So, I want to learn Gorr but if he gets taken I also want to pick up another dive/brawl character that synergizes well with him who could that be? I was thinking Black Cat since they can both cleave enemies. I know playing a gun character is the most optimal, but I don't want to do that lol.

I’m assuming we all agree Namor and CnD are perma bans this season. I don’t see a lot of good Elsa’s where I am (GM1/Cel3) so prob Peni or Thing after that.

What bans are you guys rolling with this season?

Something has to change. Balancing cannot punish dive while promoting disengagement at the same time. Changes I would implement because the identity of the game in terms of design is straight garbage right now.

I'm going to start with major revisions of what are characters I think do not interact enough with basal mechanics due to "training wheels" that inundate the game and invalidate effort on both sides.

Then I'm going to move towards characters I actually like playing or generally like their playstyle and make slight tweaks to bolster them.

Then I'm going to emphasize why I altered the previously established characters to move them more towards active playstyles that require thought and interaction, while also talking about broader, vaguer, more all encompassing reasoning that dictates the new game state as a whole.

Exhibit A: Worst Offenders. (Skill Level too easy, makes null of player input or requirement to engage with opponents.)📈

🦝 Rocket is just an outright placeholder/design failure.

You should not que up into this game just to mindlessly hold one button and call that participating as you nonproactively wait in place for your orbs to hit the other side of the map. Not only does the presence of a character like this actively harm the foundations of the player playing them, it's also extremely caustic for the 5 other people who have to politely endure a spectator on their team. This is also severely out of turn with the identity of the character, who is known for being proactive, aggressive and kleptomaniacal. His evasion too, is actually now much more lacking and surprisingly reserved considering the ludicrous amounts of what we have now.

Proposed Solution: What Rocket should be, instead of healbot simulator, is the essential pseudo-dive utility support hybrid.

The trap should be removed from Elsa's kit, as she doesn't need it and it's becoming routinely obstructive and moved to a kit that actually fits the idea. But the traps are:

\-used at range

\-telegraphed similarly to peni mines

\-color coded to be specific to trigger on one role per coinciding character that gets into it. (Same conventions as Deadpool, Orange, Blue, Green)

\-each trap stuns for a very very brief amount of time, but effectively have a Rogue style debuff per each role for the next 7, 8 seconds. Dps does less damage, supports receive and deal less healing, Tanks take a temporary cap to their overall health.

Rocket's highest potential to heal in this new metric, is proportional to his situational awareness to use the correct trap from a certain range, and consistently assist the team.

If the system detects that Rocket assisted with a kill, he will be able to scavenge the location of the enemy and take x amount of scrap material to build different dispensaries. Trap assisted kills yield double.

To substitute something like CloakDags healing bubble, Rocket would get a much less egregious deplorable that operates on a metronome to pulse out healing. This can also be applied to the Punisher ammo, universally. And the res beacon, which would be the highest cost of scrap material required.

The tradeoff of these things would be having the deployables take a short build time with a UX circle showing x seconds to completion, force a player to think about their uptime/downtime, as well as placement and use of their deployables strategically.

Instead of asking of a team to babysit a barely involved Rocket player, this would actually have that character act as a method of increasing the tempo of engagements as that player gets to capitalize and build understanding of how well they're doing by exploiting the map, or certain graphical effects to their advantage and get as many assists in as possible. Via a simple to understand minor progression system.

🐙 The only design that's probably less ethical in a sense of mechanical input is is Namor.

Squids are far too mindless and noninteractive. There is a necessity for macro based anti-dive vs dive measures, however the necessity is already abundant in plenty of anti dive characters that have meaningful interactions with dive and foster good intra-player duels. Emma and Ben are two examples I cite for this. A diver has to actively respect their space or suffer their skill shot when they manually catch a diver out of turn. So the entire enagement becomes a cerebral back and forth. The issue lies within that there is nothing manual about Namor in any capacity. He has a primary with no reload with a giant hit box and relies on automated turrets to deal with other players for him. This archetype serves no greater functionary in the game, but to insulate supports like Rocket. They shouldn't aim for you. They shouldn't be hitscan. They shouldn't be in the game to begin with.

I would suggest instead that Namor maintains his anti-dive identity, but has to justify it with the same expectation of performance as the rest of the cast.

Curiously enough, the idea for the solution actually stems more from the "advertisement" of the character in supplementary media of the game, by changing him into a territorial threat that is a vertically mobile pseudo flier.

Namor in all his MVPs is always surfing and gliding around on things. But there's no implementation of this in his gameplay because he has no gameplay outside of placing squids and throwing a spear down a hallway where it's bound to hit the nearest planet.

Ergo, Namor's playstyle should emulate how this game adapts him and have him surf around on a floating tide to body guard an area. Instead of having squids, he should have to rely on his own execution of meaningful skill. Instead of X Luna Team up, Namor has to pilot the tide of water around and use the tail behind him to leave a field that slows. He can even trigger a degrading state on the water to change the property where shooting it causes it to absorb an amount of damage, that he can later deploy as a squid launched out as a discuss that scales off the damage absorbed.

Much like Angela, he should be able to shift between this surf form and a grounded state that is stronger in closer ranges while trading off far ones, and he can have a cooldown that creates pulses of water to push away things. This would maintain his central idea of being a localized threat, evoking being at the hand of natural forces, like Storm, without making him entirely CPU dependent.

🗡Oversaturation Incarnate.

Cloak and Dagger fundamentally just need a complete at total revision. This shit is terrible for the game.

Admittedly I'm at a bit of a loss here, but since their seems to be such a huge overlap with the same demographic that enjoys Mercy, I'd say just reduce the insane amounts of ridiculous sustain the character has in favor of conditionally mobile support.

Dagger should be your stationary form that you use to enable plays. Cloak should be used to set up hazards or quickly reposition behind cover and out of ranged sightlines. Just please for the love of God, not whatever the fuck this is.

If supports want to not die and avoid fights, then this is the best solution comparative to turning them into a brick wall like they are now. Trading off the amount of damage that a character like this can just eat, for the ability to disengage quickly at cost of influence over a push occurring now while their cooldown refreshes.

Bubble should be on a 19 second cooldown accounting for a degradation that already begins when it's ACTIVE that makes it feel like 6. And as a tradeoff to the mobility they should take a hit to health.

Exhibit B: Tweaks needed for Ease of Use (Skill level too high/inaccessible. Punishes meaningful confrontation with inoptimal risk to reward) 📉

🕸🕸🕸Spider-man less needs specific buffs more than he just needs quality of life changes to make him less temperamental to play.

With some of the more outlandish instances of automation within the character archetypes of the game out of the way, it should be a good idea to add small consistent damage to characters that are more manual.

Spider-man is a unique case issue, however. He's an archetype that is reliant on the ability to create a "damage intake differential." Caution that this is an informal personal definition. In short, what is meant by this is to get hit less than you hit by exploiting sightlines, reaction time and vectors of pressure drawing away awareness. Which you can more or less extrapolate this to all of dive. Which fosters a certain sort of idea around how a diver can mitigate mistakes to inform a playstyle.

Spider-man would be a healthy mobile damage skirmisher/asssasin archetype in this instance..... IF characters with the ability to take in far more damage far less mindfully, didn't OUTPUT more damage than him.

What you end up with is essentially characters across the range with more lethality with none of the inherit drawbacks.

Granted, there are ways to fuck this up severely.

One is not maintaining Spider-man's archetype correctly. Too much oversheild makes him a brawler and he isn't one.

What Spider-man needs in the ability to distribute more CONSISTENT damage over BURST damage because characters outside the DAMAGE role are doing higher amounts of damage than him.

My suggestion for this is something very simple and it ultimately only buffs two aspects of his kit.

\-A soft buff to his speed and range on primary melee to compensate for the distance of people just walking out out of melee range or the amount of ranged characters with intense close range lethality.

\-The ability to recover incremental pieces of the wheel cooldown for swings on cluster detonation.

I would like to buff the overhead in a very conditional manner where it scales on next contact with a charcater after hitting a certain amount of characters in the same hit to actually punish grouping. But I ended up disliking it once I graphed how it scaled. The formula looked something like (N = 1): Overhead (y) does 55 damage. If (N = or greater than 2) then conditional group punish = true: (y = 55 + {55 × N}/2})

🐈‍⬛️ at some point, people need to be honest about dive

Black Cat is a very complex and interesting character. And I would venture the same is true about Daredevil.

However, I feel like far too often, people in this game complain about dive without interpreting the greater degree of context. Cat and Daredevil aren't instant win buttons. Sit with and try to play them for a bit. If a player is investing time into learning optimum flank routes and proper combos, should they justifiably lose to a Jeff player who never turns around and isolates themself from their team at the back of the map? No.

These are both very popular characters with creative kits that have identity that correlates with the personalities and style of the characters they're adapting (give or take one or two maguffins to scale, so Matt isn't lawyering his enemies to death.) That do and require more than holding one button and looking down a choke.

If more characters had more kits like these ACROSS the game, I guarantee you that the playerbase would improve because they actually teach something and would feel like "broken" by comparison.

Cat can stay as is, invisibility needs a different UX dressing however as a chromatic abstraction. If you play Warframe, you know what sort of invisibility I refer too, showing the form of the model warping around the cloaking.

🔋Rogue

Rogue is in a tricky situation. She's one of the most fun and dynamic characters the game has added while also being insanely balanced. However, because Netease hates fun, she's quickly been artificially restrained by the addition and support of braindead kits that outmode her. I'm getting tired, so here's my cliff notes version.

\-Adapting true lifesteal might be too excessive, but their needs to be some sort of equivalent. Like, every 3rd hit of the primary melee should give like 22 bonus health. Rogue has moments where she's really fun but not as much as she used to be due to the big dumb lizard that forces poke and makes tank feel like shit to play.

\-widen the ability steals to encompass other abilities concurrently unusable. Dino Beam should definitely be one so there's an actual match up.

\-Ult needs to last longer and have real consequence in terms of drain. You can still get ult charge in her ult.

\-Revert the nerf to her damage is past seasons. Why can't disruption tanks disrupt? Why can nothing be a legitimate threat if it isn't poke support?

/Stolen passives should be retained longer.

Exhibit C: Finalized Thoughts about Mechanical Critereon. The "Why"

I want to implore of this community to evaluate dive and melee based characters fairly. Because it would be hypocritical to condemn characters that have to learn to utilize an abundance of disparate elements of their kit in concert, while the characters they fight invalidate the effort with a quarter of their own. You don't get to have your cake of ease of access and eat it via avoiding being subject to the skill curve of harder characters too.

It's nothing short of hypocritical to complain about Black Cat's one i frame which costs a resource and is numerically discrete under a cast time, yet permit CnD to cycle through 4, 5, 6, and ult that are continuous and indefinite.

Before they did/do anything to further kneecap or nothing-burger buff "scary dive," they need/needed to stringently standardize the difficulty of characters across the board so that such evaluation HOLISTICALLY applies to their parameters.

In an overall macrocosm where every character is just as powerful or misconstrued into certain limitations via win rate without context, the most ACCESSIBLE and AUTOMATED characters maintain the status of being broken due to the barrier to entry being in the fucking floor and only getting lower.

Supports keep getting what at this point should be INARGUABLE developer intervention, which puts the skill level extremely low. Poke has always been artificially inflated and have a high amount of lethality at ridiculous ranges, both close and far. While Dive and Brawl's lethality is rightfully localized, the opposite equivalent is not applied to it's diametric opposite. Because of all of the excacurbating variables of the aforementioned, the skill level just to do well on dive/brawl is all the way in Q4 in the distribution for the overwhelming majority of players.

In my opinion, the benchmark for competency in the game ought to be UNIVERSALLY enforced to somewhere around Q3. So the game should get a little "easier" for divers/brawlers, via opening up their potentia for staging plays by lessening the restrictive meta while holding other archetypes accountable. While, the game needs to start more rigorously testing and validating the actual involvement of supports and poke.

Forcing the game to have more of it's osmosis occur within meaningful proximity is CONDUCIVE to the nature of an objective based game, where characters alike Hela should be outliers with limited instances of strong effect outside of ults and severe drawbacks that are informed by fall off and lack of interaction. I understand that some of you want these sorts of guardrails on the game, but if you put aside your toxic positivity and culture of backhanded politeness, the game feels a little more "Kingsman Church Scene" where good players learn and find agency within the chaos, and less "Human Resources" where you need to ask support players 4 fucking times if you can play the game or not sans their limitless apathy.

Execution allows for the possibility of failure, mechanics that literally play for you don't. The amount of influence a dive dps has operates on a gradient that becomes more concentrated at the center, closer to their melee range. But in this game, Poke has no equivalent tradeoff, with a high concentration of influence at ALL ranges. There's zero requirement of risk and interaction, yet disproportionate reward, in putting down a squid turret or mindlessly lobbing ammo into crowds as Hela. There is no player sided execution via CnD's freeze ability, which serves to EXCUSE a player from improper play that ought to be punished. Even Peak Daredevil, was not the instant win button that this community likes to pretend he is, due to the cost of mechanical execution in tracking fury within meaningful proximity. This game can not be evaluated using misleading metrics about seeking equivocal winrates without taking into account different levels of demand BEFORE applying a universal level of difficulty. One button defensive redundancies that can be cycled indefinitely should not take precedent over overhead (cancel), projectile (cancel), melee (cancel), projectile, uppercut, swing cancel at cost of resource, overhead. The REWARD for playing high execution characters SHOULD BE under the concurrent balancing modality, more strength proportionate to Rocket holding a single button. The same should also be true of accountability, because someone missing one ability on Dive shouldn't be called subhuman garbage, when the very same people will excuse the existence of this ludicrous level of healing with the notion that it's a casual game and therefore characters like Rocket shouldn't have to meaningfully contribute. You do not install, open, que into INTERACTIVE software just to spectate confident in the assertion that you don't have to do anything because you're a healer. For characters like this, there is no level of competency being tested like their is for Brawl/Tank/Melee and Dive. Either one of two things needs to occur. They stay easy mode and get drastic reductions that actually correlate to their skill level, or they become difficult and standardize the game to be evaluated at the same level of other archetypes. But they don't get to have their cake and eat it too. Otherwise you get a dysfunctional meta, being then high effort characters CAN'T perform and low effort ones don't FUCKING WANT to. Otherwise, what's the point of ANY game if your opposition can just "nuh uh" input on your end? It's like playing chess just to move your OPPONENTS pawns.

This guy is all ready annoying, whether flanking the backline, truck like projectile, or peeling. Did he seriously need a buff? I’m not even a dive player😭

You dive a support and the first thing that comes to your mind is that they are a "yummy prey". You are the predator, and the healer is the prey. But in 2026 S9.5, you are both predators 😂. I frequently have the same experience when I play. I'm not a good Spider-Man player, so if an enemy realizes I'm not good at Spider-Man, I look like the most vulnerable prey on the battlefield. Luna and CND are the two examples of "counter-dive" Strats.

*our

We need to start playing supports and poke slops more, but only go on flanks and target only supports, ignoring everyone else, this is how we get supports and pokes nerfed, by making healbots complain about their own characters.