An Irish lad who loves games and editing. I love talking about the game design behind games, whether it's for individual characters, full on game mechanics or even just an entire game. All I want is to talk about games and make ye laugh along the way, so I hope you enjoy!
To me, I think that it's very clear that since the switch in gameplay for OW2, the dev team really hates Sym's kit. She'll probably get reworked sooner or later because its obvious that they dislike her kit.
Tank’s KB passive needs to be tweaked, especially when Korean Child takes as much knockback as a Mechanical Horse who can press a button and become immune to it Also, some of the DPS needed the reload passive, but some didn’t. Like, unless you know the Reaper Melee reload tech, you his reload takes an hour and a half during a choke point fight. While others, like Handbow, basically got nothing from the old DPS Passive, and he needed something else. My suggestion is to give each DPS hero a unique passive, that differs depending on how they play. Widow for example can have a more potent version of the current passive, while Handbow could have a “Steady Hand” passive that makes it so his shots have a near nonexistent arc when he fires his arrows at full bowdraw. Mei technically has one in her chill/freezing abilities, while Sombra’s opportunist could be changed so that enemies she damages have reduced incoming healing or bypass the damage reduction of Armor These are just my deranged ramblings tho
Just imagine if they had just reduced the healing numbers of certain characters - or perhaps even reworked them entirely - rather than changing the framework all the heroes are balanced around. This is going to require dozen of small fixes in the future, where less than ten would have gotten the job done.
I think part of the reason they left him to rot in a ditch is because lifeweaver was partly added to pander to the lgtv rainbow freaks and to distract from some of the allegations going on around the time so they made him a fake sexuality "pansexual" which is retarded because if they added him because they actually wanted to he could've been so good but he was added to mainly pander and distract kind of like our newest hero venture she, oh I'm sorry "they" were announced around the time more allegations were cropping up.
the easiest way to fix dmg boost’s issues is just let mercy deal damage herself. Remove dmg boost and give her a rifle or better weapon. Then, nerf the movement so it isnt that op for her to kill people with. it’ll also fix the issue of relying on team mates and having to pocket them with dmg boost
Role passives make the heroes harder to balance. I'm hoping it's just a bandaid for now, until a big rework comes in. Also support self heal starting after 2 seconds on heroes with mobility is actually horrid
Here's what i suggest. Petal platform now heals at a slow rate and now has the utility to increase the range of damage falloff. Life grip now gives the target a speed boost for a short time. Passive parting gift: heals technology, enemies can not heal but destroy it
I miss five man Rez. In my opinion is wasn’t broken but the mercy would let everyone die on person which was a problem. People make it out to be so bad but reaper would hide and wipe everyone with an ult but mercy was the problem? Never sat right with me. She’s been boring since even if valk has been in the game longer.
I think they should make like 2/3 role passives per role, for heroes with different jobs; e.g. a dive/assassin passive (think genji and tracer type heroes), a sniper passive (obvs widow, hanzo, ana), and a midrange/flanker passive (solly, cass, maybe reaper, mei, etc) that solidifies this job.
Anything can work in the 5v5 with enough buffs I mean look at the Ball, he was tailor-made to have a second tank on the team and they changed nothing in his kit Also, I’d rather have a tank that can be trampled than a tank with no weaknesses
You did a pretty good job on this video but sometimes your sentence structure seems a bit unnaccesible if I haven't already played overwatch and know what things do already. I really like your videos but it can be a bit confusing sometimes when it seems like I'm being assumed to know something. But that may just be a me problem. I just like watching videos on games I don't play
its almost as if 90% of the games characters were built to be in 6v6!! some made characters bloated while some do nothing with the passive!!!!! in most hero based shooters passives are unique to the hero, general passives don't really work. GIve every hero a passive that can be tweaked or changed that's unique to their kit. Instead of some universal thing
Late to the topic but a game I thought also does 'ults' in a fun way is Omega Strikers, basically League of Legends airhockey. Ults not being avalible immediately until a little into a match when each character levels up a bit then being an additional cooldown you can use. There was this intresting finesse to using many of them in the game due to the multipurpose of using them both on the puck and on enemies, not all of them apply to this (Like Atlas' Heal + Ressurection field) but the majority do. For example Juliette has a really good rapid flurry ult that's often used to assassinate opponents near the edge of the field but it also doubles as a good tool to force the puck through an enemy due to the rapid hitboxes and slight stun of getting hit if the enemy lets them get in point blank. Another one is X's ult which is a simple steroid stat thta also increases your size which serves the double purpose of extending your range to hit the puck with his other abilities.
Lifeweaver one trick here. I think they should lower the time it takes to charge his heal to full and maybe lower the max to compensate if that ends up being too op. His heals take so long to charge to full which is why every time they buff the max, it makes so little difference. You almost always don’t charge your heal to full. If he’s not good after this change then I would bring back the passive 1.5 second reload when using a different weapon since that will make him much more fluid to play as he can always stay active by swapping weapons.
A major flaw in Overwatch's design from the very beginning has been the dichotomy between every hero having a unique playstyle, and every hero needing to adhere to a VERY broad "role." Blanket passives only exacerbate this problem. If I were designing my very own "Overwatch" from scratch, I'd create 6 roles: *1. Frontline* - Your standard damage dealers. Soldier 76. *2. Pick* - Your specialist damage dealers. Widowmaker. *3. Shield* - Your protection-based tanks. Reinhardt. *4. Bruiser* - Your damage-based tanks. Roadhog. *5. Medic* - Your healing-oriented support. Mercy. *6. Assist* - Your de/buff-oriented support. Zenyatta. By giving heroes more specific roles, it makes balancing them all MUCH easier. Now instead of trying to make Roadhog and Reinhardt somehow fulfill the same job, you can allow each to focus on what they do best. By STARTING development with a model like this in mind, it also ensures you don't accidentally create too many of one role. In a best-case scenario every role would fulfill a specific and important niche, ensuring stuff like double-shield or GOATS never happens.
They sort of did do this, at the start there was offense and defense heroes before they all got stuffed into dps. The issue with those, or with any categorization, is that you consume some of the characters design space by ensuring they can act within the expectations of that role. Put another way, why stop at that amount of categories? Why not have bruisers further be bodyguards/wardens/juggernauts/etc? Eventually you end up having an issue where one end up the spectrum is each character has their own category consisting of themself, and the other end is all characters share the same category, and all spaces in between inherit problems from attempting to compromise character uniqueness with category expection fulfillment. Truthfully, assigning a mechanic to a role rather than just having each member of the role share similar goals will always have the issue of misalignment between that mechanic and the individual character, with that issue scaling primarily with the uniqueness of that character. I think that the solution here is to just get rid of role passives and let heroes have their own individual passives. If a common aspect of a passive works well, it's no problem to give that exact aspect to multiple characters (looking at Ana with support passive for example) while still allowing the space to omit it or modify it if a character doesn't work well with that attribute. That way, we could have things like sigma/rein/ram all having rewards for proper shield usage, but Winston could have something completely different, as well as giving rein his steadfast and not giving it to sigma.
Sombra will always be my favorite dps even if she was more utility than anything but her rework is so new and not her i feel like this new sombra isn't the same one from overwatch 1 Also love that new bap/sombra skin 17:55
Here me out: DPS is the only role who can swap, 1 chance per match. Make it so tank and support is locked in for the whole match. There. That's a good passive for DPS and it eliminates the whole "Counter swap meta" for tanks that is kind of ruining the game right now.
Pick rein Enemy team picks anti rein characters Stuck as rein Be sad :( I do like the idea of hero swaps integrating with the dps role since they have the most potent swapping payoffs but not exactly this. But it's a good place to start the discussion at.
Great video! Role passives definitely need further tweaking, and I like the ideas you've come up with to develop them some more. Anti-heal absolutely needs a damage threshold requirement- whether it be what you suggested or percent maxHP based or anything else. Way too easy to apply currently. Might be a hot take (or not), but I'd prefer that they remove the role passives, focus on individual passives, keep and buff the out of combat healing for everyone (activate sooner or a more powerful heal), and just nerf sustain globally by an average of like 25%. That's a pipe dream tho, since T4 doesn't like mass nerfing things.. especially supps lmao
Kinda funny that your suggestion for the anti-heal change is almost 1-1 to what Paladins did, making it slowly ramp up over time as the game progresses.
They should add old translocator with the timer and a new range The new one feels like a generic escaping abilty and the other one was so unique. She also kinda lost almost all her utility. At this point just bring old Emp back and remove all the damage dealing part of it.
Playing against orisa (did I spell that right?) as brig is so scary cuz once I realize I’ve over extended I can’t even run away bc the knock back I do doesn’t do anything (and then I get sniped w/ jav)
Just make the DPS passive require a damage threshold in order to trigger and increase its potency relative to the damage done to trigger it. After doing 50 damage to an individual, you apply a 20% reduction to healing for a short duration. You can culmutively increase this duration by doing another 50 damage. Alternatively, if you were to do 100 damage to an individual in a single instance, you instead apply a 25% reduction to healing for a slightly longer duration.
My idea for dps passive: Make it so ~20% of damage dealt leaves behind purple damage that nullifies healing (capped at 50). Example: you deal 100 damage and deal 20 anti heal, an Ana or Bap heal goes from 70 to 50. Why? - It would be more visually clear than a miniscule down arrow - It would scale with damage dealt so Tracer can't use it as effectively across the map - Changes the dynamic to a brief window of anti healing, which makes it less likely that passive aoe healing disrupts damage breakpoints - Could also be used to nerf Ana anti-heal (and revert its nerfs) to make it less opressive on tanks
Proposal: Multiple Role Passives. Some characters get benefit from some passives, some don't. Some get too much benefit. If they really want role passives, and don't want to complicate things with a massive sliding scale, have three passives. DPS could have healing reduction for core DPS like soldier, ashe, cassidy, etc, movement speed and reload speed for assassins like tracer and sombra, and maybe cooldown reduction on kill for some others like junkrat or widow. Then balance healer numbers and hey presto, done. Tanks could have categories of CC reduction. High, medium, and low. And yeah supports are fine. That's a nice middle ground between too complex and too broad.
I do like the idea of having changes applied to overall classes, because sometimes I think OW balancing relies on having a single hero to balance out their problems, and that's how we get characters like kiriko. So yeah I like the concept of the role passives as a system for balancing but like everyone else is saying the execution needs adjustment.
i LOVE the idea of mercy's beam doing extra healing for the first few secs as it actively punishes pocketing (which most mercy mains aren't a fan of anyway) and as for dmg boost. i think my main thing is changing it to provide utility for characters who aren't dps, like while some tanks with good dmg can benefit from it, some tanks like rein and other supports benefit from dmg boost way less, i prefer the idea of a mini kitsune rush, just toned down, like the atk and reload speed could be beneficial to most supports and tanks while still being beneficial to dps, and accompanying this with some other small thing like a weaker lucio speed boost, or even a small cd reduction could make mercy's beam an impactful ability for all allies, not just dps, anywho im a fan of the other changes proposed. sincerely, an ex mercy main turned lucio due to her being poop this season 😞
The issue I see with the adjustment to the DPS passive is that it just swings the effectiveness of the passive in the complete opposite direction. For instance, if we use the numbers that you calculated (which, mind you, I agree would be a reasonable number), you have the issue of a hero like Widowmaker being particularly effective at applying said passive. Some heroes would have a much easier time reaching the threshold in much less time. I do think the idea sounds intriguing though. It would mean that healing still gets to be about as powerful as it is in the beginning of a fight while ramping up the longer the fight goes on (as long as the DPS players are applying the passive). I tried giving it some thought, and maybe instead of a damage cap, it could be apply a stack of the DPS passive, which would be increased every second as long as the DPS is applying damage. Maybe it stacks 5% per stack, capping at 5 stacks for 25% reduced healing. My numbers might have to be more fine-tuned, but I think that might also help with the Tracer problem. Yes, a Tracer76 can just apply the passive constantly over the 5 seconds from across the map, but now it will take time for her to actually gain the full efficacy of the passive. As for heroes who specialize in burst damage like Widowmaker, she would have a bit less of a need to apply the FULL passive to begin with, unless it was something like an unguarded tank, in which case, she can pressure the tank out or make a fight easier for her team whether she's hitting headshots or not (though at the rate she charges a headshot, she should still be fine).
Id argue that 10 damage per 1% is way too much. Something like 2 per 1% is probably much safer. Then you can imagine the passive as having a 40 damage threshhold.
