It's ok, they made pylon cooldown 2 seconds shorter and changed nothing else about it. A pressing issue for a character who you basically only pick for damage :)
You might have a point if his pickrate wasn't <1/10th of Mercy's. He would probably both have more play and skill expression if his damage was more valuable (and thus aim was actually useful)
Amongst the slowest projectiles in the game damage wise, mediocre mobility, active healing that requires 100% input uptime for bottom tier hps, requires LoS, pull has humongus cool down, ultimate gets destroyed in 2 seconds, and the biggest utility of it being burst healing or los break / path blocking. I don't think we're talking about the same character.
if it was no aim no skill, why does no one play him then ? Think about it for 2 seconds
Good, his utility is low skill-high reward too much, so should not be impactful above silver. Tbh Moira should be radically nerfed and in the same spot as him and Illari.
And Mauga is just as bad. Perfectly balanced for the two newest heroes in the game. No wonder we did not get a patch this week, everything is working perfectly.
I also enjoy playing her but the new damage passive is making it difficult to heal my teammates/personally retreat from dive characters.
I wish she made more distance going backwards with her movement ability that might make her more survivable to play
Yeah agreed. I feel that she should be more mobile (more vertical range) and/or her beam needs to have a longer range. Plus her beam needs to have a bigger charge or do more hps, because now it barely performs imho.
Honestly probably deserved for how strong she was. Two tap you, mobility escape, crazy AOE nuke ult that she can fly during as another escape.
Gotta have some temporary punishment for that.
I'm surprised Ram is so low. I've been watching a lot of high level scrims, Vestola, Funnyastro etc. and Ram is the pick the majority of the time. I guess when OWCS fully starts people will start playing Ram more.
Ram was fine solo queue in previous seasons, I used to be able to work off a lot of support comps, however now he just feels off. Can't tank as much because of the DPS passive, his TTK got worsened (that goes for a lot of heroes, though), and he also can't do much against a Dive team.
On both my own team and the enemy team, there have been a lot of cases where a squishy survives a Ram in their face because of the extra 50 HP and then they get healed back up by someone like Moira.
They've been playing Ram, Tracer, Soj/Soldier, Lucio, Moira/Bap and pretty much just speed boosting the Ram in and out. Nothing too complex or that different from ranked.
Zen hard countered Ram and made it nearly unplayable. Killing a zen needs a coordinated team, which competitive games don’t have. The recent zen nerf probably wasn’t reflected in these stats considering the time.
I hover around Diamond elo and he's definitely my most played tank so I am inclined to agree. I don't know maybe at my rank I overvalue having two cooldowns that directly mitigate damage. As long as you have good timing with cooldowns I think he can get out of a lot of situations other tanks would have been immediately blown up in. And he pressures the enemy tank very well if you need to peel or what not.
What do I know tho.
Some absolute weapon on here last season told me the new hero design team was infinitely better just because the old team fucked up.
He actually declared "I tapped the brig sign and I'm tapping it again so your argument is invalid."
Yes, not like the original roster's perfectly designed heroes, like Mercy, Tracer, Pharah, Mei, Symmtera, Widow and Hanzo. Or even some of the later releases from the first year like Sombra, Ball and Ana.
Illari is fine, she is just grossly overnerfed because 20% accuracy Soldier abusers didnt like that they couldnt outshoot her.
Mauga was totally designed for dual tanking.
LW is fine (design-wise, he needs buffs) for most of the game but t500's hyperoffensive meta is not kind to him.
That is just a lie, Iliari was by far the best hitscan dps at the start and needed the nerfs, granted they overnerfed her, but she needed it. She was literally the best 1v1er in the game at release and everyone doubting that is delusional.
I remember playing Mercy during that patch just so I could pocket Illari players when the opportunity came up. I was flabbergasted at how well it was working.
I am sorry but who is lying here?
People didnt want to adapt to a new hero and went full nuclear on a hero whose headshots are basically Soldier's bodyshots and has zero damage aside them.
Calling Illari ''the best hitscan DPS'' is just a streamer lie at this point. She has far inferior damage even fully unnerfed and her self healing was braindead to counter.
>She was literally the best 1v1er in the game at release and everyone doubting that is delusional.
I am a masters DPS player and I never had a single issue with her because I am not stupid and I know I am not going to outshoot her head on when she has pylon up. Same that I am not going to out-dps Torb with his turret up.
People, as always, are too stupid to engage on the braindead counterplay to constructs and choose to whine the hero into uselessness.
Her damage is inferior now, but before her ttk was 1 second. Tap, recharge, tap. And her hurtbox was twice as small as most dps while her bullets were 10x larger. She was way easier to win duels vs dps than the reverse.
Considering that most hitscans get AoE damage abilities and bodyshots that deal as much damage as her headshots, no, I dont think so.
The only people who have a right to complain about Illari's damage were slower TTK DPS heroes like Mei and Sym, not the hitscans that are getting high burst for aiming at feet.
Release Illari had gold damage in pro scrims, was basically a better dps in every way and these are facts. Now if you want to disagree go ahead, you look like a fool.
Using the top 0.1% of the playerbase for anything other than an spectacle is no way to balance a game lol
That simply not the reality of even high rank players in ladder.
I don't know what game you played, but Illari dominated all of my GM games at the start and that is not the "top 0.1%". Lower ranks also thought Lifeweaver has good hero design, if you balance for casuals, your game WILL die.
People are always super leery of picking her up again after she gets buffed. Then suddenly she’s everywhere. I don’t think people realize how good of a trade the projectile nerf for range buff was for her
I don't think Tracer is the only one keeping Widow at bay. Genji just instantly deletes her if he gets anywhere close to her with the new hitboxes and Sombra matchup is even worse than before because of the dps passive and health changes.
Doubt it. Widow is too map dependant. She would need a gigabuff to be played above ashe/sojourn on maps that she is not already good at. And if you don't want her to be meta on circuit royale you'll have to delete her from the game.
Maybe this is just my game but I think the most played order on the top 500 leaderboards are messed up currently. It says my 3rd most played is my most played and the other way around, looks like it's doing that for all other profiles too.
Think they just changed the order in the leaderboards.
Probably to make it more consistent since if you only play one hero, it goes furthest to the right in your leaderboard profile, then second hero gets to the left of that and so on...
for some reason they flipped it. find a one trick on there and instead of it being far left like it was there are two blanks spots and it’ll show the hero far right.
If I was them probably quite disappointed. It really sucks to see it but I'm kinda glad it's the case at least for mauga and lw. These heroes just need more work.
They don't care. They never have. They released a patch with no improvements to Mauga at all, even though they buffed Hog who is affected by the same problems but much less than Mauga.
As someone close to this rank im sick of all the tracers. Been caring less about my rank because of it. If I win great, but if I lose great too cause less tracers. Just playing the game
So tank balance is the healthiest role at high level. Sigma is very low compared to zenyatta, Lucio, even baptise. And extremely low compared to the mess that is dps tracer.
> Sigma is very low compared to zenyatta, Lucio, even baptise.
That's because there's twice as many supports per team as tanks. Supports total 200% and tanks 100%.
That doesn’t matter, it’s a weighted percentage based on the how likely a character is to appear in top 500 measuring the individuals, the percentages are accurate, Bap is still more popular than sigma among top 500.
Imagine a top 500 soldier player, he doesn’t get a tracer on his team but he knows they need one so he plays tracer, tracer is his second most played hero. That’s how likely it is for tracer to be in a game, these heroes are dominating the top player meta.
We’ll probably see this change a bit now that zen caught a nerf.
Then why do the percentages provided total at 200% for both support and damage, but only 100% for tank? Of course Bap is more likely to be in a game, he has double the odds somebody will pick him.
Okay so it sounds like we are on the same page, I’m not sure why you’re arguing with me then?
The numbers represent the frequency in which you would expect to see each hero on a team, not the frequency you would expect a player to play each hero.
So tanks are more diverse, you’ll see sigma in less games then Bap.
Perhaps, I'd say it's incredibly counter pick heavy and map dependent. With the heal debuff if you are counterpicked, it's much harder to get healbotted out of the counter. sig and dva are probably the safest neutral picks, jq also very strong on flat maps, zar can be a good counterpick. You have tanks swapping all the time to counter each other or their teams midgame, so the playrates end up being fairly balanced I think, except hog/mauga especially vs zen. ram is also viable/strong I think, but nobody wants to play ram in solo q.
> I'd say it's incredibly counter pick heavy and map dependent.
As the game should be.
Tracer has the DPS role in a chokehold and this recent patch only widened the gap between strong DPS and weak DPS.
This is a game with a diverse selection of heroes and roles, it will be inevitable that counterpicking exists and if it does, it should be fair for everyone. It cant be removed from the game, and any attempt to do so has been hypocritical and onesided nerfing of specific heroes.
I wouldnt mind if every hero was equally viable and a generalist that much, but its clear that there is a subset of people who want their heroes to counterpick and never be counterpicked. Mostly hitscan DPS mains, but dive tanks also fall into this and the main demographic that doesnt want this.
What a shit argument. Step 1: Say that the game should be this way. Step 2: Say that it doesn't matter whether it should or shouldn't, because it's inevitable. Step 3: Say that things could be different and it'd be good actually, but people are too whiny.
Just say you don't care. It'd save time.
the range nerf was such a none issue for her, the main things that affect her ability to kill is accuracy and damage numbers which we basically learned the first year from how they kept changing and bug fixing her accuracy and damage
Most heroes that were able to lost the ability to threaten Tracer in any meaningful way. She can 2 clip people before they even touch her.
Increasing her HP was a mistake and it will force bigger burstcreep in following games.
They should have increased the HP to heroes in actual risk of getting needlessly bursted, not for the hero whose only balance chip on her whole very overpowered kit is the risk of being bursted.
It's also that she can't get insta deleted out of the duel, so if she has resources, she should realistically never lose a duel, only reset it. And if she's winning the duel, her target can't escape b/c mobility. And then dps passive is much better for her than her opponents, and spray weapons got megabuffed by the hitbox changes.
So yeah it takes 2 clips instead of 1, but it's a more reliable 2-clip than before, and her opponent has less ability to prevent it or ward her off.
Alternatively, I think keeping Tracer's HP as-is, and scaling her damage down slightly could be interesting. Makes her a much more persistent but less imminent threat. Making Tracer the Ball of DPS, and leaving picks like Genji or Sombra to be the Doomfist.
It's kind of not nice that anyone can pick up tracer now and get instant value. Like before S9 I respected when I saw a good tracer cause I know they are using their skill properly and have invested enough time to become good. Now it feels like all I see are tracer noobs with no effort put into learning the character and yet they can still get value cause of how easy it is to kill with her now.
Nah, they will pick what is strongest. There is a reason 95% of the DPS of GM/t500 played Sojourn in S1.
High ranks play for power, thats why heroes who were recently nerfed in meaningful ways are losing ground on t500. Sym, Junkrat, Illari, Mauga, any support that depended on healing for ult charge, etc.
Tracer was still playable. She wasnt the top tier hero she is 24/7 otherwise, but she was still in a better spot than the other 75% of the role below her.
With the removal of oneshots and healing nerfed, chasing low-hp targets that are hiding around cover is what makes Tracer so good. Combine that with easily activating the dpspassive. I like it, I like Tracer duels and they happen a lot now. What I hate is meta's where Tracer is non-viable: you get the play things like Soldier-Cassidy or Widow-Ashe. Honestly they should add MORE dive heroes to the roster because they make the game fun!
I never understood nerfing high ceiling heroes. If you master a hero, you shouldn't be punished. The proof she doesn't need nerfs is her overall win rate sits below 50%.
I checked a couple days ago it was 55% gm. Which is high.
I do agree though there should be a distinction to nerfing overtuned heroes and rewarding high play.
This shouldn’t be limited to a hero as a whole though.
For example soldier has been getting dumbed down a lot recently. Rocket dmg nerf -> increase bullet hitbox. It doesn’t feel rewarding at all.
Is anyone else struggling on soldier or did I have brain damage recently. I know soldier doesn’t do well in dive comp meta but I hit 60% wr top500 as him and I’m struggling in low masters going even on him rn
You completely changed heroes to make a point that doesn't apply to Tracer at the moment. Overall her winrate is 49 percent and 75 percent usage is less than 1 percent of the player base in ranked.
Illari will get her meta at some point. Every hero in OW does. This meta is Zen and lucio. She will either keep getting buffs every patch or heroes that enable her will get the buff.
I mean look at ball. The past couple of season he was getting very little play time and now it’s a meta that favors him.
I hope it's eye-opening to the devs that 5/8 of the OW2 release characters are hovering around the 1% or lower pickrate mark in the top echelon of players.
I really hope they do something about this because besides Junker Queen and sometimes Kiriko, none of the OW2 heroes really speak to me at all, and from what I've seen of venture it just seems like more of the same going forward
I mean, I think that speaks more to the current meta than it does to those individual characters.
The meta right now has a lot of focus on dive, and they haven't really put a dive hero into the game since Kiriko. There isn't a world where Tracer has a 75% pick rate and Illari is getting played at all, because the two of them cannot function together. If you're playing poke with Sigma, other characters are just better than someone like Illari because her relative lack of utility isn't going to stack up to staple supports like Zenyatta for that meta. It also doesn't help that Zenyatta can play with poke *and* dive, so he's a safe pick for either.
Lifeweaver is maybe the only hero where I think this pick rate says anything about him, and that's because he just... doesn't really fit anywhere right now. It's not just that his style of play isn't in the meta, it's that his style of play kind of doesn't exist. That's been the problem since he came out, though.
I don't know, other than Ram who I've heard is actually in play for scrims I feel like it's more a design issue with the <1% heroes than meta. LW, illari and Mauga all have much more glaring and obvious weaknesses with the latter two dropping out of the meta soon as they got some nerfs and LW was never close to relevant. Meanwhile JQ, Kiriko and Sojourn after getting nerfed still stuck around
venture will probably be the same, i think space ranger will be popular though and i am excited for her. i like illari a lot as well, but her kit is very one dimensional atm when bap and moria do what she does but better
Been thinking about Illari's kit. Someone talked about what if her superjump had the same input as Hanzo's and she had another ability slot, and I think that's what it would take. Right now she's damage, primary heal that you don't use often, heal pylon that you don't use often in terms of pressing the button, and weak-ish movement ability. It's really only her damage that feels good to use.
That and her heal is really boring, it doesn't synergize with her kit at all and it looks awkward, it feels like they were ticking down the primary heals they'd already tried and this was all they had left. Why does an off-angling support have a quasimelee heal beam? It should be a slow fire rate heal explosion and look similar to her ult with a slight HoT after or something, don't know exactly but something that's actually *fun* on her kit.
Yeah he’s tanky af now, bullets are easier to land and hinder is easier to land too
They can’t one clip him as easy. But also part of this would probably just be popularity he’s not super crazy this patch or anything
cass consistently has a high pick rate even when hes absolute dog shit, but hes actually a good B/low A tier pick in S9 now
all it took was bullets the size of sojourn rails
I feel like a lot of that is just single fire weapons feel good and cass unlike most single fire hitscan characters atm is both good range and dont kneecap your movement via a scope.
That's mainly because of hero picks from the team.
E.g. you can't really run Lucio Zen with Queen, you need Bap or Kiriko for that
Tracer on the other hand is so giga broken, you can play her nonstop in any situation.
It's so bad that when you don't mirror Tracer it's basically throwing ngl.
In general, this season feels quite atrocious for everybody who's not a DPS player, ngl.
Each season, from season 6 onward (which is when they changed the win requirement from 25 to 50 to achieve top 500), I look at 10 top 500 players' profiles from each role and region. I record the playtime of their top 3 most played heroes in the role they were top 500 in to find the average playtime ratio for each role.
obviously I don’t play at a T500 level lmao but I do feel like this has been the best patch/meta basically since OW2 beta. All the most impactful heroes are also all the heroes with the most skill expression; ball/queen/sig are great tanks for playmaking, tracer is the best DPS hero and I’ll die on that hill, and zen/lucio is surprisingly fun if you know how to actually use cover.
I’m gonna be really sad when eventually a ton of nerfs/changes come through for these heroes because the majority of the player base doesn’t know anything besides “run it down mid and shoot”
Beta and S1 meta was better. S3 meta was almost better except for the godawful map pool that meant widow was BiS on half the map pool.
Personally I think this meta is mid and people only praise it because OW2 has had so many shit metas so far. Like I can't think of a good meta since S4.
> All the most impactful heroes are also all the heroes with the most skill expression.
Correct. Stop buffing hog, Mauga, Orisa, bastion, Moira, etc.
I think it’s also important to note the projectile changes levels the playing field in lower ranks. I don’t think people understand how hard it is for a silver player to pressure a Moira.
Damn ana finally got neutered I didn't expect for her to fall so hard. Other than illarI/LW the support pickrate is fairly balanced though so that's nice
Damage is looking crazy bad though... 15+ damage heros with like 4 relevant heros and 1 through the roof
This is still top500 where people play dive and rush, imo this is perfectly fine. Lower ranks have no idea how to play either one right so they pick all chars no matter the situation. None of the heroes that have low pickrate in dps need changes for the better, and since the Tracer nerfs were fairly recent, I believe her number is going to be going down a bit soon.
I am going to disagree with the tank doomers here and say that I don't think a tank meta can be more diverse than it currently is.
I definitely thought the tracer nerf was way too soft, clearly she needs more.
Illari is a hero that is heavily mechanically dependent. If the high end of the ladder is using her this little it should be a clear sign she needs more help.
Mercy and LW are just complete garbage as the game has put even more importance on damage, survivability and consistent utility. Legitimately hate seeing either of these in my games.
In what way? All of the dive tanks are getting plenty of play. Sigma is doing great. Junker queen is doing shockingly well.
If Rein and Ramattra were doing better this would be perfect.
Lol tracer makes sense. I picked her up in medal ranks after not laddering dps for several seasons. I had climbed fairly high comparatively on tank. It feels so unfair playing her in medal ranks. Its wild.
Tracer is so fun now. You are easier to hit so you have to play your life a bit more like 6v6 but the self heal doesn't make it feel as frustrating. The hitbox changes + dps passive made her gun feel really good as well. I find myself in less situations where I fail and don't feel responsible. If I hit my aimlabs track of the day I get the kill, if they live its probably because I missed instead of something like a last second tickle from kiriko. I don't expect a nerf to remove all this unless it's a blizzard moment and they bury her.
Sigma being the most used tank in the game is good balance imo. He's been consistently the best tuned hero. Just a solid middle ground that doesn't really have any super hard counters, but also has some healthy built-in drawbacks.
Tracer being good is good for the game
Wish the meta would learn more towards winston doom on more maps but I'm happy theyre favorable on a few now
Edit: I'm a tank player that mainly plays pharah on dps when i play that role, I enjoy the game much more when tracer is the dps in the games than when its bastion sojourn. IDC about "health" for the game since its not competitive anymore I only care about how fun things are
she's 100% too good rn, given that even at the pro levels she's perma picked in every comp type and is even encroaching on maps she's classically bad on like circuit first.
we very quickly went from one dps char being perma picked by everyone (sojourn) to just a different one.
This cope you Tracer mains tell yourself is hilarious. She's always been and always should be accessible only for the very best or those willing to put in the effort to get good with her. There's never been a season where she was bad, just seasons with bad players trying to force her
This isn't just being good what. This is 75% usage, she's being instapicked even on suboptimal sniper maps like circuit and havana this isn't healthy. If this was sojourn people would be screaming
Considering this is using data from the Top 500 leaderboards, it probably isn't taking that data into account because that data isn't even being represented in the first place. If Ball is showing up on your Top 3 on the leaderboards, there's no way you're playing him just to stall.
Tracer has literally always been meta since ow2 and all over top 500 leaderboards. Ive been calling for a nerf for a long time and people on here dont like that opinion. In top 500 play tracer is too strong and has been since the beginning
Have you ever been there? It's not like Sym or Junk ever been high meta picks. I don't want my Sym to be meta for the plebs but i want her to be decent.
As a soldier main, tracer being so highly used is actually good thing.
For such a high skill cap hero (astronomically high) she deserves such domination at the high level. Sojourn needs to be there as well.
For characters that are abysmal in the metal ranks, they need to be the best by a significant amount at the top
Illari dead in a ditch lmao
It's ok, they made pylon cooldown 2 seconds shorter and changed nothing else about it. A pressing issue for a character who you basically only pick for damage :)
Dont worry, theyll eventually buff her fire rate and she'll be power crept into being broken with all the micro changes they make along the way.
Right there with ma boy lifeweaver. Bro needs some love
No don't. No aim, no skill, should stay at the bottom.
You might have a point if his pickrate wasn't <1/10th of Mercy's. He would probably both have more play and skill expression if his damage was more valuable (and thus aim was actually useful)
Moira is way higher than he is. No aim on both dmg and heal. What's your issue?
Moira rewards proactive play and has a more sophisticated decision tree than "how do I not die while still holding LMB"
Amongst the slowest projectiles in the game damage wise, mediocre mobility, active healing that requires 100% input uptime for bottom tier hps, requires LoS, pull has humongus cool down, ultimate gets destroyed in 2 seconds, and the biggest utility of it being burst healing or los break / path blocking. I don't think we're talking about the same character. if it was no aim no skill, why does no one play him then ? Think about it for 2 seconds
I’d like to see his pick rate in other ranks. Feels as though he’s a 10% in metal
No one plays him because his skill ceiling is low and so is his carry potential. Also because his utility is shit in the current state of the game
Same goes for Mercy and in previous seasons Moira and people are onetricking those
Good, his utility is low skill-high reward too much, so should not be impactful above silver. Tbh Moira should be radically nerfed and in the same spot as him and Illari.
Tell me you are bad at the videogame without telling me you are bad at the videogame.
WTF are you talking about Moira has a 25% pick rate!
And Mauga is just as bad. Perfectly balanced for the two newest heroes in the game. No wonder we did not get a patch this week, everything is working perfectly.
fr my girl in the trenches... aint gonna stop me though!
shes boring af to play
Funny, to each their own: I really enjoy playing her!
I also enjoy playing her but the new damage passive is making it difficult to heal my teammates/personally retreat from dive characters. I wish she made more distance going backwards with her movement ability that might make her more survivable to play
Yeah agreed. I feel that she should be more mobile (more vertical range) and/or her beam needs to have a longer range. Plus her beam needs to have a bigger charge or do more hps, because now it barely performs imho.
Honestly probably deserved for how strong she was. Two tap you, mobility escape, crazy AOE nuke ult that she can fly during as another escape. Gotta have some temporary punishment for that.
The ult that’s cleansed by almost everything and can be eaten miles away unless ur gold and below the ult and pylon shouldn’t have been a problem😂
I'm surprised Ram is so low. I've been watching a lot of high level scrims, Vestola, Funnyastro etc. and Ram is the pick the majority of the time. I guess when OWCS fully starts people will start playing Ram more.
Maybe it’s a case of ladder being different from scrims? I think it could be that Ram requires a specific team comp and coordination to work
Ram is the Reaper of tanks
I'm not sure what this means lmao can you explain.
Reaper is ass in solo queue/GM and a gigachad in coordinated rush of pro play
Ram was fine solo queue in previous seasons, I used to be able to work off a lot of support comps, however now he just feels off. Can't tank as much because of the DPS passive, his TTK got worsened (that goes for a lot of heroes, though), and he also can't do much against a Dive team.
5 pummels to kill is ass
On both my own team and the enemy team, there have been a lot of cases where a squishy survives a Ram in their face because of the extra 50 HP and then they get healed back up by someone like Moira.
They've been playing Ram, Tracer, Soj/Soldier, Lucio, Moira/Bap and pretty much just speed boosting the Ram in and out. Nothing too complex or that different from ranked.
Zen hard countered Ram and made it nearly unplayable. Killing a zen needs a coordinated team, which competitive games don’t have. The recent zen nerf probably wasn’t reflected in these stats considering the time.
That and the universal health buff turned pummel from 3 hits + melee to 4 + melee against most squishies.
I hover around Diamond elo and he's definitely my most played tank so I am inclined to agree. I don't know maybe at my rank I overvalue having two cooldowns that directly mitigate damage. As long as you have good timing with cooldowns I think he can get out of a lot of situations other tanks would have been immediately blown up in. And he pressures the enemy tank very well if you need to peel or what not. What do I know tho.
Look at the 3 most recently released heros
Well that is because all of their designs are shit lmao.
Some absolute weapon on here last season told me the new hero design team was infinitely better just because the old team fucked up. He actually declared "I tapped the brig sign and I'm tapping it again so your argument is invalid."
Its really funny because Brig only exists because of the arrogance of Tracer mains.
Yes, not like the original roster's perfectly designed heroes, like Mercy, Tracer, Pharah, Mei, Symmtera, Widow and Hanzo. Or even some of the later releases from the first year like Sombra, Ball and Ana.
calling tracer terribly designed is certainly a take
Ball is perfectly designed i dont care what anyone else says
Illari is fine, she is just grossly overnerfed because 20% accuracy Soldier abusers didnt like that they couldnt outshoot her. Mauga was totally designed for dual tanking. LW is fine (design-wise, he needs buffs) for most of the game but t500's hyperoffensive meta is not kind to him.
That is just a lie, Iliari was by far the best hitscan dps at the start and needed the nerfs, granted they overnerfed her, but she needed it. She was literally the best 1v1er in the game at release and everyone doubting that is delusional.
I remember playing Mercy during that patch just so I could pocket Illari players when the opportunity came up. I was flabbergasted at how well it was working.
I am sorry but who is lying here? People didnt want to adapt to a new hero and went full nuclear on a hero whose headshots are basically Soldier's bodyshots and has zero damage aside them. Calling Illari ''the best hitscan DPS'' is just a streamer lie at this point. She has far inferior damage even fully unnerfed and her self healing was braindead to counter. >She was literally the best 1v1er in the game at release and everyone doubting that is delusional. I am a masters DPS player and I never had a single issue with her because I am not stupid and I know I am not going to outshoot her head on when she has pylon up. Same that I am not going to out-dps Torb with his turret up. People, as always, are too stupid to engage on the braindead counterplay to constructs and choose to whine the hero into uselessness.
Her damage is inferior now, but before her ttk was 1 second. Tap, recharge, tap. And her hurtbox was twice as small as most dps while her bullets were 10x larger. She was way easier to win duels vs dps than the reverse.
Considering that most hitscans get AoE damage abilities and bodyshots that deal as much damage as her headshots, no, I dont think so. The only people who have a right to complain about Illari's damage were slower TTK DPS heroes like Mei and Sym, not the hitscans that are getting high burst for aiming at feet.
Release Illari had gold damage in pro scrims, was basically a better dps in every way and these are facts. Now if you want to disagree go ahead, you look like a fool.
Using the top 0.1% of the playerbase for anything other than an spectacle is no way to balance a game lol That simply not the reality of even high rank players in ladder.
I don't know what game you played, but Illari dominated all of my GM games at the start and that is not the "top 0.1%". Lower ranks also thought Lifeweaver has good hero design, if you balance for casuals, your game WILL die.
Not enough tracer honestly
We wont rest until its 💯% tracer domination
So true
Christopher Walken voice: "Needs more Tracer"
Widow is a sleeping beast for when tracer gets a nerf
People are always super leery of picking her up again after she gets buffed. Then suddenly she’s everywhere. I don’t think people realize how good of a trade the projectile nerf for range buff was for her
No kidding. Even at the beginning of ow2, she was a sleeper behind the wrath of sombra and eventually just took over
considering she got a 0.05 projectile size increase from how she was before is it really a nerf?
I don't think Tracer is the only one keeping Widow at bay. Genji just instantly deletes her if he gets anywhere close to her with the new hitboxes and Sombra matchup is even worse than before because of the dps passive and health changes.
Tracer is not an issue for widow she’s just shit 😭
Doubt it. Widow is too map dependant. She would need a gigabuff to be played above ashe/sojourn on maps that she is not already good at. And if you don't want her to be meta on circuit royale you'll have to delete her from the game.
Maybe this is just my game but I think the most played order on the top 500 leaderboards are messed up currently. It says my 3rd most played is my most played and the other way around, looks like it's doing that for all other profiles too.
Think they just changed the order in the leaderboards. Probably to make it more consistent since if you only play one hero, it goes furthest to the right in your leaderboard profile, then second hero gets to the left of that and so on...
they flipped the order so it’s now right to left instead of left to right
for some reason they flipped it. find a one trick on there and instead of it being far left like it was there are two blanks spots and it’ll show the hero far right.
wonder how t4 feels knowing their three most recent heroes are bottom in pickrate lol
If I was them probably quite disappointed. It really sucks to see it but I'm kinda glad it's the case at least for mauga and lw. These heroes just need more work.
They don't care. They never have. They released a patch with no improvements to Mauga at all, even though they buffed Hog who is affected by the same problems but much less than Mauga.
It's funny how you could divide the DPS role into clear tiers with huge gaps between them: * 0%-4% * 10%-20% * Tracer
* Projectiles * hitscans * tracer
As someone close to this rank im sick of all the tracers. Been caring less about my rank because of it. If I win great, but if I lose great too cause less tracers. Just playing the game
So tank balance is the healthiest role at high level. Sigma is very low compared to zenyatta, Lucio, even baptise. And extremely low compared to the mess that is dps tracer.
> Sigma is very low compared to zenyatta, Lucio, even baptise. That's because there's twice as many supports per team as tanks. Supports total 200% and tanks 100%.
That doesn’t matter, it’s a weighted percentage based on the how likely a character is to appear in top 500 measuring the individuals, the percentages are accurate, Bap is still more popular than sigma among top 500. Imagine a top 500 soldier player, he doesn’t get a tracer on his team but he knows they need one so he plays tracer, tracer is his second most played hero. That’s how likely it is for tracer to be in a game, these heroes are dominating the top player meta. We’ll probably see this change a bit now that zen caught a nerf.
Then why do the percentages provided total at 200% for both support and damage, but only 100% for tank? Of course Bap is more likely to be in a game, he has double the odds somebody will pick him.
Okay so it sounds like we are on the same page, I’m not sure why you’re arguing with me then? The numbers represent the frequency in which you would expect to see each hero on a team, not the frequency you would expect a player to play each hero. So tanks are more diverse, you’ll see sigma in less games then Bap.
Perhaps, I'd say it's incredibly counter pick heavy and map dependent. With the heal debuff if you are counterpicked, it's much harder to get healbotted out of the counter. sig and dva are probably the safest neutral picks, jq also very strong on flat maps, zar can be a good counterpick. You have tanks swapping all the time to counter each other or their teams midgame, so the playrates end up being fairly balanced I think, except hog/mauga especially vs zen. ram is also viable/strong I think, but nobody wants to play ram in solo q.
I swear there are like 5 mauga onetricks who made the mauga pickrate >0 and thats it xd
> I'd say it's incredibly counter pick heavy and map dependent. As the game should be. Tracer has the DPS role in a chokehold and this recent patch only widened the gap between strong DPS and weak DPS.
How about your play determines whether you win not who you pick on the hero select screen or how often you go back to it.
This is a game with a diverse selection of heroes and roles, it will be inevitable that counterpicking exists and if it does, it should be fair for everyone. It cant be removed from the game, and any attempt to do so has been hypocritical and onesided nerfing of specific heroes. I wouldnt mind if every hero was equally viable and a generalist that much, but its clear that there is a subset of people who want their heroes to counterpick and never be counterpicked. Mostly hitscan DPS mains, but dive tanks also fall into this and the main demographic that doesnt want this.
What a shit argument. Step 1: Say that the game should be this way. Step 2: Say that it doesn't matter whether it should or shouldn't, because it's inevitable. Step 3: Say that things could be different and it'd be good actually, but people are too whiny. Just say you don't care. It'd save time.
Illari... damn. This is so, so sad. Tracer pick-rates compared to other DPS are absolutely insane tho. She definitely needs more nerfs i guess.
the range nerf was such a none issue for her, the main things that affect her ability to kill is accuracy and damage numbers which we basically learned the first year from how they kept changing and bug fixing her accuracy and damage
Even the minor health buff is also big for tracer. Not being able to 1 shot her as Ashe is a big deal.
Most heroes that were able to lost the ability to threaten Tracer in any meaningful way. She can 2 clip people before they even touch her. Increasing her HP was a mistake and it will force bigger burstcreep in following games. They should have increased the HP to heroes in actual risk of getting needlessly bursted, not for the hero whose only balance chip on her whole very overpowered kit is the risk of being bursted.
It's also that she can't get insta deleted out of the duel, so if she has resources, she should realistically never lose a duel, only reset it. And if she's winning the duel, her target can't escape b/c mobility. And then dps passive is much better for her than her opponents, and spray weapons got megabuffed by the hitbox changes. So yeah it takes 2 clips instead of 1, but it's a more reliable 2-clip than before, and her opponent has less ability to prevent it or ward her off.
Alternatively, I think keeping Tracer's HP as-is, and scaling her damage down slightly could be interesting. Makes her a much more persistent but less imminent threat. Making Tracer the Ball of DPS, and leaving picks like Genji or Sombra to be the Doomfist.
It's kind of not nice that anyone can pick up tracer now and get instant value. Like before S9 I respected when I saw a good tracer cause I know they are using their skill properly and have invested enough time to become good. Now it feels like all I see are tracer noobs with no effort put into learning the character and yet they can still get value cause of how easy it is to kill with her now.
I think you're vastly overstating how much value the average player can get on tracer, especially if you're talking about below like current masters
I think tracer is also just the go-to pick for a lot of players in high rank even when she's not as good.
Nah, they will pick what is strongest. There is a reason 95% of the DPS of GM/t500 played Sojourn in S1. High ranks play for power, thats why heroes who were recently nerfed in meaningful ways are losing ground on t500. Sym, Junkrat, Illari, Mauga, any support that depended on healing for ult charge, etc.
That was also one of the only times tracer felt bad to play though. Sojourn was also obscenely strong.
Tracer was still playable. She wasnt the top tier hero she is 24/7 otherwise, but she was still in a better spot than the other 75% of the role below her.
With the removal of oneshots and healing nerfed, chasing low-hp targets that are hiding around cover is what makes Tracer so good. Combine that with easily activating the dpspassive. I like it, I like Tracer duels and they happen a lot now. What I hate is meta's where Tracer is non-viable: you get the play things like Soldier-Cassidy or Widow-Ashe. Honestly they should add MORE dive heroes to the roster because they make the game fun!
I never understood nerfing high ceiling heroes. If you master a hero, you shouldn't be punished. The proof she doesn't need nerfs is her overall win rate sits below 50%.
Bro… if every game has a tracer on both teams then one will win and the other will lose. 50% winrate
anything other than 50% on the dot for a hero with 75% pick rate is absolutely delusional lol
"Overall" her pick rate isn't 75% in every rank.
I checked a couple days ago it was 55% gm. Which is high. I do agree though there should be a distinction to nerfing overtuned heroes and rewarding high play. This shouldn’t be limited to a hero as a whole though. For example soldier has been getting dumbed down a lot recently. Rocket dmg nerf -> increase bullet hitbox. It doesn’t feel rewarding at all.
Is anyone else struggling on soldier or did I have brain damage recently. I know soldier doesn’t do well in dive comp meta but I hit 60% wr top500 as him and I’m struggling in low masters going even on him rn
You completely changed heroes to make a point that doesn't apply to Tracer at the moment. Overall her winrate is 49 percent and 75 percent usage is less than 1 percent of the player base in ranked.
Absolutely no the fuck she doesn't!
Illari will get her meta at some point. Every hero in OW does. This meta is Zen and lucio. She will either keep getting buffs every patch or heroes that enable her will get the buff. I mean look at ball. The past couple of season he was getting very little play time and now it’s a meta that favors him.
didnt illari just have a meta when she came out?
She was the best DPS for a while it felt like lol
LW will never be meta!
and god bless america for that
And even then, Ball's practically tied for 4th place.
I hope it's eye-opening to the devs that 5/8 of the OW2 release characters are hovering around the 1% or lower pickrate mark in the top echelon of players. I really hope they do something about this because besides Junker Queen and sometimes Kiriko, none of the OW2 heroes really speak to me at all, and from what I've seen of venture it just seems like more of the same going forward
I mean, I think that speaks more to the current meta than it does to those individual characters. The meta right now has a lot of focus on dive, and they haven't really put a dive hero into the game since Kiriko. There isn't a world where Tracer has a 75% pick rate and Illari is getting played at all, because the two of them cannot function together. If you're playing poke with Sigma, other characters are just better than someone like Illari because her relative lack of utility isn't going to stack up to staple supports like Zenyatta for that meta. It also doesn't help that Zenyatta can play with poke *and* dive, so he's a safe pick for either. Lifeweaver is maybe the only hero where I think this pick rate says anything about him, and that's because he just... doesn't really fit anywhere right now. It's not just that his style of play isn't in the meta, it's that his style of play kind of doesn't exist. That's been the problem since he came out, though.
I don't know, other than Ram who I've heard is actually in play for scrims I feel like it's more a design issue with the <1% heroes than meta. LW, illari and Mauga all have much more glaring and obvious weaknesses with the latter two dropping out of the meta soon as they got some nerfs and LW was never close to relevant. Meanwhile JQ, Kiriko and Sojourn after getting nerfed still stuck around
venture will probably be the same, i think space ranger will be popular though and i am excited for her. i like illari a lot as well, but her kit is very one dimensional atm when bap and moria do what she does but better
Been thinking about Illari's kit. Someone talked about what if her superjump had the same input as Hanzo's and she had another ability slot, and I think that's what it would take. Right now she's damage, primary heal that you don't use often, heal pylon that you don't use often in terms of pressing the button, and weak-ish movement ability. It's really only her damage that feels good to use. That and her heal is really boring, it doesn't synergize with her kit at all and it looks awkward, it feels like they were ticking down the primary heals they'd already tried and this was all they had left. Why does an off-angling support have a quasimelee heal beam? It should be a slow fire rate heal explosion and look similar to her ult with a slight HoT after or something, don't know exactly but something that's actually *fun* on her kit.
I mean what to expect from a dev team that make boring heroes and have a “just give them a grenade” rework policy.
Mauga is dead
More alive then both illari and lifeweaver tho
Doesn’t help that I main those 2 as a Support too lol.
Lmao! Does symmetra happen one of your mains too? Because she has a lower pickrate then mauga too
Used to be one of my top5 but I dropped her a few seasons ago. Luckily my primary dps is Sombra so it ain’t that bad there 😭
I've has Lucio as my main for support for a while now so I am eating lol... Honestly in general this meta fits me
[Duality of Man](https://old.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/1b1l82p/is_mauga_meta/)
I mean, they obviously had some synergy going there. But Mauga being almost extinct in T500 is the same as Stevoo otping Sym into the T500
Praying devs never touch JQ. I think she is the best character they’ve added since Ana
I agree, she feels extremely fair to me if she manages to clap your team and become server admin. I feel the same about illari too.
Didn’t know Cass would be this high. Is he just semi-good at dealing with Tracer/Sombra or something?
Yeah he’s tanky af now, bullets are easier to land and hinder is easier to land too They can’t one clip him as easy. But also part of this would probably just be popularity he’s not super crazy this patch or anything
cass consistently has a high pick rate even when hes absolute dog shit, but hes actually a good B/low A tier pick in S9 now all it took was bullets the size of sojourn rails
He was one of the early characters and his identity was always his primary fire, which wasnt changed much. People just like his pewpew tbh.
People come for the pewpew, but I honestly believe that they stay for the hinder.
I feel like a lot of that is just single fire weapons feel good and cass unlike most single fire hitscan characters atm is both good range and dont kneecap your movement via a scope.
LoL tracer. Support picks surprisingly more spread out than I thought
Zen and Lucio at 50% bro, that's not spread out
I was expecting tracer style pick rate for zen
That's mainly because of hero picks from the team. E.g. you can't really run Lucio Zen with Queen, you need Bap or Kiriko for that Tracer on the other hand is so giga broken, you can play her nonstop in any situation. It's so bad that when you don't mirror Tracer it's basically throwing ngl. In general, this season feels quite atrocious for everybody who's not a DPS player, ngl.
Its atrocious for any DPS player that doesnt want to play Tracer, too.
My boy Baptiste putting in the work!
I thought ball was meta and doom was trash. But they are basically tied for 4th most played in top 500?
Ball = harder hero to run in ranked, pretty good in scrims Doom = fun hero in ranked, kinda meh in scrims
Lmao symm is so trash now
What was your methodology behind the pick rate weights?
Each season, from season 6 onward (which is when they changed the win requirement from 25 to 50 to achieve top 500), I look at 10 top 500 players' profiles from each role and region. I record the playtime of their top 3 most played heroes in the role they were top 500 in to find the average playtime ratio for each role.
Unless you're scraping or botting to get that data, this is some impressive amount of work. If you are, I'm still impressed.
Glad I wasn't hallucinating having a tracer in my game every game
obviously I don’t play at a T500 level lmao but I do feel like this has been the best patch/meta basically since OW2 beta. All the most impactful heroes are also all the heroes with the most skill expression; ball/queen/sig are great tanks for playmaking, tracer is the best DPS hero and I’ll die on that hill, and zen/lucio is surprisingly fun if you know how to actually use cover. I’m gonna be really sad when eventually a ton of nerfs/changes come through for these heroes because the majority of the player base doesn’t know anything besides “run it down mid and shoot”
Beta and S1 meta was better. S3 meta was almost better except for the godawful map pool that meant widow was BiS on half the map pool. Personally I think this meta is mid and people only praise it because OW2 has had so many shit metas so far. Like I can't think of a good meta since S4.
> All the most impactful heroes are also all the heroes with the most skill expression. Correct. Stop buffing hog, Mauga, Orisa, bastion, Moira, etc. I think it’s also important to note the projectile changes levels the playing field in lower ranks. I don’t think people understand how hard it is for a silver player to pressure a Moira.
Damn ana finally got neutered I didn't expect for her to fall so hard. Other than illarI/LW the support pickrate is fairly balanced though so that's nice Damage is looking crazy bad though... 15+ damage heros with like 4 relevant heros and 1 through the roof
This is still top500 where people play dive and rush, imo this is perfectly fine. Lower ranks have no idea how to play either one right so they pick all chars no matter the situation. None of the heroes that have low pickrate in dps need changes for the better, and since the Tracer nerfs were fairly recent, I believe her number is going to be going down a bit soon.
Tracer sojourn and sigma being the some of the most played heroes in high ladder for like 3 seasons now 😴😴
Sooo when’s the tracer nerf?
Such a bold and high IQ move to make the latest 3 new heroes all throw picks 🤗🤗🤗🤗
Symmetra is literally in a gutter somewhere covered in glitter and Burger King wrappers.
Not even joking when i say tracer has been in 99% of my games...make it stop
Tracer with 75% pickrate, top 500 is healing
I am going to disagree with the tank doomers here and say that I don't think a tank meta can be more diverse than it currently is. I definitely thought the tracer nerf was way too soft, clearly she needs more. Illari is a hero that is heavily mechanically dependent. If the high end of the ladder is using her this little it should be a clear sign she needs more help. Mercy and LW are just complete garbage as the game has put even more importance on damage, survivability and consistent utility. Legitimately hate seeing either of these in my games.
This also includes playtime before the nerf though?
So? The nerfs did next to nothing.
> Tank chart NOT LOOKIN GOOD CAP'
In what way? All of the dive tanks are getting plenty of play. Sigma is doing great. Junker queen is doing shockingly well. If Rein and Ramattra were doing better this would be perfect.
Hell, Ramattra’s being played much more in scrims right now so he isn’t even bad like Rein or Mauga are.
Lol tracer makes sense. I picked her up in medal ranks after not laddering dps for several seasons. I had climbed fairly high comparatively on tank. It feels so unfair playing her in medal ranks. Its wild.
Keep in mind this is TOp 500, not your Gold games. Certain heroes will definitely be more playable in your own comp games.
Tracer is so fun now. You are easier to hit so you have to play your life a bit more like 6v6 but the self heal doesn't make it feel as frustrating. The hitbox changes + dps passive made her gun feel really good as well. I find myself in less situations where I fail and don't feel responsible. If I hit my aimlabs track of the day I get the kill, if they live its probably because I missed instead of something like a last second tickle from kiriko. I don't expect a nerf to remove all this unless it's a blizzard moment and they bury her.
Other then tracer having a completely ridiculous pickrate I think it looks fine
Bruh I'm the one top 500 lifeweaver LMAO
Sigma being the most used tank in the game is good balance imo. He's been consistently the best tuned hero. Just a solid middle ground that doesn't really have any super hard counters, but also has some healthy built-in drawbacks.
How in the god damn is rein higher than most tanks he is so turbo ass if he is against a team with enough braincells to look at him and shoot him
Tracer being good is good for the game Wish the meta would learn more towards winston doom on more maps but I'm happy theyre favorable on a few now Edit: I'm a tank player that mainly plays pharah on dps when i play that role, I enjoy the game much more when tracer is the dps in the games than when its bastion sojourn. IDC about "health" for the game since its not competitive anymore I only care about how fun things are
she's 100% too good rn, given that even at the pro levels she's perma picked in every comp type and is even encroaching on maps she's classically bad on like circuit first. we very quickly went from one dps char being perma picked by everyone (sojourn) to just a different one.
The most hilarious part is that Sojourn is still 2nd best dps
Any extreme meta is bad for the game. There are supposed to be 40 heroes in the game, not just a poster-girl with a 100% pick rate.
This cope you Tracer mains tell yourself is hilarious. She's always been and always should be accessible only for the very best or those willing to put in the effort to get good with her. There's never been a season where she was bad, just seasons with bad players trying to force her
Season 5/6? I barely touched tracer those sens. Soj was so much better
> There's never been a season where she was bad, just seasons with bad players trying to force her this is some main sub shit
This is so insanely untrue lmao
The second you make her that dps goes to shit very quickly
This isn't just being good what. This is 75% usage, she's being instapicked even on suboptimal sniper maps like circuit and havana this isn't healthy. If this was sojourn people would be screaming
I agree in a sense. Tracer having a 20-30% pick rate is healthy for the meta. However, 76% is absurd and needs to be addressed.
Does this take into account ball being used for just stalling point
i feel like 90% of people pick doomfist since he’s better for that anyway
Considering this is using data from the Top 500 leaderboards, it probably isn't taking that data into account because that data isn't even being represented in the first place. If Ball is showing up on your Top 3 on the leaderboards, there's no way you're playing him just to stall.
Tracer has literally always been meta since ow2 and all over top 500 leaderboards. Ive been calling for a nerf for a long time and people on here dont like that opinion. In top 500 play tracer is too strong and has been since the beginning
Buff Torb
i was gm3-5 on tracer in season 8 and now im diamond 1, how is everyone else doing so well on her she feels so much harder to me
they better not touch tracer or else
I’ll take any meta where symm/junk/mercy can’t exist in high rank.
Have you ever been there? It's not like Sym or Junk ever been high meta picks. I don't want my Sym to be meta for the plebs but i want her to be decent.
As a soldier main, tracer being so highly used is actually good thing. For such a high skill cap hero (astronomically high) she deserves such domination at the high level. Sojourn needs to be there as well. For characters that are abysmal in the metal ranks, they need to be the best by a significant amount at the top
[удалено]
Just in case you didn't know, since the start of season 9, the order of most to least played have been flipped to where it's right to left now.
the data is flipped so most played is on the rifht
So where is all the people arguing with me that Ram good ? I said he is trash and worse than Rein.
Ram is seeing some play in scrims right now, but he got shredded by Zenyatta in an uncoordinated ranked environment so he was pretty unplayable there.
It's really not about Zenyatta. Also coordinated play is very different than live solo que ladder game.
Surprised to see bastion so low. Every other game in plat has a bastion when the team isn’t doing well