devtrackers.gg
To clarify: by good I mean she's picked a healthy amount and wins a good amount of her games. We've buffed her literally every patch since she came out so she's gonna chill for Season 8, at least for the initial patch. One of our designers is playing around with how much time we can shave off tactical to make it feel better--making it faster apparently has implications on the VFX and it's also one of the scarier changes in terms of you losing track where she went, so we wanna try just making it faster to use and go from there. Like I said, not gonna be in Season 8, possibly also not in 8.1; might never ship if we find it's too powerful in playtest or if her pick and win rate continue going up.
EDIT: Having written this of course I remember there was a non-tac related fix that will likely go into Season 8: the ability to look into airdrops and open them with ult. No rest for Loba I guess.
For real, I hate how we're left starving for the slightest adjustments for seasons on end. I'm getting so fed up of waiting for nothing... Meanwhile Horizon exists. Why are they so scared of even giving Loba the tiniest buff to her tactical? Yes, she's a support character, but there are still things that can be done.
We buffed her like every patch since she released? I think what it is is you really wanted a buff to her tactical, which is understandable: we were so concerned with balance and combat readability that we made it not feel very good at all to use.
Or maybe. Just maybe.... have it work on WE. Saw my teammate Loba throw it 5 times in a row without it working lmao
Is that still happening? Ugh :( Sorry! We're fixing those as we find them, but unfortunately a level designer has to go in and fix each of those places where it fails individually.
Reading his comment really highlights how slow these patches come out, one to two patches for legends could be anywhere between 3 - 6 months away. Then when buffs/nerfs happen it's only a small portion of the cast with any significant change. Rollout is soooo slow for a live service game.
I agree with you! Coming from a game like League that patches every other week the pacing felt glacial to me as well. Not that this will help you, but it's not devs being lazy; making a game that has to go through certification for console adds a lot of overhead, and with the current patch schedule we already have less than a week of time between one patch releasing live and us having to lock the next patch. When performance data also has lag time (generally we see win and pick rates that are 2-3 days old) it's hard to see how we could go much faster.
I will say this, and I don't know how much you'll care about it, but Respawn really cares about their devs. There's no crunch here that I've seen; certainly no mandated crunch. I think that kind of stuff is really important for hiring and retention and long term you all get better games because there's an experienced happy team that isn't worked to within an inch of its life.
Also it's just the right thing to do.
During the last drop package event...it kinda highlighted how useless Loba is at times since her ult and passive were obsolete. Out of all the legends who have ways of repositioning themselves/getting out of trouble she is arguably the weakest.
You pick her for loot and ammo, she gives the rest of her team the best chance of winning due to superior firepower/armour. At the end of the game though, she is kinda pointless.
Would like to see them fix her dodgy head peak issue and improve her tac (something like speed it up, let her draw her weapon/improve her mobility after its thrown, don't make it leave a trail, remove the sound effect, etc.). She still wouldn't be considered a necessary legend, but it might help her in combat. If they're going to keep horizon as she is and buff wraiths abilities after the hitbox nerf, then loba needs something to compete. Even Octanes jump can be more useful for building hopping (hitting someone in air is harder than someone staggering slowly).
Fun story: we had Loba being able to look into and open care packages just barely ready to go out with the airdrop takeover, but wouldn't have had any playtesting time, so we considered it too risky. That fix should come soon!
Quick question, I’m assuming the data says Loba uses her ultimate more than her tactical. Does any other legend also use their ultimate more?
This is actually not a data point we look at / have a graph for. It's hard to compare, right, what with tacticals and ultimates being on such very different CD ratios between different legends. I'm sure we could get that data, but I'm not sure what I would do with it.
You overbuffered her ultimate and left her tactical underwhelming. The charge time on her ultimate compared to other legends is a little crazy. I love playing her, but her tactical is often more punishing than rewarding. A cooldown like pathfinders would help in situations where using it is punishing. The bracelet is so hit and miss. If you compare her tactical to other mobility based tacticals it has to be at the bottom for efficiency. I understand wanting to make it not too OP but she's supposed to be a sneaky little thief but her bracelet is the equivalent of a loud music blaring disco ball blasting through the sky.
Have you considered giving her a slight buff with the teleportation endpoint? I find the most frustrating thing being that the bracelet is so easy to see that if you use it in any kind of fight, especially if there is line of sight, the entire enemy team will lazor you the second you blink. The second or two it takes to orient usually ends in death. If you fixed this she would be perfect.
Moving some of the power from ult to tac is absolutely an option! We buffed her ultimate because anecdotally it hadn't been used much at all--both from looking at our games as and with Lobas and from watching streams, people basically disregarded the ability. We definitely fixed that, but it was a heavy swing. I think we could add some CD back into the ultimate and tone down how much of it she gets for free start of match. Don't think we're locked into always having this much power in the ult now! But it for sure was the safer option; I don't think any amount of power in her ult would have made us go "oh sh*t that was too much, revert immediately", while with the tactical that was a real risk.
Hello. I was wondering if you are planning to modify Bangalore somehow since she basically wasn't touched since game release. I remember an idea here on reddit that her smoke granade could break doors or her ult rockets be triggered by proximity of an enemy and not by timer.
I never wanna change a character just for the sake of changing them. What would be your goal in making a change to Bangalore? Her abilities seem pretty good and healthy for the game, her performance is really good both in terms of pick rate and win rate; like, why make a change to that?
Daniel could you confirm if a tactical buff is coming for loba? because that would keep me motivated to play her even though her tactical is the worst
I can't confirm that anything's coming, but we're looking at it. One of the possible outcomes of looking at it is that we don't make a change, so keep that in mind. Certainly nothing planned for Season 8.
Why not buff her ultimate? Here's my idea.
When you manually close the Black Market, it steals all the ammo out of everyone's guns in the nearby area, and dumps it on the floor of where the Black Market was, forcing everyone to reload.
It also makes sense, since she's actually thieving from people, rather than being a pro scavenger, and would give you a good opportunity to push on enemies. (Also, it's a minor L-Star buff since it would be immune to this, and I love that gun)
I actually think the tactical is fine. The only problem is that it is just the only ability she has that is directly useful in combat, so it has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Letting a Loba sabotage her enemies with her ult would be great.
I seriously cannot tell if this is a sh*tpost or not. If it is, good work!
Since Loba is a loot based legend why cant she open blue supply bins? i don’t see a problem in sharing it with lifeline.
Fun fact: she used to be able to, when we treated ability to open blue bins as a "class passive" for support legends; her and Lifeline are the only support legends so far. I don't 100% remember why we moved off that during her dev; might have been that we couldn't find good fits for class passives for defensive and assault, might have been that we thought Loba already had enough loot power. I really can't remember now! (We would have made that call some time in February 2020)
That's absolutely something on the table we could bring back. We'd need a few more new voice lines for her (not a problem; just adds some dev time) and we'd need to make sure we absolutely do want new support legends to get access to blue bins (sounds like a no-brainer, but you never know in game design).