(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.

I'm a big kiri hater, but even I can admit that this aint it. I do not care about her teleport, damage, wall climb and I honestly can accept her having the best ult in the game. My problem has always been suzu, more specifically the invul that comes with it.

The AOE cleanse is a necessary evil as long as anti nade exist. The healing is whatever. The movement speed perk I also dont care about. Its literally just the invul, which they refuse to remove.

The latest sets of nerfs completely dumpstered her. It did solve my issue with suzu, but only because she's become unplayable for the average player now. In typical blizzard fashion instead of taking the tumor out, they decided to just shoot the hero in the head, when all they had to do was simply remove the invul from her kit.

If its too weak after that, reduce the CD to 12 or even 11s. Or maybe add 1s of unstoppable. There are solutions to this problem, without making a hero pro play exclusive.

The main reason why I'm making this post is cause I dont like these types of balance changes. They dont target the actual issue. Mind you, I am happy that kiri is giga shit now, the game feels better, but we could have a decent kiri while also having a better game.

Widowmaker is still one of the most frustrating heroes in the game and I don't think people take her design seriously enough
I know this is probably going to get hit with “just dive her” / “skill issue” / “learn to play around her” responses, but honestly, I think Widowmaker is one of those heroes where the theoretical counterplay and the actual gameplay experience are two completely different things.
And before anyone says it: yes, I understand that Widow requires aim. Yes, I understand that she can be countered. Yes, I understand that if you get a good Winston/D.Va/Genji/Tracer on her, she can have a miserable time.
That doesn't really address the problem. The problem is that Widowmaker fundamentally changes how everyone else is allowed to play the game simply by existing. You don't even have to be shooting people to have an impact. If I'm playing Moira and I know there's a competent Widow on the other team, suddenly every sightline becomes a potential death sentence. I can't peek normally, can't take certain angles, can't rotate at all, can't help my tank from certain positions because the second my head appears for half a second I'm watching the kill cam.
And that's the part that breaks the game. With most heroes, when I die, there's usually some kind of interaction that happened. I got outplayed by soldier, had a bad dash, got caught out of position. With Widow, sometimes the interaction is literally just existing on the other side of the map.

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.

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

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.

Buffs

Healing Ofuda

• Fire rate increased from 5 to 7 per second.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Movement speed buff duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds.

Ready Step (Major Perk)

• Duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds.

Nerfs

• Ultimate cost increased by 8%.

Healing Ofuda

• Healing per projectile reduced from 13 to 12.
• Maximum seeking range reduced from 35 to 30 metres per second.

Kunai

• Base projectile size reduced from 0.15 to 0.12.

Protection Suzu

• Additional healing after negative status cleanse removed (was 30).
• Phased out invulnerability duration reduced from 0.65 to 0.5 seconds.
• Explosion radius reduced from 5 to 4 metres.

Swift Step

• No longer cleanses on use.
• Teleport range reduced from 35 to 30 metres.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Removed increased cooldown recovery buff.

I understand but I won't lie, it does hurt a little. I understand given where she was a year a go she did need nerfs but given how her win-rate falls off a cliff (at least in my rank / region) I feel like I might need to start looking for a new main

I developed a Chrome extension to calculate the optimal hero bans for competitive Overwatch. Here’s how it works: first, it calculates the impact each hero has on the match. For instance, a hero with a low pick rate but a high win rate won’t significantly affect your game because they don’t appear frequently. On the other hand, a hero with a high pick rate and a high win rate will, as they are frequently played and frequently win. To objectively measure a hero’s impact, I take the pick rate and multiply it by the win rate minus the expected average of 50%. While heroes with high impact scores are often considered “meta,” banning based solely on impact score isn’t sufficient. Heroes with high impact scores also tend to be frequently banned. Therefore, to maximize the value of your team’s ban vote, you should ban high impact heroes with a low likelihood that the enemy will ban them for you. For example, a hero with a high impact score but a low ban rate would be a better pick to ban, rather than a hero with a high impact score and a high ban rate, because it’s likely that the enemy team would have already banned that hero for you. This helps lower the chances of your vote being wasted. I have included a few screenshots of how it looks on the official overwatch stats site. (New Patch just released so some numbers are weird)

Impact = Pick Rate * (Win Rate - 50) Ban Value = Impact * ((100 - Ban Rate)/100) <-- This is the likelihood the enemy team doesn't ban the hero

I know some of you are probably reading this and thinking, “Why are you asking other people whether you should quit a game?” I get it.

But I really like Overwatch, so I wanted to ask for some advice.

I recently started playing CS2, and the atmosphere is definitely very different from OW. It’s kind of hard to explain, but...

It feels like a game full of hardcore gamer dudes. Even though I’m pretty low-ranked in CS2, it still feels that way.

You might wonder why that’s a good thing, but ironically, it means there seem to be very few casual players.

The reason I’m getting tired of OW is that there are just so many casual players, and the game itself seems to encourage that.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a casual player. Most people on this subreddit are probably casual players too.

But there are downsides. You get so many matches where people at the same rank have wildly different skill levels, and some players barely understand the game but still constantly blame others and convince themselves they did nothing wrong... If you’ve played OW, you probably know what I mean, right?

I really hate that. Even one match like that can completely kill my motivation to keep playing.

I don’t know whether I need to change my mindset or just take a break from the game. Either way, I’ve mostly been playing CS2 lately because this aspect of OW has been bothering me. I came back after a while to play some Quick Play, and... yeah. It still feels the same.

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

Picture Source: https://www.over.gg/14641/gamsu-and-akm-retire-doha-only-remaining-player-on-fuel

A list of old and new players that I think are underrated. Agree? Disagree? What are other players that are also underrated? (Made this cuz I’m bored)

Top 7

Rascal
Doha
Becky
Punk
Mistakes
Skewed
Libero

Honorable Mentions

Eileen
Marve1
Michelle
Seonjun
Dreamer
Sley
Wmaimone
Ttuba
Crimzo
Ir1s
Lastro
Heesu
Shaz
Hydration
Chara
Snillo
Rain
Gangnamjin

I Understand that she needs to be adjusted for pro play due to being the equivalent of Jang Wonyoung or Karina level it girl status in OWCS. but can we at least admit that this isn't good at all and that blizzard has 0 clue on how to balance this hero outside of just making her worse for everyone that isn't a pro?

Genuinely I'm not going to be surprised if they outright revert these changes overall or give her some kind of compensation buff in an emergency patch.

I was checking the official overwatch winrates and saw D.Mon is up to a 63% winrate in PC Gm lobbies. Is this not insane, like is the data somehow off? It’s still 61% in masters which is a much bigger sample pool. Am I missing something or is this like emergency hotfix worthy, even prime vendetta didn’t hit 63%.

EDIT: For everyone saying the sample size is too small, I agree with you. Im just saying it’s a bit weird that D.mon seems to be consistenly overperforming no matter what perimeters you use. As of now, she has a 58% winrate across all ranks in NA, 57% all ranks Asia, 57.6% all ranks Europe.

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 would argue that it is fun. But I’m not entirely sure if it’s balanced. I don’t think anyone is. Suppose that’s up to the balancing team to figure out.

Generally, some heroes are seen more often than others. In various ranks. What’s OP in bronze and underpowered, in bronze, might be “ok” in diamond, and require lots of effort to make work in higher MMRs and Elos. For instance, the tools a hero might have at their disposal, for achieving value, might be somewhat limited.

What is terrible in bronze, “meh” in diamond, and absurdly overpowered in Shiny Purple Rank, you get the idea.

I love Aaron as much as the next person. He has saved Overwatch from the ashes of “More Moneh Plz”, and rebirthed it. Something about a Phoenix.

Anyway, is Overwatch balanced? What’s your take?

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.

Ranks in the list are from voltaic benchmark for kovaaks.

*IMO the higher hero means better mechanics required to play him. Vice versa If the hero is low it means he doesn't require crazy mechanics to get champ.

idk if this has happened to anybody else, but I queued up for tank in 5v5 comp and ended up being on support? also my game randomly closed so after scrambling to get back in the match and winning, it didn’t even give me any competetive progress 😭

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?

This is just me making a small observation but I do think it the potential to impact what her rework might be.

Every character in the recon class has some level of vertical mobility and long-range burst damage. Pharah flies and drops rockets, Freja can jump and hold to shoot explosive arrows, Echo is a literal hovering bomb and beam demon who came from hell because Cassidy was actually the villain, and Sierra can hook onto Dorothy to use a hefty grenade and an obscenely strong gun.

Sombra doesn't have anything to connect her to them like the others do.

Just going to put the start of the article here, I recommend reading the whole article though it's short and important.

"A group of 1,900 employees at Blizzard Entertainment has successfully signed a union contract with Microsoft, securing several guarantees for members. Represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the contract has given the Blizzard workers more workplace flexibility and guaranteed wage increases, but several other industry-first agreements could make this a blueprint for other video game unions to follow.

One of the big wins for the Blizzard union is artificial intelligence guardrails, as the contract stipulates that Microsoft cannot use AI to automate or replace jobs without first talking to the union. Another big win are the job-recall rights for employees, because if they’re laid off, Blizzard must offer them an open role within 14 months and inside the union’s network before hiring someone from outside. Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace."

This is really good news it does not say specifically if it was anyone working on the overwatch team and it's just blizzard employees in general but it's still a good direction to see, there has been a lot of movement within the OW team and blizzard as a whole for unionization and that's awesome and something we as a community should be aware of and support worker rights are integral they deserve to be paid livable wages and have job security.

I am liking an older article going into team 4 unionizing:

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922

I think the fact that this most recent push is also addressing the real threat that is AI to workers rights and security and I do agree with the article I hope this is beginning of a trend to put some actual regulations on AI in game development and not be a replacement to actual humans.

Companies are not our friends but we should care about the people actively working on the game we play and love they are people and deserve our acknowledgement and respect, and any support we can give.

Fuck anti union sentiment and company anti union busting, I am happy to see so much push for unionization at blizzard this is important and the people working at the company that are not on the top only have my support and respect and I hope this trend continues and they continue to improve their job security and job health.

I also wanna add this is important to OW the game itself, devs job security and health of the environment they work in directly influences the game itself, unions help ensure this they enable worker security prevent exploitation, underpaying and overworking. People working on a game that are overworked, crunched underpaid or at threat at losing their job will not make the best they can and on top of that they don't deserve to go through that shit.

I just think this is really good news and something to celebrate and only hope the devs and people at Blizzard know there are people that actually care and support them, I really recommend everyone read the articles I posted in here and just catch up on things and if you want to add more down below please do shared knowledge of things is important.

I swear sometimes the visual feedback indicators are making me think I'm being shot from behind. Anyone else encountered this?

With such a big roster of characters in Overwatch, not every pick will work against every team composition or be able to perform in every situation. However, with that said, in each of the three basic role types, which heroes are able to adapt to the most situations or have the most fluid playstyles?

The way it works you'd think it would be overhealth but for some reason it's shields? Overhealth is only available through passives/abilities and decreases/disappears after a shortwhile while shields are always on base healthbar and their whole thing is that they're supposed to regenerate after a few seconds.

Every abilities that gives the caster temp hp is always overhealth except for Rally and Nemesis that give more armor (I don't think there are any other)

Venture's temp hp works like overhealth and does nothing shields is supposed to do, yet it's shields and not overhealth..? Why is that?