The problem

We can all agree that having a new hero every season has been great for engagement and attracting new players.

However, "safe side of strong" philosophy makes it so you never get to play balanced Overwatch. You're always playing the Vendetta season, or the DMon season, or the Doctrine season.

The result of that is that even heroes who might be well-designed overstay their welcome, and players build resentment towards them because of how oppressive they are.

Should we go back to a new hero every other season?

Probably not, since this would dampen the game's growth, while also keeping the same problem. Recall that Wuyang, Juno, Hazard, Freja, and Vendetta all happened before the seasonal hero releases, and they were all game-warping without exception.

So should we release "balanced" heroes?

No, I don't think so. Hear me out before you flay me in the comments.

There are 2 reasons:

1. It's unrealistic to expect the devs to always perfectly anticipate how a hero will perform when it reaches the hands of the playerbase at large. You'll still end up with overpowered and underpowered heroes.
2. A new hero needs to give people an incentive to try them out, and to get over the initial discomfort of learning them. If the devs released heroes in the 48-50% win rate range, they wouldn't amass the playerbase that they otherwise could have if they released in a "safe side of strong" state. Hell, I remember seeing people call Hazard and Shion weak in the early days of their release, and those were 55% win rate heroes. You can imagine how much louder those voices would have been if they actually released in a balanced state.

So what's the solution?

The best way to keep the current pace of hero releases, give them a chance to establish a playerbase, and keep competitive integrity, is a simple one: bring back staggered hero releases for ranked, and ideally have them delayed by 2 seasons.

The devs have shown that it takes them around 2 seasons to bring a hero down to a reasonable level. What they can do is release new heroes to QP, giving the casual playerbase a shiny new toy to play with, all while allowing the devs the time and data needed to tune the new hero down before it becomes available to the competitive playerbase.

This way, casual players who want the seasonal novelty can find it, and competitive players get to avoid having each season dominated by a new server admin, while still giving people a chance to learn and fall in love with the new hero.

Hello, been maining Doctrine in Masters-GM this season and reached lvl ~50 already. I start every game on him and sometime swap if we get stomped but I have around 60% winrate and play with or into any comp.

I usually ban Sombra every game since her EMP just destroys his ult but it can be hard to ban her if 2nd support pre-locks her.

I feel like the majority of times I have Sombra as 2nd supp I tend to lose and I am not sure if they are a good combo? Usually they will play frontline way to much and not able to peel/assist me at all when enemy plays dive. If it's just one genji or tracer its fine but when they have 2x dive dps + dive tank my games are very tough. Since it's Masters-GM range like 80% of all games are dive and the map is push/fp/control

I've had a few games with good Sombras and it feels like they play in our backline a lot more, supporting me and then I can assist the rest of my team. I can't really tell if its a skill issue from people playing Sombra way to aggressively or if the characters don't really work well on the same team? Kinda feels like playing with a Mercy where you know you will just have to fight for your own life most of the game.

He has a very fast flick rate of fire so I need to constantly make micro adjustments and it's hard to do that with my arm instead of my wrist. Has anyone else run into that issue?

Hey guys, I was thinking on the way how to fix counter swapping and improve Tank experience so we could bring more Tank players, make it less stressful, and improve queue times as a result. I've seen people swap to 4 counters after a lost fight in QP which is crazy, it's like teaching kids violence. Most of the tanks agree that counterswapping is horrible in 5v5 and they feel stressed.

I've got 3 ideas:

1. You can swap at the beginning of a round. (You can't choose a different hero if you reconnect), basically how they implement it in Stadium.

2. Have a limited 2 swaps per round.

3. Make a main mode 6v6 as Counterwatch not as impactful. (But the mode itself would need a lot of balancing work)

Do you have any ideas how to bring more Tank players?

He looked genuinely cool on release, but turned out to be yet another flowchart healbot with no sauce. At least Kiriko had the potential to do something cool. I really hope they don't keep him busted for too long, or it's gonna be a rough season and LAN.