A.N. I've been asked to put in a short glossary for (and I quote) "Those reading from the outside looking in." So, for those wondering:
A "Nerf" is a patch in a game that makes a weapon or ability less powerful, usually because of player data indicating that it's being over-used or becomes incredibly obnoxious to deal with.
A "Buff" in this context is pretty much the opposite of a nerf: a patch that makes something more powerful because it's under-used or useless in all but a handful of rare situations. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
So, I'd like to start off by apologising for the lack of a review this week; I had a math test on Friday, and revision for that seems to have made up a decent portion of my time recently. I did manage to play the Overwatch Beta last weekend, but I decided against reviewing that for two reasons. The first is that I intend to do a review on the full game once I can actually get my hands on a copy, and the second is that it was in beta and as a result, not entirely finished. At least, I hope it isn't entirely finished yet, because there are still a few characters that definitely need a whole bunch of balancing.
This is actually a topic I've been meaning to talk about for a while, but let's start by focusing on Overwatch (or more specifically, the character Bastion). Bastion's main "thing" is that he can walk around normally and do reasonable damage, but he can then turn into a freaking minigun-turret. It's absolute BS. Everyone playing knows it's BS. Even the people playing as Bastion know it's BS, as they do to the enemy team what power tools have been known to do to swans (and in around the same time frame, too). I once played against a team of five of the buggers, and I nearly left on the spot.
Quite frankly, anything that can kill a tank character in a single mag and kill an offense character before they realise they're even being shot at shouldn't exist in the game as a standard ability. There have been rumours that they might be removing him from the game altogether, but I don't think that's the best answer. They've got so many options on how to nerf him effectively that just removing him seems somewhat lazy. There are the simple options: lowering his damage and/or rate of fire in turret form. The there are the more in-depth solutions: they could limit the time he can stay in his turret form, and put a high cool-down time on it, but at that point they might as well just make it his Ultimate and scrap the Configuration: Tank thing.
There are also a few other characters that on their own are fine, but in conjunction with other characters make them an absolute nightmare. One of the main combos that comes to mind is in 'deliver the payload' games where Torbjorn can put his turret on the payload or somewhere else and then have Reinhardt shield it from the enemy team, making it virtually impossible to get past. I've had a bit of time to think about this, and what they'll probably have to do is either nerf Reinhardt's shield health a bit (which they'll probably do anyway, because even without a turret hiding behind it it's a pain to deal with for most characters), or have it so that friendly bullets don't pass through. In addition, they'll also probably have to make it so that Torbjorn can't place his turret on the payload because shield or not that's kind of a cheese, even for a character whose entire 'play of the game' catalogue across all players can be summed up as 'player does nothing while the turret ends 3 or more promising young lives'.
In the whole 'Nerf Hammer' debate, there are (in my experience) three types of developers. There are developers that do balancing badly (like 343), there are developers who do balancing really meticulously (like Valve), and there are developers who do balancing really slowly but reasonably effectively (like Bungie). Speaking of Bungie, that brings me to my next point: Developers, I have nothing against you wielding the Nerf Hammer over your games. I do mind when you don't wield it strongly enough and only nerf or buff things in teeny-tiny increments, or wield it too overzealously and make things too overpowered or nerf them into the ground (looking at you, Bungie. I know the Destiny Auto Rifle nerf was needed at the time, but not by that much). In the same way that slowly boiling a crab might result in the crab not feeling the pain after a while, piling miniscule nerf on top of miniscule nerf for, say, The Last Word won't work because there is no noticeable difference from patch to patch, and I'm still bitter about getting two-shot from full health.
At the end of the day, Devs need to be careful with how they use the Nerf Hammer, but they should by no means be afraid to wield it where it is needed. If it sits in their metaphorical cupboard gathering dust, it's no use. If it's installed in every office by the water cooler and broken out for every little thing, it's worse than useless. There's a balance that needs to be found, and until Overwatch has managed to find that balance I'm going to stick to leaving the game anytime I end up on the receiving end of more than one Bastion.
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