[2019] Geoff appreciation thread

Thanks!

Overwatch is certainly a challenging game to both tune and continually add new/interesting content. When I think back to how the game was in beta, or even launch, I feel like we’ve come a long way since then. Remember, there was a time when McCree’s fan the hammer did full damage per bullet, Zenyatta had 150 health, Pharah’s Conc Blast did 700 damage to shields/barriers (poor Zen…), Reinhardt’s charge had no “wind up”, it would just come out instantly and pin/kill anyone in front of him.

That said we’re committed to continue to update and tune the game. Although there will always be some changes that will not be popular with some players, know that the the goal is always to keep every hero unique and powerful for everyone.

While I’m here i might as well clear up a couple minor misconceptions I see occasionally about my history at Blizzard. Previous to the Overwatch team I worked on World of Warcraft as an encounter designer. I made a ton of different content from dungeons like Shadowfang Keep, Deadmines, and Gnomeregan, to raid encounters like Onyxia, Blackwing Lair, C’Thun and Lich King. From there I moved directly onto Titan which eventually became Overwatch. While I have great respect for the designers over on the the Heroes of the Storm team, I never worked on that project other than occasionally sending feedback or talking to various designers over lunch etc.

Geoff, what do you think was the most overpowered balance change the team has made?

I’d say at this point its pretty clear Brigitte’s initial balance was pretty far off the mark. She has been nerfed multiple times since then and she is still very strong.

Another regret is although I really like the way Hanzo has turned out, I somewhat regret increasing his projectile speed specifically. It will always feel great when testing a change like that, and it has helped make him a lot more consistent… but he has lost some of what helped make him feel very different than other heroes. That’s not to say you’re going to see Hanzo nerfed next patch or something, but its just one of those retrospect things that I wonder if there was another way to get to the same goal.

Thanks for the response, and I look forward to the responses in Baptiste Q&A. Have a good night.

We’re mostly going to see how this next patch shakes out, since it has a ton of changes in it already.

That said, we would have liked to keep the Junkrat buff at 140 from a pure DPS stand-point (especially against Tanks/Barriers), but it was just really pushing it once he could one-shot 200 health heroes with a 50%+ boost (Orisa ult, Nano, Baptiste ult, etc). We experimented with making the grenades no longer explode on enemy impact once they hit a surface (as a way to nerf his spam, without affecting direct hits) but it felt really weird and kind of broken in a lot of cases.

So possibly Junkrat buffs and some different Reaper buffs, since the pure passive healing buff was really problematic at the lower ranks.

We have a ton of unused ability and weapon prototypes sitting around. They’re generally either something we’ve tried on a hero in the past and didn’t like, or something we did like but didn’t feel like it fit right on the hero we were testing.

Some examples off the top of my head:

Bomblet Gun: We had this gun where the projectiles would stick into enemies, but the impact damage was pretty low. The alternate fire had a fairly long animation time but would remotely detonate all the little bombs you stuck into all your targets. It was pretty fun but we just need the right hero for it to work with (it was really fun playing around with it on Tracer!).

Invis Wall: This was originally on Sombra i think? The idea is you plant this wall that made it so enemies couldn’t see you though it, but you and your allies could see just fine. It didn’t block bullets like a barrier, it was just for hiding while running past a choke or just throwing into the middle of a fight. It was pretty scary to fight against when all these projectiles were just magically coming out of the thing but you couldn’t see who or where they were being fired from. It was like a high-tech smoke bomb, kind of.

I always thought it would be cool to try to do some sort of “tunneling” effect, where you could maybe temporarily destroy or remove a small part of a level to move or shoot through.

Honestly it’ll probably never happen due to immense tech issues, but it always seemed like it could be cool to see.

I think that’s certainly possible. Overall her healing output is still higher than the other healers, which she pays for by not being able to split focus and do other things while healing. I’d also love to be able to increase the power of her damage boosting, but it causes a lot of issues with various breakpoints where suddenly X hero can one-shot 200 health heroes etc. There are other ways to make it feel better without just adding raw damage though, we’ll see.

I actually looked into the railings stuff with Symm/Reaper ground targeting and worked on it for a while last week. It turns out its a bit more complicated and is going to require some code changes to try to change it, but i’m hoping we can get something in next patch if it goes well in play testing.

As far as the teleport build speed… maybe. I totally get the thing where you go to try to make the clutch save and the build time is so long that they die anyway, but the concern is we need to make sure we don’t just give your whole team nearly instant teleportation across a huge area. If we’re not careful it could really make all chokes not even worth trying to defend etc. That said it something we could try and play test with and see how it goes.

Hmm… you’re right…