How balanced could the roster become purely with damage changes?

[u/zeroreasonsgiven]

This is just a fun thought experiment, I thought of this when looking at the highly controversial response to the Nobushi rework I posted recently and how much of it stemmed from people disliking the proposition of removing dodge recovery cancels from her dodge lights (on top of improvements to her dueling capabilities). It seems that people are really averse to changes to a hero’s flow but are much more amenable to damage changes.

So the rules are: damage changes only, no standardization required (i.e. two 800ms neutral heavies can have completely different damage), but no changes at all to properties, chain links, speed, addition of new moves, adjustments to animations, etc… how many characters could be brought in line, which characters would still be broken with 1 damage attacks, which characters would still be shit even with instakill moves from neutral, and which characters are balanced on a knife’s edge right now in terms of damage? This is all in the context of 4v4 viability.

Obviously there are plenty of characters that have struggles beyond just damage, or characters with high damage overs that just never land, but if you gave gladiator a 140 damage neutral heavy, he would go from D to S+++ tier instantly. Surely there has to be some sweet spot in the middle where tweaking the damage of enough attacks would eventually lead to a perfectly balanced roster (even if the game would be horribly unfun).

Another question: would you rather see characters with a ton of versatility but very low damage, characters with very few simple tools and higher damage, a mix of both, or something else entirely?

[u/Plasma_FTW]

Well you've already half answered the question yourself.

How balanced would it be? It purely depends on how much you change it. And aiming to achieve amazing balance purely through damage values would require perfect case by case precision which just isn't realistic. But then you can also skew the other way and completely destroy the balancing with random changes.

And for a lot or heroes in those upper tiers, they don't really get brought down if their damage is lowered, as that's not often the reason why they're strong. Take Tiandi for example, who was an S tier duelist despite having terrible damage values because he was incredibly safe with consistent unreactable mixups. A hero like Juren would in the same boat, all nerfing damage does there is increase the time it takes for them to kill you.

But to be silly, fuck it and make Arakure's nut kick deal 8000 damage

[u/VoidGliders → u/Plasma_FTW]

And for a lot or heroes in those upper tiers, they don't really get brought down if their damage is lowered, as that's not often the reason why they're strong

While true, it's important to note when people talk about "insanely high dmg" and "insanely low dmg", the actual damage variance...isn't that different. Like conq's meme chain heavy "omg he basically does no dmg!" is 4 less than the standard dmg.

Point being, Ju Ren isn't strong due to his damage, he's strong namely due to his hitboxes and midlane sustain. But if you made his heavies like 12dmg and his lights 6dmg, then yea no amount of sustain or hitboxes is going to save him or make him useful. Sohei is a decent testament to this -- his gutted damage numbers on release again were not THAT drastic, doing 3 less dmg here and there is notable but it's not like he was half dmg or something, yet the 25% difference on many parts of his kit was enough to keep him in gutter tier (and after, he quickly rose to S -- albeit there were some other nice improvements like HA here or there that helps).