@Ptiloui said:
So when you think about Phantom ability, this is what you think about at first : disable enemy deployables and rest of your team push as you destroy enemies backlines. The difference is that Phantom is too much situational compared to his OW counterpart : if enemies don’t have any deployable or too few, his ability becomes useless, while Sombra’s hacking ability is universal.
But you see the trick here ? We’re talking about ability driven gameplay, when a lot of players (mostly the older ones) want Dirty Bomb more focused on aiming skill than on using abilities. It works wonders in OW because the entire game is designed around each hero’s ability. It will never work that well in Dirty Bomb because the core of the game is designed around gunplay. And as you pointed out, mercs like Phantom or Guardian (but I think Hunter is concerned too), whose abilities are especially designed to act on/counter a small part of the game’s content, will rarely be picked in competitive environment, in which the need of being useful close to 100% of the time is the way-to-go.
Increase explosive cooldown by 1.5x minimum, limit merc stacking, see how it goes and how those would suddenly have some place to shine.
Yes, experienced people want DB more focused on gunplay. But that mostly implies, at least from my point of view, less kills with explosive, which are way too dominent right now, even on 5vs5.
Even though the 130 hp nerfed him strongly on public, fragger is still a strong choice on ranked as he’s still one of the few having access to a pretty much guaranteed kill ability. That’s already 4vs5 and not to say 3vs5 very often, all due to one single explosive ability at every wave.
Remove his implied ability to deny every spawnwave, fragger will get terrible.
Or limit the 1 hit to kill capabilities of most explosives, results could be similar as well.
Of course, fiddling with Phantom abilities and stats is way easier, but SD never really hit what really hurt in this game. As long as explosive/AOE abilities are this strong, you’ll always see stacks of fraggers, artys, naders in ranked, with close no transfer on other strategies, reducing usage of Phantom, Guardian, Hunter… (pretty much 2/3 of the merc would apply in some way).
This has to be said, in 5vs5 situations, Javelin shows way weaker than Fragger, Thunder, Nader, Arty and even Stocker because she has a quite high CD, and an ability which depends on how good your opponents are at forecasting and dodging. Making her and skyhammer, targets to align other explosive mercs with, at least in this very context of 5vs5.
