(Overwatch) Blizzard Doesn't Understand "Moderation": Turns Bastion into God

[Paragon Fury]

So, Blizzard gave Bastion a new passive to improve his play-ability on the PTR for Overwatch. Said passive is;

Ironclad
While in Sentry or Tank Form, Bastion takes 35% less damage (from all sources).


Basically, Bastion is God now.

Combined with his self-healing, Bastion can effectively completely ignore or survive everything from;

- Every Support
- All Defenders except Mei and Hanzo's Ult
- All Offensive Heroes except Pharah's Ultimate - and he can kill Pharah faster than her Ult can burn him down
- All Tanks except Roadhog and Reinhart

And he can also kill faster than he can be killed on many maps now. If Bastion has any outside healing at all, he can survive literally anything in the game EXCEPT D.Va's Ult. He can also repair on the move in Recon mode now.

This is one of Blizzard's problems - they don't seem to understand moderation; they took Bastion from basically unplayable to now he will have a 100% pickrate and require 2/3 people working in tandem to 2/3v1 him in order to kill him.

Come on guys. Really? You couldn't have started at like....15%? 20% reduction instead? Had to go for the full 1/3rd+change reduction?

 

[CritialGaming]

Blizzard has never been good at balance. They always swing wildly from one-side to another. Look at every expansion for WoW, they take complaints of the previous expansion and go way to far in the opposite direction with the next one.

While the games are typically fantastic, competitive is really not their strong suit. I think it has only ever been good in Starcraft, but I don't know enough about it to be 100% sure.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah_v1legacy]

I think he would have been fine with just the change to his Recon mode and the speed it takes to go from Sentry to Recon, but not vice versa.

I still don't understand why they felt the need to increase Symmetra's tether range. It's literally impossible, with any character, to reliably get out of the range of that unless you can fly, and with her shield it's even more so.

And all these changes keep making Arcade mode that much less fun to play, since certain characters become totally overpowered on most maps (like the afformentioned Symmetra on the Show Your Support mode, or CTF)

It just seems like everytime a character is getting a buff everyone actually starts playing that character properly for once and then it becomes overly powerful once the buff hits.

 

[Glongpre]

This is one of Blizzard's problems - they don't seem to understand moderation; they took Bastion from basically unplayable to now he will have a 100% pickrate and require 2/3 people working in tandem to 2/3v1 him in order to kill him.

...Well, then I guess it's good that these changes are going through the PTR so they can gather data on how these changes affect the game's balance.

 

[Paragon Fury]

This is one of Blizzard's problems - they don't seem to understand moderation; they took Bastion from basically unplayable to now he will have a 100% pickrate and require 2/3 people working in tandem to 2/3v1 him in order to kill him.

...Well, then I guess it's good that these changes are going through the PTR so they can gather data on how these changes affect the game's balance.

Every single change put on the PTR, no matter how vocal the community was about it, has gone through to the main game unchanged.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

This is one of Blizzard's problems - they don't seem to understand moderation; they took Bastion from basically unplayable to now he will have a 100% pickrate and require 2/3 people working in tandem to 2/3v1 him in order to kill him.

...Well, then I guess it's good that these changes are going through the PTR so they can gather data on how these changes affect the game's balance.

It's going to go from the PTR to the main game without any changes, and then it'll be nerfed back into the ground a patch or 2 later. The only group that Blizzard listens to are the professional players and if something is under-performing at the tournament level then that's where the buffs/nerfs are going to go, even if 95% of the population are happy with where the character is.

The fact of the matter is, not every character has to be viable at every level of play. There's top tier players and there's low tier players, and there's everyone in between. Buffing bastion is just going to be frustrating for the lower skill level players considering the fact that his counters are high skill characters.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Either a dev knows how to balance a game or they don't. You can't rely on data and community opinions to balance a game because most players don't know how to really play meaning there could be a counter to something that just most players don't know and thus complain about it, and obviously the data will then provide a false positive. If the devs listen, then that character/gun/class/etc will be nerfed and make that playstyle no longer viable. Every competitive game has to be balanced with regards to high-level play and according to what every character can do in the hands of a great player. If you balance to the average player, then you will have the really good and great players totally abusing the OPed-ness of certain characters that normal players just can't execute. I don't play Overwatch but the second a dev starts balancing by data or community opinion is when the game has zero chance of ever becoming balanced.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Either a dev knows how to balance a game or they don't. You can't rely on data and community opinions to balance a game because most players don't know how to really play meaning there could be a counter to something that just most players don't know and thus complain about it, and obviously the data will then provide a false positive. If the devs listen, then that character/gun/class/etc will be nerfed and make that playstyle no longer viable. Every competitive game has to be balanced with regards to high-level play and according to what every character can do in the hands of a great player. If you balance to the average player, then you will have the really good and great players totally abusing the OPed-ness of certain characters that normal players just can't execute. I don't play Overwatch but the second a dev starts balancing by data or community opinion is when the game has zero chance of ever becoming balanced.

Balancing a game like overwatch isn't like balancing guns in call of duty. It's not just about balancing characters against other characters, but you also need to balance character synergy, because a lot of character abilities are dependent upon other character abilities, and tweaking a single character slightly can throw off how every other character in the game plays, and which team compositions are effective.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Either a dev knows how to balance a game or they don't. You can't rely on data and community opinions to balance a game because most players don't know how to really play meaning there could be a counter to something that just most players don't know and thus complain about it, and obviously the data will then provide a false positive. If the devs listen, then that character/gun/class/etc will be nerfed and make that playstyle no longer viable. Every competitive game has to be balanced with regards to high-level play and according to what every character can do in the hands of a great player. If you balance to the average player, then you will have the really good and great players totally abusing the OPed-ness of certain characters that normal players just can't execute. I don't play Overwatch but the second a dev starts balancing by data or community opinion is when the game has zero chance of ever becoming balanced.

Balancing a game like overwatch isn't like balancing guns in call of duty. It's not just about balancing characters against other characters, but you also need to balance character synergy, because a lot of character abilities are dependent upon other character abilities, and tweaking a single character slightly can throw off how every other character in the game plays, and which team compositions are effective.

I realize that as I play Battleborn. Guns are so easy to balance it's not even funny yet almost every shooter has balance problems because devs don't know how to balance. Character balance with lots of different powers is a lot harder as each power itself is inherently imbalanced as some powers are just better and obviously using certain powers together is a whole other thing as well.

 

[IceForce]

Well OP, hold onto your hat, because it gets much MUCH worse...


Turns out, Bastion's new 35% damage resistance ('DR', from now on) stacks with the 50% DR you get from Ana's nano-boost. Meaning, a nano'd Bastion has a whopping 85% DR.

And at 85% DR, he is literally unkillable. No-one and nothing in the game does enough damage to kill him. High-noon won't even lock on to him, even when used for the entire duration of the ultimate. Hell, not even a point-blank fucking D.Va ult can kill him. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous.

So now, the very best way of pushing a point, bar none, will be to use a nano'd Bastion in tank mode. The entire enemy team can throw literally everything in their arsenal at you, and you'll still wipe the floor with them.

In fact, hilariously and ironically, the one thing that stands the best chance against a nano'd Bastion is... another nano'd Bastion.
So yeah, no prizes for guessing what the next meta is going to be.

Fuck this game and its horrendous balancing issues, seriously.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Well OP, hold onto your hat, because it gets much MUCH worse...


Turns out, Bastion's new 35% damage resistance ('DR', from now on) stacks with the 50% DR you get from Ana's nano-boost. Meaning, a nano'd Bastion has a whopping 85% DR.

And at 85% DR, he is literally unkillable. No-one and nothing in the game does enough damage to kill him. High-noon won't even lock on to him, even when used for the entire duration of the ultimate. Hell, not even a point-blank fucking D.Va ult can kill him. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous.

So now, the very best way of pushing a point, bar none, will be to use a nano'd Bastion in tank mode. The entire enemy team can throw literally everything in their arsenal at you, and you'll still wipe the floor with them.

In fact, hilariously and ironically, the one thing that stands the best chance against a nano'd Bastion is... another nano'd Bastion.
So yeah, no prizes for guessing what the next meta is going to be.

Fuck this game and its horrendous balancing issues, seriously.

Yet more proof that putting Ana into this game has irreversibly fucked up the balance of all the characters.

Mercy went from a primary healer to a situational pick because Ana's healing potential is ridiculous.

Ana's ult makes it too easy for Genji and Rein to wipe out entire teams, well, better nerf Genji. Ana's healing made the tank meta too good and made it too hard to kill tanks. Well, better nerf Dva and Roadhog into the ground.

Bastion hasn't been getting enough play, what do we do? Better give him more damage resistance that stacks with Ana's ult, making him totally unkillable because that's both fair AND fun.

It feels like almost every balance problem where something was "OP" since Ana was added has revolved around Ana and her ult.

 

[IceForce]

It feels like almost every balance problem where something was "OP" since Ana was added has revolved around Ana and her ult.

Pretty much, yeah. (God, do I hate that fucking annoying old hag with every fiber of my being... ahem...)

I'm pretty sure the devs have even come out and admitted publicly that they fucked up royally with Ana's kit and abilities.
Her kit is just simply too good. She out-heals every other healer, she can boost healing from all sources, she can block healing on the enemy team, she can stop certain ults dead with sleep-dart (including sleep-darting enemy nanos, which leads to the problem of 'Ana counters Ana', so when one team runs her the other team is forced to mirror it to even stand a chance), and she's incredibly difficult to kill because she's the only healer with 300 effective hp (because EVERY Ana, without exception, will always grenade herself to get back 100hp for free whenever she's under attack). And then there's her ult, which is basically impossible to balance because of the unique way it interacts with each different hero it's used on.

It's funny because during the game's development I distinctly remember the devs talking about how they wanted each weapon, attack, ability, and ultimate to have consistent and predictable damage output. So you could always know ahead of time roughly how effective your attacks will be at any given moment. It's the reason why 'damage resistance' was something the devs deliberately left out of the game at release, because it ruins the consistency and predictability of people's attacks in the game, which in-turn makes the game unfun to play.

Buuut then they added Ana, and it all went to shit from there.

I guess it wasn't quite so bad, since the DR provided by Ana is an ult and not a regular ability. But now, DR *has* been implemented as a regular ability (a passive ability, no less), and what-do-you-know, the DR stacks together.

That's the problem with DR in videogames in general; you don't have to get the percentage very high for it to quickly spiral out of control and become overpowered. (Just look at any Bethesda game for good examples where stacking high-DR items on the same character can make the character basically unkillable.)

 

[IceForce]

...Well, then I guess it's good that these changes are going through the PTR so they can gather data on how these changes affect the game's balance.

Riiiight. That's why the massive D.Va armor buffs went straight from the PTR to the live servers without any changes or alterations, only for her armor to be severely nerfed again in literally the very next patch.

The PTR isn't the safety net that so many people seem to think it is, because so far history has shown us that PTR changes always go through to the live servers before the devs even start to realize the ramifications of the changes.

 

[The Madman]

Blizzard have been doing decent at balancing Heroes of the Storm... most of the time anyway. At least nothing so disastrous as their other attempts at balance in the past with their other franchises anyway. A good chunk of the reason I stopped playing Hearthstone was distaste over how they approached balancing it.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Anyone who's played WoW for any length of time knows Blizzard's MO is "nerf to the ground, buff to the moon" and pretty much nothing in between.

 

[WindKnight]

...Well, then I guess it's good that these changes are going through the PTR so they can gather data on how these changes affect the game's balance.

Riiiight. That's why the massive D.Va armor buffs went straight from the PTR to the live servers without any changes or alterations, only for her armor to be severely nerfed again in literally the very next patch.

The PTR isn't the safety net that so many people seem to think it is, because so far history has shown us that PTR changes always go through to the live servers before the devs even start to realize the ramifications of the changes.

The devs have actually said openly that the PTR is there primarily to catch bugs and crashes before they hit the live server, so we don't get a situation where a patch makes the game literally unplayable

 

[IceForce]

The devs have actually said openly that the PTR is there primarily to catch bugs and crashes before they hit the live server, so we don't get a situation where a patch makes the game literally unplayable

Yep, that much is true. But as far as we can observe, the PTR has never been used to test for balancing issues. Maybe it's because the PTR player base is too small or whatever, but PTR hero changes always seem to go through to live untouched, only to often get re-addressed later (ie: buffed/nerfed) in a future patch.

 

[IceForce]

One thing these videos don't mention is that Sombra is effectively going to become a Bastion hard-counter. (A hard-counter to a normal Bastion, that is; not a counter to the nano thing I talked about above.)

Because if you hack or EMP a Bastion, he can't use his self-heal, he gets forced into recon mode and cannot transform back (which means his passive stops working), and he cannot use his ult (unless he's already *in* his ult when the hack/EMP happens, in which case Sombra basically has no effect on him). A hacked Bastion should theoretically be a fairly easy kill.

... Weelllll, that's one way to make people play Sombra more, I guess, - buff another hero to such a degree that Sombra becomes the only counter to it.


Oh, and before anyone says it, Genji is no longer going to be a Bastion counter. (Not that he ever was, because anyone who's played the game for more than 5 minutes knows not to shoot at a deflecting Genji). Because Bastion also takes 35% less damage from his own deflected attacks, giving him plenty of time to stop shooting at the Genji and wait for the deflect to go down.

 

[totheendofsin]

Well I guess taking a break from Overwatch isn't such an awful idea

Seriously though does Blizzard just not know how to balance properly? It seems that they're only able to swing to extremes with their buffs/nerfs

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

Didn't Blizzard say they want everything to be overpowered and unbalanced anyway? If you're playing Overwatch I think your best bet is to buckle up because I'm sure this isn't the last catastrophe coming your way.