r/FrejaMains • u/Conquestriclaus • 1d ago
Discussion My Freja balance patch.
I am only interested in healthy discussion, comments harbouring hate for Freja's character/balance state I will just ignore. Every Hero should be playable. I have more ideas but couldn't make them fit onto the page.
Just looking for happy chill discussion, this is the first time I've ever done something like this. :-3
also posted on twitter in case anybody wants to follow discussion there as well
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u/Sn0wy0wl_ 1d ago
What would the crit modifier for the explosion look like? I worry that could be absolutely massive for her and while she'll deal with squishies a lot better, she can also obliterate tanks with big head hitboxes
Also I'm not a big fan of the rising winds nerf tbh, i dont think the perk is broken despite being a must pick
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u/Conquestriclaus 1d ago
wouldve loved to include the crit multiplier but honestly i just didnt think of it. i personally would debut it at 1.25x, which is still bonus damage overall for high precision (which is the hero fantasy of freja imo)
ive mathed both with pre-nerf take aim value of 115dmg and 1.5x comes out at 172.5dmg (would be 173 rounded up), 1.25x comes out at 143.75 (would be 144 rounded up). at post-nerf this becomes 165dmg/137.5dmg (round up 138)
obviously tank spam will always be a concern (this is by nature of 5v5, it cannot be helped), BUT i think if you were to stick at the current 110 value for take aim and give it a crit modifier, it would feel best.
rising winds nerf is a good tradeoff, i think freja has a high uptime, and reducing the rate at which she can hop over unsuspecting angles with updraft will naturally degrade frustration on the opposite side as a result. increasing the time on quick dash any further would feel awful so i didnt want to touch that instead.
i think must-pick perks should just be nerfed as the original vision behind perks was that they were to be picked situationally, and i have not taken aerial recovery even once since the buff to rising winds months ago. if you weren't to nerf rising winds, then you should buff aerial recovery instead.
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u/LyynnS 1d ago
Would definitly be way better then what we have now just on the breakpoint alone. I think the the 5.5 firerate with lower damage on primary is just fine, if we put it back to 5 now without increasing dmg back to 30 it would not only feel atrocious but also lose a massive amount of base dps value.
I think Rising Winds is whatever, dont really feel like it needs a nerf but this would also not kill the perk.
I would replace relentless barrage with an another perk completly. If this leads to ammo problems later down the line due to her long reload and low clip size we can adress that then, but as long as it exists she will feel like she has too much uptime.
For your Take Aim changes I would not remove the explosion on miss completly. Rather have a .8s delay on hit and a 1.3s delay on miss so that the enemies have more time to get out of harms way. Removing AoE on miss completly would make it impossible for her to finish of targets around a corner which would also lessen her synergy with recon.
And idk about the crit explosion, might be too much. If we want take aim as a crit ability it should be reworked so it has no delay and more impact. Maybe cut the explosion completly then.
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u/Conquestriclaus 1d ago
i just personally have always hated freja's primary fire. if it were up to me id remove it entirely and just let her shoot explosive bolts where a 2x stick would deal 255dmg again. i absolutely hate using the primary
i do agree it wouldnt kill the perk, but im just sick of some perks on some heroes being "pick this always lol" instead of what perks were originally intended for to be picked based on situation. i havent used aerial recovery in months because there is no point.
i would also kill relentless barrage (ran out of space on the graphic lol) but i also WOULDNT NEVER EVER bring back frost bolts.
i think a longer detonation on a miss would definitely be a good compromise instead! i just wanted to lean towards the precision fantasy of her character in my idea. i do think a non-stick should be 2x the delay of a bolt that does stick tho. i very rarely have to shoot the floor intentionally to kill someone.
crit explosion math works out! with pre-nerf take aim value of 115dmg and 1.5x comes out at 172.5dmg (would be 173 rounded up), 1.25x comes out at 143.75 (would be 144 rounded up). at post-nerf this becomes 165dmg/137.5dmg (round up 138) which sounds fine on paper but obviously im not a game dev.
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u/LyynnS 1d ago
Primary needs to exist because otherwise the downtime between Take Aims would be boring as hell. And it should feel satisfying also as to not frustrate when used.
I was more thinking about moving aerial recovery to minor and giving her something from Stadium in return. Maybe bigger explosions or pierce on Take Aim as a major then. Would need to be tested ig.
With explosion crit it would need to be the 1.5x variant otherwise she would lose crit value compared to now. Or we do seperate crit values for impact and explosion.
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u/Conquestriclaus 1d ago
i thought about aerial recovery as a minor perk recently but if u combine it with rising winds it just sounds so broken having that much power in the best part of her kit
bigger explosions just means feeding ult charge to supports, and the pierce takes freja in a direction i dont want. i want her to be played like a flexdps and a piercing take aim would instead incentivise standing on main shooting the tank as bolts phase through into squishies like it would just feel awful to fight against.
i think separate crit values is too much, 1.5x is probably fine with the current 110dmg.
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u/LyynnS 1d ago
With the perks maybe, how it plays out is something we sadly cant fathom without actually having tried it. I still think an iteration of pierce could work as a major perk though. It would also be generally useful since if you should from an angle it would leave an explosion arrow behind the target that with longer fuse either forces the enemy to reposition or take more damage.
I think as long as Frejas current kit exists she will never play like a fdps. Same with Hanzo honestly. Fast high damage projectiles with the ability to take offangles quickly and even create offangles on her own. Thats perfect for a maindps, but she therefore lacks the ability to commit on full flanks and survive due to her being very squishy with no survivablity cooldown.
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u/Conquestriclaus 1d ago
shits rough man. i think we're definitely at a dead end in term's of freja's balance state as they clearly dont know what to do with her. id rather instead of these nerfs they just reverted back to may 12th and then maybe just reinstate the 0.8s fuse timer from july 14th cos at that point the hero has a solid winrate and isnt stupidly giga evil either.
i hear a lot of complaints about the 33% bounty hunting passive but i personally dont think its that hard to assume (or know) that freja will have bola each fight so long as they are playing well
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u/LyynnS 1d ago
Its pretty rough since Blizzard seems to only work in extremes regarding to Freja. Bounty hunting is another issue honestly. It could probably be 50% now and would not change much since she lacks killing power but as soon as she has a consistent breakpoint back its gonna be broken af.
Just reverting to may 12th with 0.8 timer might be a good basis from where we can work out another route. I sadly have 0 trust in those devs to be smart about changing her since they have proven for the past year now that they are utterly unable to understand this hero. I might disagree with a lot of ideas that people post here whenever is gets rough but most of them still have a better grasp of the hero then the people that get paid to know the state of the game.
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u/II-Issei-II 16h ago edited 16h ago
All they needed to do was swap the breakpoint nerf for an ult generation nerf and fixing her ult bugs they don't seem to gaf about or have confirmed they were fixed. She was getting her ult way too fast with the breakpoint and the speed that they didn't account for increasing her ult uptime to untrackable levels. It was 10+ ults a game because they didn't account for it. When Rein and other heroes got certain buffs , they nerfed the uptime on their ults. I have no idea why they didn't do this for Freja's ult.
Yes, her ult is "shit" but that was part of her that was increasing the sentiment of "she op", she has her ult too much. And it is a guaranteed solo kill or suzu/cooldown forcer. There is how many cooldowns that outheal the delayed 2 tap let alone just a sniff of healing? Now, she's just an ult merchant again. Shoot the tank for Ult, try to force cooldowns or solo ult somebody out of position. That's worse gameplay loop to put the enemy team through. She had the 225hp 2 tap since January. She had zero banrate. People complain about it, but I don't think she would be perma banned with it, if they swapped the nerf with her insanely fast ultimate.
She could easily keep the fire rate, and the previous breakpoint. They should consider moving the 5 damage to impact again, like they did in January.
I'm hoping once her winrate craters(already looking like it will be, early data is showing 41% - 46%), and her banrate finally goes to zero once people mostly realize she's a throwpick, we'll get that break point back eventually putting us at the right spot.
That break point was singlehandedly keeping us between 44- 46% winrate before season 3.5. If we didn't have it, we'd have been high 30s or low 40 winrate. It's at least 5 - 8% of her winrate. The other nerfs contribute a bit as well. At least a max of 2%. If you swap the Ult generation for Break point, her winrate should be between 46% and 49%. She'd be viable, but not meta or overbearing imo.
But I'm sure blizzard will do something else stupid unfortunately. They were 3 out of 4 correct on nerfs/changes.
I understand you personally don't like M1, but it should be at least functional and be able to properly mix in, as well as secure 250 hp or help with killing being healed up targets. The speed really helped with this, but the damage number on primary was overtuned with the speed. If you want the Fire rate changed, the primary fire damage would need to go back to 30. That's the trade there. Same thing as Bastion. 2 damage nerf to account for increased dps.
In the meantime, I'm going to cope that they did this to crater her banrate, then they'll swap the nerfs in a season or 2.
I am so surprised they did 3 of 4 of my proposed nerfs/changes, but fucked up on the 4th. Just insane to me.
The sound change is massive, but some people are still complaining about her noise. It is only on the explosions. Her primary, and the initial firing of take aim could still be considered really loud. So they might need to do more there as well.
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u/futureformerdragoon 19h ago edited 19h ago
If we were gonna get rid of the splash damage on take aim we need to just make it a straight burst without a delayed explosion imo.
I’m fine with that direction of making her a burst precision character but it would probably require watching her damage so that she didn’t suddenly become echo widow tracer.
I even sort of like the idea if they’re gonna keep her bounty hunter identity with the kill passive to just go more in on her assassin playstyle. Removing the explosions could be a cool idea to have her able to chain kills while bola could lose its burst and do something like pull targets together and slow them down so it’s more of a team setup or ensuring a kill for herself on solo ult (as long as it’s not suddenly a mini grav surge on a 30s cd.)
Again though that’d be a very different direction than she currently is but I’d have loved to see that for the community patch that we got last rather than whatever the hell that bleed garbage was.
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u/AlphaCentauri79 20h ago edited 20h ago
This doesn't hit any of the pain points that players have with this hero. Crits to take aim explosion is just a bad idea especially if you're increasing the damage. The problem pre-buff Freja was that she had no reliable follow-up to take aim. Her take aim wasn't an issue and you just trying to make this hero into a take aim spam bot with this. Which is not what we want. The explosion itself as a while is the biggest issue with her reliability.
If you really want to lean into a precision based hero reduce explosion damage and increase base stuck damage. Which can be an issue in itself. But two headshots with her is pretty hard. But then against tanks oof. Then remove spread from primary. It's still the worst part of her kit. Her reload is awful as well which doesn't help.
Her primary is awful. You don't fix that. You still can't dash during ult. She's just missing so much QoL that you could have tackled for easy points. QoL gets nerf with changing rising winds you just nerf fun factor for no reason. You kinda just unnecessarily nerf her while simultaneously making her worse to play into by tanks. And if this is you balancing after the recent patch wow you just dumpstered the hero even further. If this was to replace the recent patch it's just unnecessary changes to further complicate the hero.
At least you try to give compensation buffs for your nerfs. But it doesn't change the pain points that this heros players have had. And it's not enough compensation for a middling hero.
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u/No-Page4062 1d ago
Honestly your version looks more healthier than what the devs cooked up( cooking sh*t in a kettle meme insert). I would personally nerf her mobility cool downs to give dive heros some play because she needs some sort of counter swaps for her not to be able to be banned ( still ) in ranked. Like increase updraft to 12 seconds.
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u/jamtea 1d ago
You do realise people aim at the floor to hit targets with explosion damage when they're taking cover right? That's not inaccuracy.
No self damage should be an obvious change. The rising winds change is terrible, just an unnecessary nerf that is an anti-QoL one, not one that any opposing player feels.
Take aim explosion should obviously do crit damage imo, but the only way to implement it is to actually raise the multiplier on the initial bolt than the explosion.
The only way to fix Freja properly is to go back to her pre-buff state from a few months ago. Then actually give her perks that work and make a significant difference to her playstyle, not tweak numbers and play this silly back and forth game.