Hello Hunters!
We’re currently running a Brawl with adjustments to Hero health, healing rates and the damage output of frontline Heroes. We’re looking to collect player feedback and thoughts on these changes.
How did you change your teams and strategies to adopt to these rules? Which teams were successful, which weren’t? Did a Hero you previously ignored suddenly shine? Were you having more fun, or less?
We really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with us!
I love it. In the normal PvP ist mostly Mandrake added with healers, now you have much more possibilitys.
I took Maven into my team and she did well. She normaly is lacking HP, but now you can take use of her damage output, wihout beeing killed after 10 seconds.
Heckler is now playable and the early game heroes like Ryker, Cross and Savlatore can do some damage, too.
Honestly, this is how regular PvP should be all the time. The current meta is dominated by a handful of heroes and compositions. I can’t tell you how tired I am of seeing teams like Mandrake + Gammond + Phalanx + Heim/Razor + god-level Dogface or Clyde that can burst down the opponent’s best option in two clips with very little chance of being countered.
Higher health takes some of the OP effectiveness of these high burst DPS heroes away. It makes lower health/lower DPS heroes like Maven at least viable even if they aren’t being transformed into top-tier options. Matches are taking a little longer to complete but still not close to regularly bumping up against the timer limit and I’m not seeing any more ties than usual (almost never unless some fool insists on staying invisible with Mandrake to run out the clock). But there are far fewer 30 second or less games and that’s a good thing.
A larger health pool allows for more opportunities for longer cool-down skills to have a chance to proc. Lower healing rates mean that once the initial health pool is depleted, we aren’t getting stuck in a cycle of heroes continually regenerating back to full health. In short, I love it. Player skill and team composition becomes more important. Meta heroes are somewhat de-emphasized but not neutered. And having other heroes become viable is what you should be shooting for: diversity is good!
If you guys were inspired by Overwatch at all when creating this game (seems likely given how many heroes there are, how unique they look and play, etc), striving to create as much balance as possible between all the heroes is how you make the game thrive. Sure, some options will always be a little better than others and that’s fine. But having a huge portion of the hero universe be completely useless in PvP and a handful be so overpowered that they are almost mandatory is getting stale quick. This is a great change that I hope gets implemented in some form on a permanent basis. And continuing to tweak individual heroes when it becomes apparent they are either too strong or too weak is also important.
I played three times to reach daily target.
The purpose of the Brawl was great but after I reached Level 60, 100k vs 1000k is a huge difference to get the reward.
I am actually going to make a video that I will post in the community forums specifically about this brawl. I think you are on the right track in some ways… aka. Increase hp, decrease healing.
However…
The way you did it in this brawl is likely to make things worse not better. This is why:
Increasing HP by a percentage greatly increases the power of tanks disproportionately. My mandrake for instance had over 360k hp using this system… gaining nearly 160k health…but my clyde gained only 60k… this is compounded by the fact that many tanks have some of the highest damage abilities in the game. (Gammond, Razor, Phalanx, savage, etc).
If your goals is to make a TANK only meta, this would be a great way to do it.
Suggestion -> instead increase hp by 15% (not 80%) and a flat amount. Based on my experience in this event. I was surprised to discover that heroes STILL DIED VERY FAST! in fact, I watched my 360k hp drake die in under 10 seconds at the beginning of the match 
. What this tells me is that my original suggestion (increase base hp by 50k at lvl 60) was actually too low.
Part 2…
I agree that healing needs to be decreased…HOWEVER, only AOE heals, Nerfing single target heals is crazy…they are already obscenely weak in my oppinion and Nightengale is currently THE ONLY VIABLE SINGLE TARGET HEALER IN PVP.
Suggest that you nerf the AOE heals (except for matador) by 50%. Currently matador’s heal is already 50% worse than Gammond’s or heimlocks, and significantly less than moss’s aoe heal. Currently there IS NO JUSTIFYABLE REASON to run single target healers (video incoming will talk about this).
More to come…
Cheers,
H.D.
I went ahead and uploaded a youtube video with a much more in depth discussion of what I experienced during this Brawl.
Thanks for trying new things!
Brawl discussion and commentary stream
Cheers,
H.D.
My experience was a bit different from what others have posted here. I felt that some DPS, like Dogface, became disproportionately powerful in this brawl with no natural counters other than similar DPS comps.
In regular PVP they are commonly referred to as “glass cannons” - high damage, low health. The low health is meant to counter their high damage output. In this brawl, they lost their normal disadvantage and just became “cannons”. Tanky heros/teams were not able to kill DPS before heals landed. Since healing was also nerfed, certain DPS heroes could easily outpace heals, whereas the same could not be said for tanks.
I understand that characters with very low health to begin with, like Clyde, didn’t get a very big boost, but I saw many Dogfaces out there with over 300K health in this brawl. Even with the added health he is able to take down many heroes, even some tanks, in a single clip with his bronze and silver ability, and thanks to the added health that he receives, the normal counter - killing him quick - didn’t work.
The most difficult teams for me to defeat were ones with several tanky healers like Gammond and Heimlock with several super glass cannons like Dogface. If these changes were to become permanent, I have very little doubt that this would become the new meta.
It may be the case that DPS is currently doing too much damage, but increasing health coupled with decreasing healing, only makes the DPS stronger, imo, because it takes away 2 of their natural counters/disadvantages.
I dont know how anyone could call heroes like dogface or prophet glass cannons…both have much much higher hps than most dps slots. Same with salvator.
Odachi, sentry, clyde, saphyr…all of those gained a whole lot less from these changes…and why should dps not be able to beat teams that have no dps slots? And last time I checked…gammond is also a dps because of kill shot.
Cheers,
H.D.
Yes, I am mainly referring to those 2. They both do tremendous damage and giving them this hp boost made them insanely overpowered, imo. Maybe they were not typical glass cannons but in a normal match I could kill them fairly quickly if they were focused. That was not the case at all in the brawl. That was just my experience playing I don’t know how many matches. I ended up ranked 80th in the brawl so take it or leave it.
Also even if the true glass cannons received far fewer hps than tankier heroes, I believe they benefit from those hps far more heroes who already have alot. My point from above is that what matters most is having enough hit points to survive until heals go off.
Ultimately I don’t think we are on opposite sides of the issue. It seems like you feel that DPS is too strong and I agree. However, I think DPS was only made stronger in this brawl, even if it may seem counter intuitive at first. I will try to break it down in a simple example.
Let’s say you have a 2 vs 2 match. One team consists of a tank and a healer and the other team is DPS and a healer. Even if the tank has 10x more hps, heck even 100x more hps than the DPS, if the DPS can survive until heals are charged, the team with the DPS will win. The added hps ends up helping the DPS more than the tank, even if the tank receives a much higher amount. The healing nerf also exacerbates this problem because damage/healing ratio becomes much higher for DPS characters.
The problem is that those are a bit vague, what are you defining as a tank specifically?
I think that hp HAS to be raised, and healing HAS to be weakened (aoe healing specifically) but the way it was done, not sure it accomplished the desired effect.
The problem with your arguement is that some of the highest dps heroes (razor/ Gammond/ fortess / savage and even dog) are majorly high in hp already. Dog is going to be an issue in any match where it goes long becasue the combination of his silver and bronze skills can pump out almost 1 Million damage or more… regardless…nothing really survives his abilities. Very few dps really can do this…in fact only a Plat halo + savage are likely to come close.
The “tanky” heroes that are used the most can also bring the beats. So I think my experience did differ. On Dogface however I think we both agree…long term they will need to tone him back…but that will also really hurt his viability in pve, which sucks…
As I said before I don’t think we are in disagreement. Also my comments are based solely on my perspective playing with my regular team comp which consists of Razorback, Gammond, Mandrake + another support, either Heimlock or Halo and another DPS like Dogface, Hideo or Fortress.
You bring up a good point in that Razor and Gammond are both tanky and do good damage, Razorback in particular but their damage is mostly from AoE abilities. I found that these abilities were rendered somewhat ineffective in the event because it difficult to bring anyone down really low, let alone kill them, due to the increased HPS. For reference my Razorback has 8 stars and 4 gold bars. So even the tanks that do good damage couldn’t really combine to bring anyone but the lowest health characters down before heals went off. Whether or not this is the way it should be is up for debate.
Teams with platinum dogface and/or prophet were almost impossible to beat. My Dogface was only gold 0 and 7 stars so I couldn’t really beat them at their own game. I even tried using odachi and maven (both 7 stars) but to no avail, dog in that event had way too many hit points and could easily find cover in the backline.
You are right, we agree. And if I really think about it, Dogface was really the only dps hero that stood out to me as being obscenely op…Its also possible that odachi at plat might be comperable as well. Most of the other dps heroes deal damage in short bursts that have the “possibility” of being mitigated by healing. I honestly think if they nerf AOE healing hard enough, and fix the single target healers there can be some actual strategy involved, single target healing is much more balanced but is way way too weak atm. Only Nightengale is a viable single target healer atm.
Cheers,
D.L.
Not true, Operator’s single target heal is WAY stronger than Nightengale’s.
I don’t think Operator’s healing cools down nearly as quickly though. Nightengale can spam her heals pretty quick, feels like you have to wait forever for Operator.
There are a lot of factors that go into the strength of a heal…for instance, you can cast nightengale’s heal ever 6 SECONDS! The maximum speed you can charge up opperator’s heal is 15 seconds. Not only that but if your AI is controling both, the gale will heal for WAY WAY more. The reason is that overhealing is rather useless. If operator healed the CURRENT lowest health hero (AKA switched when they no longer needed healing than I would agree).
For the record:
Nightengale
Bronze max = 20 seconds
Bronze min ~ 6 seconds (-6 seconds per shot, maximum of 3 shots per cd)
Silver max= 18 seconds
Operator
Bronze max = 40 seconds
Bronze Min = 15 seconds (hitting every single shot)
Silver= is irrelevant because its actually one of the worst crap abilities in the game…unlike gale’s silver which is one of the best ones.
Frankinoise…
Literally one of the crappiest heroes in the game…don’t get me started…
Hardscope…
Doesn’t do either damage or healing very well…mostly because his bronze has a base 60 SECOND COOLDOWN, and his silver has weird mechanics.
(Does have potential though)
For this past brawl and current, Halo platinum is crazy.
During the brawl every time savage unleashed his special with Halo platinum it was as good as game over.
Other than that the games were fun, could try more heroes and use them effectively but the games took 3x as long.
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