I want to make a thread about Tracer.
I have played this game for roughly 2 years, am lvl 418 atm, due to a recent influx in interest of HOTS (seeing how it fits my lifestyle atm).
I feel that when playing most heroes I am capable of controlling the outcome of the game, and I feel all of them are balanced, except for a few…
And only Tracer I feel is extremely weak.
I have been trying to master her this last week seeing how the abilities she “excels at” eludes me. No matter what I do I feel this hero is inherently aweful, or at least underpowered.
I know that she is supposed to be a diver, a mage-killer and an extremely skill-dependant hero, but as I play her I seem to always be too squishy to 1v1 almost anyone, even if I do dodge all of their skillshots.
Take for example last night where I played vs a mage-heavy comp and I went after a 40% hp Nazeebo.
Even though I dodged his Wall of Death and I reset his Toads, he could still 100-0 me with just auto attacks and his E.
This I feel is partly due to her low hp and also her low dmg.
What also feels apparent to me is her low HP regen.
I feel that due to the HP being so low, if I ever get poked down even a little bit I can never engage on pvp again until I am healed up by fountain or a healer.
This coming from the fact that Tracer is basically melee and to ever deal dmg, you open yourself up to the enemies’ Auto Attacks, meaning a certain death.
To sum it all up: Tracer feels like in a difficult spot right now, where you are cannot engage in PvP if not topped up by a healer, or your E is up.
Solutions:
Make Tracer gain 2x amount of hp from globes (going from 10% to 20% of her hp - something I deem fair, because then she would gain as much hp as the rest of the assassins, seeing she has only half their hp).
Up Tracers hp to that of a normal assassin.
Up Tracers regen somehow, possibly by bumping up her hp/s immensely (to compensate for the low hp, and also reward technical play), or give her a lvl 1/4 talent to give her lifesteal.
Possibly with one of the other solutions - Give her “Leeching Rounds” the ability to also heal off of minions, to give her ANY sort of stayability.
Your english is awful and your reading capacity.
I will explain what you don’t understand about Tracer.
@1 She already has a talent that does that and more, it literally DOUBLES Healing Fountain and globes recovery rate.
@2 No need, Tracer is an extremely mobile DPS, she can deal LARGE amounts of damage in a short amount of time and retreat very quickly.
@3 look point @1, as for life steal, no need because of option to get double passive healing, her kit is dedicated to dealing massive amounts of damage to the level of her being unfair, not only she can deal large amounts of damage to a single enemy hero, you can pick up her ricochet talent and deal up to 150% damage to anyone near your main enemy target, Tracer is easy to heal and can easily retreat from danger AND cause huge damage while doing so.
@4 look up @2 and @3.
All you complain about is remedied in her talents, you play this game for 2 years but it shows you can’t even read talent descriptions properly. You don’t even understand how to play a hero so all you do is complain. I would wager you went to unranked or worse, ranked, and played Tracer very terribly and got a lot of heat from how badly you play her. Go play VS AI with Tracer, see how she plays and google her talent builds and see which ones works for you.
Tracer is an incredibly strong and extremely mobile Hero, if she had high HP and sustain by leeching hp from targets she would be impossible to kill.
Keep in mind that every hero is supposed to be effective, not godlike.
Otherwise no one would play this game. But seeing how a lvl 400 for 2 years complains about his or hers inability to read talent and ability description with understanding, I’d say you are 12 years old and on your vacation from school for 2 weeks and you plan on wasting it on computer games instead of studying because you should do more studying instead of playing games, you clearly have academics problems.
Tracers fundamental design is so broken for a MOBA she must be undertuned to be even reasonable. If she had the regular health of an assassin she would be oppressive since her mobility is just insane. 3 charges of blink, her E and can shoot while moving? Her 2 offensive abilities don’t even slow her down like normal characters, this mobility is the majority of her defense and it’s why she’s so weak to auto-attack characters.
I still remember her release times, if you think Li-Ming at release was OP, think again. It’s basically what you want her to be, she was and it proved her to be unbeatable, her talents been nerfed to be barely useful because otherwise she is too strong.
I do believe it’s healthy for her to be weak to AA-heroes, BUT, the problem with her as I have seen it when playing her is that she is weak to anyone’s auto attacks - Even casters’ AAs are strong enough to kill her.
You literally have to oneshot people for her to be anywhere near decent at killing people (that is, you need 100% on R, u need W up and E up), else you get outmatched.
This is another part I cannot feel is true either for the time being.
For many parts of the game I see myself only being able to engage in combat when my E is up. This means that I only play the game when my E is up (see every 30s). This is not the case when fighting low-engage melees, but there are not so many of those in the game.
This brings the satisfaction down a lot for me, while playing said hero.
I’ll try and respond to you so that it’ll be easier for you to understand
What I tried to convey for this point is that her health is so weak that the globe % regen should be upped from 10 to 20% as a default, to make sure she gains as much from globes as other assassins do. Considering how globes heal for 10% of maxHP (correct me if I’m wrong), they are a lot weaker for her than any other hero in the game (except for Murky of course). This I feel is an unnecessary complication for the hero.
I can’t feel that her dps is any more than that of a normal assassin, I’d claim that it indeed is way less. This is why I feel that you might aswell up her survivability, seeing how the damage is sort of underwhelming atm.
I don’t know why you’d feel she would become unkillable. What I am promoting is simply a way for her to deal in PvE to make her more stayable without constant attention of a healer.
With that being sad I have however flagged you for the personal attacks in your post, as they cannot possibly be part of the code of conduct.
That is absolutely not my experience when I’ve played tracer, then again I’m not good with her so perhaps I’m just wrong on that. But the advantage of tracer is that whether anyone will auto-attack you is your choice. You either need to get ambushed by a hard CC (stun/root/silence) or you need to be fighting genji for the other team to lock you down long enough to attack you reasonably.
She needs to 1 shot people to compete 1 on 1, otherwise it’s basically a game of cat-and-mouse with any melee and against any ranged she can basically avoid them when she doesn’t have the advantage. But this game is a 5v5, if you have a good front line you can use tracer to build up some damage and pulse bomb charge until your team is ready to dive for a kill.
In that role, she excells. There is next to nobody with more mobility than her and her burst damage can be really high and her E can get her out of a lot of bad situations other heroes couldn’t escape from. Sure there’s a lot of down time between these but that’s ussually when you do objectives so your stuff is ready by the time the objective is (hopefully) won.
Tracer might be weak mathematically by almost every measurable metric, but it’s her excessively dominant mobility that gives her an edge. These days there are other heroes that can do most of what she does to a slightly higher degree, but as I said before, if she were to be balanced to be on par with them in terms of her abilities, her mobility would be so broken that she would ruin the meta.
That goes for every squishy though, that’s not a Tracer issue. Every squishy has to deal with that, usually by avoiding damage or sticking with healer for sustain.
Also you seem to be underestimating how much difference her health pool really makes. Tracer has low base health, but it really isn’t that far below average. Tracer has about 1300 health at lvl 1, same as another couple of super squishies (Valla, Li-Ming most notable). Most ranged assassins are at about 1500-1600, not that much higher either. Increasing her globes from 10% to 20% would be ridiculous, as that would put her effective health for globes at around 2600. At that point she’d gain as much from globes as tanks do, far more than assassins are supposed to get.
(Also note that she already gets increased base health regen compared to normal squishies. Her base regen is already on par with that of tanks. )
What you ‘feel’ doesnt matter though. All that matters is how much damage she can actually do when used effectively. You might not realize this, but Tracers aa dps is among the highest in the game (2d highest after Pilot D.va if you ignore her reload time, still top 10 with reload taken into account), and she also has two big burst abilities to follow up.
One thing you need to remember about Tracer is that she is not a normal assassin. Tracer isn’t meant to straight up out-trade enemies in a fair fight. She’s supposed to use her mobility to avoid damage, and to pick off (weakened or isolated) targets and get away with it.
Why I would feel she was unbeatable ?
Lemme see … ah right, SHE WAS UNBEATABLE FFS.
Her quest talent stacked 10 times not 5 and was permanent once at 10 stacks (like Kael’s and Butchers) and it was stacking up to 25% damage increase.
Her damage per bullet was more or less what she deals at lvl for the entire mag, that was the first thing that was nerfed.
Her next nerf was dealing with the insane blink cooldown reduction from auto-attacks, all she had to do was attack something and her CD was ready to go.
That was nerfed.
Next on the list was her standard HP, her HP is intentionally lower to counter her still insane attack capacity, it was nerfed by roughly 20%.
First things first about Tracer gameplay, even with all the nerfs she is still a force to NEVER underestimate. What most people do wrong about her is that they stand still while attacking. YOU DON’T STAND STILL WHILE ATTACKING FFS.
That’s why you feel she’s weak, you let her get hit.
Another bad thing people do while playing Tracer is following the guide.
What’s wrong with your thinking ? applying the guide in every match and you learn bad habits, teh guide tells you her optimal talent picks and ability usage, but she will lose against most ranged assassins, especially if enemy team has blinders, LiLi, Cassia, Johanna, you FEAR THEM because they deny your attack ability. If you first pick Tracer your team has 50 chance to lose if you are GOOD with her, once enemy team chooses any of the blinding CC Heroes, your team loses +20% with each blind pick, at this point even Valeera is your biggest threat, all she has to do is Cheap Shot you with extended blind talent and you died without a fight.
Problem with Tracer is not that she is too weak, the problem is that she has far too many counters and STILL can win.
You don’t understand how to play Tracer, which is why I told you to play VS AI, learn various tricks she can do, I suggest playing against elite AI for best feel of it and if you really think you LEARNED what you need and learned which talents WORK FOR YOU (seriously, forget the guide, learn by your own effort, experiment) you can go QM but I really don’t recommend QM, either learn to play heroes really well and shine in unranked and ranked, or waste it all in QM cuz QM follows different team play rules, it’s BAD if you want to enjoy the game, well the MMR is bad entirely, so you can’t really enjoy the game much anyway but you can try right ?
But yeah, she’s still strong even after all that lesbian nerf she got.
Yeah… no. There was a time when she was more durable, and it could be described with one word: “busted”. She absolutely needs those weaknesses to cover for her strengths. Playing against her as melee and/or a mage is still the single most miserable experience HOTS has to offer (and no, a mage can’t kill her with autoattacks without dying first; that’s just exaggeration).
That being said, she’s also an inherently flawed character (a dedicated hero killer with unmatched mobility will never be balanced) that can’t be salvaged unless reworked, but being intentionally kept undertuned is the next best thing to that.
