PvE - Changes to make it more fun!

General Discussion
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Hey all - wanted to bring up the PvE game feel and something that was bugging me about it after playing through both the free as well as paid PvE missions. By far the best parts are the cinematics and getting all the player interactions, but the actual player experience left me wanting a fair bit. Whilst there are a lot of big and grander thoughts which could naturally uplift the PvE moving forward, my focus here is on more achievable changes which could be made to existing content as well as new ones going forward.

When PvE was first announced the main draw for me was this was an opportunity to really lean into giving players the experience of playing as these heroes - this should be the perfect place to make each character feel powerful and satisfying to play when not being put up against other heroes.

Unfortunately, the reality of the PvE experience is that characters actually feel weaker than they do in PvP - because every enemy, even the most basic ‘grunt’ types, all have significant health pools and time to kill.

There’s a fair bit of cognitive dissonance when you are presented with cutscenes showing the heroes easily dispatching enemies with quick attacks, single swings of Rein’s might hammer, which is then contrasted against the reality of how many hits it actually takes to kill anything in game.

My request, and hope, is two-fold.

  1. First - for grunt type enemies reduce their HP closer to the 200HP mark to make it more satisfying to dispatch them - perhaps increasing their numbers to compensate.

  2. And secondly - work towards overtuning and buffing heroes into PvE to give them proper awesome moments of impact they can have.

As it stands ultimates in this mode feel…underwhelming. There is some great opportunity here to really lean into giving these heroes cool abilities and changes that could never make it into PvP for being ‘broken’ but could be extremely satisfying and fun to do in these stages.

So yeah - please Blizzard - consider making it more satisfying to play but giving us more cannon fodder and powerful ultimates, and work the challenge to be instead on the damage received and the boss fights/number of enemies that are in the fight!

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I agree with quite a few of these points, but instead of giving us thousands of easy to dispatch grunts, how about they add a grunt like that?

That way we would get that experience of creating tons of scrap metal but there are those slightly more dangerous bots in between there.
The number rate between the easy and difficult enemies would scale according to difficulty, most enemies being the easy variety on the easiest difficulty.

I agree with you on ults, but again it scales with enemy healthpools which do scale a little between difficulties.

The pve mode has different patchnotes to pvp. For example they reverted mei’s damage back to the higher one and zarya’s bubbles have a shorter cooldown and longer duration in pve.
So the team did try adjusting the heroes.

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To clarify - I was suggesting they add cannon fodder in addition to the elite and harder variants much like you’ve suggested :slight_smile:

I’m aware they made some adjustements for PvE, I don’t think they really properly realised this however, in some cases delivering nerfs, and in others not making changes at all or properly executing it :slight_smile: I’d like to see them do more and make every hero feel a bit more satisfying to play.

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You just mentioned grunt type enemies and the reducing their hp, so i thought you meant the existing cannonfodder.

As to how heroes are and feel, i think the team might have been a bit too careful with keeping the heroes feeling more or less like their pvp variants. Perhaps in order to make swapping between modes more intuitive?

The ults could definitely do with some juicing up, either with the size of ults (earthshatter for example could cover more ground) maybe duration for others like sojourn’s, or just purely upping the damage a little more accross the board.

As the ults don’t passively generate and require more effort to build up than in pvp

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