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Sometimes, all you need to do is ask. An Overwatch player devised a survey to gauge the fan base’s feelings on the state of some of the game’s heroes.
The poll follows developer Josh Noh’s comments that the game isn’t experiencing a “power creep.” The creator plans to make up a community-balanced version of the shooter by devising a Workshop mode with all the proposed changes.
The “Overwatch Community Balance Survey” was posted on Reddit and consists of an intricate form that allows players to choose particular heroes and skills that they think are in need of changes. The survey must be taken once for each character and allows players to explain which specific aspects of the skills should be tweaked.
Preliminary results evidence a belief that Mei and Baptiste are overpowered. Both heroes are at the top of leaderboards with 16.8 percent and 15.3 percent of responses, respectively. At time of writing, the survey counted over 6,500 responses. Hanzo, Orisa, and Sigma make up the rest of the top five.
Mei’s primary fire is “by far” the biggest skill in need of balancing. The answers denote that ditching its multi-freeze effect and nerfing its slowdown would be considered positive changes on the hero.
Baptiste is the most mentioned support hero and received nearly four times as many nominations as Moira, who sits in second place. The combat medic’s Immortality Field is overwhelmingly cited as his most troublesome feature and accounts for nearly 90 percent of all his responses.
Initial results also show that both Orisa and Sigma are perceived to have troublesome kits following the release of Patch 1.43. The two tanks were the fourth and fifth most mentioned heroes in the survey, and both abilities considered in need of changes were amplified with the latest patch. The update reduced the cooldown on Orisa’s Fortify and Sigma’s Experimental Barrier as a tradeoff for a general shield nerf.
The survey also points to Genji as the hero most in need of a buff. The community feels that his biggest weakness is his Deflect and the main suggestion would be to increase its hitbox.
Blizzard and the community seem to share similar opinions regarding Mei and Baptiste. Both heroes were listed by Overwatch players as in need of a nerf and developers announced changes to Baptiste’s Immortality Field and to Mei’s kit. D.Va will also receive a mobility buff as part of the next wave of adjustments to make their way to the PTR.
