There doesn’t seem to be a PTR feedback forum anymore so posting here …
I understand what the dev team are trying to do (making Pharah more of a skill character). The buff to firing speed is good and I understand it has to be balanced, but shifting the balance between Direct and indirect is the wrong nerf.
Instead they should have reduced the splash damage radius from 2.5 meters to 1.5 meters and removed the drop off - so if you hit anywhere in that smaller circle you do the 80 damage.
A 1.5m circle may sound big, but realistically if someone is running towards or away from a Pharah she’s isn’t going to hit a splash damage shot (it will either be a direct hit or it will miss completely).
Your only ever going to hit a splash shot, if someone is running left of right and you have the elevation of the shot correct.
So why do I want, what sounds like an even more severe nerf, one word:
Brigitte
Aiming around Brigette was the only effective way to kill her as Pharah (who is one of the best counters for Brig).
With the Nerf on the PTR now, it makes it pretty much impossible to kill Brig as Pharah !
Smaller splash damage effects her as well, so she would have a much easier time being in close quarters without hurting herself.
Why? This seems to fix everything the community has against pharah. Low elo players won’t die as easily to her because they can’t aim properly, there’s no way a pharah does direct hits consistently there, so it fixes the “broken pharamercy” there. In higher elo’s this is a straight up buff, more movement (well less cd), more damage and more rate of fire.
Btw its not “Your only ever going to hit (…)” it’s “I am”, you might wanna fix that, higher tier players hit those fine. The point was to make her viable in high tiers, and less opressive in lower tiers. This patch achieves that.
I’m not a pharah player, but if I was I’d be really happy for the balance changes.
Your sort of right, it would probably cause more damage when Pharah Rocket jumps.
But the reality is the existing damage drop off mechanic means most of the time you take very minimal damage (around 20) at anything other than point blank range. This change would create a hard cut off to make sure your outside that range before firing (otherwise it would really hurt).
There was a little hyperbole in my OP (which I concede is due to me being gold and not the best of shots in the world).
However there is also some math:
I am not exactly sure how big the hitbox is on Pharah rockets, but it’s significantly bigger than the visual effect (lets assume 0.25m radius).
She is firing at a target that’s roughly 1.75m tall, so to hit behind the target she would need to be at an angle from the ground of greater than:
invTAN( ( 1.75 + 0.25) / 1.5) = 53 degrees.
At a shallow firing angle the available area to hit in front of the target would also be very small - probably less than 1m when both the rocket and target hitboxes are considered (verses 2m in the vertical for a direct hit).
So I think a variant on my point still stands even for a T500 player, specifically:
With the Nerf above and a T-500 firing at a shallow angle:
- Assuming they get the left/right aim correct.
- Its not possible for them to hit a splash shot behind the target,
- And it is easier to get a direct shot than it is to get a splash shot in front of the target.
yeah i think this is a great change overall, you now have to be accurate as pharah so it’s actually just a skill cap increase and not really a damage nerf. she used to be really hard to get value out of because of the shots per second being so low, but now you can squeeze 3 shots in 2 seconds. where previously it was still only 2 shots.
1 Like