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[EnigmaticHat]

Wouldn't the game be more fun if she weren't viable at lower levels?  Lord knows there's going to be plenty of crazy snipers running around who still have a low elo or whatever because they don't know how to help their team.

[Skyrunner]

Not if you like to play Widowmaker but aren't good

Also if you nerf Widow's viability at low skill levels you'll now have a ton of people who stick to widowmaker but are literally useless... while the pros still manage to snipe you from across the map.

[chaoticag]

Probably yeah. This is my sister's first FPS game, and she's picked out widowmaker to play as most the time. She at least caught on that it would be a good idea to have a character in each category. But yeah, I don't think she'd be dissuaded from playing widowmaker with a nerf if she really wants to play as a sniper and sees widowmaker as easier than hanzo because hitscan.

[Flying Dice]

Lower damage. Something like 100 base damage full charge (meaning 200 damage headshots, 100 damage everywhere else). That takes care of the Zenyatta problem, makes it so that she can still instakill all the low health heroes if she lands her headshots, and reduces the reward for playing her poorly (i.e. spamming shots and bodyshots). That leaves the skill ceiling and its reward high, but reduces the effect of having even a mediocre Widowmaker in certain contexts.

Because seriously, fuck Widowmaker. I like the character concept, I like the kit, but it's the same shitty overpowered twitchy sniper rifle that's ruined matches in every multiplayer FPS since the Railgun in Quake.

I'm okay with Hanzo having better damage because Hanzo players actually have to have a modicum of skill beyond twitch reactions and he doesn't have the wallhacks ult.

--

EnigmaticHat, you pretty much just agreed with what I said. A McCree who isn't in your face can be killed by anything with good ranged DPS and/or a way to negate his shots. If he runs at you, you kill him. He's only dangerous when he gets the drop on you--which, admittedly, can happen a hell of a lot if it's a good player who positions well. That's why you react to the presence of a good McCree by not putting yourself into situations where he can ambush you, just like you don't walk out into the open if there's a good Widowmaker around, or play games at range with a Mei who can shoot accurately with the M2 icicle.

Yeah, if he flashbangs you you're dead. If you turn a corner and he fans with proper recoil control, you're dead. That's why he needs to be nerfed again, the lack of counterplay at close range. But he can't fire fast enough or do enough damage at range to stop a Hanzo/Widowmaker/Pharah/Mei from killing him. He can't flashbang and fan a Junkrat spamming grenades through every potential ambush spot from a dozen meters away.

Besides, basing your argument on the best McCree players working in premade teams isn't really a realistic representation of the McCrees most players will encounter. It's like pretending that every decent Genji out there is as good as Seagull. And, fittingly enough, at lower skill levels Genji does effectively counter McCree, since most aa players of the latter don't have the knowledge or reaction times to alter their throw to avoid the reflect. You see Zarya and Mei ults get deflected, and you think that most McCrees are going to do better with the ability they're habituated to spamming at peoples' faces?

Not to mention how the low update rate can affect things--I've had plenty of times playing Junkrat where I flung my concussion bomb at the floor in front of me to blow a Genji away and promptly died, then saw a kill-cam shot of it flying right at Genji's waist or legs and getting deflected back. Shit like that happens way too often, and I've seen it a time or two with just about every ability that can be screwed up by the client and server not being closely synced.

He certainly needs a nerf, though, since he's nearly as oppressive as Widowmaker if anyone remotely competent uses him. Even if those are pretty rare compared to the people who think that they're competent with him.

[EnigmaticHat]

McCree's almost as good as the midrange specialists at midrange combat, while being utterly godmode at short range.  He doesn't need to get the drop on anyone; the fact that he has a death radius around him at all times is OP even if he never executes the threat.  Some characters rely on getting close, and some characters rely on being able to plant their feet and not have to run away because some skinny cosplayer came within 50 feet of them.  Its no coincidence that the three weakest non-turret characters right now are all mobility-survivalist hybrids with close range weapons (although Roadhog is also to blame for that).

[Cthulhu]

Wouldn't the game be more fun if she weren't viable at lower levels?  Lord knows there's going to be plenty of crazy snipers running around who still have a low elo or whatever because they don't know how to help their team.

There will always be assholes picking Windowlicker two or three times a game regardless of the situation. They'll pick her even if she's objectively useless and the worst hero in the game.

I love McCree and I can't wait for the nerf just so I can play him without feeling like a scumbag, whenever I do I get like fifty kills on stupid shit, like running fan-the-hammer headshotting a guy twenty feet away, though I dunno about what Enigmatic said.  The entire point of him is to shut down those mobility-flankers at close range.  The unintended behavior is fan-shift-fan killing tanks in the duration of his flashbang too, as well as being a mini-sniper, which he was already nerfed once in beta.

Fuck widowmaker though.  If it weren't for the fucking SMG she also gets she wouldn't even be that bad, but you can't even flank her because she's just as good as you at close range and she'll just teleport away and snipe you.

I like playing Hanzo more, even though he's got the same problem of tickrate and "favor-the-shooter" giving him basketball-sized arrows.

---

The above is also what I meant about bastion has no hard counters.  If you're tracer or something you can't really outplay McCree if he's even sort of on the ball.  Likewise, Genji can't really outplay Mei.

That's what I consider a hard counter, a situation where you really need to pick a different hero or alter your play to avoid the counter in order to overcome the challenge.   I don't think bastion has any of those.  Junkrat's probably the closest since he can hit from around a corner.  Corner-peeking pharah maybe, but prefiring will make them back off.  And I had to rent a storage unit to put all the genji corpses who tried the deflect thing on me.

[darkrider2]

Ok. rant time. Torbjorn is **** useless.

My original impression was that the purpose of Torb was to place a turret in my own teams back line to provide protection (area denial) for hyper-flankers (tracer/genji) and other miscreants (mccree/reaper), generally out of the way of front liners that will kill it easily (pharah/soldier) or laugh in the face of its damage (reinhardt/zarya), and then molten core if the front gets pushed up on payload or ult spam starts happening from the other team.

Ideally, I'd want to use torb to take pressure off of my team from these hyper-flanker characters (tracer/genji). But the turret takes nine centuries to build and is really weak until level 2. So said hyper flankers can just prevent any construction until the rest of my own team deals with those hyper flankers, and I'll usually end up dead in the process. Basically torb can only get a turret up if the rest of his team is already competent enough to deal with tracer/genji "carry" players, which means any time Torb can actually get his turret up, his team doesn't really need it (and you could just play mccree/winston instead). At this point I basically consider torb to be THE 5v6 champion.

After several nights of running into enemy tracers that are seemingly fueled by space-cocaine who run around dunking our whole team, we started joking around to each other "didn't you know? tracer counters torbjorn." We would get tracers who could blink right up next to the (level 2) turret and kill it in one-clip of their main weapon, rewind and then continue killing everyone on our team like it was just some minor annoyance. Against these enemies, the only thing switching to torbjorn accomplished for us was painting a giant target on our heads. Any genji worth his salt just ninja-stars the turret from ten miles away.

"But forcing those heroes to focus turret before the rest of your team is effective counterplay" ... no, I could just switch to mccree/winston and actually kill those champs instead (tracer/genji).

Essentially you've got a hero who's job it is to jerk off in the corner for a while with very little pay-off, then IF your team wins the 5v6 just spam armor packs all over the place. He's utterly frustrating to play and laughable to play against.

/rant.

[Cthulhu]

I've never lost with Torbjorn, and I always have multiple gold medals.

[Levi]

I think Torb is kinda like Symmetra, in that he's only any good if your team is also doing good.  The turret and armor provides a bit of support while punishing flankers, but if your team isn't dealing with the bulk of the enemy team well then you are going to get stomped.

I think I've only had one good game as Torb, and I'm 98% sure it was more my team playing well than me playing well.

[Cthulhu]

I'm somehow #62 for score per minute on Reinhardt.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the Symmetra comparison is a good one. He's situational and relies on good team play, but can seriously reinforce an already competent team. I've had more than a few matches with him where I've held a point 1v4 or 1v5 because I placed my turret carefully and held my ult until the right moment.

That said, there's nothing more useless than someone playing Torb who doesn't switch after the first point gets rolled. Except possibly a Torb on KotH.

[Cthulhu]

So what do people think about Zenyatta?  He's a lot of fun but I always feel like I'm fucking my team over by playing him.  Even if he weren't so fragile Widowmaker can one-shot him to the body, he just doesn't bring anything to the table the other supports don't.

He doesn't heal as much and he has to be in line of sight to do it, his ult is just an aoe teamfight save like Lucio's, that just leaves his offensive capabilities, but if I wanted to play a damage-dealing off-support I'd just play S76.

Aside from his weaknesses which will probably be patched, why would I pick him over Mercy or Lucio?

[chaoticag]

Well, he needs line of sight to heal, yes, but he can heal over greater distances than anyone else. Behind reinhart, he can mark enemies to take more damage, so he's helpful if the enemy team takes a lot of tanks. And he probably has the best weapon among the various supports. In a way, because the discord orb is visible, he can help direct and declare priorities to your team assuming they're co-ordinated. The orb itself loooks like it would pair well with a widowmaker on your team.

But yeah, he's mostly a pick if the team can cover for him given his lack of escape options. Very fragile to boot so situational awareness is key. Do not pick if your team is not working together.

[EnigmaticHat]

There's a pretty strong hierarchy of Lucio > Mercy > Zenyatta right now, simply because the primary function of a healer is to heal and at any given level of play the amount of heals you'll get on your card is going to follow that hierarchy.

That being said, Zenyatta is still an extremely powerful character in a vacuum.  As long as you can keep someone in your sight once every 3 seconds, you can heal them forever, making him a great heal buddy for Winston or Pharah, or even an elevated sniper if you can position things just right.  Zenyatta is also an extraordinarily powerful offense character, his weapon is great but its really the orb of discord that puts him over the top.  He's in the enlightened company of Bastion as a tank killer who doesn't care really what range the tank is at, and its not just tanks that Zenyatta can shred.  As Zenyatta, I've shutdown an ulting 76 that was shooting at me by hitting him twice in the head (we both died).  He's really, really powerful on top of being able to heal; his main weakness is that 150 health, which is why he loves anyone who can let him stand around introducing people to his enormous balls.  He has the best synergy with Torb's armor packs in the entire game (Zarya and Symmetra are also great with Torb), and him and Reinhardt are like TF2's heavy/medic if the medic could put on the heal beam and simultaneously be using a sniper rifle.

One of the reasons he rarely sees play (aside from most people not understanding him) is that his ult has no synergy with the other healers and can't save people from things that would one shot them.  He's in the same place as Winston where characters who fuck him up were added to the game after he was.  In his case, he's the only healer who can't ult to save his team from the RIP-tire, which is not an idle concern.  Zenyatta would be a great supplemental healer due to his offensive capabilities and longer heal range, the problem is his ult.  Him and Lucio both want to ult in about the same situations yet Lucio's ult is not only superior in most situations, but as long as sound barrier is protecting people transcendence is doing nothing for them.  Likewise transcendence ensures that if anyone dies first its going to be Mercy with her 200 health, and if anyone dies last its going to be Zenyatta.  That's the reverse order of what Mercy wants if she's going to use resurrect.

I do think he's going to become more used after the more over the top damage dealers get toned down.

[Levi]

So what do people think about Zenyatta?  He's a lot of fun but I always feel like I'm fucking my team over by playing him.  Even if he weren't so fragile Widowmaker can one-shot him to the body, he just doesn't bring anything to the table the other supports don't.

He doesn't heal as much and he has to be in line of sight to do it, his ult is just an aoe teamfight save like Lucio's, that just leaves his offensive capabilities, but if I wanted to play a damage-dealing off-support I'd just play S76.

Aside from his weaknesses which will probably be patched, why would I pick him over Mercy or Lucio?

I think he's good when the enemy is going tank-heavy, but yeah he doesn't feel as good as lucio or mercy.  Way more fun to play than mercy though.