SonOfGarry

It’s well known at this point that tanks are the least popular role to play. Do you have any thoughts to share on this ie. Balance philosophy, upcoming ideas that you’d want to try?

Actually we've been talking about Tanks, as role, a lot recently. In the past we've had trouble trying to figure out how to make tank heroes like Roadhog compete with big protective tanks like Reinhardt. Lately we've been thinking, what if we just go the other direction? What if Reinhardt was more like Roadhog? What would that feel like for the entire game? Basically, what if all 'main tanks' became 'off tanks'?

This would mean Tanks would be less about pure protection, and more about brawly offense. Barriers would be less prevalent, damage overall would be higher (tanks doing more dmg, and reducing less dmg), which is kind of scary potentially. We've already been experimenting on this front and so far its been pretty fun, though the game does feel significantly different. Players have to play the map angles a lot more aggressively as you can't just rely oin your Tank/barrier for cover.

I'm not sure where these experiments will go but they're pretty interesting so far.

Blizz_JeffKaplan

tracer plz

Doomfist could also work, hes kind of a fighting game hero already! He's certainly inspired by fighting games.

fraggg3r

Will there be a balance between the amount of heroes in each role (so 33.3% in tank, damage, support) or will damage always have the largest pool of heroes?

This comes up a lot so i'd like to touch on this.

I would love to get the roster to 33% each, that's certainly a goal. That said, I'm worried about going a very long time without any damage hero representation. If you look at the release history, we've been trying to push it towards an even roster without just ignoring damage heroes entirely.

orisasb00ty

Do you regret any of the reworks you have done with any of the heroes at all, If so who and why?

Not really... though as i've mentioned a couple times here already maybe we could have pushed harder to iterate on Symm as a healer instead of a damage dealer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer.

solfizz

Thanks for allowing the community to do this first of all!

(/u/blizz_jeffkaplan) (/u/blizz_smercer) (/u/blizz_geoffgoodman) The biggest thing on my mind is that of Ultimate Abilities and your take on their current power level, particularly when they are thrown in conjunction with each other. A solo Ultimate feels pretty fair for the most part, but more often than not those "desperate pushes" that involve 2 - 4 going off simultaneously just feel TERRIBLE on the receiving end.

I acknowledge that there's strategy in saving Ultimate abilities, so blasting everything the team has isn't always the best choice. But I still can't help but feel like when these moments DO occur, which is still too frequent for my taste, that they negate the gameplay integrity that is so demonstrable in the regular gunplay w/ normal abilities.

Does the team think along the same lines, where Ultimate Abilities might still be too strong still, and what are the plans moving forward to change this if at all? Even if there are no current plans to change the weight of these Ults, would you still be able to shed light on what the thought process is toward them currently?

Thank you so much again guys!

This comes up fairly often, and in the past we have done a few things to nerf ultimates already. We've nerfed the ultimate costs across the board twice now, to try to make sure they aren't coming up too often. We've tried to adjust ults that feel like they don't have enough counterplay, such as Sombra's EMP getting a longer delay before going off.

Overall this is something we're very aware of and we're trying to make sure ultimates still feel like big moments within the game, but not just purely being an 'I win' button. Abilities like Baptiste's lamp (which btw i find funny the community calls it this, since internally we literally used a lamp model while testing it) were created to help open up more options to counter ults without requiring your own ultimate. Ideally it should feel great to land a big ultimate, but also feel great if you can work around or straight up counter an enemy ultimate, which is also why we made a change a while ago which made it so if you ever kill or stun ...

shiftup1772

People love to throw around power creep because everyone can attribute whatever issues they with the game to some kinda power creep.

However, most discussions center around damage/healing and ttk.

On the lethality/ttk front:

Its hard to know exactly if lethality has crept up in the actual hero data, if the meta and/or player skill has pushed it up further than it was, or if its all just perception, but we've tried a couple internal experiments where we've tried lowering dmg and healing across the board to see how it feels. That experiment didn't quite work as a simple experiment, because there are a number of heroes that have certain thresholds that break if you lower damage etc. We'd have to do something more methodical to test it properly but I can tell you for sure the game doesn't feel very good when lethality gets too low, even if healing also gets low.

On the healing front especially, once health bars are moving up and down a lot more slowly, it makes it really hard to feel like you're "saving" people in clutch situations (unless you use an ult or something of course).

Interestingly, on our list of experiments to try is to make the game significantly more lethal than i...

FoxCabbage

Would it be possible to make it a real feature that doesn't require a weird button mash combo?

This is a reasonable request. I'll look into it.

IAmBLD

Geoff, could you maybe explain yourself a bit better? Sorry, but since you're already so forthcoming on these upcoming changes, I was hoping you could elaborate. Because what you're saying here sounds like a straight nerf to Moira, Surely that's not what you're trying to acomplish?

Sorry no this would be part of other changes, like Fade still causing your team to phase out (like the last experimental card).

It was a fun experiment, but it was too good as a dispeling/cleasing tool and far too good at countering zarya/sigma ults. We're going to try a version where she can still phase out her allies, but she doesn't remove debuffs (like ana nade) and it wont break people out of these ults. You can, however, learn to time it vs. sigma ult to try to cancel the damage part of the slam, or just reduce incoming damage while stuck in Zarya ult, which can still be very powerful (maybe too much still? we'll find out)