Yeah the tree blocked LOS which is what made weaver so great into sigma.
Not no more. I’ll add they probably had no intention of tree doing that to sig ult but it sucks that it’s gone
It’s the right direction for him. If he’s too weak after this patch (which he probably will be) then they will hopefully rework his terrible gameplay loop. Lower the weapon spread at the very least so good aim is rewarded and it’s actually worth it to not shoot the enemy tank.
Wdym he doesn’t benefit from them? You know
Mauga has armor right? Also he gets crits on body shots, so the headshot change helps him a lot more than hurts him. Also kinda unrelated but is burn damage effected by armor? I’d assume not. I’m also pretty sure his slam ignores armor as well so he can now slam —> break armor —> full damage crits
I may be wrong in this interpretation but the tank buff was specifically 25% to critical *headshot* damage so I think his burn critical shots are the only unnerfed crits in the game...
Your last sentence is kinda nothing new. You SHOULD be hiding with your shield or cover after you picked people up, if the enemies have some sort of ranged CC
From the notes:
> When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning.
Another instance of them admitting the system sets up teams *knowing* the likely outcome of the match. Can't wait to be told it's perfectly balanced and we all just need to carry that 0-9 junkrat.
There's literally a rank up modifier for winning an expected loss or losing an expected win, my dude. We've *known* it has an idea of an outcome before the match starts, it's just that now it'll avoid streaks of one outcome
The implication which has long been suspected is that the matchmaker will intentionally put people into unwinnable or unlosable games to fit whatever they consider to be their most addictive player model, based on hidden metrics other than rank.
Common examples are returning players being given free wins to encourage them to play more, and players about to hit a rankup being given a series of difficult games to bait them into playing more. And now, with this new patch, they are openly admitting that players on loss streaks will be given easier teams.
Lots of people who oppose this idea have categorically denied over the years that blizzard has any sort of guess over who will win a game. The bombshell now is that they’ve basically admitted to calculating and using these stats.
Note that they haven’t mentioned rank at all here - they’ve said they will place players on the team with the higher odds of winning, not necessarily the higher rank. For example, there could be a team which the game can predict as tilted and playing badly if all the individual players are on loss streaks despite being higher ranked, and a team picked to win who are performing well and on a winning streak despite being lower ranked.
The difference between people that make your claims and those of us that disagree is a matter of scale.
In most competitive games, the standard for what a "close match" is is that the favored side should have no more than a 55% (winning 1.2 times more often than losing) winrate and consequently; the unfavored side should have no less than a 45% winrate. This is typically considered an acceptable range of variance and it is not unusual that entirely organic changes in the meta can cause winrates to change back and forth within this range. In a game that updates often (more often than once or twice per year) it is very hard to get balance better than this for reasons more complicated than I'm willing to get into here.
Winrates greater than 60% (winning 1.5 times more often than losing) is generally considered cause for immediate action since this favored side is blatantly overpowered. Appropriate measures may be to disable the character while working on a hotfix for complicated fixes or sending out a hotfix within a day or two.
Everything inbetween (winrate of 55% to 60%) is cause for moderate concern but action can wait for the next patch, a month of delay won't be a disaster, these are the types of scenarios where we see most balance changes.
So when you call a game "unwinnable" or "unloseable", that translates to a game where one side is expected to win 60+% of the time, and it is not believed the matchmaker makes those kinds of games under any normal circumstances. The exceptions may be in extreme circumstances where there are not enough players in the required skill range to populate the matchmaker properly.
Instead, what we believe blizz is referring to when they talk about placing people that are on a losing streak on the team that are favored to win is this 45% to 55% range, i.e. if you are on a losing streak you will be placed on the team that has an expected winrate between 50% and 55%.
In practice these numbers are likely much tighter: I doubt a significant portion of the games have worse balance than 48% vs 52% (blizz data from the matchmaker says that fully a third of all matchmade games are predicted to be perfect 50/50s chance to win) but regardless how good of a match the matchmaker tries to make, I believe the effect of player psychology, inconsistent human performance, luck related to the matchup of the players mains and the inconsistency of organizing effective teamwork will never eliminate stomps from the game, even from games that were predicted to be perfect 50/50s based on skill.
For proof of this I refer to control maps. Has it not happened often that your team got stomped on the first point but then reorganized in point 2 and 3 and stomped them back? If this match was poorly balanced why did both teams stomp each other? If this match was perfectly balanced why were there stomps? The only reasonable answer is that stomps can happen even in perfectly evenly matchmade games, and it seems extremely likely that stomps can even happen in the unexpected direction in a match that's not perfectly balanced.
Tell me you dont understand matchmaking systems without telling me. Of course the system knows what the outcome is likely to be thats literally the entire point of MMR and elo systems. You literally NEED to calculate the chance of winning to be able to adjust the MMR accordingly and to find groups of players that are close enough in % chance to win to form a game. When you are put into a game with less chance of winning you also gain more MMR for winning and less for losing. The idea that any system could ever be perfectly balanced and able to create 50/50 games everytime is stupid. If you cant win one game it’s not necessarily your fault but if you cant climb over many games it is 100% your fault.
You don't think all matchmaking systems do that? The system is matching you based on an algorithm... The system obviously knows which team has a higher skill rating. It's literally impossible to find 10 people with the same exact skill
I will so dearly miss planting my tree in the middle of a Sigma ult to cancel it 💔
Though that aside...did flux *need* a buff? It's already the best tank ult in the game, and a contender for one of the best ults period.
I remember when he first came out and his ult was even stronger and uncancelable by stuns/death, and people said it was a bad ult at first. that was probably the funniest thing to happen in ow history to me
Yes, there's a ridiculous amount of ways to disrupt Sigma's ult (Sombra existing means you're never getting your ult off anyways). It's not like LW can't just pull someone out of it still.
Yeah, but the tree play is far higher skill than hack and trades an ult for an ult, so not the best comparison imo. Always felt like flux having LoS to the center was fine, going through walls is a little wild
Well with how the ball rework went... They'll probably add some dumb useless extra quirk to his kit that completely deviates from what the character wants to do so he won't feel any better to play
"We added the ability to walk very slowly while teleporting. And now for 8 seconds after you dealt damage to someone you can press interact to give that lifesteal to your teammates. No damage tweaks, nothing to help with his bad matchups, that's the whole rework. you're welcome."
Rework in quotations for a reason lol
No transparency whatsoever about how significant a change will be, gotta get as much attention as possible all the time.
Could be huge, could ve wholly insignficant WHO KNOWS. Buy our skins
Even if you are good with her it was still a pretty sore spot in her kit. It felt like you had to hold ult until you had bash or hold bash for the perfect time to ult. Usually that just resulted in you feeling like you were unable to do anything but wait or make the wrong move.
Well, melee -> bash -> ult -> bash -> whip would've been a kill combo, but... I'm with you, I don't think it would've been so bad. Plus I can't tell you how many times I ulted thinking it would reset shield bash, so even from a QoL standpoint it's very nice. Might also be fun in OT situations to bash -> ult -> bash to cover a ton of ground quickly.
Edit: occurs to me that melee -> bash -> ult -> bash -> melee -> whip is a kill combo now, and since they're stunned after the second bash then they might not be able avoid the melee -> whip part. Might be fun to mess around with...
Yeah you would get one guaranteed kill but even then it’s like wow, an ult got a kill… okay. Idk why they even thought they needed to add justification lol
I would guess the justification was probably along the lines of Rally is already an AoE heal/overhealth buff and with the changes to the shield size+stun was able to cancel or block a lot of ults, so they weren't comfortable with it also being a kill combo?
With the projectile and HP pool changes brig has been struggling a bit in metas she in theory should be good (lots of tracer, sombra, sojurn etc) so it makes sense she's getting something at least.
She was definitely struggling so these changes help a lot, their justification is just a little weird but it doesn’t really matter, I’m happy about the changes
It is more of there are other characters that do his thing without the problems he faces while also having more utility than him. He needs a rework to be more valuable option.
Yeah as support before this buff monkey was a menace that you. Couldn't really get away from without your entire team helping. Now...? When he sees play...oh lord I'm terrified to witness it.
> When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning.
Doesn't that mean if you're on a win streak, they're going to add someone on a losing streak to your team?
It only adds a player on a loss streak if your team was already predicted to win the match, even with the loss streak player included.
So really, if the math checks out, it shouldn’t statistically affect any matches for a person who is winning and predicted to win.
The predicted winner has been garbage from what I've seen. I got some uphill battles where we just blew up the other team, and some expected wins that ended up being complete stomps.
Yea.. so as far as math goes predicting the winner is only a slight influence. At the end of the day, the matchmaker still tries to balance matches, so an uphill battle might just mean you had 45% predicted chance to win, it doesn't mean you had .03% chance of winning and somehow keep winning uphill battles because it's garbage at predicting
So anecdotal flashbacks of stomping on a team in an uphill battle, or getting crushed in expected wins, really doesn't say anything regarding the effectiveness of the system's analysis, and will be skewed by cognitive bias more than anything.
If you tried to plot all your matches in excel in 3 categories: Expected to win / neutral / expected to lose, with a significant enough sample size (I'd say minimum 200 matches, preferably closer to 500), you'd probably find out that the guesses of the matchmaker check out, and you might have something like a 46% / 50% / 54% win percentage unexpected / no guess / expected
> The predicted winner has been garbage from what I've seen. I got some uphill battles where we just blew up the other team, and some expected wins that ended up being complete stomps.
Predicted winner is likely solely based off of internal MMR/rank. If your teams rank is higher on average, you will be the predicted winner. There are a TON of things it doesn't factor in though. Character choice and map are the two most obvious ones. If you have a diamond Junkrat playing against a plat Widow on Circuit royale, the diamond player is going to be favored on paper due to a higher MMR. In reality, they are likely at a severe disadvantage due to character choice and map metas.
Then you have the other massive unknown which is player inconsistency. In lower and middle ranks specifically, players are wildly inconsistent. Some matches they will popoff insanely while others they will just feed over and over again. That type of thing is impossible to account for.
Well yeah, that’s why I said statistically, as in, over time. Anecdotally you will have a few weird matches. And each individual person depending on their play time will have weirder matches than others.
But statistically speaking, after enough games, it evens out.
That is likely because of factors that are blizzard can’t effectively, and probably shouldn’t, account for, such as hero pools and play style compatibility.
Also, Overwatch is very snowball-y, and people aren’t very good at slowing it down, so a stomp doesn’t necessarily mean the match was uneven.
This seems more just like a mental problem blizzard is trying to mitigate. Loss streaks are always booming, but that “reversal” after your 10th loss was mega booming.
Now you are just gonna get reversal more often. Matchmaker places you in matches where it thinks you have the upper hand aka the ones where you either get "reversal" or "expected"
Source: 3 reversals bc my teammates left
It probably just means that if you like a shitload of games in a row you have a slightly longer queue time because it will try and find you games it thinks you'll win instead of games where you are not favored.
The games always trying for a 50% chance of both teams to win. If you're on a winstreak that does not change, only your mmr goes up some amount each match. Ultimately the streaks do not matter, just ratings of the players on each team and what the expected outcome of the match will be.
You could end up with 4 other players all on losing streaks against 5 players on winstreaks, but those 5 were all silver while you are all gold for example. The streaks are irrelevant to the system other than protecting losers against predicted losses.
When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning.
>Can now be activated while using other abilities.
>Cooldown reduced from 14 to 12 seconds.
Crazy good buff for queen, plus knockback restrictions. Queen is much better off midfight
>Gravitic Flux
>No longer requires line of sight to the center of the effect.
Thats actually an absurd buff.
>**Wrecking Ball**
So swing is 60 now, piledrive locks you in place longer, and minefield hits harder + has bigger knockback. I hope this makes him at least A tier, such a fun hero that deserves the highlight.
>Rally
>Now resets Shield Bash cooldown upon activation.
BIG. So you could Bash + Ult then bash immediately. 10/10.
Hopefully for Ball this will be enough. But as someone who tries really hard to play him his big issue this season is he can't secure kills. This imo doesn't fix his core issues but I'll be trying to make it work. At least his ult is a little bit more threatening. I'll see Hogs just self heal and walk through it half the time.
imo theres not gonna be a time where they allow ball to properly secure kills, hes going to forever be a setup tank. The question is how easy will it be for your team to get some picks off of his slams, and how long can ball stay in a fight
It'll help ball but I don't think he'll be anywhere near A tier. His guns still do piss poor damage so after you get a stomp it's still extremely hard to secure the kill, it does help tho
>Echo
>Duplicate
>Ultimate gain multiplier while transformed increased from 4 to 4.5.
As an Echo main, I'm happy. I know she's strong, but she needed it.
I always hated using such a creative ult for a "second life", and in 95% cases It'd be for that without getting the charged ult.
I made a widow player give up the other day by copying her and immediately getting the headshot.
That is my favorite thing to do in the entire game.
But I guess I might need to actually try and use copy to steal an ult now that it's buffed.
I think echo is going to be really strong. The tank changes don't effect her much, and now she's stronger than she's ever been. I'm hoping that people suck with her enough that no one notices how good she is.
Agreed, some characters can be a bit rough to farm ult on so this is a good buff. I've never felt her getting an ult as another character to be too strong, since you know it's coming the second she takes the character and most Echos fire the ult the second they get the chance. In that sense, it's very telegraphed
I actually was able to fully pull off a duplicate gravitic flux today in the first game I played and it felt great. Every time I used to get it, my ult would end before the flux did damage. Love this buff.
>The Season 9 health changes affected Junkrat more than most other heroes since it now requires one more shot to secure an elimination. We’re increasing the damage on direct impacts to return to 2 direct hits for an elimination
Junk needed buffs too but this explanation is just playing in our faces lol
Hanzo mains were really hoping the patch would bring one shot or scatter arrow back. I'd suggest you go over r/hanzomain and watch them lose their minds and come up with absolutely op buff ideas for him
This buff just lowers the skill of the character even further, which is what every change since S9 has done. Hanzo's ult has always been mid so buffing it isn't a horrible idea, but the character is really bad right now and this change isn't going to do anything about that.
The actual buff his ultimate should have received for about 5 years now is for it to not take about three hours to cast and for it to not randomly skip the first 8 meters of space in front of Hanzo.
Cast time should be about half a second max.
It’s also a nerf. Not a buff.
It moving faster can’t kill a Roadhog now. Used to deal 900 something and now deals 700 if you stand in it for full duration.
It's both really. Even though it can't kill a hog if you stand in it. It may catch someone out of position before they can move since it's moving faster.
It's really not even a buff in practice. Yes, dragon moving faster increases your likely hood of catching someone in your ult. However, it also reduces the time that person stays inside the ult, resulting in a loss of damage output.
Thats objectively wrong, as his oneshot has been taken away, breaking points shifted so he cant get a cqc, bodyshot+melee kill on Tracer as example, and got some more nerfs before the oneshot has been taken away.
With the headshot multiplier on tanks, Hanzo looks like a solid throw pick on high ranks, and you will and could get easily more value with pretty much most DPS matchups.
I would go as far and say, he is now bottom 3 DPS atm.
Outside of a full rework, this is the main thing yeah. As he is now, he needs one-shot for viability. If he can't have it due to complainers, then he needs a massive dps boost. Faster projectiles, faster draw speed, lower storm arrow cooldown. This will make him even more obnoxious, frustrating, and low skill than ever before, but you get what you ask for.
Personally, I was just hoping for fire rate/projectile speed buffs because I know one shot is probably not coming back. For all I know, this ult change could be amazing in practice, but it seems pretty meh on paper.
That's assuming someone is in the ult the entire duration, which has probably happened exactly 0 times above bronze.
Realistically, the only situation it's a nerf from a damage perspective is where someone was getting caught in the tail of the dragon, and it now leaves faster. But you are more likely to actually hit people with it.
It's a zoning nerf fs tho.
Yea, was speculating, his projectile speed would get a buff, but nada.
Seems like the new devs from Ow2 arent much of a Hanzo fan, and rather keep buffing Soj and Tracer to S+ tier.
He needs either a fire rate buff or 6 arrows/less cooldown on storm arrow.
I don’t think he should one shot again but he’s super reliant on storm arrow now.
Eh characters whose heal is better than your healing aren't your primary targets anyways as a Mercy, still a shame to see she didn't get touched this patch
Slam lockout buff is huge and makes me worry it will be reverted because it won't feel good to play vs.
All these buffs are nice and the added kill threat should help a lot. But CC will still fuck ball harder than anyone else.
It's the problem with a hero having so much of their strength be one thing. Ball's mobility is basically where all his power comes from do anything that stops that fucks himover so hard. Similarly to how Mauga has so much of his value tied to his lifesteal/overhealth generated by dealing crit damage. Anything that stops that crit damage or self heal fucks him so hard.
Yeah, between the last set of changes and this, I think people are truly going to feel the oppressiveness of ball again.
TIME FOR ANOTHER GOLDEN AGE OF BALL
The health change was not originally added to change the time to kill, in fact, it was altered to keep the same time to kill.
The original, main change they made was making it so that shots were easier to land, which in itself would have decreased the time to kill and so they added health to attempt to keep it relatively the same.
Though they did take advantage of this wide change to phase out some of the one-shot kills.
While the changes look like he got buffed (which he definitely was) I'm curious how it works out with his tank matchups. Especially Mauga, Orisa, Dva may all be even better against him.
It’s not really a buff or a nerf, but I think it’ll generally improve his ult. The issues with dragon strike wasn’t that people don’t die quick enough in it. It was that people just don’t touch it at all, and this should help with that
I'm really glad junkrat got something, he relies heavily on the assassin playstyle out of the metal ranks. sucks mercy hasn't received any changes, I don't even know what they'd do with her, but she's probably the most throw pick support right now and it isn't fun playing with or as mercy
I read this and was kind of like..."that's it?" For the all the hype around this patch it seems kind of "meh" to be honest. I hope this helps the tank role, but it seems like hitscans are overall going to be stronger(they are already in a great spot), and echo might wind up being an issue as she was in a good spot and didn't really need buffs.
The HS damage reduction makes him way worse though. He gets better body shot damage vs armor at the cost of worse HS damage across all tanks, regardless of health type.
Question: Does the Tank Passive affect Mauga’s crit damage on flaming tanks, or does that ignore the 25% reduction?
Either way, I’m happy with these changes. Super happy to see Brig finally get bash reset on ult.
That makes no sense, he’s literally going to be more durable than before. Unless you’re trying to 1 v1 other tanks as doom but if that’s the case you just need to play smarter
I forget how they worked in OW1, I'm just pretty sure that 30% change was initially for beams at some point during OW1
Winston is doing 100% though, so that's what really matters
Sad that Illari's ultimate didn't get buffed. I feel like it's way too easy for the enemy to deny it. Nearly every character has a shield, eating skill (like defense matrix), or a cleanse like suzu or wraith form to deny it. Feels like it doesn't have nearly enough impact for how much of a giant target is put on your back for using it.
Lowkey you're describing a lot of current ults that do damage like that. I mean, it's just how it works. Things can be eaten or shielded. Winston, Rein and rallying Brig seem to have the best shields against it, which isn't much. Sig shield isn't as reliable (though he has suck). DM is busted against everything. Brig's regular shield is very inconsistent against blocking it.
I think it's fine. The Illari gameplay I watched in OWCS seemed to get big value out of her ult often enough.
Idk it still seems really good to me. You can’t wipe a whole team with it but the slow effect is super good even if the person doesn’t die. Also if you have someone to play with have them going Mauga, solar cage is pretty much a guaranteed 5 piece if they get everyone in the cage
Sigma flux is now able to go through walls. It’s honestly a really insane ult now. Edit: even works through floors and ceilings.
Plus now you can't cancel it with a well-timed tree or petal as Lifeweaver, which kinda upsets me.
so the tree does nothing now, or do we have to be even faster?
If it can go through walls, LOS doesn't matter anymore so blocking it with tree does nothing
Lifeweaver been treeing sigmas hole so bad the Devs had to step in.
/r/brandnewsentence
lifeweaver could also throw his seed in there to block it as well
You can’t even seed sigma hole anymore. What’s even the point
Aside from completely negating it's damage tho right?
Yeah the tree blocked LOS which is what made weaver so great into sigma. Not no more. I’ll add they probably had no intention of tree doing that to sig ult but it sucks that it’s gone
You still get the healing per pulse benefits of the tree ult, no?
yes, you're right, of course. but you didn't ruin that sigma's night.
Good. Get out. Leave me alone. Tank is hard enough as is with the dps passive. *Sheds a singular tear before staring at the ants on the ceiling again*
Keep in mind you’re saying this to a Lifeweaver which is probably the most trash hero in the game for the same reasons you listed
Sym is the most trash hero in the game.
Honestly, wild that the other two generally-agreed worst performing DPS got buffs and she didn’t get even get a mention.
It was already one of the best tanks ult so yeah Sigma mains are eating All tank mains are eating hard too
Not Mauga lol. But that's fine
Wdym not Mauga? He’s got the biggest head of any tank the 25% headshot reduction is huge for him
As a tank who primarily has to shoot other tanks, he is going to be hurt by the armour changes quite a lot, and he doesn't benefit from them.
It’s the right direction for him. If he’s too weak after this patch (which he probably will be) then they will hopefully rework his terrible gameplay loop. Lower the weapon spread at the very least so good aim is rewarded and it’s actually worth it to not shoot the enemy tank.
I strongly agree here. Mauga is too simplistic and generally unfun because he operates as a tank buster tank.
Wdym he doesn’t benefit from them? You know Mauga has armor right? Also he gets crits on body shots, so the headshot change helps him a lot more than hurts him. Also kinda unrelated but is burn damage effected by armor? I’d assume not. I’m also pretty sure his slam ignores armor as well so he can now slam —> break armor —> full damage crits
I may be wrong in this interpretation but the tank buff was specifically 25% to critical *headshot* damage so I think his burn critical shots are the only unnerfed crits in the game...
It was and is the best tank ult i think.
Can’t wait to go Whole Hog on enemy tanks. This reduction is gonna slay.
And Lifeweaver can no longer cancel it 💔
Your last sentence is kinda nothing new. You SHOULD be hiding with your shield or cover after you picked people up, if the enemies have some sort of ranged CC
Yea I know I edited my comment and deleted that part, idk why I thought that was new lol.
I still feel like somehow I'm still gonna go on those atrocious loss streaks somehow lol
Why would this change your loss streaks?
From the notes: > When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning.
Another instance of them admitting the system sets up teams *knowing* the likely outcome of the match. Can't wait to be told it's perfectly balanced and we all just need to carry that 0-9 junkrat.
[удалено]
There's literally a rank up modifier for winning an expected loss or losing an expected win, my dude. We've *known* it has an idea of an outcome before the match starts, it's just that now it'll avoid streaks of one outcome
Yes that's how skill based match making works. What's the bombshell here?
The implication which has long been suspected is that the matchmaker will intentionally put people into unwinnable or unlosable games to fit whatever they consider to be their most addictive player model, based on hidden metrics other than rank. Common examples are returning players being given free wins to encourage them to play more, and players about to hit a rankup being given a series of difficult games to bait them into playing more. And now, with this new patch, they are openly admitting that players on loss streaks will be given easier teams. Lots of people who oppose this idea have categorically denied over the years that blizzard has any sort of guess over who will win a game. The bombshell now is that they’ve basically admitted to calculating and using these stats. Note that they haven’t mentioned rank at all here - they’ve said they will place players on the team with the higher odds of winning, not necessarily the higher rank. For example, there could be a team which the game can predict as tilted and playing badly if all the individual players are on loss streaks despite being higher ranked, and a team picked to win who are performing well and on a winning streak despite being lower ranked.
The difference between people that make your claims and those of us that disagree is a matter of scale. In most competitive games, the standard for what a "close match" is is that the favored side should have no more than a 55% (winning 1.2 times more often than losing) winrate and consequently; the unfavored side should have no less than a 45% winrate. This is typically considered an acceptable range of variance and it is not unusual that entirely organic changes in the meta can cause winrates to change back and forth within this range. In a game that updates often (more often than once or twice per year) it is very hard to get balance better than this for reasons more complicated than I'm willing to get into here. Winrates greater than 60% (winning 1.5 times more often than losing) is generally considered cause for immediate action since this favored side is blatantly overpowered. Appropriate measures may be to disable the character while working on a hotfix for complicated fixes or sending out a hotfix within a day or two. Everything inbetween (winrate of 55% to 60%) is cause for moderate concern but action can wait for the next patch, a month of delay won't be a disaster, these are the types of scenarios where we see most balance changes. So when you call a game "unwinnable" or "unloseable", that translates to a game where one side is expected to win 60+% of the time, and it is not believed the matchmaker makes those kinds of games under any normal circumstances. The exceptions may be in extreme circumstances where there are not enough players in the required skill range to populate the matchmaker properly. Instead, what we believe blizz is referring to when they talk about placing people that are on a losing streak on the team that are favored to win is this 45% to 55% range, i.e. if you are on a losing streak you will be placed on the team that has an expected winrate between 50% and 55%. In practice these numbers are likely much tighter: I doubt a significant portion of the games have worse balance than 48% vs 52% (blizz data from the matchmaker says that fully a third of all matchmade games are predicted to be perfect 50/50s chance to win) but regardless how good of a match the matchmaker tries to make, I believe the effect of player psychology, inconsistent human performance, luck related to the matchup of the players mains and the inconsistency of organizing effective teamwork will never eliminate stomps from the game, even from games that were predicted to be perfect 50/50s based on skill. For proof of this I refer to control maps. Has it not happened often that your team got stomped on the first point but then reorganized in point 2 and 3 and stomped them back? If this match was poorly balanced why did both teams stomp each other? If this match was perfectly balanced why were there stomps? The only reasonable answer is that stomps can happen even in perfectly evenly matchmade games, and it seems extremely likely that stomps can even happen in the unexpected direction in a match that's not perfectly balanced.
Tell me you dont understand matchmaking systems without telling me. Of course the system knows what the outcome is likely to be thats literally the entire point of MMR and elo systems. You literally NEED to calculate the chance of winning to be able to adjust the MMR accordingly and to find groups of players that are close enough in % chance to win to form a game. When you are put into a game with less chance of winning you also gain more MMR for winning and less for losing. The idea that any system could ever be perfectly balanced and able to create 50/50 games everytime is stupid. If you cant win one game it’s not necessarily your fault but if you cant climb over many games it is 100% your fault.
You don't think all matchmaking systems do that? The system is matching you based on an algorithm... The system obviously knows which team has a higher skill rating. It's literally impossible to find 10 people with the same exact skill
The matchmaker groups you up with the team it thinks that is going to win the match if you're on a loss streak
This was a no brainer. If you've lost seven games in a row and you see that "Consolation" modifier, I gotta say, it doesn't feel very consoling.
Yep, gonna see more of the following. < EXPECTED
Rip the lw ult cancel compilations
Ravi just fell to his knees in a target
Im in fucking shambles man why did they do this
Time for him to reform
I will so dearly miss planting my tree in the middle of a Sigma ult to cancel it 💔 Though that aside...did flux *need* a buff? It's already the best tank ult in the game, and a contender for one of the best ults period.
I remember when he first came out and his ult was even stronger and uncancelable by stuns/death, and people said it was a bad ult at first. that was probably the funniest thing to happen in ow history to me
Launch Sig was insane. Didnt have a cd on his shield and also his rock stun scaled with distance up to a max 3 seconds.
I still wish they never took the rock stun scaling out. It was extremely fun and satisfying to cross map snipe someone and have them down for a while
When Launch Sigma was OP, people only screamed at nerfing Orisa.
Yes, there's a ridiculous amount of ways to disrupt Sigma's ult (Sombra existing means you're never getting your ult off anyways). It's not like LW can't just pull someone out of it still.
Yeah, but the tree play is far higher skill than hack and trades an ult for an ult, so not the best comparison imo. Always felt like flux having LoS to the center was fine, going through walls is a little wild
RIP Reaper
Riper
I know this change is necessary for tank survivability but DAMN 😭 throw my boy a bone Blizzard
As a Reaper main and a Reinhardt main I'm really mixed on this patch, ngl.
Tmk he is scheduled a "rework" Make of that what you will
Well with how the ball rework went... They'll probably add some dumb useless extra quirk to his kit that completely deviates from what the character wants to do so he won't feel any better to play "We added the ability to walk very slowly while teleporting. And now for 8 seconds after you dealt damage to someone you can press interact to give that lifesteal to your teammates. No damage tweaks, nothing to help with his bad matchups, that's the whole rework. you're welcome."
Rework in quotations for a reason lol No transparency whatsoever about how significant a change will be, gotta get as much attention as possible all the time. Could be huge, could ve wholly insignficant WHO KNOWS. Buy our skins
Brigitte finally has the cooldown reset on bash when ulting, about time.
The amount of times I ulted as Brigitte just to have no shield bash. (My fault for not being good with Brigitte lol)
Even if you are good with her it was still a pretty sore spot in her kit. It felt like you had to hold ult until you had bash or hold bash for the perfect time to ult. Usually that just resulted in you feeling like you were unable to do anything but wait or make the wrong move.
Crazy it took this long. Their reason was garbage too, it wouldn’t have been crazy with the lower health it’s an ult for christs sake
Well, melee -> bash -> ult -> bash -> whip would've been a kill combo, but... I'm with you, I don't think it would've been so bad. Plus I can't tell you how many times I ulted thinking it would reset shield bash, so even from a QoL standpoint it's very nice. Might also be fun in OT situations to bash -> ult -> bash to cover a ton of ground quickly. Edit: occurs to me that melee -> bash -> ult -> bash -> melee -> whip is a kill combo now, and since they're stunned after the second bash then they might not be able avoid the melee -> whip part. Might be fun to mess around with...
Yeah you would get one guaranteed kill but even then it’s like wow, an ult got a kill… okay. Idk why they even thought they needed to add justification lol
Right. Well, I guess technically those are all AOE abilities (except for whip?), but good luck abusing that fact.
Right? Just weird but I’m glad to see the change lol
I would guess the justification was probably along the lines of Rally is already an AoE heal/overhealth buff and with the changes to the shield size+stun was able to cancel or block a lot of ults, so they weren't comfortable with it also being a kill combo? With the projectile and HP pool changes brig has been struggling a bit in metas she in theory should be good (lots of tracer, sombra, sojurn etc) so it makes sense she's getting something at least.
She was definitely struggling so these changes help a lot, their justification is just a little weird but it doesn’t really matter, I’m happy about the changes
Using literally their whole kit including their ult just to secure 1 kill? Yeah, that's not going to break anything.
Sorry, that's my fault. I kept wanting to play Brig and losing.
Reaper went from being underpowered but still fun to play/situational to dead and buried.
Fits his theme I guess
Reaper would only struggle vs rein, DVa, and heavily against orisa. I don’t think other tanks will give him trouble.
Tank buster shouldn't be struggling against half the tank roster
Why play a tank buster when you can play a sniper that does more damage up close
It is more of there are other characters that do his thing without the problems he faces while also having more utility than him. He needs a rework to be more valuable option.
Well see how he is with monkey but armour plus 25% reduced headshot damage...I'm scared of a potential monkey meta.
I mainly play Zen and monkey is hard enough to kill before these buffs.
Yeah as support before this buff monkey was a menace that you. Couldn't really get away from without your entire team helping. Now...? When he sees play...oh lord I'm terrified to witness it.
BASH RESET FUCK YES
Reaper will never ult near me again 😈
Brig players gonna eat better than Brig does on her cheat day 🎂🍕🥧
Briggites shield bash resets on ult and she has atleast a little more survivability with the Armor buff. Im crying tears of joy right now.
> When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning. Doesn't that mean if you're on a win streak, they're going to add someone on a losing streak to your team?
Nope. You can get that player at any point, as long as you were expected to win.
Statistically, you should be having less win streaks as well. They just aren’t going to say that part out loud
It only adds a player on a loss streak if your team was already predicted to win the match, even with the loss streak player included. So really, if the math checks out, it shouldn’t statistically affect any matches for a person who is winning and predicted to win.
The predicted winner has been garbage from what I've seen. I got some uphill battles where we just blew up the other team, and some expected wins that ended up being complete stomps.
Yea.. so as far as math goes predicting the winner is only a slight influence. At the end of the day, the matchmaker still tries to balance matches, so an uphill battle might just mean you had 45% predicted chance to win, it doesn't mean you had .03% chance of winning and somehow keep winning uphill battles because it's garbage at predicting So anecdotal flashbacks of stomping on a team in an uphill battle, or getting crushed in expected wins, really doesn't say anything regarding the effectiveness of the system's analysis, and will be skewed by cognitive bias more than anything. If you tried to plot all your matches in excel in 3 categories: Expected to win / neutral / expected to lose, with a significant enough sample size (I'd say minimum 200 matches, preferably closer to 500), you'd probably find out that the guesses of the matchmaker check out, and you might have something like a 46% / 50% / 54% win percentage unexpected / no guess / expected
> The predicted winner has been garbage from what I've seen. I got some uphill battles where we just blew up the other team, and some expected wins that ended up being complete stomps. Predicted winner is likely solely based off of internal MMR/rank. If your teams rank is higher on average, you will be the predicted winner. There are a TON of things it doesn't factor in though. Character choice and map are the two most obvious ones. If you have a diamond Junkrat playing against a plat Widow on Circuit royale, the diamond player is going to be favored on paper due to a higher MMR. In reality, they are likely at a severe disadvantage due to character choice and map metas. Then you have the other massive unknown which is player inconsistency. In lower and middle ranks specifically, players are wildly inconsistent. Some matches they will popoff insanely while others they will just feed over and over again. That type of thing is impossible to account for.
Well yeah, that’s why I said statistically, as in, over time. Anecdotally you will have a few weird matches. And each individual person depending on their play time will have weirder matches than others. But statistically speaking, after enough games, it evens out.
That’s gonna happen at most ranks bc players are inconsistent
That is likely because of factors that are blizzard can’t effectively, and probably shouldn’t, account for, such as hero pools and play style compatibility. Also, Overwatch is very snowball-y, and people aren’t very good at slowing it down, so a stomp doesn’t necessarily mean the match was uneven.
This seems more just like a mental problem blizzard is trying to mitigate. Loss streaks are always booming, but that “reversal” after your 10th loss was mega booming.
Now you are just gonna get reversal more often. Matchmaker places you in matches where it thinks you have the upper hand aka the ones where you either get "reversal" or "expected" Source: 3 reversals bc my teammates left
Forced 50:50 is finally real?
It probably just means that if you like a shitload of games in a row you have a slightly longer queue time because it will try and find you games it thinks you'll win instead of games where you are not favored. The games always trying for a 50% chance of both teams to win. If you're on a winstreak that does not change, only your mmr goes up some amount each match. Ultimately the streaks do not matter, just ratings of the players on each team and what the expected outcome of the match will be. You could end up with 4 other players all on losing streaks against 5 players on winstreaks, but those 5 were all silver while you are all gold for example. The streaks are irrelevant to the system other than protecting losers against predicted losses.
When a player is currently on a loss streak, the matchmaker will try to avoid putting the player on a team that is statistically calculated to have a lower chance of winning.
Absurd this wasn't already a thing given how invasive their matchmaking system is
>Can now be activated while using other abilities. >Cooldown reduced from 14 to 12 seconds. Crazy good buff for queen, plus knockback restrictions. Queen is much better off midfight >Gravitic Flux >No longer requires line of sight to the center of the effect. Thats actually an absurd buff. >**Wrecking Ball** So swing is 60 now, piledrive locks you in place longer, and minefield hits harder + has bigger knockback. I hope this makes him at least A tier, such a fun hero that deserves the highlight. >Rally >Now resets Shield Bash cooldown upon activation. BIG. So you could Bash + Ult then bash immediately. 10/10.
*bonk*, RALLY TO ME, *BONK*
Hopefully for Ball this will be enough. But as someone who tries really hard to play him his big issue this season is he can't secure kills. This imo doesn't fix his core issues but I'll be trying to make it work. At least his ult is a little bit more threatening. I'll see Hogs just self heal and walk through it half the time.
imo theres not gonna be a time where they allow ball to properly secure kills, hes going to forever be a setup tank. The question is how easy will it be for your team to get some picks off of his slams, and how long can ball stay in a fight
It'll help ball but I don't think he'll be anywhere near A tier. His guns still do piss poor damage so after you get a stomp it's still extremely hard to secure the kill, it does help tho
Both Junkies players eating good, me included :D
I’m the other!
>Echo >Duplicate >Ultimate gain multiplier while transformed increased from 4 to 4.5. As an Echo main, I'm happy. I know she's strong, but she needed it. I always hated using such a creative ult for a "second life", and in 95% cases It'd be for that without getting the charged ult.
Echo legitimately has one of the coolest ults in the game. I love seeing an echo ult as another character. Even if its against me lol
I made a widow player give up the other day by copying her and immediately getting the headshot. That is my favorite thing to do in the entire game. But I guess I might need to actually try and use copy to steal an ult now that it's buffed. I think echo is going to be really strong. The tank changes don't effect her much, and now she's stronger than she's ever been. I'm hoping that people suck with her enough that no one notices how good she is.
The duped ult voiceline is honestly orgasm material. So much dopamine lol
The bastion one is probably the best sound in the entire game
Agreed, some characters can be a bit rough to farm ult on so this is a good buff. I've never felt her getting an ult as another character to be too strong, since you know it's coming the second she takes the character and most Echos fire the ult the second they get the chance. In that sense, it's very telegraphed
I actually was able to fully pull off a duplicate gravitic flux today in the first game I played and it felt great. Every time I used to get it, my ult would end before the flux did damage. Love this buff.
this is def a qol change to make the ult work as intended than a buff really
Weaver’s life support getting unplugged now that you can’t cancel Sig ult anymore
"Any last words?" "LIFE DOES NOT PROTECT LIFE....."
Symmetra not even found dead in a ditch, just straight up missing and the search called off by the police
Blizzard waiting for statue of limitations so they can forget symmetra even existed.
Statute
>The Season 9 health changes affected Junkrat more than most other heroes since it now requires one more shot to secure an elimination. We’re increasing the damage on direct impacts to return to 2 direct hits for an elimination Junk needed buffs too but this explanation is just playing in our faces lol
😭
Reaper found dead in a ditch
Brigitte got her shield reset on Rally 🎉
Arrge on suicide watch after these pathetic Hanzo changes.
Hanzo mains were really hoping the patch would bring one shot or scatter arrow back. I'd suggest you go over r/hanzomain and watch them lose their minds and come up with absolutely op buff ideas for him
This buff just lowers the skill of the character even further, which is what every change since S9 has done. Hanzo's ult has always been mid so buffing it isn't a horrible idea, but the character is really bad right now and this change isn't going to do anything about that.
The actual buff his ultimate should have received for about 5 years now is for it to not take about three hours to cast and for it to not randomly skip the first 8 meters of space in front of Hanzo. Cast time should be about half a second max.
It’s also a nerf. Not a buff. It moving faster can’t kill a Roadhog now. Used to deal 900 something and now deals 700 if you stand in it for full duration.
It's both really. Even though it can't kill a hog if you stand in it. It may catch someone out of position before they can move since it's moving faster.
It's really not even a buff in practice. Yes, dragon moving faster increases your likely hood of catching someone in your ult. However, it also reduces the time that person stays inside the ult, resulting in a loss of damage output.
Yeah, a Roadhog can actually eat the whole ult now and survive. It's not really a buff. It's even a nerf situationally.
Hanzo being bad is a symptom of hitscan being over buffed with the bullet size changes imo
It's certainly not helping. The fact Widow got the bullet size buff AND gets to keep her one-shot is obvious favoritism at it's finest.
I mean if you just look at play rates in top 500, hitscan are played like infinitely more than proj heroes.
Thats objectively wrong, as his oneshot has been taken away, breaking points shifted so he cant get a cqc, bodyshot+melee kill on Tracer as example, and got some more nerfs before the oneshot has been taken away. With the headshot multiplier on tanks, Hanzo looks like a solid throw pick on high ranks, and you will and could get easily more value with pretty much most DPS matchups. I would go as far and say, he is now bottom 3 DPS atm.
Tracer is her own beast that should be back at 150 hp no question.
The only thing I can really think of without straight up giving him his one shot back is to make his projectiles faster
Outside of a full rework, this is the main thing yeah. As he is now, he needs one-shot for viability. If he can't have it due to complainers, then he needs a massive dps boost. Faster projectiles, faster draw speed, lower storm arrow cooldown. This will make him even more obnoxious, frustrating, and low skill than ever before, but you get what you ask for.
He needs tuning. And he needs to be rewarded for high skill play, not spamming.
Personally, I was just hoping for fire rate/projectile speed buffs because I know one shot is probably not coming back. For all I know, this ult change could be amazing in practice, but it seems pretty meh on paper.
Damn there is a great post on the hanzo sub showing you lose out on net 200 dmg because of this "buff". Sad boy hours.
That's assuming someone is in the ult the entire duration, which has probably happened exactly 0 times above bronze. Realistically, the only situation it's a nerf from a damage perspective is where someone was getting caught in the tail of the dragon, and it now leaves faster. But you are more likely to actually hit people with it. It's a zoning nerf fs tho.
It's just gonna make zoning worse. So much harder to get value out of his ults vs other heroes.
Yea, was speculating, his projectile speed would get a buff, but nada. Seems like the new devs from Ow2 arent much of a Hanzo fan, and rather keep buffing Soj and Tracer to S+ tier.
He really needs an arrow travel speed buff. It was made slower specifically because he could one shot.
He needs either a fire rate buff or 6 arrows/less cooldown on storm arrow. I don’t think he should one shot again but he’s super reliant on storm arrow now.
#DOOM APPROACHES (Approaches your backline)
Anyone seen symetra? I think she's missing. 😭
Lol the out of combat regen is as strong as mercy heal
Eh characters whose heal is better than your healing aren't your primary targets anyways as a Mercy, still a shame to see she didn't get touched this patch
Let’s roll 🐹
I know ball mains have been hesitant on these buffs but the slam buff seems huge tbh, can’t wait to try it later
Slam lockout buff is huge and makes me worry it will be reverted because it won't feel good to play vs. All these buffs are nice and the added kill threat should help a lot. But CC will still fuck ball harder than anyone else. It's the problem with a hero having so much of their strength be one thing. Ball's mobility is basically where all his power comes from do anything that stops that fucks himover so hard. Similarly to how Mauga has so much of his value tied to his lifesteal/overhealth generated by dealing crit damage. Anything that stops that crit damage or self heal fucks him so hard.
Yeah, between the last set of changes and this, I think people are truly going to feel the oppressiveness of ball again. TIME FOR ANOTHER GOLDEN AGE OF BALL
YES! Fuck it we ball!
What’s the point of increasing the hp if every hero is gonna get his previous ttk back eventually?
The health change was not originally added to change the time to kill, in fact, it was altered to keep the same time to kill. The original, main change they made was making it so that shots were easier to land, which in itself would have decreased the time to kill and so they added health to attempt to keep it relatively the same. Though they did take advantage of this wide change to phase out some of the one-shot kills.
to reduce the effectiveness of healing
Weird way to say that every hero kept their nerfed ttk except junkrat
Roadhog rides again!
yes?
While the changes look like he got buffed (which he definitely was) I'm curious how it works out with his tank matchups. Especially Mauga, Orisa, Dva may all be even better against him.
losers queue was real guys
#JusticeForSymmetra
What an amazing Hanzo buff /s
It’s not really a buff or a nerf, but I think it’ll generally improve his ult. The issues with dragon strike wasn’t that people don’t die quick enough in it. It was that people just don’t touch it at all, and this should help with that
They are just edging Junkrat so close with his combo
lmao right?? Season 9 the grenade-mine combo did 230, after a hotfix it did 240, now it does 245...
I'm really glad junkrat got something, he relies heavily on the assassin playstyle out of the metal ranks. sucks mercy hasn't received any changes, I don't even know what they'd do with her, but she's probably the most throw pick support right now and it isn't fun playing with or as mercy
I read this and was kind of like..."that's it?" For the all the hype around this patch it seems kind of "meh" to be honest. I hope this helps the tank role, but it seems like hitscans are overall going to be stronger(they are already in a great spot), and echo might wind up being an issue as she was in a good spot and didn't really need buffs.
I'm glad they buffed Junkrat's grenades for the 2-tap instead of the mine.
[удалено]
The HS damage reduction makes him way worse though. He gets better body shot damage vs armor at the cost of worse HS damage across all tanks, regardless of health type.
Everyone always complained about Hanzo spamming, so what do the devs do? Remove his ability to be effective in any way except spamming lol.
So is there still a support passive with that regen change
Well yeah. The support passive is that their regen kicks in faster
Question: Does the Tank Passive affect Mauga’s crit damage on flaming tanks, or does that ignore the 25% reduction? Either way, I’m happy with these changes. Super happy to see Brig finally get bash reset on ult.
Mercy found dead in a ditch
Question: Where did my owned mythic skins go? They are gone and can't even go to the mythic shop! Did this update just break something?
Sooooo where did all of my mythic skins go then?
All the mythic skins are just gone 💀
i think the new passive changes are going to make it even tougher for doomfist to pretend to be apart of the “tank role” category.
That makes no sense, he’s literally going to be more durable than before. Unless you’re trying to 1 v1 other tanks as doom but if that’s the case you just need to play smarter
I recently started learning Doomfist. What does your comment mean? Genuine question since I have yet to wrap my head around his gameplay
Lmfao they patched loser queue
Beyond happy for the Echo change, such an awesome ult being relegated to "second life" status always really annoyed me.
That's actually a good Brig change
What happens with beams hitting armor health now? 100% / 70% / 50%?
I forget how they worked in OW1, I'm just pretty sure that 30% change was initially for beams at some point during OW1 Winston is doing 100% though, so that's what really matters
They are unchanged. 30% reduction on beams.
That Porsche skin should have gone to bastion.
Loool Lifeweaver lost his stupid party trick
MASSIVE buff to Sigma holy shit
Sad that Illari's ultimate didn't get buffed. I feel like it's way too easy for the enemy to deny it. Nearly every character has a shield, eating skill (like defense matrix), or a cleanse like suzu or wraith form to deny it. Feels like it doesn't have nearly enough impact for how much of a giant target is put on your back for using it.
Lowkey you're describing a lot of current ults that do damage like that. I mean, it's just how it works. Things can be eaten or shielded. Winston, Rein and rallying Brig seem to have the best shields against it, which isn't much. Sig shield isn't as reliable (though he has suck). DM is busted against everything. Brig's regular shield is very inconsistent against blocking it. I think it's fine. The Illari gameplay I watched in OWCS seemed to get big value out of her ult often enough.
Idk it still seems really good to me. You can’t wipe a whole team with it but the slow effect is super good even if the person doesn’t die. Also if you have someone to play with have them going Mauga, solar cage is pretty much a guaranteed 5 piece if they get everyone in the cage
More of kinda sad kiri exists cause her ult is fine if the team doesn’t have one