I personally don’t see a big problem with javelin, but i completely understand the problems with her.
When nader was considered too op by splash damage, they nerfed her martydom and nades with a reduction in explsovie/insta gib radius, reducing the effectiveness of the spam. This made nades more valuable, naders now need to decide when and where they bounce nades to get the best value. (this was back in 2015/2016). The recent balance changes to javelin on her explosive radius did the same, but instead of leading to playing against a nader who would save her nades and give you a chance to kill when she follows up now the nades only wounded you, all the javelin changes did was give the enemy facing jav even less of a chance as now a javelin needs to close the gap even more to make sure you’re dead, reducing the time an average player has to run away from a rocket.
So here is the one change i propose: Make her actually usable at anything other than close range situations.
Everyone complains about the 1v1 cheese, but the ‘meta’ people like me use is because of the guaranteed value it gives. I COULD do some fancy fecking ground-to-air loop-de-loop to bomb a team from above, or do some long range snipe over high cover, but WHY RISK IT when i could just jump around the corner and nuke you? Ive done aerial shots a few times, but its at great risk for my long cool down ability so why bother?
To balance Javelin, they need to make long range possible on a consistent basis.
Move javelin to the assault category, fire support should be characterized as anti ev NOT ammo giving and shes fecking awful at anti ev, and give her a longer range niche. I dont know, maybe copy Ironsight’s blade drone, a mix of predator missile and hand held missle, but the ET rocket launcher model simply doesnt work in this game. (Tbh, that game handled dedicated hand held rockets very well by making them EMP, effective against the killstreak drones in the game but doing literally 8 damage versus players since they are fundamentally designed to NOT be used against players, but at drones, while the rocket designed to kill is a killstreak that fires into the air first, giving the enemy a chance to react)
OR
Give her ACTUAL anti ev potential, give her a reason to use her pocket nukes at long range, and then balance around the cqc cheese, just giving her a damage nerf/damage nerf at close range/longer rocket set up times won’t work. It only PUSHES javelins players MORE to the cheese tactics as it becomes the only way to get stuff done with a high chance of certainty in its effectiveness. If it becomes more worthwhile to stay back and blast the rocket from a distance/use it against an ev, the problem resolves itself.
Rockets have no place in its current form in DB, a game where ‘killstreaks’ dont spawn in actively visible helicopters like COD they are meant to shoot down or a game like Unreal tournament in which fast movement made it skill based in cqc.
Tl:DL - Javelins rocket is highly valuable to a player, so closing the distance is the way to get value. Encourage long range behaviour through changes., and people will stop having a problem with it. Fragger has the closer range insta kill niche, give javelin a longer range one. The ability, on a fundamental level, will always be ‘cheap’ due to its design of high risk (one rocket) and high reward (lots of damage), but the problem is how and when its used, being halfway through a gunfight or before you even have a chance to see the javelin leap around a corner, not that it actually exists as an ability.
Wow this turned into an essay, sorry.