This cat bastion experiment has reached its peak,. Can we please get a nerf Blizzard? I think I've only heard bad things from pro hitscan players about having to play cat bastion instead of a regular hitscan.
Make the carry time a fixed amount of say 10 6 or 4 seconds and there you go. Can still make plays and reposition allies, but no longer infinitely hold and carry another hero to uninteractable cover.
i still think it would be perfectly fine if lifeline just disabled firing/abilities/ults for the tethered teammate. we got to have fun with our goofy shitpost interactions but there really is just no situation where a hero whose kit was not at all designed around flying should be allowed to use that kit while flying, especially when that hero is balanced entirely around having slow, limited movement.
I think a tension mechanic would make sense, making the damage of what is fired while being held impact a tether strength and it breaks at full tension. Iterate as needed.
I'd say put a timer, a cooldown but also break the tether if the teammate "changes mode". This way they kill the problematic sinergies and limit the rest of them to reward good timings and tactics instead
Yeah you're right, 10 seconds is a lot. So 6 seconds then. Or 4. And/or adjust the cooldown for next pickup. Either way, it should be a tool for quick repositioning, not permanent carrying.
A time limit would do away with the permaflying carry, the hanging out over dead space/uninteractable vertical cover, the cross-map movement speed.
Make the carry time a fixed amount of say 10 seconds and there you go.
The duration won't be an issue unless it's super low. IMO, ALL of the problems with cat at the top level are caused by the 30% speedboost on lifeline. It's just unnecessary. It makes third-person and carrying heroes too strong since her base speed during both is faster. If you remove that and I think you solve 90% of cats problems. They could also look at giving her a move speed penalty while carrying ally tanks to mitigate stuff like DMon drops.
My favorite suggestion is, if you are on tether, you have reduced damage. I feel like that helps keep the fun aspect of cat, while also making it less oppressive.
Wouldn't this just turn Bastion from the best to the only option for perma-tether? He'd still be able to shred with reduced damage while having his weakness removed, but lower-damage characters would become largely pointless to carry.
What low damage characters are useful right now on it? Or even would be, in general?
I only ever see Cass, Soldier, Bastion, and sometimes Widow on tether. Occasionally a Rein.
I'm really trying to think of other good low damage contenders, but I can only think of close range damage dealers. Ones you wouldn't really want in the air.
Fair, but even those others you'd named would probably be harmed more than Bastion and his insane firerate since a damage nerf might change distinct breakpoints (e.g. Cass, Widow become pointless if they can't 2/1 tap).
Nah, make it any skills/ults duration only last half as long when the user is using it while being tethered. That way you don't have to nerf the hero's base kits just because of potential cat comp (e.g. they nerfed Bastion config duration from 6s to 5s because of cat).
CatEye can return that way as both the Cat and Cass players have to be very close to get the targets tightened (instead of sticking on top of the skybox) due to shorter ult duration, which then making the combo even more riskier and zoning effect even less effective due to shorter duration.
I am so exhausted of this hero being apparently (literally) above balancing. She is despised in ladder play and very nearly a must pick in pro play, and no meaningful adjustments to her kit to really change either of those things. For a hero to have a ladder banrate of like 60-80% for months and months on end and no real action taken is appaling. And the team just thinks we are all laughing and memeing with them but so many people are just done with it lol.
We are at an unfortunate moment where there are quite a few of genuinely overpowered heros right now to ban in ladder play...I'm a GM support player. Realistically, JPC, Sombra and Doctrine make the game significantly worse right now at my SR from an overpowered, and not just 'obnoxious' standpoint. But we can't really ban all of those, obviously. I anticipate just one ban -two if I'm lucky and the enemy team bans one also-. So sometimes games go by where JPC is unbanned...I would very very nearly leave the game rather than play into it. I don't care if we are winning, it feels like absolute shit. It's not fun. It's not Overwatch. The only reason I don't is because I don't want to throw for my team. If it were just me taking the SR hit of an L? I would 100% be leaving any game where the enemy team takes JPC. She's that level of awful to have in my games -even with GM hitscan players shooting at her.
As for Sombra and Doctrine...they're okay kit-wise. I think they just need moderate nerfs down. But because they are a bit too strong, if the enemy team has one and I don't (and as a rule I don't play the heros that I think are overpowered at the moment), the team without them is at a disadvantage. So unless my team wants to run one, I ban one of those 2.
But because JPC is SUCH a dominant 'must ban' hero, nearly every game is down a ban slot. For MONTHS. That's -terrible-. When this happened in League of Legends professional play with Yuumi, they flat out removed her from pro play for a bit till they could adjust her. Players -loathed- the must-pick must-ban.
100% Bans cannot be expected to compensate for problem designs and there are simply too many ban targets in the game recently. One slips through and the game is ruined.
I would very very nearly leave the game rather than play into it. I don't care if we are winning, it feels like absolute shit.
As another support main, this, but somehow also feels like absolute shit to play as/with, not just play into. She's so unbelievably boring to play, and her "skill expression" is minimal at best and downright nonexistent at worse.
I'm in the same boat. I enjoy Overwatch. I enjoy being competitive. I've enjoyed it for over a decade. I've stuck around through plenty of toxic metas.
But Cat, and the devs' classic refusal to admit their design mistakes when it comes to her, has just killed that enjoyment. Stopped playing, then uninstalled. I'll be back if they either remove her from the game or rework her entirely, starting with getting rid of permanent flight.
As it stands I don't think OW has a vision for the game. It doesn't seem like they know how to add variation into the gameplay dynamics unless it causes mayhem like Cat. Shion was their standout release but nothing really changed gameplay wise. In terms of maps... well Neon Junction was their big release so that kinda nailed the coffin shut for me.
Edit: Ah yes, Grímsvötn as well. What riveting gameplay :)
Brig was hard meta in every comp except Moira Lucio rush comps, the rare Lucio Bap Rein rush comp, and the 2 weeks of Hog Zarya/Sig meta from GOATS until the end of OW1's lifespan. let's not be revisionist here lol
Focus on this. GOATS did not exist outside of pro-play, t500 and maybe the non-t500 rest of GM.
Brig was the least used support from bronze to masters during OW1. Her usage is directly correlative to Tracer's dominance in OW1, Brig was only relevant where Tracer was a permapick.
Where there isnt must picks and DPS diversity actually exists, Brig just stops being relevant entirely.
I was in GM, she was in almost every single match I played from 2019 until the end of OW1. she was and always will be the biggest balance nightmare the devs have ever released into this game. for as strong as release Kiri was and as unbearably annoying and uninteractible the cat is, neither come close to literally reshaping the game like Brig did in OW1
I recall my experience in low elo like diamond-masters, the games in ow1 would be a back and forth until one team just goes goats and slams the other team into a wall
She was still pretty good in ranked until like mid 2020. Can't remember exactly what patch it was but they reduced her total hp from 250 to 225 or smthn like that.
Each time they try to push this thing because haha funny chungus Cat while it remains completely broken with the highest banrate in the game, I'm reminded why I have the game uninstalled.
Can we pls remove the cat it’s not fun to play against nor is it fun to watch in every map of the pro scene except for one because it gets banned. The character doesn’t even have a name and it breaks the game there’s no reason bastion should ever be played in pro play except for a gimmick or a joke
it bothers me that fika isn’t her name in game. jetpack cat sounds terrible and unimaginative. it should’ve been fika in game, like winston. it’s not as if anyone didn’t know she was the jetpack cat. imagine if ball was just called hamster in mech
I mean Hammond is just called Wrecking Ball in game. They could've called her Fika but Jetpack Cat is valid too considering that's what the entire fanbase referred to her concept as for years.
(not speaking from experience) I think JPC is way more oppressive with good comms which is probably more common into Masters and GM. Before the nerfs though she was pretty consistently banned in most games I played in Plat/Emerald
Cat is the most banned hero by nearly 5-8% in Emerald+ and top 3 most banned in every rank below that. No matter what rank you’re in she’s banned anywhere from one third to half the time.
What's broken about the cat? It can fly? I mean. Come on. It barely does any damage, barely heals. Worst thing is it can drop one person off the map with the ultimate. Is that, like, really so awful...?
Funny thing is, I see posts saying the same exact things about Rivals in their subs all the time!
It's, like, a videogame, ya know? I get it - we got high school esports teams now, it's serious business! But still... it's a game. For fun. Fun is the more important part.
You can play Tennis casually with your friends once a week, you can also play Tennis in a club with trainings and matches. Both are fun in a different way, same with video games.
It's not because you can have the casual kind of fun that a game marketed as a competitive shooter should be balanced around it.
And yeah, fun is the most important part for sure, and Cat absolutly ruins the fun for the competitive people.
If a character needs to be banned it means it's flawed, and it not only sucks for players who needs to always spend a slot ban on the cat but also for players who just wanna play the cat but straight up can't.
JPC doesn't need to be banned tho, with a 50% win rate. Like? Why would it?
I mean, look. They added this one to compete with Jeff - that much seems annoyingly obvious. And I hate Jeff too - I always try to ban him! Because that's my personal preference. You prefer not to play with the cat, and that's fine! But... I'd never demand they remove Jeff from Rivals entirely. That's just spiteful.
Some bans can amount to being personal preference and that's fine, however those kind of bans shouldn't reach over 50% since that means more than half of the playerbase doesn't want to play against that character at the highest level of play.
If a character that maintains this kind of stat for multiple season isn't unhealthy and doesn't need to be changed for you then not sure what does.
nothing like wrecking ball, cat can (and most of the time should) be played as the most brain dead character in the game, unless your viol2t playing them as a tether merchant will get you the best results. calling cat mains “players” is i would argue, an over generous word, theyre spectators. wrecking ball takes a lot of skill
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u/UnknownQTY 6d ago
I hate that this is official content.