Agreed with everything you said(one thing I do want to add is that mandrake his gold can mess up auto aim and cost you a match, but that’s a different discussion that needs to be addressed not his skill)
I would say I still agree with a Gale nerf as Sogui said, but using it as the easy way out or an excuse to say we shouldnt buff others is not something i support.
I get that having a Heimlock who heals too fast or an Odachi who kills too quickly is just putting more OP guys in different slots. However, I’m more so asking for creative teams on the same level as the tier 1 counter parts. For example, when Halo was massively OP, she brought up with her heroes you hardly ever see otherwise. I’m not in favor of making her OP to that level again, but having a core hero or 2 who pulls an otherwise tier 3 guy into a tier 1 team is really the goal. We need a few key characters you can build NEW teams around. Not just cycle the 4 healers and 1 dps meta. Its already stale and will just get worse.
This used to be the case when people built halo teams or keel cover destroy teams or other creative builds. But none can match the tier 1 team we are talking about. If they did and we nerfed Gale I would be happy. Part of the reason we all dont like this meta is not just because Gale is overpowered. Its also because it brings a playstyle no one can break through or equivalent counters to. Mauler might be the exception, but is usually a 4 healer w/him as DPS team so its more of the same.
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One thing I want to ad is that PvP is not made to get 50+ wins. If you only get 10 wins it is not always because of OP heroes, but maybe you just met some that are better/got more lucky than you early on.
Is it possible to agree with nearly everyone on this thread?
The chicken or the egg?
To nerf or buff?
Any change is good by me. I’d just like to see actual change. Not this tip toeing, slow rolling, minor tweaks per role warfare update. It’s hyped up prior to each update like we are going to see some massive change to the balance and variety of hero loadouts. Yet, months later these same exact threads are still going strong.
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It’s pretty baffling to me to see people saying Gale doesn’t need a nerf… I don’t even know how to approach a conversation with someone who thinks that. Are we not playing the same game?
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I can get plenty of wins without Nightingale on my team.
What I’d rather like to see a cast that gets a taunt or other hero’s that get faster stuns or silence, this way Nightingale isn’t able to use her healing.
This way the game changes to a more technical game, instead of a nerf I’d like to see more counters
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If you read my post you’d see that I already said Panzer was overall balanced and that many heroes can survive with roll spam. But the only reason that’s true is because they nerfed her spread into oblivion while barely touching her opening DPS. So you can survive with Nightingale or Flatline or Min on many maps but Panzer still makes energy front and midline non-viable, along with many of the squishier Mech front and midliners.
Overall it’s just bad design because as long as Panzer remains a top-tier DPS it becomes suicide to include most energy heroes on your team. Heckler, Fortress, Sapphyr, Hivemind, Butter, Castellan, Gammond, Ronin, Halloway, and Baron along with squishy mid-mechs are suicide against a Plat panzer. If HHG would just buff her spread back to what it used to be, cut her magazine to 10 ammo, and buff her reload a little, Panzer could stay a top-tier DPS without forcing everyone to use Bio frontliners.
The only reason I’m still playing is because I enjoy experimenting with PVP teams, and I am 100% confident that Panzer remains a hugely oppressive force in the metagame. There are so many interesting heroes and builds that are simply unusable because a plat panzer will run someone over in the first 10 seconds. You simply will never have a health meta when a hero’s gun can dump over 500,000 damage into an energy hero in the first 10 seconds of a match - backline energy can now dodge a lot of that damage but tanks and midliners cannot - hence the flaw of HHG’s nerfs.
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Part of the problem is that a Plat Nightingale doesn’t need to use her heal to heal anymore.
One of my teams can permanently stun Nightingale 2 seconds into the match, but she will still easily rack up 20k+ healing per second without ever being able to actually cast a heal.
Her plat heals for over 10k per second if anyone on her team is under 80%hp and hasn’t taken damage for ~1 second. Those are absurdly easy conditions to fulfill.
Some people rely on Nightingale for easy wins and will say whatever they need to defend her. Just like there were people here defending Panzer at release saying you could counter her with Phalanx’s shield… keep in mind this was before Role Update I and Panzer’s bronze alone could 1-shot a ton of energy heroes even with Phalanx’s shield up.
Other people are just ignorant. They’ll make fallacious arguments like “I can get plenty of wins without nightingale” but they won’t acknowledge the fact that in draft mode you 100% had to use Nightingale if you ever wanted to beat other top teams. Other OP heroes like Mandrake and Panzer were in 95% of the top teams, but some people got creative with some teams and could still sometimes win without them. NOBODY ran without Nightingale though.
5 Likes
@Sogui
Not trolling here, but how would you balance Panzer? Reduce base damage? Reduce crit potential? I just think most of what you are calling for can be achieved with some tweaks rather than a major overhaul. You’re right, Panzer is still OP to front/midline energy heroes. Night is OP and the more I think about it, I concede that fighting Nightingale with Nightingale is the only way to even the odds. As far as Mandrake is concerned, I always considered him a pain in the ass. I asked months ago to limit the number of applications of invisibility or limit his invisibility to one team member at a time. This was shot down by a dev, so I just learned to deal with him. You are definitely at a disadvantage if you don’t run Mandrake and your opponent does.
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@Sogui, trust me I’m not saying they are bad hero’s, they really are on top of there function, but I’d like to see a buff on others, if we nerf Nightingale, we can wait a few days and it’s just ifrit and flatline non stop, paired with 2 dps or a shield hero.
So instead of new nerfs(unless there is a new really broken hero that can’t die and kill everything in a second type comes along)
But I’d like to see new hero’s taking over better functions, if we speed up the heal of a matador, or gammond it would change so much, other hero’s with quicker stuns can lay down more dps, I think this adds more variation then just nerf 1 or 2 hero’s
Panzer was an extremely poorly thought out hero. She was supposed to be this insane burst hero at the start of a match that gets worse as the match goes on. Unfortunately Hero Hunters doesn’t lend itself well to that type of style. Once a team loses a hero and it’s 4vs5, they start losing momentum and often end op losing a match (unless Ifrit and Flatline are around reviving everyone back).
2 Likes
I was undecided about this but now to me it is clear that also Mandrake’s gold needs to be changed. Why? Because although in manual play I can aim at cloacked heroes I can’t throw grenades at them. Putting Ghoul and the like at an unfair disadvantage.
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I’ve described my Panzer nerf for months.
Cut her mag size down, I think 10 or 12 would be best for now. In compensation, undo her crazy spread nerfs, give her a slightly faster reload, and if she still need buffs after that you can always just give her back a little more damage, cover damage, etc.
It’s ridiculously simple, and her opening burst would still be the strongest in the game, just not “deletes energy tanks or most midliners in under 10 seconds” strong.
You can’t argue for buffing other supports up to Nightingale’s level if you ever want the “wall of healing” to end. I’ve also described Flatline as a potentially problematic support because like Nightingale she can do her job well even if she just spends the entire match rolling around in the back.
I would rather see supports as a whole kept near their current levels, the weak ones like Francois (HHG reaaaally doesn’t understand what kind of buffs Fran needs) and Operator can get some buffs too, but its still a large number of DPS and Tanks that need buffs. I’ve experimented with every non-7* hero in this game and out of all my heroes, Fran is the only support that fails to justify any spot on any team. Meanwhile I’d say 75% of tanks and DPS are simply non-competitive right now.
I agree that letting us manually use abilities on cloaked heroes is important. It’s pretty infuriating that I can shoot cloaked guys in the face but if I want to throw something at them my character just refuses to.
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So an obvious and sane nerf would be to slow down her auto skill charge, so she has to stand up and shoot to get her heal off in an usuefull time, which would make her much easier to kill, or, if you just duck and rol, less usefull.
Most of her healing comes from her Gold, that was my point. If someone is running a “big” Flatline then they can just roll around in the back and you’re forced to try and burst someone else through her gold.
Her gold heals herself for more than it damages her, so you can’t wear her down that way. For example her heal at lvl 75 8* is 132,000hp + 135,000 over 10 seconds. So each time you trigger her gold you’re giving the enemy team 400,000 healing over the course of 10 seconds. Your most realistic option is to do overwhelming damage to Flatline but if she just rolls around in the back getting heals from Nightingale, Caine, Keel, etc. then you face an extremely difficult “wall of healing” that makes teams without marks or teams without major mech DPS unable to win.
Flatline’s OP nature is partly concealed by the fact big mech DPS and Nightingale’s mark are extremely good right now, so most teams can just blow her away. But the focus of this post isn’t just on “______ is OP, nerf it!” but on mechanics responsible for creating an oppressive metagame where most heroes aren’t viable.
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My post was regarding Nightingale…
I burst down Flatline first, if the opponent starts to roll and hide I simply change to his other heal. You only have trouble with that, if you play Panzer. No trouble using Dogface, because he does not rely on his first 30 seconds only.
100000% with you on Fran. Shes one I’ve posted about and tried to comment on many times. She never never pulls her weight as a healer, buffer, damager…anything. Its like they tried to throw a small bit of everything into her and havent really found a focus since. The only thing Id be curious to see her with is Brogan, but thats a special use case.
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Woops, thought you said Flatline.
Nightingale is the same problem though, her base heal CD is 12 and her plat kicks in after just over a second of not taking damage. If she rolls around in the backline she can still pump out 15k+ healing/second while under 10k power which is nuts.
Like I said in the OP, if we didn’t have marks in this game Night’s plat would have absolutely broken the game. Instead we have this stupid situation where we rely on Nightingale’s silver to counter Nightingale’s plat. Wesson, Ifrit, and Artemis can also mark but their marks have longer cooldown with lower uptimes, and Ifrits is also indiscriminate/conditional with much larger drawbacks.
I was talking about the low used healers, I never said bring
all of them up to Nightingale ‘OP’ lvl to get more healing meta(still I can easily win without her)
How much of us really use the tank healers? And actually win thanks to them?
But instead of nerf talking (I don’t use panzer, and yes I’m annoyed when I get defeated by her) we should really talk about buffs.
We need more stuns, interrupting, silence, taunt etc,.
Nerfing the few hero’s that seem to be OP according to a few, will result in a 5 highest health dps team, and everyone will run that, it will break more then it will fix, recent change already helped a lot, but we need more utilities, besides healing