Just to start, I know this game is out of active support. But some things are just strange.
1) Matchmaking.
Caveat - I’m not talking about when people join as a party vs randoms.
For some reason the matchmaking in this games likes to make extremely unbalanced compositions. For example, Tracer + nova on one team and the other team is full of mages.
Now, I assume that your matchmaking formula has some “counter” rules, or rock-paper-scissors rules that it tries to implement. For example if there’s an invisible character - you’re more likely to put someone with reveal on the opposite team. Or if there’s a strong mage like Chromie you put Valeera against her to be a kind of natural predator. The thing is - it seems that this only works for one iteration of evaluations, so you often get the aforementioned Tracer+Nova vs a team full of mages. Or you put Abathur on one team and “Something with shields” on another, which can be Zarya or Medivh. And it just doesn’t work.
Or sometimes I play games with 3 specialists (I know you deprecated that term, but the gist remains) on one team and 0 on another. Why?! This is so oppressive to play against when 1 team has Azmodan-Nazeebo-Zagara megacombo + healer and tank, and the other team gets 3 melee champions and Tyrande, i.e. 0 waveclear.
I think this entire “counter” matchmaking needs to go. I think we need to just mave a mage-AA-tank-bruiser-assassin-healer “classes” and matchmake them semi-equally for the two teams. I know why this was implemented in the first place - it was because certain characters had “No counter” on the enemy team, but not only this still frequently happens but I would argue it happens MORE OFTEN than not.
And it feels that sometimes your matchmaker just outright bugs out. So for example there’s Sgt. Hammer in the game. This can be easily countered by Chromie, Illidan or Lili - but the matchmaker puts them on the same team as Hammer (and they are not in a group), while the other team has nothing to counter her. It almost feels like the matchmaker FOUND the counters to Hammer, but then forgot to put them on the enemy team and just gave up.
Take my Tracer+nova combo. Is it better to have that toxic skewed game when 1 team doesn’t have waveclear and another team gets one-shot with no counterplay? Or is it maybe more prudent to say “Ok, we have two diver-assassins, let’s put them on separate teams to counter each other”? I think the latter.
Or take the 3 specialist example. Wouldn’t it be better to at least put them 2-1 and then move one of the warriors into the other team? I think it would.
I think the current system does much more harm than good.
2) Certain talents are broken by Abathur or Vikings
Take Hanzo where his first talent requires you to hit every hero 3 times. Against abathur - nearly impossible if Abathur is any good. You just will never see him on the map, and if you do - he doesn’t stick around to fight you but runs and hides as fast as possible. Or even just outright stays in core. Or vs vikings - you suddenly have 7 heroes on enemy team instead of 5, and you need to hit EACH of them 3 times. This clearly makes the quest much harder. I assume there are other quests like that.
An example of this particular talent rework could be:
- Hitting a character with Abathur’s hat counts as 0.5 hits against Abathur
- Hitting any of the vikings counts as a hit vs vikings.
3) greatly unbalanced characters being matched against each other.
One team gets Morales or Ana - the other team gets Kharazhim who is basically half a healer. Or one team gets Zarya, the other gets Medivh - which is much higher level of support.
I honestly don’t know what to do with this other than rework them. This is the reason why Tassadar got reworked - because he was just so much worse than any other healer but was matched in that role.