devtrackers.gg
I appreciate all the thought and effort they put into the game, but simply cannot agree when he brings up balance here.
How is it a healthy play pattern when all tournaments and high ranked games are filled with Wraith, Pathfinder, Wattson and Gibraltar?
I wish they would dare to make as much changes to legends as they do to weapons. Weapon balance changes has been really good overall.
" How is it a healthy play pattern when all tournaments and high ranked games are filled with Wraith, Pathfinder, Wattson and Gibraltar? "
They're different issues? Those legends are the meta more because of their own abilities, than the lack of ability on other legends. That is to say; in order to buff a legend like Caustic to a point where he competes with their inherent capabilities is likely to create a very broken Caustic. As much as we hear players constantly say "buff everyone to be as good as X, don't nerf X!" it's not sustainable. I think Gibralter is an example of that; when brought up to a level that competes with the top tier legends, which data wise he still struggles to do (even at his best) he becomes unfun to fight against.
" I wish they would dare to make as much changes to legends as they do to weapons. Weapon balance changes has been really good overall."
Thanks, I'm glad you're happier with the weapon balance situation. Weapons are far easier to make balance changes to because they're much more data driven than the legends. We can tweak damage, raise/holster times, viewkick, magazine size, etc... without much (if any) downstream work. Changes to things like fire rate and reload speed are bit more involved; fire rate requires audio work, and reload speed requires both audio and animation if the changes are drastic. New hopups tend to require audio and FX, as well as significant lead time for ping voice lines.
Legends, on the other hand, have far fewer knobs to tweak. Cooldowns and damage are easy, but a lot of the ability durations require audio, animation, and FX work to adjust. Abilities themselves can require significant code work, depending on the type of change.
Even if that is all true it doesnt change my point. We saw the the same thing happen in the past for many legends. I said right when the game launched they could never balance these legends in a good way without adjusting health pools if they are going to have vastly different hitbox sizes. Respawn tried over and over for months to balance them on abilities. Of course it failed. Then they go back and start adding low profile and eventually fortified.
Another example is pathfinder, people said his hitbox was too big for the longest time. They kept buffing the shit out of his abilities, more beacons, longer zipline, faster grapples. Finally they realize its not going to work and they change his hitbox. BOOM over night he becomes an impossible to hit god that is also insanely fast has super fast ultimate and can mobilize around the entire Kings canyon at a crazy fast speed. Now they have to spend many more patches trying to get him back in check.
All this is because they DONT get what is important to balance because they dont listen to people who know it, people who have seen it in game after game. So how much work, and how many months of time were wasted, and the saddest part is they are still screwing around with it and still screwing it up. By now all the launch legends should be balanced and the only issues should be new legends coming in.
"Another example is pathfinder, people said his hitbox was too big for the longest time. They kept buffing the sh*t out of his abilities, more beacons, longer zipline, faster grapples. BOOM over night he becomes an impossible to hit ..."
Unless I've warped in to some bizarro timeline, Pathfinder's hitbox was adjusted Mar. 19th, one whole month after launch. It was the first live adjustment we made to him. It was adjusted once more July 2nd.