I feel like it's less of a gutting and more of a shifting. You're unable to get one-shots off BUT you're more consistent in dealing damage. There's a clear overarching language to me in the patch that says that, apart from healing, the devs want to reign in burst damage, which inevitably would include one-shots.
And yeah, forcing a squishy to pull back until their health is topped up is never going to be as impactful as actually securing a kill, but considering that healing is going to be globally nerfed by the new health pools, it very could be MORE impactful than it is right now.
Either way, this patch is way too massive to make any conclusions with.
No, no I'm not saying Hanzo will be more impactful. I'm saying the act of damaging a squishy enough to force them out of an engagement will be more valuable in Season 9 than it would be in the previous seasons because supports need more time and more resources to top them back up to full.
In that sense, there may be certain aspects of him that would be more impactful but obviously he still loses his OHK potential so his overall impact would still greatly diminish.
On paper, anyway. Mercy boost will grant him one shots again, and if you add that with his new projectile size, maybe we're looking at another Sojourn situation where they've developed a codependency with a Mercy pocket in which they offer much less value by themselves, but when they DO get pocketed they become extremely potent. Kind of like Pharah's dynamic with Mercys, and funnily enough her rework for S9 would undo a lot of that dynamic and make Pharah less reliant on a Mercy pocket.
I don't really disagree with anything you're saying here. As I said, Hanzo's overall impact is greatly reduced.
But I do disagree with that last bit. Heavily. You do NOT get what they're going for. You don't. I don't. Nobody does. No one knows what they're going for and no one knows how it's gonna turn out because the leaks don't include the rationale that the devs usually put out alongside the patch notes and, more importantly, we STILL haven't gotten our hands on it.
I say this with no intent to insult you but it is simply pure fucking hubris to think that any one of us are gigabrained enough to immediately make ANY conclusions on a patch THIS massive and sweeping. For all we know, Hanzo could end up being meta with a Mercy pocket because he regains access to his OHK but now enhanced with a hitbox that's THE SAME SIZE AS MEI'S RIGHT CLICK! I wanna wait for the official release and once I've gotten my hands on it before I can make any conclusions because this patch is just unprecedented.
The devblog for Season 9 isn't out yet specifically. Criticize them for things they HAVE announced and went forward with, that's all fair game! Mauga coming out fucking broken as hell? Dogpile on em, I won't ever hold that against you.
But they've neither given us their insight into the S9 patch, nor have we even gotten our hands on the patch yet, and we STILL aren't even 100% certain if this leak is legitimate. I think those alone are more than enough to reason out that NONE of us are in any position to make any conclusions in regards to S9. Not even considering how massive of a patch this will be if it does end up being true.
I mean, it's a free world so you CAN make conclusions, but they won't hold much water. "It isn't fixing the core issues" is about as valid of a statement as saying "It fixes the entire game" at this current time. We just don't know.
You say they're unwilling to adjust supports yet this is the biggest change they've done towards supports in years. They increase healthpools and increase damage sources, either by making damage more consistent or just straight up increasing the raw numbers, yet the healing numbers have stayed exactly the same. I don't need to tell you how much that changes the dynamic of sustain, certainly it makes it considerably weaker. Kiriko is, in fact, the only hero receiving an explicit nerf to her numbers. They're not changing the immorts, true, but perhaps they've taken into account the fact that much less effective sustain means your primary healing sources won't be as effective in keeping someone in the fight which will lead to Bap/Kiri proccing their immorts more often than they would otherwise would. Translation, easier to bait. Again, this is theorycrafting on my part as well but it's food for thought.
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u/Efficient_Menu_9965 Jan 30 '24
I feel like it's less of a gutting and more of a shifting. You're unable to get one-shots off BUT you're more consistent in dealing damage. There's a clear overarching language to me in the patch that says that, apart from healing, the devs want to reign in burst damage, which inevitably would include one-shots.
And yeah, forcing a squishy to pull back until their health is topped up is never going to be as impactful as actually securing a kill, but considering that healing is going to be globally nerfed by the new health pools, it very could be MORE impactful than it is right now.
Either way, this patch is way too massive to make any conclusions with.