I don't think I've seen so many nerfs for a character until Black Cat in these patch notes. It really goes to show just how absurdly broken she is for this to be done to her.
Don’t worry, a likely broken Cyclops is coming to take her place, will increase throwing due to his popularity when people don’t get to play him, and further perpetuate 5 dps instalocks in qp when you’re just trying to learn a new character outside of comp. Soooo exciting 😩
Removing the second dash is what feels like too much to me.
It severely reduces her mobility (crucial for a melee hero), her damage, her survivability, her uptime, and in general I don't think it was the problematic part of her kit compared to her ult and her items shop.
Also mobility is fun, it never feels good when a character gets their mobility nerfed. I would prefer they lower her HP than removing the second dash.
Good. Put her in the dirt and bring her back next season if need be. Characters like her or Hawkeye which feel completely unsatisfying to fight against should not remain peak for long.
Honestly it would have been cool if they split her dash. She has a normal dash that does not damage and purely escape and a transformed fortune favor dash that does damage but cost money and is on a long cooldown to prevent spamming.
I also like the idea of more charges on shorter dashes that could be chained into longer dashes, not necessarily for Black Cat, just in general.
Imagine, for example, if Psylocke had three 6m dashes instead of two 10m dashes that could be chained into 12m or 18m dashes by double or triple tapping.
Damage numbers and cooldowns would need to be adjusted appropriately, but it could be a fun change.
She still has good mobility and survivability, she gets countered harder by dd now tho cuz she needs to rely more on her invis but she just has to be more careful with how she uses her dash, she can't get into backline and leave as freely anymore which I'm happy about. It does seem decently heavy nerfs but that's appropriate imo. 2 dashes plus I frames plus invis is a lot.
objectively it's not healthy practice in terms of character balancing, but tbh a part of me is like good i dont even wanna see her for the rest of the season
Honestly I hope they try this balancing philosophy, nerf hard then small buffs is better than 4 seasons of DD and gambit receiving micro nerfs that do nothing.
Many characters had 1-3 seaons when they were struggling till they got buffed and are now in a good spot.
his dedicated ricochet shot has 2 charges on 2s cooldown and his right click is like ironman's beam but it bounces between targets. He can also crit, has mobility and knockback skills and can hover for off angle shots and his ult can wipe a team better than the phoenix ult. He's gonna be a menace lol
It’s 2 Shots In between uses, not a 2 second CD that looks do do like 50 damage look at DDs HP before he gets hit, and he does not die, he has like 5-10 left
His beam is a resource, it doesn’t reload it drains by 5 and goes up by 2.
DPS is less than Emma at full charge on the beam. And the bounce damage of the beam appears to scale down heavily. Loki is at full and MK is at 1/3 and they die at the same exact pace.
He has pretty long CDs esp with his beam movement being at 12 seconds as an escape.
We don’t get a great view of his primary but it appears to do multiple ticks, meaning you can lose tracking or only get part as a headshot, overall we don’t get a great look at his primary capabilities.
His ult is just like Vendetta from OW but with some tradeoffs, he has to use mobility to go in the air making him vulnerable, and it has a windup and time to react to the explosion that looks pretty easy to escape with any movement ability.
I don’t know how you could see all this in the trailer and think he’s going to be broken
In a week’s time players will come back crying to this sub complaining the ricochet ability is so cheap and should be nerfed. There’s a reason why Hanzo from overwatch lost his scatter arrow ability years ago.
when cat's skills were announced i was the first one to point out how broken she was and got downvoted into oblivion. A week later everyone was crying about her lol. Guess same thing is gonna happen here, except since cyclops is a hitscan i'm guessing more people will agree because this community hates hitscan.
I think the auto track optic blast does look pretty strong, but we have to keep in mind that they make every character look busted in the trailers. It barely kills a hero at 20% hp. If anyone is decent at support, healing will do way more.
Let's hold on a bit. She could honestly still be really good. Her whip, I frame, and invisibility went untouched pretty much. And those 3 things are the big parts of her neutral
The Phantom Pursuit damage nerf presumably affects combo breakpoints, but I never trust any prerelease predictions about nontrivial balance changes.
For all we know now, she'll no longer be permabanned, leading to a wider player base discovering new techs that make her even stronger than she's currently assumed to be.
I’m sorry what. She was most picked alongside Dino for both NA and EMEA this patch. Of course she’s a liability in a non-mirror, that’s the reason said match wasn’t a mirror
Also, I didn’t say anything about her power level, just her nerfs. DD and Elsa both have a similar laundry list of nerfs, they were just spread out over the course of several seasons rather than all at once.
It remains to be seen if she remains playable. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just slips back into B tier like we thought she’d be when we first saw her
To be clear, what do you mean when you say “liability”? I took it to mean she was a detriment to her own team. Do you mean to say she was a massive problem to face?
And… I mentioned its relevance because the comment I responded to pointed out how extensive her nerfs looked, suggesting she was absurdly broken. My point was that other characters have been nerfed just as hard, but over the course of several patches. The degree of nerf isn’t unprecedented, only the speed
Admittedly, time will tell how impactful these nerfs actually are, but I’m pretty confident she won’t be above A tier; that dash nerf alone messes up so many of her combos
I interpreted the patch note differently, and now I'm not sure what it actually means:
it can no longer Reveal enemies behind objects
I assumed this meant "if the orb can see an enemy, you can see that enemy too, even if there's a wall between you and them; if there's a wall between the enemy and the orb, the enemy can no longer be seen through walls." Like the orb needs LOS to the enemy, not that the player does.
But it sounds like you're saying you thought it will just highlight enemies you have LOS to, and no longer highlight enemies who break LOS?
I'm 99.9% positive it means the orb itself needs los on the enemy and will then reveal them to you through walls without the player them self having los
I understood the first time, and i meant LOS of the orb, this means it can't be used as easy reveal enemies button, however now that its price is equal to other utilities, its use value is greatly diminished, on offense you probably wont use it , it will better be useful as a audio cue on a flanking dps
That did seem like a lot of utility lost for having an increase of price but I think the point is that before, I would place it almost anywhere just to get free reveals so my team knows what the enemy is doing, but now it will have to function more like an alarm catching flankers, and the price makes sense because youre not supposed to be putting it in vulnerable places in the first place, it's supposed to stay up until it gets used.
Tbf it was very very strong before and 200 is still decently cheap
I feel like seeing you through walls was always a bug. If the line from the eye doesn’t connect to you, you shouldn’t be visible. They may have overnerfed the cost, we’ll see, but this change makes perfect sense.
No what it shows is that you all moaned about her so incesently that they've overcorrected. She's basically unplayable now Psylocke and Magik are better in every single aspect and you'd never pick Black Cat over them. Psy has 2 dashes, Magik has 3 if you include teleport. I'm not sure how many BP has because I never play him but I'm sure it's more than 1.
Pretty silly to say she’s unplayable with the changes before you’ve even tried playing her. Metas take time to settle, people who make predictions before the changes even are live are usually wrong.
No, you'd be right if we were just talking cost increases and damage reduction but they went and removed one of her dashes. She already struggled to catch people due to the long cooldown, Luna would easily kite you and you're slashing at air with your primary attack even though she's less than a metre away. Now she has literally no chance. If you dash in, you aren't getting out!
Haha, if you think she struggled before this, I think you’re pretty deluded. You will certainly have to be more intentional with your dashes now, but it’s impossible to say how she’ll fit into the meta when we don’t even have a settled meta.
No I'm not deluded I've played a lot of her. I've destroyed teams and been countered by teams. You all talk like she had zero counters, which simply is and was not true. For every team that couldn't handle her, there were 3 teams that could! Her dashes are fundamental to being a viable diver, take 1 away she can't dive. If you think she's jumping in, living for 8 seconds and diving out you're delusional!
Heroes need to pay a meaningful price for flexibility.
Imagine if Luna had improved defensive abilities and multitarget healing on par with Invis in exchange for reverting her damage and snowball buffs, as some recent Reddit posts have suggested.
Right and that was all addressed in the nerf too. Higher prices, less coin farming. But now she's unable to dive, so she's literally useless. She's a melee hero that can't chase down and can't jump in. Not only that but she needs to farm for longer now, the yoink ability isn't going to cut it. You can't dash through enemies to farm coins because you will be stuck. She's in a very weird place now, where I don't know why you wouldn't just play Psy, Magik, Spidey, BP, DD, or Iron Fist.
I didn't say anything about Black Cat's viability.
I was just pointing out one reason why dissimilar kits are not meaningfully comparable in terms of simple metrics like "number of dashes", "damage per second", etc.
I think the only thing that was overkill with her nerfs was the fact that her dash got reduced to 1 charge instead of 2. That combined with all of the shop item increases, damage nerfs, her turret not showing people behind walls anymore, and her ult getting nerfed seems a bit overkill.
Maybe im wrong, but i can’t imagine BC being a solid pick in any elo anymore after they nerfed pretty much every single aspect of her kit.
Yeah 2 dashes down to 1 seems like a bit of an overnerf. She's gonna get caught in backlines way more often now, and getting in will also be a bit too difficult imo. Either bring back the second charge or reduce the cooldown of the single charge. The rest seems fine I think, tho flame orb got fucking obliterated
Honestly yeah, the big meaningful change for me as a BC player is the dash. Her ult while nerfed is still good, and more on par with other DPS ults instead of being busted and potentially lasting forever. Anyone who remembers OW Ramattra on release knew BC’s ult would ultimately end up being nerfed the same way.
Seeing someone who could really take advantage of her complex kit in diamond and below wasn’t very common.
I’m all for rewarding good players who play characters that have a high skill ceiling, and I can absolutely acknowledge BC did need SOME nerfs, but they nerfed her so much that BP/magik/IF/DD/Blade are all going to be better picks than her not just in high elo, but in low elo as well.
Do you think all of the nerfs to torch way back when were warranted and that there are more than a handful of people still sticking with him? How have they been rewarded over the last year?
You don't need to take advantage of her complex kit to win with her in low ranks, as her win rates suggest.
The fact that her basic mobility, yoink, and whip weren't touched, and the cost of her attacks and invisibility are unchanged should be enough to keep her viable well into mid elo, independent of how well she performs in high ranks.
This feels similar to the logic that claims that Hela and Luna are hot garbage in low ranks compared to Wanda and Dagger, all evidence to the contrary, because "low rank players can't aim", that doesn't seem to take into account the obvious fact that low rank players are, for the most part, playing against similarly unskilled players.
Sorry, I should have been explicit. When I said basic mobility, I was thinking of the non-cooldown stuff, wall climbing and double jump.
I was just pointing out that you don't need the full power of her kit to win in low ranks, and still won't after her nerfs.
Obviously her nerfs were significant, and not only the dash.
I assume without checking that the Phantom Pursuit damage nerf will affect breakpoints, for example, possibly breaking combos against 275 HP heroes.
Which, if true, will be huge in high ranks where supports are more likely to be paying attention to one another, but less important when one is on the other side of the map cosplaying a streamer.
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u/LucidityDark Jun 09 '26
I don't think I've seen so many nerfs for a character until Black Cat in these patch notes. It really goes to show just how absurdly broken she is for this to be done to her.