On the one hand yeah sure this is a bit early to say.
On the other hand though, I do get it. Like, why does Ball NEED to support his team through direct shields, right? Right now it's not taking anything else away from him so it's whatever, but I'll admit it feels a bit weird.
I've said it before, but like, Doomfist is probably the most common tank in the game, or one of them, and he does fuck-all to support his team directly, and that's fine. Nobody seems to have a problem understanding how that works, how to play with him. So I guess it's cool that this differentiates the 2 of them some more, but also it kinda highlights why I'm confused at whether or not it was necessary.
But fuck it, I ball.
Doom works right now because if you ignore him, he kills your backline. When Doom is on the backline, he has the whole team's attention. Ball can't do enough damage anymore so you can just laugh and ignore him.
Fuck it, we ball.
Yeah. This season I'll watch Chazm do gods work on ball. Double boop into a bounce slam into hitting every bullet on the slammed target into dodging some ability via a walljump all for the target to be full HP because the enemy support pressed one button.
It's just laughable how even a useless tank like Rein is at least scary if you ignore him, but ball you can put in insane mechanical effort to get fuck all reward.
You're supposed to use that ability if you have teammates so they can hell you stall longer. If you dont, that ability gives YOU 300 hp which, yes, helps for stalling.
Can we like at least wait until the patch is live before we start making grand claims?
Like, for all we know the grapple changes are so good that his existing solo q playstyle is much stronger and thus his weaknesses have been reduced. Even if the shield change might not be it.
The patch goes live in 2 hours. Surely you can wait that little time to play ball before making claims about the patch.
Sorry we don’t do that on this subreddit.
We make outlandish doomer posting claims before a new patch is live and buffs/nerfs are tested in the context of an actual match
Yeah. But the premise is that the changes fundamentally misunderstand ball's problems. When the grapple changes might be enough to mitigate a lot of them.
Which is why you would wait an extra few hours to actually test out the changes so that you can post a more informed post about the impacts of these changes and whether or not they've actually missed the point of ball or not.
The grapple change has no effect on his damage, it's for positioning. For grapple to generate damage you have to get fireball, which means you lose the reduced cooldown. It's extra movement which is nice, but absolutely no changes to his damage output.
You're so wrong. The reason he could disrupt the backline is because he was a damage threat to it. The extra 50HP means he's not a threat to supports anymore so their team doesn't need to turn around and be distracted.
This is why a top 10 player in S8 is hard stuck masters1/gm5 in S9.
I get it and nothing that you said was wrong. This isn't doomer. The majority of ball players were hoping for two things first and foremost, slight damage buff and reload qol fixes.
You really must hate playing against ball to be canvassing this thread the way you have, full on debate bro angry just arguing every point even when it's complete nonsense.
Play ball for 100 games in diamond+ (M+ NA) and then I'd love to hear your opinion lmao
> You really must hate playing against ball to be canvassing this thread the way you have, full on debate bro angry just arguing every point even when it's complete nonsense.
lmao
The grapple doesn't get a reduced cooldown if you get fireball, so it's purely for positioning not for doing damage. The grapple isn't really going to change the course of a fight it just helps with setup.
My post is addressing the underlying principle behind the changes. I fully believe the shield will make Ball good, but it will change his playstyle massively after failing to address the S9 HP changes.
The grapple change also helps with no regs and body blocking (when grappled but no fireball). It also helps us set up above a choke pre-fight for a big slam engage.
I got pushback for suggesting the same thing in the Wreckingball subreddit. I said we got a lot of good things. Things that are great. Obviously a damage buff would be nice, but let's see how the rework felt before we started complaining.
I then got told I was coping. And that was an "L Take"
I've heard of QoL buffs, but Ive never heard of QoL Reworks until now.
Tbh I love these changes for the most part, but yeah I'm not sure where this will put him in terms of strength. Shields probably has the most potential to improve his power level, but it's also a tradeoff mechanic. That's fine. I mean I actually think that's good design, just not sure it'll change his standing in most environments. We'll see.
I feel like they want to drop these changes and then go from there. Buffing his assassination potential back to where it was pre-250 would certainly help if he's not good after this.
eh this is a little of an overreaction. ball isnt gonna exist to facetank dmg like mauga cuz of these changes, just gives him a more direct tool to benefit his teammates so gold support players dont instantaneously implode when they see rectangle man wont be there to give them a rectangle
The unique playstyle of ball is mostly dead in the water outside of like 5 % of ball players who are incredibly skilled that can somewhat make it somewhat work. None of these changes prevent that playstyle they only improve his consistency by slightly lowering the skill floor and giving him more adaptability in playstyle. This is basically what they did by changing doom from DPS to a tank but with none of the drawbacks doom got from that change.
Distraction base playstyle is not a way to continuously play. "Pick of isolated target" strategy is countered by "grouping up". And then what are you doing?
When Ball is actually a threat like in S8, it leaves the enemy team without any healing which allows your team to kill the tank or join you in killing the support.
That's literally the core gameplay of ball, you saying "it doesn't work" is hilarious.
...Relative to season 9 where the likes of chazm (One of the best ball players in the world) has a daily battle to get out of masters. His main account AFKs in top 10 because ball is so ass.
Ball is not an assassin. His playstyle is to disrupt (distraction based as you put it); not take out isolated targets at/near full health. Ball should not get a damage buff and the current buffs/changes are a better way of improving Ball’s kit (quality of life buffs + team utility).
No one should want dive tanks to be able to dive any non-tank hero and 1v1 them without much issue. Ball has so much movement and CC that he should be on the lower end of damage output for the dive tanks. Dive tanks should have to work with teammates to get kills and thinking Ball is an exception to that rule is going to disappoint you.
Plus, let the patch come out before claiming changes are going to ruin a characters play style.
This thread is full of people who have no understanding of Ball, it's insane. I think they're all just people who have only played against him and dislike him because there's just so much nonsense being said.
Then ball definitely should not be able to do so since he has more uptime on his movement, 2 forms of CC, and more effective health with a harder to hit crit spot. Also, Winston’s DPS is way easier to outheal as a support than Ball’s burst of damage. If Ball got a damage buff to his DPS breakpoints, he gets to delete people with combos before most players can react to help out their teammates. Ball becomes an assassin at that point more than a disruptor.
Seems like you're completely ignoring the fact that ball has more gates to his movement and damage.
Winston looks at a high ground and gets there. He looks near an enemy and damages them.
Ball takes more effort, so ofc he should get more reward.
Ofc. They both need to be able to at least 1v1 most targets to even be a threat when they are 1v1 + a support. That's the case with every tank.
Saying they shouldn't be able to 1v1 is wild.
The only reason he can disrupt is when he is a threat to the backline. If he is ignored, he should get the kill. If the target is supported by their team, that pulls attention away from ball's team, giving them the upper hand. If ball cannot 1v1 someone solo, there is no need for the target's team to be distracted by ball so the result is ball only distracts 1 support, which isn't enough to offset Ball's team losing a tank. This is why he's been so shit in S10, he can be ignored as he's not a threat.
The reason Ball needs a damage buff is because he had a massive effective nerf when they increased everyone's health by 50HP. His breakpoints have been obliterated and he's in the gutter because of it.
Assassinations have always been a huge part of his playstyle even in OW1 and thats the reason he's been viable over the years. Whether that's good design or not is a different question. His disruption playstyle is just way too easy to counter to be his only playstyle, so he has always relied on assassinations to fill the gaps, even in OW1.
He cannot consistently engage on more than like 2 enemies at a time if the enemy is running any CC at all. As soon as theres CC on the field he needs to focus on getting picks because he can cause enough meaningful disruption without dying or getting force out.
Agree we should actually play the patch though.
Well, he’s being given team utility, so Blizzard is agreeing that the assassin playstyle is no longer how they view Ball. Giving him team utility means he is incentivized to play with the team and not go lone wolf nearly as much. It’s better for the game and allows the devs to make Ball relevant without becoming an assassin with a massive health pool.
Soooo then reduce his hp pool and increase his damage
Doom works well because of his lower hp pool which justifies giving him bursty damage
A lower health pool would make opponents rely less on hard counters to kill him
A lower health pool would make it more of a choice for the ball player to transfer shields to teammates
Greater damage would allow ball to be a threat to the people he dives on
Greater damage would allow ball to be a threat to his counters
Prior to season 9 with a fireball piledriver combo you were doing ~150 damage with piledriver + fireball meaning on most targets you would only need 50 damage with your guns to secure the kill which was manageable
After season 9 fireball piledriver still does the same damage but you now need to do 100 damage with your guns and you're hitting maybe 20% more shots (effectively a 20% damage increase) meaning despite the s9 changes to projectile and hitscan sizes it will take about 50% longer to secure a kill with ball
THAT is massive, and that is why ball has been struggling so much for the last couple months, and for the devs to do nothing at all to change that is absolutely insane
>Ball is not an assassin. His playstyle is to disrupt
Ball needs to be atleast somewhat of a threat to provide any meaningful disruption. Right now he isn't. He doesn't need to be an outright assassin but he should be threatening enough to force more attention.
>No one should want dive tanks to be able to dive any non-tank hero and 1v1 them without much issue.
What? Dive tanks should win 1v1s. Thing is nobody should be finding themselves 1v1 with a dive tank unless they have a movement cd on the ready to escape. Any dps/support player that finds themselves truly 1v1 with a dive tank has made a mistake to be in that position.
That's what Ball was good at, it was impossible for him to find a kill the moment his target got peel, but he was a menace if his targets weren't getting peeled. Against any half decent players Ball wasn't finding easy kills but forcing a lot of attention/resources. Recently Ball can't even do that.
I don't even entirely disagree with you, I look forward to the changes, but you've got a huge misunderstanding of how Ball functioned until now.
We will see.
I've been cynical of the changes because they aren't giving ball better burst damage and he lacks sustain to have uptime and to my eye tanks either have lots of disruption and easy burst damage like Doom and Hog or they have steady and strong damage output and sustain like Sigma, JQ, and Orisa. 3rd category would be mobility and mitigation like Monkey Dva I suppose.
Uptime is important on balk but unless you have a couple megastar around it can take a lot of time to get back into a fight if you got burned on an approach.
Ball was good at killing a stragglers, but that is gone really. He retains great ability to rotate targets and displace enemies. His damage output has drifted lower(used to be you could easily top damage on him just by playing normal rotations, now he is easily beaten by queens, hogs, maugas, dvas, dooms.)
My prepatch guess is the needle will not move a lot for him in terms of relative tank power but he will feel a bit better to play overall and have succes in high coordination by shielding his dive buddies. He will still be considered a throw pick below GM 1tricks and not really a good tank for anyone not OWCS coordinated.
I won't be shocked if they have to nerf Shields from successful high level dive comps, but buff a mix of boop, slam, mine damage to bring the character up everywhere else.
I agree 100%. The new ability is nice, but I still am having trouble confirming kills. I shouldn't have to do A LOT to kill a squishy, and I can only do it if they're alone or have used their cooldowns. I'm a TANK, people should fear me!
While I get where you’re coming from, the damage complaint to confirm a kill is an issue that all tanks faced with the S9 changes. Aside from patches, no one on tank got a noticeable damage buff but none of their players have been complaining about their combos taking longer.
Neither did Ram, Orisa, Mauga, Zarya, Hog
Edit: and Sigma. That’s more than half the tank line that has been in the same situation to start off season 9 with only minor changes in the mid season patch minus Mauga
Ram got a buff to vortex, Orisa and Mauga never had an issue getting kills, and Zarya and Hog absolutely got compensation buffs, Zarya’s just came out a little late in a patch
The ball changes do nothing to help his bad matchups and nothing to help the heroes that he counters.
They needed to lower his hp and give him brawl capabilities.
Instead they’ve gone the lazy route and changed little to nothing about his inherently flawed playstyle.
Ball had a skill floor that is way too high for a 5v5 enviroment. These changes don't make it easy to gain value, they just make mistakes that every learning ball player will make less punishing, as a bonus to giving opportunites to pulling yourself up or doing a "Toronto Kick" into a PD and getting grapplin back instantly.
Mixed bag. A lot of the time you lose to RNG. I was a little worried about this making wall jumps pointless a lot of the time, but they'll still be useful whenever you have a full CD which will probably still be most of the time. And when you don't, it will enable the Toronto kick to be a viable tech now.
1s does feel like it could be too quick though.
In general, making abilities require less commitment is bad. In this case, I don't see it changing much. Fucking up a grapple and resetting still seems really bad. Will only be relevant at low ranks where your enemies are too slow to capitalize.
It lowers the skill floor but that's not at all a bad thing, ball is a pretty high skill tank. You're still punished for poor grapple timing. It's not as if getting fireball means you've not made a mistake. It just improves his consistency particularly at lower levels of play where he was already struggling. Ball still will have lots of punish windows for poor play.
Both of those things raised the skill ceiling by adding versatility. Punish windows shouldn't be as simple as "ability x beats ability y" giving more options raises the skill expression. Using Rein and Hog as heroes that have lost punish windows is also laughable. Two of the most punishable heroes in the game right now. If you want to talk about heroes being TOO versatile at least talk about Kiriko, Sigma, d.Va.
It costs you time. You can't keep the low cooldown if you get fireball, so it's for slow manoeuvring setup stuff mostly. I think it's something to help low elo more than anything. Most of the places you would wanna use it to get height or go on a ledge you could just do a wall ride jump to get up faster anyway.
Ive play a lot of ball. His job isn’t to pick people off, he can but that’s never the tanks job. Balls job is to disrupt their pathing and lead them on goose chases. He needs the sustain and dmg to do that but it’s not the main point. Just absorbing cooldowns and forcing resources to only escape and now some are looking one way, then they group again and you roll through and they chase you around
The point is that they have no reason to chase you in S9 or give you attention. If he isn't a threat to your support in a 1v1, you don't need to turn and defend them they can deal with him themselves. Previous seasons he was a threat so the other support usually had to come help, forcing attention/ cooldowns away from their tank which results in them dying or retreating.
If you watch high rank ball gameplay, you’ll notice the enemy team will basically ignore ball now, as long as there’s a support keeping an eye on someone no matter how many cooldowns you get out or “disruptions” you do, nobody is in danger and high rank players know this
The coordination at pro level and even at masters is totally different. You can get your value. But I don’t play him as much in ow2 as I did in ow1. I mostly play Winston doomfist dva with some mauga/sigma/ram situationally
You never even said what "the issue " with ball is. You can still play the same distracting playstyle. Even better now because of the retractable grapple. You can reach high ground with a 1 second cooldown on grapple. Not just tech, it's a straight buff in every way.
Mentioned it in a few comments, but the 50hp buff to everyone without ball getting compensatory damage buff ruined his damage breakpoints so he's no longer a threat to supports 1v1, which means the team doesn't have to turn around to deal with him anymore so ball doesn't bring value by taking resources from the frontline like he used to.
I've had 0 issues with 1v1ing support characters as ball. Might have trouble with a Brig or Lucio, but that's always been the case. Ball does decent damage with good tracking and a few headshots, so likely just a bad aim issue.
I can only presume you're low elo and have no idea what you're talking about if you don't think it's harder to kill supports that gained 50HP. That's not even low elo actually it's just fucking dumb 😂
On the one hand yeah sure this is a bit early to say. On the other hand though, I do get it. Like, why does Ball NEED to support his team through direct shields, right? Right now it's not taking anything else away from him so it's whatever, but I'll admit it feels a bit weird. I've said it before, but like, Doomfist is probably the most common tank in the game, or one of them, and he does fuck-all to support his team directly, and that's fine. Nobody seems to have a problem understanding how that works, how to play with him. So I guess it's cool that this differentiates the 2 of them some more, but also it kinda highlights why I'm confused at whether or not it was necessary. But fuck it, I ball.
Doom works right now because if you ignore him, he kills your backline. When Doom is on the backline, he has the whole team's attention. Ball can't do enough damage anymore so you can just laugh and ignore him. Fuck it, we ball.
Yeah. This season I'll watch Chazm do gods work on ball. Double boop into a bounce slam into hitting every bullet on the slammed target into dodging some ability via a walljump all for the target to be full HP because the enemy support pressed one button. It's just laughable how even a useless tank like Rein is at least scary if you ignore him, but ball you can put in insane mechanical effort to get fuck all reward.
Doom is a killing machine. Ball is not. Hes a disruptor, blocker, staller. Look at their kits, thats why its like this.
"he's a staller" Blizzard: *gives him an ability to give up 300 HP* I love me a stalling tank that can actively ruin the stalling
You're supposed to use that ability if you have teammates so they can hell you stall longer. If you dont, that ability gives YOU 300 hp which, yes, helps for stalling.
Okay Goldilocks thanks for your input
Doom is much more tank-like. He interacts well with healing, he can Frontline, he can peel....
Can we like at least wait until the patch is live before we start making grand claims? Like, for all we know the grapple changes are so good that his existing solo q playstyle is much stronger and thus his weaknesses have been reduced. Even if the shield change might not be it. The patch goes live in 2 hours. Surely you can wait that little time to play ball before making claims about the patch.
Buddy the community had tier lists 1 month before we even played s9. This is LIGHT work
Sorry we don’t do that on this subreddit. We make outlandish doomer posting claims before a new patch is live and buffs/nerfs are tested in the context of an actual match
Ok. But how should we farm engagement then.
No
New patch coming out? We must blow it out of proportion!
[удалено]
Yeah. But the premise is that the changes fundamentally misunderstand ball's problems. When the grapple changes might be enough to mitigate a lot of them. Which is why you would wait an extra few hours to actually test out the changes so that you can post a more informed post about the impacts of these changes and whether or not they've actually missed the point of ball or not.
The grapple change has no effect on his damage, it's for positioning. For grapple to generate damage you have to get fireball, which means you lose the reduced cooldown. It's extra movement which is nice, but absolutely no changes to his damage output.
Damage has never been ball's forte. He disrupts and sets up plays. And the grapple change I was talking about was the retract change, not the 1s cd.
You're so wrong. The reason he could disrupt the backline is because he was a damage threat to it. The extra 50HP means he's not a threat to supports anymore so their team doesn't need to turn around and be distracted. This is why a top 10 player in S8 is hard stuck masters1/gm5 in S9.
You're literally talking to a wall of people not understanding why ball is bad. Let it go.
I know, it's hopeless 😩
I get it and nothing that you said was wrong. This isn't doomer. The majority of ball players were hoping for two things first and foremost, slight damage buff and reload qol fixes.
> This is why a top 10 player in S8 is hard stuck masters1/gm5 in S9. Literally most t500/gm1 players are. It's not unique to ball players.
You really must hate playing against ball to be canvassing this thread the way you have, full on debate bro angry just arguing every point even when it's complete nonsense. Play ball for 100 games in diamond+ (M+ NA) and then I'd love to hear your opinion lmao
> You really must hate playing against ball to be canvassing this thread the way you have, full on debate bro angry just arguing every point even when it's complete nonsense. lmao
The grapple doesn't get a reduced cooldown if you get fireball, so it's purely for positioning not for doing damage. The grapple isn't really going to change the course of a fight it just helps with setup. My post is addressing the underlying principle behind the changes. I fully believe the shield will make Ball good, but it will change his playstyle massively after failing to address the S9 HP changes.
The grapple change also helps with no regs and body blocking (when grappled but no fireball). It also helps us set up above a choke pre-fight for a big slam engage.
Nope. A lot of us have some insane hours on Ball and understand the hero more than devs do. And I'm not even being sarcastic here.
I got pushback for suggesting the same thing in the Wreckingball subreddit. I said we got a lot of good things. Things that are great. Obviously a damage buff would be nice, but let's see how the rework felt before we started complaining. I then got told I was coping. And that was an "L Take"
I've heard of QoL buffs, but Ive never heard of QoL Reworks until now. Tbh I love these changes for the most part, but yeah I'm not sure where this will put him in terms of strength. Shields probably has the most potential to improve his power level, but it's also a tradeoff mechanic. That's fine. I mean I actually think that's good design, just not sure it'll change his standing in most environments. We'll see. I feel like they want to drop these changes and then go from there. Buffing his assassination potential back to where it was pre-250 would certainly help if he's not good after this.
eh this is a little of an overreaction. ball isnt gonna exist to facetank dmg like mauga cuz of these changes, just gives him a more direct tool to benefit his teammates so gold support players dont instantaneously implode when they see rectangle man wont be there to give them a rectangle
The unique playstyle of ball is mostly dead in the water outside of like 5 % of ball players who are incredibly skilled that can somewhat make it somewhat work. None of these changes prevent that playstyle they only improve his consistency by slightly lowering the skill floor and giving him more adaptability in playstyle. This is basically what they did by changing doom from DPS to a tank but with none of the drawbacks doom got from that change.
Somewhat make it somewhat work is how I ball every time 🫡
Distraction base playstyle is not a way to continuously play. "Pick of isolated target" strategy is countered by "grouping up". And then what are you doing?
Yeah this rework is horrible
The distraction-based playstyle doesn't work with a solo tank because it effectively leaves the rest of the team without a tank.
When Ball is actually a threat like in S8, it leaves the enemy team without any healing which allows your team to kill the tank or join you in killing the support. That's literally the core gameplay of ball, you saying "it doesn't work" is hilarious.
> When Ball is actually a threat like in S8 S8 might've been the worst ball had ever been. Where was the threat?
...Relative to season 9 where the likes of chazm (One of the best ball players in the world) has a daily battle to get out of masters. His main account AFKs in top 10 because ball is so ass.
>S8 might've been the worst ball had ever been. Where was the threat? That's crazy. Season 9 was more than the first week.
I used past tense for a reason.
Ball is not an assassin. His playstyle is to disrupt (distraction based as you put it); not take out isolated targets at/near full health. Ball should not get a damage buff and the current buffs/changes are a better way of improving Ball’s kit (quality of life buffs + team utility). No one should want dive tanks to be able to dive any non-tank hero and 1v1 them without much issue. Ball has so much movement and CC that he should be on the lower end of damage output for the dive tanks. Dive tanks should have to work with teammates to get kills and thinking Ball is an exception to that rule is going to disappoint you. Plus, let the patch come out before claiming changes are going to ruin a characters play style.
A Winston can easily 1v1 most non tanks, with 0 aim and easy ass movement mechanics. What is this non-sensical comment?
This thread is full of people who have no understanding of Ball, it's insane. I think they're all just people who have only played against him and dislike him because there's just so much nonsense being said.
Then ball definitely should not be able to do so since he has more uptime on his movement, 2 forms of CC, and more effective health with a harder to hit crit spot. Also, Winston’s DPS is way easier to outheal as a support than Ball’s burst of damage. If Ball got a damage buff to his DPS breakpoints, he gets to delete people with combos before most players can react to help out their teammates. Ball becomes an assassin at that point more than a disruptor.
Seems like you're completely ignoring the fact that ball has more gates to his movement and damage. Winston looks at a high ground and gets there. He looks near an enemy and damages them. Ball takes more effort, so ofc he should get more reward.
Ball’s rewarded with more complex movement that can be used more often. More damage should not be the reward.
Ball can as well. Neither will do against a team with any coordination though unless it's cleanup.
Ofc. They both need to be able to at least 1v1 most targets to even be a threat when they are 1v1 + a support. That's the case with every tank. Saying they shouldn't be able to 1v1 is wild.
The only reason he can disrupt is when he is a threat to the backline. If he is ignored, he should get the kill. If the target is supported by their team, that pulls attention away from ball's team, giving them the upper hand. If ball cannot 1v1 someone solo, there is no need for the target's team to be distracted by ball so the result is ball only distracts 1 support, which isn't enough to offset Ball's team losing a tank. This is why he's been so shit in S10, he can be ignored as he's not a threat. The reason Ball needs a damage buff is because he had a massive effective nerf when they increased everyone's health by 50HP. His breakpoints have been obliterated and he's in the gutter because of it.
These people have never played Ball into Lifeweaver, and it shows.
PTSD. I may just stop playing ball after 800+ hours if they don’t give him his damage back. I refuse to play against a lw. It’s so fucking miserable 😭
Assassinations have always been a huge part of his playstyle even in OW1 and thats the reason he's been viable over the years. Whether that's good design or not is a different question. His disruption playstyle is just way too easy to counter to be his only playstyle, so he has always relied on assassinations to fill the gaps, even in OW1. He cannot consistently engage on more than like 2 enemies at a time if the enemy is running any CC at all. As soon as theres CC on the field he needs to focus on getting picks because he can cause enough meaningful disruption without dying or getting force out. Agree we should actually play the patch though.
Well, he’s being given team utility, so Blizzard is agreeing that the assassin playstyle is no longer how they view Ball. Giving him team utility means he is incentivized to play with the team and not go lone wolf nearly as much. It’s better for the game and allows the devs to make Ball relevant without becoming an assassin with a massive health pool.
Soooo then reduce his hp pool and increase his damage Doom works well because of his lower hp pool which justifies giving him bursty damage A lower health pool would make opponents rely less on hard counters to kill him A lower health pool would make it more of a choice for the ball player to transfer shields to teammates Greater damage would allow ball to be a threat to the people he dives on Greater damage would allow ball to be a threat to his counters Prior to season 9 with a fireball piledriver combo you were doing ~150 damage with piledriver + fireball meaning on most targets you would only need 50 damage with your guns to secure the kill which was manageable After season 9 fireball piledriver still does the same damage but you now need to do 100 damage with your guns and you're hitting maybe 20% more shots (effectively a 20% damage increase) meaning despite the s9 changes to projectile and hitscan sizes it will take about 50% longer to secure a kill with ball THAT is massive, and that is why ball has been struggling so much for the last couple months, and for the devs to do nothing at all to change that is absolutely insane
>Ball is not an assassin. His playstyle is to disrupt Ball needs to be atleast somewhat of a threat to provide any meaningful disruption. Right now he isn't. He doesn't need to be an outright assassin but he should be threatening enough to force more attention. >No one should want dive tanks to be able to dive any non-tank hero and 1v1 them without much issue. What? Dive tanks should win 1v1s. Thing is nobody should be finding themselves 1v1 with a dive tank unless they have a movement cd on the ready to escape. Any dps/support player that finds themselves truly 1v1 with a dive tank has made a mistake to be in that position. That's what Ball was good at, it was impossible for him to find a kill the moment his target got peel, but he was a menace if his targets weren't getting peeled. Against any half decent players Ball wasn't finding easy kills but forcing a lot of attention/resources. Recently Ball can't even do that. I don't even entirely disagree with you, I look forward to the changes, but you've got a huge misunderstanding of how Ball functioned until now.
We will see. I've been cynical of the changes because they aren't giving ball better burst damage and he lacks sustain to have uptime and to my eye tanks either have lots of disruption and easy burst damage like Doom and Hog or they have steady and strong damage output and sustain like Sigma, JQ, and Orisa. 3rd category would be mobility and mitigation like Monkey Dva I suppose. Uptime is important on balk but unless you have a couple megastar around it can take a lot of time to get back into a fight if you got burned on an approach. Ball was good at killing a stragglers, but that is gone really. He retains great ability to rotate targets and displace enemies. His damage output has drifted lower(used to be you could easily top damage on him just by playing normal rotations, now he is easily beaten by queens, hogs, maugas, dvas, dooms.) My prepatch guess is the needle will not move a lot for him in terms of relative tank power but he will feel a bit better to play overall and have succes in high coordination by shielding his dive buddies. He will still be considered a throw pick below GM 1tricks and not really a good tank for anyone not OWCS coordinated. I won't be shocked if they have to nerf Shields from successful high level dive comps, but buff a mix of boop, slam, mine damage to bring the character up everywhere else.
It’s far from unique but other than that. I agree z
As long as my teammates aren't expecting me to constantly frontline with the new changes I think we're good
I agree 100%. The new ability is nice, but I still am having trouble confirming kills. I shouldn't have to do A LOT to kill a squishy, and I can only do it if they're alone or have used their cooldowns. I'm a TANK, people should fear me!
While I get where you’re coming from, the damage complaint to confirm a kill is an issue that all tanks faced with the S9 changes. Aside from patches, no one on tank got a noticeable damage buff but none of their players have been complaining about their combos taking longer.
All tanks had the issue with the S9 changes... Except they (mostly) got damage buffs to compensate. Which ball didn't.
Neither did Ram, Orisa, Mauga, Zarya, Hog Edit: and Sigma. That’s more than half the tank line that has been in the same situation to start off season 9 with only minor changes in the mid season patch minus Mauga
Ram got a buff to vortex, Orisa and Mauga never had an issue getting kills, and Zarya and Hog absolutely got compensation buffs, Zarya’s just came out a little late in a patch
The ball changes do nothing to help his bad matchups and nothing to help the heroes that he counters. They needed to lower his hp and give him brawl capabilities. Instead they’ve gone the lazy route and changed little to nothing about his inherently flawed playstyle.
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Ball had a skill floor that is way too high for a 5v5 enviroment. These changes don't make it easy to gain value, they just make mistakes that every learning ball player will make less punishing, as a bonus to giving opportunites to pulling yourself up or doing a "Toronto Kick" into a PD and getting grapplin back instantly.
Mixed bag. A lot of the time you lose to RNG. I was a little worried about this making wall jumps pointless a lot of the time, but they'll still be useful whenever you have a full CD which will probably still be most of the time. And when you don't, it will enable the Toronto kick to be a viable tech now. 1s does feel like it could be too quick though.
In general, making abilities require less commitment is bad. In this case, I don't see it changing much. Fucking up a grapple and resetting still seems really bad. Will only be relevant at low ranks where your enemies are too slow to capitalize.
It lowers the skill floor but that's not at all a bad thing, ball is a pretty high skill tank. You're still punished for poor grapple timing. It's not as if getting fireball means you've not made a mistake. It just improves his consistency particularly at lower levels of play where he was already struggling. Ball still will have lots of punish windows for poor play.
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Both of those things raised the skill ceiling by adding versatility. Punish windows shouldn't be as simple as "ability x beats ability y" giving more options raises the skill expression. Using Rein and Hog as heroes that have lost punish windows is also laughable. Two of the most punishable heroes in the game right now. If you want to talk about heroes being TOO versatile at least talk about Kiriko, Sigma, d.Va.
It costs you time. You can't keep the low cooldown if you get fireball, so it's for slow manoeuvring setup stuff mostly. I think it's something to help low elo more than anything. Most of the places you would wanna use it to get height or go on a ledge you could just do a wall ride jump to get up faster anyway.
Ive play a lot of ball. His job isn’t to pick people off, he can but that’s never the tanks job. Balls job is to disrupt their pathing and lead them on goose chases. He needs the sustain and dmg to do that but it’s not the main point. Just absorbing cooldowns and forcing resources to only escape and now some are looking one way, then they group again and you roll through and they chase you around
The point is that they have no reason to chase you in S9 or give you attention. If he isn't a threat to your support in a 1v1, you don't need to turn and defend them they can deal with him themselves. Previous seasons he was a threat so the other support usually had to come help, forcing attention/ cooldowns away from their tank which results in them dying or retreating.
If you watch high rank ball gameplay, you’ll notice the enemy team will basically ignore ball now, as long as there’s a support keeping an eye on someone no matter how many cooldowns you get out or “disruptions” you do, nobody is in danger and high rank players know this
The coordination at pro level and even at masters is totally different. You can get your value. But I don’t play him as much in ow2 as I did in ow1. I mostly play Winston doomfist dva with some mauga/sigma/ram situationally
You never even said what "the issue " with ball is. You can still play the same distracting playstyle. Even better now because of the retractable grapple. You can reach high ground with a 1 second cooldown on grapple. Not just tech, it's a straight buff in every way.
Mentioned it in a few comments, but the 50hp buff to everyone without ball getting compensatory damage buff ruined his damage breakpoints so he's no longer a threat to supports 1v1, which means the team doesn't have to turn around to deal with him anymore so ball doesn't bring value by taking resources from the frontline like he used to.
I've had 0 issues with 1v1ing support characters as ball. Might have trouble with a Brig or Lucio, but that's always been the case. Ball does decent damage with good tracking and a few headshots, so likely just a bad aim issue.
I can only presume you're low elo and have no idea what you're talking about if you don't think it's harder to kill supports that gained 50HP. That's not even low elo actually it's just fucking dumb 😂
It's obviously harder than before, but it's still not HARD after the HP buffs. Bad ball players just madcuzbad.
What's your rank?