I have been playing Overwatch since it was released and had invested over 1500 hours on genji. I used to hit 4.3k by playing genji only and has been hitting top500 for seasons. Here are my feedback regarding the new genji nerf.
I have no problem with the damage decrease. As a dive hero with such great mobility and small hitbox , genji shouldn’t be able to insta-kill squishes with most of his combos. 28 damage per shuriken seems to be a reasonable choice.
However, the firerate nerf is extremely DISGUSTING. I understand that you think genji was pushed too far and wanted to pull him down, but that is not the reason you destroy players’ feel of playing him which takes months to build. It is as awful as what you did to hanzo back in the days by changing his arrow speed back and forth. Players need tons of time to get used to the arrow speed so they could pre-aim enemies. It’s the same as genji that players need tons of time to get used to the combo paces with 0.65s right click firerate.
By changing the damage per shuriken, genji players need to change their play style because they can not one-shot squishes that easily and their engagements take much more risks. They have to play with their teammates more. That’s ok. Blizzard nerfed genji this way so that players need to change their play style so that genji becomes a hero that requires lots of team coordination, whom also he is designed to be. But by changing his firerate, Blizzard is simply NOT LETTING PLAYERS PLAYING HIM because it destroys the combo paces which consists of 50% of genji plays. It also gives maximum frustration to players who spent months to get used to the combo paces and feelings of playing genji.
Below are the personal suggestions for nerfing genji.
Plan A:
shuriken damage stays 30
firerate stays 0.65s
dragonblade charge rate decrease 10%(or even 15%)
By doing this, we make genji a close-range damage dealer which can help teammates make solid picks during team fights while not giving him that much capabilities of completely reverting a team fight with his ult. Defensive ults like zen ult and lucio ult can charge equally fast as dragon blade and thus easy to counter him. Nanos will be charged much much faster than dragonblade so that nano blade might not be an economical choice compared to other choices that can be done with nanos.
Plan B:
Shuriken damage 30 -> 28
right click spread 9->10
In this way genji is not that strong during usual team fights. He requires team coordination and will be played mostly to finish off kills and follow up damage. As he can not win most 1v1s against other heroes even those whom he is designed to counter, he maintains his capabilities to do fight-winning ult combos like nanoblade/emp-blade.
Some other personal views:
Widowmaker is still the most broken hero in this game. If genji is ever designed to counter widowmaker, give him the ability to one-shot widow so widowmaker doesn’t get healed or protected by her teammates nearby while genji has no abilities to get out. It also takes genji lots of time and risks to even get close to widow, while she has barely no risks chilling and aiming at the back. All she needs to do is calling for help when genji is on her. She can aim and try to make scary picks to enemies while the enemy genji is trying to even get close.
To summarize, please give back genji’s firerate so that players who have already denoted tons of time practicing him didn’t do all those hard-work for nothing.
