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[EnigmaticHat]

The changes sound great, it sounds like a nerf to turret mode and a buff to recon mode.  Self repair is a junk ability because its never the difference between survival and death.  A change to that could be exactly what Bastion needs.

The only thing that's kinda odd is that it seems like we're getting a proliferation of 76.  Sombra is already this weird tank-killer variant of 76, now Bastion is shaping up to be something similar but slower and more selfish.  Recon mode is already, well not good but unexpectedly good, against Pharah.  If we keep adding hitscan characters Pharah is going to need some kind of answer to McCree and Widowmaker.  It was OK that Pharah's counters were insanely hard when there were only like 4-6 total and only 2 of those were really really powerful, but if we're getting more hitscan something's going to have to change...

[Reudh]

I'm generally pretty good with Pharah, reliably land rockets (the hitboxes are so generous compared to TF2, and I have lots of hours on Soldier), and I can generally provide lots of disruption.

Of course, I'm fuckin' out of there if the following occur:

- A Soldier 76 is smart enough to tapfire at me.

- A Soldier 76 has tactical visor up, or activates it to deal with me.

- A McCree is moderately close.

- A McCree has Deadeye up, or activates it to deal with me.

- A Bastion is anywhere visible in turret mode, and I can't easily peek to kill him with rockets.

- A Bastion is in Recon mode and is tap firing. It is unlikely I'll be killed by a tapfiring bastion, but it's certainly enough to frighten me off.

- A Winston does his jet pack -> punch -> tesla cannon combo. This is only about 50+30 + however much the cannon ticks in the period he's in range, but it is enough to frighten a Pharah and drop them below 100HP.

- A Widowmaker exists and has any level of accuracy, and is aware I exist.

- A Hanzo exists and has any level of inaccuracy, and is unaware I exist.

- An Ana takes a brief second to look in my direction.

The way it is currently, Pharah is useful in niche circumstances, but she's countered to hell and back. Yes, I'm aware that two direct hit rockets are capable of killing all but Bastion and Winston, but she's very much a high risk, medium reward sorta hero. Not bad by any stretch, but you have to be very aware of her limitations.


Bastion's changes are a long time coming. He dominates in low level play because it is hard to co-ordinate effectively to take care of him, and when he's accompanied by another turret and/or a symmetra or reinhardt shielding him, new players and low leveled players face an uphill battle to take Bastion out for robot dinner. Self repair is never used in combat anyway, it's always a "mopping up after battle" sorta thing, so you can take the load off your healer, because you will take a lot of damage as Bastion.

Bastion's Recon as it stands pre-patch is if you took 5 bullets from S76, reduced their accuracy slightly, and reduced their damage slightly. Still enough to be viable-ish, except Bastion has armor, and a much bigger model.

[EnigmaticHat]

I don't necessarily agree with you.  I consistently make Pharah work against *almost* anything.  I've gotten PoTG against a stacked aimbotting gold gun Ana + McCree in quickplay with my very casual friends.  I've done well against teams that are 5/6 hitscan.  You really need a good healer to keep it from being frustrating, otherwise you'll have to run for a health kit every 3 seconds (most support players will physically lose track of you and thus not heal you), but only 2 characters can consistently solo-kill a cautious Pharah.  Widowmaker at least has the excuse that she's not very good in a lot of circumstances, but McCree is absolute bullshit.  If you miss half your shots as McCree, never headshot, and fire both your clips, you'll do 120 damage at max range, and 420 damage at where his falloff begins (which is not nearly "short" range) over the space of ~7 seconds.  That's if you're like hold down LMB not even aiming potato McCree.  If you're solid on him, dear god.  I'm so happy the 76/Ana meta has temporarily diverted the self proclaimed "solo carries" from playing him, but its done nothing to solve the fundamental design problems with the character.

Anyway, IMO the problem with Pharah is that she has the least neutral matchups of any character.  I actually... can't think of a single neutral matchup for her.  Against 2/3rds of the cast Pharah is overpowered to the point of being cancerous.  I think we've all been there in quickplay solo queue where you've got a team that's like Rein+Zarya+Lucio+Mercy+Mei+Tracer and the enemy has a skilled Pharah with a pocket Mercy and its the most miserable experience ever.  But against those few remaining heroes she gets shut down to the point of being frustrating.  That being said you can still do it.  The trick is to fly weird, and never miss.  Concussion blast forward a lot, even great players get surprised by it.

Oh also 76 vs Pharah is hilarious matchup if there's no Ana involved.  He hits Q, you've got exactly 2 shots so you better hit those directs.

[King Kitteh]

Oh god yes, I hate Pharahs in Quickplay.

Just press tab and take a glance at the enemy team. As soon as you see that little line connecting the portraits of a Pharah and Mercy, you may as well quit, there's no fun to be had here.

In other news, I'm thinking of finally doing competitive. Golden guns are cool and all, but my main inspiration is that Widowmaker has a much lower pickrate there.

[Leafsnail]

Clever Pharahs can also hang out close to cover so they can easily duck down if a hitscan starts going after them. You don't have to play her by floating out in the open.

[EvilTwin]

Hell, maybe we'll see people do the whole 'suppressive fire' thing if ol' B can take a few hits now.

It's just gonna be this: Suppressing Fire!, except there's gonna be grenades and rockets coming from the corridor.

[Skyrunner]

Good Pharah are the wall between Play and Diamond, as they say.

[Ygdrad]

I'm going to share a trick I've been using to warm up faster for competitive play for a couple weeks now which has saved me a ton of time.

I used to just jump straight into Overwatch and play some dreadful quickplay matches until I deemed my performance acceptable(but not necessarily at peak performance) before getting into competitive. Problem is, sometimes I never made it to competitive. It sometimes could take me hours to properly warm up and react/aim accurately and consistently. I learned something pretty neat and pretty important: Warming up quick/accurate mouse handling/hand-eye coordination and warming up ingame reaction/accuracy are two separate things and trying to do both at once just ruins the efficiency of the warmup, at least for me. My guess is either they get in each other's way or warming up mouse-handling is required before aim warmup and with all the stuff going on ingame overwatch isn't the most effective/efficient hand warmup tool, especially since a match features mostly horizontal movement with only short bursts of demanding actions.

What I do now is that I warm up my mouse handling and hand-eye coordination before playing overwatch. There's this little pc rythm game I hadn't really looked at in years which perfectly did the trick: "Osu!". It is a moddable pc game that plays exactly like the the nintendo DS "Elite Beat Agents" games. Here's some random modded gameplay. Due to its origins you'll find it caters to and is mostly played by people who like japanese culture, but you can probably find some non-japanese tracks you'll like. The tracks vary wildly in difficulty and are user-created.

With this game I can easily tell how warmed up I am when it comes to mouse-handling and I can usually achieve a good warmup in 5-15 minutes. Once that's done it usually only takes me 3 to 5 quickplay matches in overwatch to get my aim and reactions accurate-enough to confidently go play competitive.

I hope this helped. Let me know if this worked for you or if you have your own warmups, I'm curious.

Edit: make sure your sensitivity in Osu at least somewhat reflects your sensitivity in Overwatch. Just make sure you have to use roughly the same amount of wrist or arm movement as in overwatch play, you really don't have to follow the next example, I'm just weird and like to be thorough. For example, using https://pyrolistical.github.io/overwatch-dpi-tool/ I know that my cm/360 is 74.65cm(which is extremely low, I don't suggest playing as low sens as me) and we know overwatch is played with a FOV of 103 degrees. 103/360=0.286111... so we know our screen is worth roughly 28.61% of a full 360 degree turn. If we take my cm per 360 turn of 74.65cm and multiply it by 28.61% we get around 21.36cm of mouse movement required to go across the screen. My mouse dpi couldn't be set low enough to achieve this desktop sensitivity but Osu's settings allow me to further increase or lower it to get what I wanted.

[MrRoboto75]

The PTR beta for Bastion buffs as well as the custom game server browser is active.

[PTTG??]

You could make an Omnic War server by allowing one team bastions only and only allowing the old characters on the other side. Make the bastions fairly weak but respawn instantly, and make the other side have a really, really long revive timer, and you've got something kinda interesting.

[EnigmaticHat]

Can you set game stats separately by team now?

[JimboM12]

-snipy snip-

My personal warm-up for any competitive online game that requires fast reactions and judgement is to play Monster Hunter. Sounds strange, but I know my hands have the speed after a warm-up match, it's about getting me into a sort of samurai mindset. I need to hone my timing, positioning and willingness to dance on the edge of danger.

So to get me there, I usually do a big Tigrex hunt with a greatsword. I'm slow and powerful and he's big and fast and powerful. I need to remain calm and watch his movements. I know my hands and my controls. Walk half a pixel to the left, dodge his charge by a hair's breadth. Is he charging me to ram me into the wall or just to get in range fast to roar? Look for the subtle movement. His heads lowered, it's the wall charge. It takes 1 second for my main attack to perform. Aim for the tail. It just becomes second nature after the first engagement.

When I transfer this to Overwatch, I usually play Junkrat. I know the timing and arc of his grenades and abilities like it's my own damn hands. If I arc my grenades off the wall there, they'll hit that Mercy. If I put the trap here, I know I'll catch a flanker, so I'll post up there so I can bounce grenades off the floor and they'll reach the trap and so I can also cover the main door. I'm a timing and strategy guy, so that's usually it for me. But this does occasionally seep into other characters I enjoy such as Mei (know your wall and when exactly to back off to heal) and Tracer (similar reasons, constantly play my positions over the last 3 seconds over and over so I know where I'll end up).

[Ygdrad]

I messed around with sombra for a few hours and quickly got decent-enough that I realized a few things about her. First, she really doesn't need more damage, it wouldn't take much to make her brutal. Second, when not ruining enemy team cohesion by hacking their rein shield away, Sombra is actually a great healer's bodyguard. She easily shuts down Tracer, Genji, Winston, and annoying stuff like Mei.

Tracer's reloads are super predictable and thanks to the hack time buff, you can hack her between clips for a free kill or to make her waste her abilities at no cost to you.

You can hack genji when he reflects and if he's going after someone else like your healer it's pretty easy. Hacking genji while he ults is pretty hilarious and your teleport grenade has a lower cooldown than his dash so he'll have a hard time escaping you.

Winston can be hacked before he even lands if you're fast enough and without his shield he doesn't last too long in an enemy team. You can also hack him to stop him from fleeing or when he ults so he can't catch anyone. His big head and low damage makes him a fairly easy kill for Sombra, especially since you can just teleport back and forth and out of his range.

Mei is another easy kill if you engage on your terms. If you get a hack off and aren't inside her freeze range, it's a free kill, she's wide and easy to hit. You can also trick her into wasting her time doing little damage to you by setting up a teleporter, getting close to her and dumping as much damage as you can into her while she tickles you with left-click before teleporting nearby to reset the freeze and finish her off.

Being able to shut down Mercy's rez is also pretty convenient, removing the only thing she's good for. Overall I had a lot of fun with her and I think she'd just become a monster if you gave her any more damage, it would be the death of flankers.

[MrRoboto75]

There was a Gibraltar match where I just kept hacking their D.va and Hog, and it ended up being a roll.  I'd like to believe it was because their tanks couldn't do much and were way easier to kill, but the reality probably is the enemy was just bad.

I'd say tanks make the best hacking targets.  All of them have at least one ability they rely on, D.va need defense matrix, roadhog needs his hook, Rein can't shield nor charge, Winston can't leap and needs to commit, and Zarya is forced to drain charge and can't bubble.  Hacking can directly impact their survivability, so your team can take them out, and the smg's spread doesn't matter as much on big targets.

But on the other side of the coin, there's characters that don't really care if you hack them.  Like 76.

[SOLDIER First]

"Oh no, you hacked me. I can't run slightly faster without being able to shoot. Woe is me."