TL;DR at Bottom
Brigitte since her introduction has always been problematic, with player’s anger at the shield bash as well as her shield absorbing so much damage, but Blizzard have since made adjustments to the character.
However one could argue that the changes made to her have avoided the real issues with the character and ignored the elephant in the room for a character such as her. The elephant in this case is Brigitte’s survivability. The issue with her is not her high damage or healing rate, its how long she is able to sustain herself in a fight compared to other supports. Instead of making Brig able to defend herself and easy to kill, the balance team make her unable to defend herself but impossible to kill. She is a healer, not a tank.
Brigitte has 8 different abilities / weapons on her kit, with rocket flail, whip shot and repair pack having no adjustments made to them as of yet. These three weapons / abilities are fine as they are and no such adjustments should be made to them in the future.
Good Nerfs / Changes
Cool-down Increases on Shield Bash: Puts her in line with McCree and stops the spam of stuns, requiring more of a thought-out play style for her.
Not being able to bash through Barriers: Requires more thought when countering shields as it was too easy to shut down Rein, compared to how you have to aim McCree’s flashbang.
Shield Health Decrease: 600 health was an odd number to start off with for her Shield. Lowering it to 500 makes her able to tank less health and survive for longer than fair.
Maximum armour per player reduced from 150 to 100 from Rally.
PTR: Rally Armour now lasts 30 seconds, instead of infinite:
Fighting DPS heroes or Brigitte herself when she has almost twice the health alongside this potentially lasting several fights was difficult to counter. If you lost the fight, the armour would be put back as Brig would have already gained her ult again and the cycle would continue.
Shield Bash Now knocks down and gets knocked down by other charging targets (e.g Reinhardt and Doomfist).: puts her in line with Doomfist and Reinhardt.
I feel these changes were all beneficial for balance because they made Brigitte require more thought when playing rather than blindly spamming attacks, as well as making it more fair to fight armoured enemies, as they wouldn’t have twice your health to start off with. The Armour change also made Brig herself easier to eliminate.
Bad Nerfs / Changes
Shield bash Damage reduced from 50 to 5: The lower damage is fine but reducing it less to than the damage of McCree’s flashbang (30) seems unfair. It makes Brigitte less able to defend herself.
Inspire Cooldown reduced from 1.5 seconds to 1 second; Duration increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds; Total healing increased from 80 to 100: Brigitte’s most frustrating and difficult to counter mechanic is how she is always last alive in a team fight, despite not being a tank or having a very high health pool. High RPM but low damage attacks do very little to her because of the armour and the majority of high damage abilities take so long to recharge that she ends up gaining the health back before they can attack again. the healing she provides to her teammates is fine, but to herself it makes her very difficult to fight against, and close proximity 1v1 fights with her almost always result in a loss, no matter the hero.
I feel these changes are bad for Brigitte because they enforce the idea that Brig shouldn’t be defending herself by attacking enemies, but rather by just not dying. This is the equivalent of letting Mercy’s passive ability activate at all times during a fight, aka her Ultimate Ability, but in regular combat. The attempt at balance here is that it only activates during combat, but the only time Brig is going to need to stay alive is in combat, and it isn’t exactly hard to not hit someone when your primary weapon is a melee weapon.
Changes that should be implemented, but have not
When hacked, Brigitte’s rally gets cancelled, but the armour retains and Inspire cannot reactivate until she is unhacked: When Lucio is hacked he becomes completely useless as a support. His heals stop, his speed stops and he cannot use his wall ride either. The important thing here is that his passive ability is the songs and they are disabled when hacked, but Brigitte can not only continue to use Inspire, but can also activate it whilst hacked. The same with Brigitte’s ultimate as it works in the same way Lucio’s healing does, in an AOE, yet it cannot be interrupted with a hack. If Lucio can be disrupted with a hack, Brigitte should too. I would also not like it if the Lucio change was reverted, as I feel it is fair that he can be completely shut down.
To conclude, I feel brig can survive for much longer than necessary, often outliving her team and healing herself far too much. Proposed changes would be buffing Shield Bash to 30 damage, having hacks disable her abilities (or at least EMP disable) and have her do less self healing than she does healing to others, like Lucio, maybe by 20% or 30%.
TL;DR Brig survives too long by herself, have her do slightly more dps, but survive for less time.