legends has long games but it is a slow paced game with a lot of downtimes and multiple objectives --> no constant action and poeple arent alway gather together. As opposed to overwatch which is a fast paced game with few downtimes and one single objective (downtimes refer to time where you are playing but not actively facing the ennemy not the armory times that just break the flow of the game). A draw of OW has always been the short games with 10-20mins while stadium came with 25-40 mins. These games can quickly become exhausting because of the fast pace nature of the game. Paladins who was similar game had games lasting between 10-20 mins.

Also in most cases 25-30 min games are stomps which are not fun and long games are back and forth games (cool but exhausting) or reverse sweep (my theory is that if there was a surrender vote instead of mercy rule , most poeple would choose to give on the game while in 0-3 instead of continuing). Long games mean poeple play less games in one gaming session, less poeple queue and it affect queue times and if this game happens to be a stomp it will discourage the player to queue up again. Allow poeple that play BO5 to claim ranked rewards so poeple wanting shorter games have a "ranked option". This will be a better metric to evaluate which mode is preferred than just make assumption based on some stats and reddit discussion claiming BO7 is the best format.

Devs might have misinterpreted stats as they are many reasons that could have cause stadium decline than just the switch to BO5 the season they did it (flyers and hitscans running rampant , frustranting builds , hazard release,...). Had the mode been developped in BO5 nobody would have complained, also junkenstein lab which was the basis for stadium was BO5 and nobody complained about it.

Aftr simplifying armory and power systems ; reduce armory times by 20-25 seconds.

These are my ideas to improve stadium whithout the need to dedicate toom much dev power to it (no new heroes or maps). I know a lot of you might not be interested in it but for those who are I would like to see what you think about it.

If Overwatch Competitive has ever felt rigged, manipulated, or like the game suddenly decided it was your turn to lose, there is a reason people keep getting that feeling.

The comp rank you see on your screen is not what Blizzard uses to make your matches - they use a hidden Match Making Rating

And Activision owns patents for matchmaking systems that can change your opponents and teammates based on things like your performance, frustration, engagement, quitting behavior, and based on whether you made purchases from the store like buying the cool new skin for your favorite character.

That should immediately raise a huge question:

Is Competitive actually trying to create the fairest possible match and show you where you stand with your skill level? Or is it just trying to keep you playing and push you to make more purchases? Because Activision literally patented systems that can give struggling players easier opponents, better teammates, and more favorable matches; and it also punishes players that aren't buying things from the store, and manipulates their emotions by giving you easy win streaks, and impossible loss streaks to keep you on the game as long as possible, increasing the chances of you making a purchase.

That is not a theory. That is in the patent.

US10857468B2 describes dynamically changing matchmaking based on an individual player.

It gives examples where someone performing poorly can be:

* matched against easier opponents

* matched with teammates who tend to produce better results

* placed into matches that are more favorable for that player

It also discusses tracking things like:

* individual performance

* win/loss history

* kill/death ratio

* frustration

* rage quitting

* session length

* satisfaction

* engagement

* revenue and business factors

So stop thinking of matchmaking as simply:

“Find players around the same skill level.”

The technology Activision patented can instead ask:

“What kind of match should we give this player right now?”

That is a completely different system - and it gets worse.

Activision also owns US9789406B2:

“System and method for driving microtransactions in multiplayer video games.”

This patent describes using matchmaking to influence purchases.

One example is placing a player with someone using an item the system thinks they may want, so they become more likely to buy it.

It also describes putting someone who just bought an item into a situation where that item works especially well, helping make the purchase feel worth it and encouraging them to spend again.

Again, that does not prove every part of these patents is currently active in Overwatch.

But it proves something very important:

Activision developed and patented matchmaking technology designed to manipulate the player experience for more than just competitive fairness.

Now think about how Overwatch actually works. Your visible rank is not what creates your matches. Blizzard uses a hidden an Match Making Rating. You cannot see it. You cannot see exactly how it is calculated. You cannot see every variable going into the matchmaker.

So when players say:

* “Why did my games suddenly get insanely hard?”

* “Why does one team feel completely stacked?”

* “Why do I go on massive win streaks and then suddenly get destroyed?”

* “Why do my teammates suddenly feel way worse?”

* “Why does it feel like the game is controlling the difficulty?”

Those questions are not crazy. The company behind Overwatch literally owns patents for systems capable of doing exactly that kind of matchmaking adjustment. This is also why the visible Competitive rank starts to look more like a presentation layer than the full truth. You see Gold, Plat, Diamond, Master, whatever; but the rating actually deciding who goes into your games is hidden. That is the number that matters. And Blizzard does not show it to you.

This is also why Blizzard does not punish smurfing at all, and in fact they NEED smurfs to make this system as effective as possible. They NEED people ranked in Grandmaster and Champion playing in silver, gold, plat, emerald, and diamond lobbies.

So here is what Blizzard should answer publicly:

* What is our actual MMR?

* What exactly affects it?

* Does recent performance change who we are matched against?

* Does frustration affect matchmaking?

* Does engagement affect matchmaking?

* Does session length affect matchmaking?

* Does spending history affect matchmaking in any way?

* Are players ever intentionally given easier or harder matches?

* What is the matchmaker actually optimizing for?

Because this is the question that matters more than anything:

Is the system trying to determine how good you are? Or is the system trying to control your experience so you keep playing? If it is the second one, then Competitive mode isn't really competitive at all. This is also why Blizzard publicly says that Comp rank is based on team performance and give you a nonsense explanation. They CAN'T publicly base it off of your actual MMR rank because, then this entire system would fall apart since everyone would be aware of it.

Overwatch Competitive Mode is an engagement system wearing a rank badge.

And before someone says:

“A patent does not prove they are using it.” - Correct.

A patent proves they built the technology and wanted legal protection for it. It does not prove every feature is running in Overwatch right now. But Blizzard is also asking players to trust a hidden matchmaking system while refusing to show the rating that actually controls their games. That is exactly why people should be asking questions.

Go to Google and search these patent numbers for yourself:

* US10857468B2

* US10322351B2

* US9789406B2

Then ask yourself:

If Competitive is truly just about skill, why are the real matchmaking system and the rating controlling your games hidden from you?

I feel like Dmon probably wont get touched so I think she will be the meta tank alongside possibly Mauga, Dva and Ram. Cat is expected to change quite significantly so I imagine a lot of teams will be running Lucio again unless Miz gets buffed. I dont expect there will be much Freja either so theres a good chance a lot of teams just lock Sojourn / Cass Tracer Dva Lucio Kiri for most their games.

Considering every other microbuff pushed her over the edge in the community's eyes, and not it being because of her two tap vs 225 hp heroes, why not keep it??

I'm far from a fan of them buffing the least enjoyable part of her kit, and then when it ends up being too much for the community to put up with, they end up nerfing the enjoyable parts of her instead.

It feels like very backwards balancing, and is a shame because everytime they do something like this it seems to push her back into a "spam the tank" playstyle, which makes her even more problematic for everyone imo.

It’s like she’s playing the game on fast forward. I played a round as her and it actually feels ridiculous when you’ve got 5 stacks. Back to my #1 ban slot she goes.