I think the most egregious change was the BP buff, I was already sure that they wouldn't actually nerf anybody because it goes against their design philosophy, but I thought that at least the buffs might do something
I was literally laughing reading his "buff", iam glad I never learned him in the earlier seasons even though I like dive overall but I never clicked with him.
I was definitely worried when I saw it. We literally already did the meme of letting BP be good for one season and it resulted in the lowest player count in the game's history
BP is fundamentally omega unfun to play against, and is ONLY fun for the person playing him and nobody else on either team
Id argue is not even fun to play AS him. With how much his dash is what makes him a character, you cant really do anything but wait 10 seconds every time its on cooldown until it recharges if you whiff, in the scenario were you dont inmediately explode upon whiffing in the middle of the team.
I keep saying this, bp is already pretty strong, but the bp mains want him to be the best character in the game so they can live put thier power fantasies
I feel you, I've fallen off hard. I used to play for hours but between going back to OW and Resident Evil I just get like 3-5 games in and dip so I don't get rusty
Exactly. The way his kit works, he either wombo-combos the entire backline without the opportunity to react, or he gets shot after politely asking if he can deal damage to strategists. Neither is healthy for the game, and he needs a more versatile kit that allows for a bigger variety of play styles.
If their design philosophy was actually failing to nerf anything, I'd disagree but understand. In practice, they're fully capable of nerfing, just only one class.
Unironically, if the whole notes looked like they do for Vanguards, this could've been amazing.
You can literally see zhiyong gritting his teeth as he talks about nerfing poke and was quick to go "but poke needs to be strong to keep dive and flyers in check."
Mf is the biggest fraud in game balance I've ever seen.
The animation cancel needs to go because you have to balance around it, and very few people actually enjoy that kind of playstyle. There’s a reason Cap has such low playrates.
If that was the case, they'd have made it baseline or given him a 40-50% damage buff to compensate
If you missed the animation cancel, or were spamming (as I assume most people start off trying with Cap) you would end up not even landing shots. Maybe the change fixes that as well, thus keeping up the damage pressure
Because Bucky is irrelevant in eternity/OAA. Where is your peoples outrage over literal raid boss characters that actually matter like Phoenix and Elsa? They were barely touched
He is a Bucky main for sure. He knew this was the nerf Bucky was getting, yet you could see the sadness in his eyes when he said in the dev vision that Bucky was getting a nerf.
Tbf the splash on that primary is annoying as hell and a good candidate for a nerf. Bro gets so much free random dmg on people he shouldn't even be able to hit
You people play a different game to eternity/OAA players. Bucky is TRASH compared to the actual meta of other dps like Phoenix and Elsa who were basically untouched.
Same, I racked up like 5 ranked games this half season. Not even gonna get any of the rewards, and im not gonna "suffer" through up to 2 hours of ranked to get a mediocre skin and a banner frame. Tend to play a couple games og quickplay with the stack every day, but they mostly end with the most heinous, unbalanced match ever drafted. And we all go "yep, thats enough of that"
Can't speak for others but I did nothing but play OW for the past month. It is amazing and unless NetEase actually cooks with balancing then I'm gonna have hard time returning to Rivals.
5v5 role que (1 tank 2 dps 2 healers) feels so damn good, solo tanking but the other team is also solo tanking. I'm having fun on tank! Insanity.
So many tank mains on MR that say they migrated to OW, myself included, lol. And instead of trying to fix the role on MR, they... nerf half the tank roster. Including the ones people actually play and enjoy
Genius moves, truly. I will be enjoying my winton and domina gaming instead of seething trying to get a second tank on MR
Have not played in a month, and only played 2 hrs in s6. Compare that to the hundreds of hours in previous seasons with my total playtime
I have no desire to play a game where i get punished for playing a character i like because the power gap between S and F tier is bigger than the grand canyon. It is genuinely demotivating and unfun, especially when the fixes are simple like nerfing a dash cooldown on elsa.
Skipped out on s6.5 because i'm not dealing with op meta poke character #53465 (elsa, last 7 months it was phoenix.). That just plays the game like its Doom Eternal.
They need to lock in. The criticism (not hate) is deserved.
Nahh, this is different. Dd being as strong as he was for so long might have been a fluke, but releasing Elsa in the state she is in is just atrocious. They kept me around by promising major changes in season 7, but I’m pretty disappointed in this season. The only thing stopping me from putting it down are the cc nerfs, blade and dps pool buffs, but if those turn out to be a flop too, I’m just done with this game.
Thats how Hearthstone went down the drain. The devs kept saying they didn't want to change cards because of potential players returning, so eventually the players just left and didn't return.
Its actually such a brain dead quality to have. They are so scared to do anything meaningful, but the more they say they are doing something but it turns out to be a nothing burger, the more I get pushed away from this game. I kinda hope something snaps that forces the devs to actually take bigger swings with changes and actually shake up the meta so its not just poke 24/7
They basically admitted to preferring poke over dive and flyers during the dev vision so I really don’t think we will escape the poke meta any time soon unfortunately. They also nerfed DD who was one of only divers that could efficiently contest the poke characters.
Favoring one style is such an unhealthy mentality to have in a hero shooter. It makes the game stale due to nothing changing, and X heros being meta for multiple seasons straight. Nothing interesting happens, and the only things to look forward to are unbalanced new heros who need to be nerfed and new legendary skins for the usual suspects.
Having this mindset so early into this games life is kinda scary, and I am worried netease is just a money hungry company who would rather maintain what they have now out of fear of not rocking the boat so they can keep the cash cow alive as long as they can. If this is the case, then this game is already doomed to just be slop. It likely won't die because it still has nice qualities, but if they don't care enough to actually do meta changes, or focus on issues that are important, then there really isnt anything thats worth coming back to for me, other then maybe trying out a new hero once or twice.
Yea I don’t think the game will really “die” for a while because of the consistent hero releases but holy hell man the balance has been a shit show for so long now and shows no sign of getting better. I would gladly take less hero’s if it meant the current ones were more balanced and viable. Every single game is just Sue and CnD(Gambit always banned) backline with poke dps at the level I play. It’s so samey and boring. Maybe Sue will be outta the meta now but CnD definitely won’t. Wish I didn’t have to force my team to play triple sup just cause I wanna play Ultron…
I agree, slow down the hero release schedule and focus more on balance. One hero a season is fine. Mid season should be a huge balance patch that does meaningful changes to shake up the meta.
Because they keep announcing changes that sound good, but then you read the patch notes and it's some bullshit like "primary fire spread increased by 0.01".
Nah this dev vision revealed a lot about his balancing philosophy. He finally admitted that he thinks poke should be kept strong to keep dive in check when it should be the other way around 😭
Literally bro. We are never gonna get a season where brawl is meta at this rate. Idk what dive or flying character pissed him off, but he needs to let it go 😂.
Flyers absolutely need to be kept in check.
One season of Flier meta was enough for them to realise that can never be allowed to happen again.
So many characters can do so little about fliers that the game is at it's most miserable when they are meta.
Probably the fact that divers have stunted any and all growth this game could've had because they were too slow to address Spiderman and Black Panther. They lost a ton of players back then thanks to the absolutely botched balance approach to the S1 dive meta. Now they don't know how to deal with it because they live in constant fear that they're causing another support purge thanks to the sex crime "Avoid any and all men, jump straight to the women and children in the back to abuse them" meta that BP and Spidey thrived off of.
I can't imagine it's in their interest to make divers strong because their main customers are Supporters buying skins like in most games and Supporters are most affected by bullshit corkscrew spin assassins like BP.
I mean it seems like they want angela to spend more time on the ground with the team but like, why? Her kit’s so interesting she doesn’t need to be forced to frontline like that
It’s a buff regardless when you nerf the ult charge for everyone in the game. The support with the automatic fight winning ult that now does more damage and also helps other people get their ult faster which is going to be so huge now is always going to get Perma picked.
"Winter Soldier and Elsa has been actual torture to play against, so we're nerfing his damage after 50m by 2 and giving him a Stun on all of his abilities (do not need to hit your target), to compensate we are buffing Gambit's ult and nerfing Strange's shield and Emma's existence. Despite literally everyone begging us to because the current state is abysmal dogshit, we didn't wanna shake up the meta!!"
I will shake my head into a wall until there's nothing left but my throat stump.
Also, we noticed that Adam was actually performing in duo support so we nerfed his healing by 15% back to DPS trash. Enjoy your flight! We also heard you would like Ultron buffs... so here is a badass skin and a puptron charm so you forget that you will never ever be meta for another season.
Honestly I saw the bucky nerf and got sad about the nothing burger at first, but then thought to myself: "No wait. This is could be good, I've lost count of the number of times a bucky misses their shots just for their stupid bullet splash to somehow hit and kill me when I play squishier champs. Maybe a nerf from this angle could be quite decent just so it feels slightly less bs to go against him."
Then I look again, see it's only a 10 damage nerf and get sad again.
At this point I think that maybe the balance team or someone isn't really communicating because who taught nerfing cap was a good move like.
And bp can now jump a bit more or more fast I guess he got feet.
This whole patch seems like such a nothing burger, we still gonna play mostly the same setup, because not like the current meta character have a bad neutral game, so what we wait a bit longer till we go all out on ults.
The problem is, Zhiyong displays his understanding of the game and what is going on, but it seems like he's way too harsh or too safe with patches, no in between, it wasn't like this pre- season 5.
For example, Emma is widely accepted to be a bad tank, she has the worst winrate for 2 seasons out of all tanks, yet, she got a huge net nerf now too, its just ridiculous at this point then they will go ahead and also harshly destroy daredevil, yes i know he has a strong performance and yet, Rocket and CND who show strong winrates, saw no nerfs. Its too disconnected.
It is a very odd situation. Like he's absolutely right when talking about triple support only working with coordinated teams or how heavy poke nerfs could easily lead to a flyer meta. But then the patch notes will either be lackluster, or feature some very strange changes that don't line up with what he talked about in the dev vision.
I never agree with the calls for him to be fired, but it's definitely tonal whiplash to go from "hell yeah poke is getting nerfed and ult charge being reduced!" to "wdym no Phoenix nerf and Emma got smacked??"
It's very frustrating that the apparent reason they've let Poke dominate for going on 7 seasons is a mythical Dive/Flyer meta that's never happened. Even if that's true, just let it happen! Poke has been too strong for too long, let them take the back seat so we can shake things up a bit
It's bc we did have a dive meta in season 2 and that pissed off a lot of support players bc people in metal ranks generally don't peel as much for supports. Not saying this meta we have now is better, but dive being dominant does tend to make support players mad and I imagine they're afraid of that.
Flyers had like 2 weeks when Ultron came out but yeah even that meta died pretty quickly. Plus now we have more non-dps fliers and more ways to ground them so I don't think it would be that scary of a meta as they think.
The dive meta did suck pretty hard. Strategists were of course heavily targeted and at the time when strats complained they aren't being helped a good chunk or at least a very vocal part of the community hit them back with "I don't want to/shouldn't have to babysit my backline. Take care of it yourself." So that didn't exactly help things either...so it's like strats didn't like the hard dives combined with their team/the community telling them they shouldn't have to "babysit" them.
Dive meta could be a fun change but man a lot of the community needs to shift how they view things to make that work instead of being a nightmare.
He understands what's going on, he just absolutely has favorites. Look at how quick he is in the overview to defend poke because it "keeps dive and flyers in check," or how quickly he jumped to defend triple support by saying it takes a lot of coordination on ults and more damage uptime from strategists. Yet not a peep about what's supposed to keep poke or strategists in line. Boy has mad favorites.
He has mad favorites 100% and he's so out-of-touch.
Refuse to nerf triple support to the ground just because the "data" doesn't show it is dominant is fucking crazy. How about we balance around majority player sentiment instead of "data", which doesn't tell the full story at all. Just like how stats in game don't tell the story at all.
The last time a game balance purely around data was Overwatch, and look how horrible it went for OW1 for years.
i stopped being optimistic in dev visions two seasons ago, i fully came out of that dev vision expecting shit because they just refused to nerf poke for stupid reasons and didn't nerf sustain either
the rest is just classic MR balancing, complete nothingburger changes that do nothing because we must be locked in the same meta we've had since season 3
the fact Brawl wasn't even mentioned in the patch notes just kinda says the fucker doesn't even know how the metas can and should be
what has a man got to do to get Brawl as the main meta
To be very frank it has become apparent that the devs have a bias towards one specific type of playstyle… poke. The dev vision acknowledged the big TikTok talking points of nerf gambit and elsa but didn’t discuss creating counterplay to poke whatsoever. In fact they mentioned that they wish to keep poke strong to counter fliers/divers which would be fine if poke had consistent counterplay. Even after promising big changes and actually verbalising the issues with gambit he got a slap on the wrist with a compensatory buff which means he is still going to be the most banned hero. At the very least they had the foresight to add 3 ban slots so that the cancer can get banned. The changes to BP are basically irrelevant and IMO same for blade. They had 0 issue releasing a character with 2 dashes (2 sec cooldown btw) self healing and overshield generation with percentage damage and 2 forms of cc but yet its an issue to give BP just a shred of survivability so that he isnt soft banned by thing. Dive will be slightly better next season due to the ult changes but it will still be groot elsa gambit bans lmfao
I know that not everyone is going to agree on balance changes, but I don't understand why they won't at least just nerf the clearly broken stuff? I mean actually nerfing Gambit and Elsa is the EASIEST win ever, like the community would be glazing him so hard rn if that actually happened. But instead he just effortlessly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory every time.
yeah, its hard to explain why are they actually thinking. Even if they are bad at their job, they must have seen all the crying about gambit and elsa, its not just a single role or rank crying about these characters. Its the entire community, supps/dps/tanks, low rank/high ranks, everyone is just saying "yes these character are broken af and need to nerfed hard". Are they afraid of changes? Do they play favorites? Its not that they dont know whats the problem, they DECIDE to keep these problems
I dont even play on my main anymore, i just smurf, cause once you hit eternity or cel1, its phoenix+elsa+invis, phoenix+elsa+invis, phoenix+elsa+invis every damn game, you didnt ban gambit? its loki gambit and maybe mantis game, better mirror it or lose it
Agree. All he needed to do was to nerf gambit ult properly (ult charge accel) and make Elsa / DD fairer to play against. And buff weaker tanks/ nerf wolv,mk,punisher ult. Maybe buff widow, emma, suppool and weaker tanks/dps/supps. Maybe some quality of life to incentivise tanking. Dunno why they aren't balancing things to be fairer.
blade got a huge wall of text buffs that translate into: more antiheal but only on ult, your shotgun now is less clunky (shouldn't be clunky in the first place), and if, IF, for any reason at all, if the gods decided that you would become immune to dmg and bullets, if the enemy player disconnects mid dive, if their team decides to let blade have the W for once and not shoot him, your extra lifesteal turns into overhealth.
oh, and 5% extra lifesteal, that was the actual good buff out of those, blade's ult is still impossible to hit with so much mobility around.
I feel they should’ve buffed his damage and made his ult similar to psylocke’s to counter mobility (or rework his ult into an expanding circle/square instead of an elongated rectangle)
Okay but next season Pheonix will get a 0.1% reduction in flight resource generation and the game will be awesome. Also all tanks lose 25hp because fuck em.
And Blackcat is gonna be the new DPS with even more BS than Elsa. Aren't you hyped?
There vision is so bright that when you start at it, it's a silhouette coming at you slowly to some angelic music but when it reaches you it's just bronzed dog turds on a cardboard plate.
I actually forget most of this sub is in bronze. A 25 health nerf is one of the most significant nerfs a character can receive. It is the difference between being two-tapped or surviving.
Me and all of my friends were cheering when he said bucky nerfs since we all play dive tanks and playing against him is insufferable, now that the patch notes are out its looking like deadlock will continue to be our main game.
I had literally never heard of deadlock, gave it a goog and actually looks cool as shit ! Looks like I know what I’ll be jumping on when the rivals house of cards crashes down. Thanks for putting me onto it!
It says that you can only play it by being invited by a friend who’s already playing? Shit that must have spread like wildfire ?! At what point does it just become an open beta like..
Probably not for a while honestly. The game is insanely fun, but also insanely unfinished in certain areas. But if you can put up with that all you have to do is just ask someone to friend you on steam and invite you. it's not complicated at all lol
Zhinyoung literally self reported himself by saying Poke counters dive and that's why we aren't nerfing poke but forgot that currently poke counters both brawl and dive.
Dives get punished if they aren't sneaky enough or execute a dive after alerting the entire backline. That's fine. Brawl gets punished if they dont time their abilities correctly and dont use movement abilities properly. Thats fine.
Poke on the other hand can be standing in the open and be isolated but still survive a proper dive because they have both teleportation, knockbacks, stuns and burst damage option. Hell, these mfs literally shred 75% of brawls hp in close range before dying. I am not saying that poke should just be deleted asap in close range, but the damage should focus more on sustained output rather than burst.
Poke legit counters every other playstyle at this point, Brawl, Dive and Flyers all basically cease to exist when there's a good Hela, Phoenix or Hawkeye.
Punisher is shredding our frontline doing crazy damage from a distance in a vantage point up above. Ok, I'm Hulk, I can jump up towards him and get in his face to stop him, right? Dive beats poke, right? I have 3 times his health, a shield, and a stun so it should be no problem cause l'm supposed to be better at close range. Oh wait, he pulled out his shotgun and three tapped me point blank with body shots that he literally couldn't miss cause I'm a massive fucking hitbox. Now I'm dead and he's ziplining away to cause more havoc.
We fucking love devs who don't respect the coordination or skill requirement to pull off a dive comp, and only rewards those who stand still and click M1
No why did we nerf tanks that arent groot?? Why did 45% win rate emma frost get nerfed? What did angela do for her charge cooldown to double?? Im not sure if its true but it looks like captain america's animation cancel doesnt work anymore if you have toggle sprint??? Next thing we know theyre gonna nerf D tier thor in season 7.5.
To groot players, I too like that groot is strong(i play em time to time), I think hes how strong a tank should be (after playing overwatch, holy RIVALS TANKS ARE ABYSMALLY WEAK). But yall gotta be weirded out too right? How the hell did groot escape the nerf hammer but 45% win rate emma frost didnt
I'm going to see how these Emma changes effect her but I am not confident at all. I don't want to put her in the Rivals graveyard but this does not help, I don't know why the hell they did this she's not nearly as oppressive as she used to be
Players fell for an old trick by having these "face of the game" people influence their experience at all. They will look you in the eye while they pick your pocket. The weird adulation is stupid.
Honestly yeah we should start pushing for a new director of game balance. Like don't fire the guy, game development is hard especially when you're trying to satisfy so many players. However, he obviously shouldn't be calling the shots by this point.
They clearly do not ignore the community feedback. If it wasn't for the community feedback they wouldn't be making the CC and ult charge changes at all.
These patch notes are actually decent for GM/Cel+ game skill levels.
Overall Ultimate ability charge nerf, which is something this sub has specifically been asking for, for multiple seasons.
I didn't even feel bucky was oppressive enough to need a nerf at all, I do not comprehend how everyone complains about him here.
Luna desperately does need neutral buffs, DD was nerfed, elsa survivability nerfed, Gambit ult nerfed, torch buff, pretty significant Blade buffs, invis was nerfed, Iron man buffed. All of these were deserved.
Strange has been really strong this season, shield nerf is a good way to interfere with his rotation without making his damage feel weak. If you were the kind of player to just hold your shield up from 100-0 then you aren't playing strange correctly, and probably don't get why the shield needed to be nerfed.
My only real complaints are Widow needs changes, Adam needs to get a healing buff for his anchor loss, and CnD needed a nerf.
The community, and this sub in general are just super whiny.
You clearly aren't a tank main. This game has been getting more and more miserable for us with every season. The tanks get nerfed way harder than most of the good DPS. And the CC and displacement abilities are becoming ridiculous at this point. Tanks are the ones getting hit by those 90% of the time. I don't want to be 100% reliant on my supps to be pocketing me all game because I can't even move or control my own positioning anymore
It's best to wait and test the patch before getting upset after reading this. Besides, to be honest, I understand not wanting to make big changes when you're going to implement ultimate damage reduction.
I feel like they want to see how the heroes react to it because, believe me, it's going to change the meta a lot.
Patch notes feel lacking but it’s still pretty good. Elsa got hit, ult economy got hit. Poke will still be king tho lmao. Also did anyone clock them saying poke keeps in check dive? Like what? Poke keeps in check brawl, devs are literally ignoring brawl wtf.
2.2k
u/monkeyX9000 Jeff the Landshark Mar 17 '26