[2020] Experimental Card Recap - June 5

Hey folks!

Earlier this afternoon, we ended our most recent test on the Experimental Card - thanks to everyone that participated in the experiment while it was up. If you missed it, check out the Past Experiments notes: HERE.

Overall, this test was meant to take a balance pass at some of the heroes we feel are not currently in-line with their counterparts. We saw lots of discussion and feedback surrounding two heroes in particular: Genji and Moira. So, we wanted to take a moment to share some insights into what we were trying to achieve, as well as some learnings from the experiment.

GENJI:
We are generally trying to find a stronger niche for Genji, especially now that he’s competing against both Echo and Doomfist as a mobile burst damage hero. In this experiment, we tested pushing his strength towards dealing with hitscan heroes through Deflect. Additionally, we made adjustments to his Shuriken damage and Secondary Fire spread to improve his close range damage consistency. We feel both of these changes are getting us closer to our overall goal of bringing Genji in line with our other mobile burst damage heroes.

MOIRA:
We’ve been having a lot of internal discussion and playtesting to find the right place for Moira. Moira’s damage is especially powerful because it heals her and is fairly easy to use. In this test, we were looking for ways to decrease Moira’s damage while maintaining her overall power level by increasing her healing per second on Primary Fire. From the start we were pretty hesitant about these changes, but we wanted to give players a chance to play and provide opinions as well – that’s the beauty of Experimental Card! We’re glad we did the experiment, but we feel that this test still doesn’t hit our goals for Moira overall. We’ll be reverting these changes for now, but will continue iterating on changes for Moira - so you may see more experiments for her in the near future.

Thank you again to everyone who participated in the Experimental Card. Please continue to provide your thoughts and feedback!

My biggest “annoyance” with Moira is how the projectory changes with her damage orb. I feel this is more of a map design issue rather than a hero balance issue, but it can he pretty frustrating to evade that purple ball when you think it should turn left and I go right but the orb just goes right as well and melts any remaining HP I have.