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[MrRoboto75]

Eh

I find having a character just be a walking instant death radius kinda irritating.

[EvilTwin]

Eh

I find having a character just be a walking instant death radius kinda irritating.

There's always Zarya and Mei if that annoys you, can block those hooks all day long.

[Leafsnail]

Roadhog's change feels like a buff to me because I was pretty bad at landing the combo before. It's probably a nerf for really good players who had it down though.

[EnigmaticHat]

Eh

I find having a character just be a walking instant death radius kinda irritating.

Fear is how Roadhog tanks.  Without that he's just like... an ult battery for the enemy team.

[Folly]

Not liking the D'va changes. Sure her dps is a bit more consistent, but what good is that when her paper thin armor folds and pops her out of mech the instant she drops shield?

[Leafsnail]

Her DPS is a lot worse than it used to be, "consistency" doesn't really matter. At long ranges it's something like a 30% damage cut which makes her way less useful against shields and other large targets.

[PTTG??]

Come to think of it, D.va's mech is really badly designed for fighting a single heavily armored robot. Who does military procurement for Future!Korea?

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm loving the gun change.  It was fucking ridiculous against Pharah.  She could fly in, get the shove, get the punch, and then get 50-100 damage on the way down if her tracking was good.  That's 100-150 damage on a character who is supposedly short range, against a character who's supposed to be protected by mobility.  Combos like that need to be removed from the game.  I've had Genjis dash at me, flub all their attacks in mid, hit q, dash into me again and then hit me with the sword.  200 damage in like 3 seconds that cannot be meaningfully dodged.  If they're actually good they don't even need that, they can get like a 100 free damage off just the dash and midair hits.

[Leafsnail]

I think it's pretty easy for Pharah to dodge honestly, especially if she has one of her cooldowns ready.

[MrRoboto75]

Eh

I find having a character just be a walking instant death radius kinda irritating.

Fear is how Roadhog tanks.  Without that he's just like... an ult battery for the enemy team.

He tanks by there being an Ana on literally every team.

You know, the other well thought out character.

[EnigmaticHat]

I've had Ana as either a main or second favorite since she came out and the whole time I've been saying she was broken

That being said, healer choice is fundamentally broken in OW and has been since release.  You have these 4 characters who all do the same thing but via a different mechanism.  Its clever, and it could have worked, except that OW has other fairly deep balance problems that prevent it from having varied hero choice.

There are 4 groups, from a tryhard perspective, that OW heroes fit into.  Attack/defense/symmetra (14 heroes), barrier tank (3 heroes), non-barrier tank (2 heroes), healer (4 heroes).  You could get even more granular than this and put Rein in his own category (since he fills a niche no one else does) and Ana (since she take the slot of a healer OR a DPS).

So you have this situation where most of the slots in a tryhard OW team are going to be filled from an extremely tiny pool of characters that have almost no overlap.  The misc heroes fit into nice categories, for example Widow and Hanzo.  They both provide their team with extra vision, do burst damage to one-shot squish, and use mobility to move vertically but struggle moving horizontally.  You've also got Pharah/Junkrat, Torb/Bastion/Symmetra, Genji/Tracer/Sombra, as well Soldier 76/Mcree/Ana.  Within each of those categories there's usually a top pick (unless the meta calls for 2 or 3 characters from that category) but there's still some wiggle room for picking between categories.  You'll never pick Junkrat over Pharah or defense Bastion over defense Torb, but you might have a legit choice between Genji or McCree if you've only got one slot left.

But healers don't have that dynamic.  All of them fill totally different niches, but you have to pick 2-3 out of 4.  So of course at any given time at least one is going to be trash tier and one is going to be ubiquitous.

Add all this to the inherent balance problem having utterly dissimilar maps.  You can't have a Tracer that's balanced on Lijiang tower and on Eichenwald, its just not in the cards.  So like yeah you might swap out that Zen for a Lucio on Nepal, but at the end of the day there's still going to be a meta comp for each map and not much encouragement for deviating from it.

[MrRoboto75]

Its just silly.  Ana has the highest healing (even after nerf), AND the highest healing range, AND two fight-winning abilities that also can double for protecting Ana herself, AND on top of that a decent long range weapon.  Coupled with a powerful, albeit team reliant, ultimate.

Mercy, the healingest of healers, has less HPS and almost no offensive capability on her own.  Why, I dunno.

The only one that competes all that well is Lucio, because he is actually capable of something Ana can't do, which is boost speed.  He can also match Ana in survivability, which is helpful.

Meanwhile you have tanks like Hog, Dva, and Zarya that match DPS heroes in damage, while still being tanks and making full use of Ana's HPS, so those DPS heroes are basically irrelevant as well.

Honestly the overall effect is a boring game where no one really dies aside from ultimates and Roadhog hooks.

[Leafsnail]

I think Ana is really the problem. While tanks can do decent damage at close quarters they all have limited range (Zarya less so, but she still can't duke it out with a McCree, Widow or S76 at range) and less mobility than the divier DPSes. If you tried to run an all-tank strat before you'd get shut down by long range DPS forcing you to move out of position, but now Ana can just heal all the tanks through that.

[MrRoboto75]

Evedently, Bastion is next on the chopping block for changes, here's what the slated changes for next PTR:

-Recon mode's gun will have more less bullet spread, but a bigger mag.

-Turret mode will also get more spread, but also lose the ability to headshot.  He'll also have damage reduction while in turret mode.

-Self repair doesn't force you to stand still and cannot be interrupted by damage, but will have a resource bar much like Defense Matrix.

Dunno if it will help him much.  I'd rather he get more mobility in recon mode, or a much faster switch between modes.  Most of my deaths as bastion are because a 76 pumps 15 bullets and a helix rocket while I'm trying to grow legs, and there goes 3/4th of my health.

[IWishIWereSarah]

I'd rather he get more mobility in recon mode, or a much faster switch between modes.  Most of my deaths as bastion are because a 76 pumps 15 bullets and a helix rocket while I'm trying to grow legs, and there goes 3/4th of my health.

I don't know, I like it that the mode change is a real choice of opportunity cost.
I like it that changing mode when the enemy has seen you and that he can fire at you is nearly obviously a bad choice, because it forces you to try to change the circumstances of the fight.
I feel like it's cool that, when you're in turret mode and that too many enemies for you to handle come at once, you're fucked, and that there is nothing to do... well, it's normal. Basically, it's your fault for staying/being there, because after all, you can see where your team mates are, and half of the game is to guess when the enemies are, even when you can't see them