Let’s talk about
- Soldier 76
- Sombra
- Pharah
I will go into detail as to why each of these is problematic.
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Soldier 76 has a very high rate of fire, fast reload time, he can heal himself, and he can run. He takes very little skill to play, and his ult is a legitimate aim bot. Statistically, you can just fire nonstop from game start to end and kill things without any game sense or skill. WITH game sense and skill, he becomes absurdly damaging. He needs either a cooldown on his PRIMARY fire to reduce the total amount of damage he can deal or to be projectile-based. You could also take away the rockets, and we’d all be fine, thanks. His ult can always be countered by a good Zen, Lucio, or a decent tank with a shield, so that’s a non-issue. But removing any one of his heal pod, the rockets, or the dumb running would make him a lot more balanced to play against.
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Sombra is single-handedly ruining the experience of playing Overwatch. If you are a support main, she will dive you, give you virus, and then kill you repeatedly. Most of the time it happens too quickly for your damage heroes to react, and supports are not strong enough to kill her before her virus and her lack of spread kills you first. I’ve also been spawn-camped by her and prevented from even reaching my team to heal them. It is not rewarding to play support at all if you can’t keep yourself alive to heal your teammates. She needs a nerf: either reduced damage, the original spread on her weapon, or health at 150. She stays invisible most of the game, so she should be more vulnerable when she IS visible. I personally wouldn’t mind if she were removed altogether. When she’s on your team, it’s harder to stay alive because that’s one less target for the enemy team to aim at, so they’re all shooting at YOU and your other teammates more. On the enemy team, she’ll dive your supports constantly and force you to play more defensively, or else you constantly play “hunt the Sombra”. It’s not fun. It’s annoying, and it makes me want to stop playing this game altogether.
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Pharah. Another character which requires no skill to be devastating. Indeed, this is even joked about in one of her voice line interactions with Hanzo where he says, “With enough precision, explosives are unnecessary”, and she says, “Are you saying I can’t aim?”. She is impossible to hit unless you are a good widow player or a hitscan god. As a Hanzo main, I can generally kill her in two to three shots in the air, but I have to be dead-on with my aim because if I miss, she’ll kill me in three shots just by shooting NEAR me. Same with almost any damage hero that doesn’t one-shot her. If you are projectile-based, there is no frame of reference to hit something in the sky. You’re aiming blindly. And those of us who think that hitscan is a boring play style (i.e., hover your mouse and click with no thought) shouldn’t be punished by a character that doesn’t need to aim at all. I think her projectiles should have a smaller AOE, deal less damage, and maybe you could then increase the size of Pharah’s clip and/or keep her in the air longer. Even as a gold Hanzo against a bronze Pharah, it can often take three or more arrows to kill her, especially if she’s being pocketed by a Mercy, and they’re both flying. In my experience, and I’m sure the experience of many others, she’s single-handedly taken a successful defense and literally blown holes through it such that you end up in overtime at the first point with zero deaths on your team and then lose the whole game simply because one person on the enemy team swapped to Pharah. No single character should have so great an impact on the composition of your team.
Forget the Roadhog rework. Fix these broken damage heroes.