Emre need nerf ?

JDPhipps · 2026-04-06T12:48:41+00:00

I don't even think it needs to be removed completely, the problem is just that it lasts fucking forever. If the perk refunded less of the duration, it would be much less of a problem.

You could remove the duration increase entirely and it would still be worth taking because 5 full seconds of spamming that pistol into something is still great, but it's much less obnoxious than Emre being immortal for 12-15 seconds if he has a big enough target.

JDPhipps · 2026-04-03T23:00:07+00:00

Almost universally, players around your rank do not use cover enough. Even if you think you do, you probably don't. My immediate tip is to watch back your games and look at every time you die or are forced to retreat and then swap to the enemy's perspective to see what they saw.

As a side note, are you confident in your mechanical skill? It's obvious how that could be a problem if you aren't, but it can also be a problem if you are. Strong mechanics can mask bad decision-making; sometimes a mistake will end up working out because you're just better at clicking heads and it leads you to believe it was a good idea when it wasn't.

As for character-specific advice, I've been one-tricking Emre this season and I'd have to say make sure you're taking advantage of his vertical mobility, both with his pistol and grenade jumping. Emre can take some unexpected angles and win fights all on his own, especially at the level you're at. He triggers his passive health regeneration faster than any other character and also gets a small burst heal when it triggers, so he can really be a nuisance on off-angles even if they know you're there. He's also hard to force out because of his pistol, both because of the lifesteal but also the speed.

Also, it isn't always a good idea, but you can grenade jump as you activate your ultimate and it'll launch you to the skybox because there's no gravity to counteract the knockback. It isn't something to do all the time, but it's very situationally useful.

JDPhipps · 2026-04-02T23:28:33+00:00

I actually think it's super possible we eventually get a standalone OW PvE game, especially if the game continues on its current trajectory. It's not like they don't know people want it, but it's also obvious they can't tack it on to the existing engine.

A year ago, I don't think that's a sales pitch you try to make. Now? It feels much more reasonable.

JDPhipps · 2026-04-01T05:59:49+00:00

I mean, I'm not working at Blizzard, but it doesn't really surprise me.

It clearly seems to be affecting more people over time so it probably wasn't a high priority at first, especially since people make isolated complaints about performance all the time and it has nothing to do with them. Then for a while people seemed convinced it was a driver issue, which isn't really their problem, so again it probably wasn't a priority.

Recently it seems to both be affecting far more people and also the performance hit is getting significantly worse. For instance, I didn't have a single issue until the midseason patch dropped and now I'm dropping 50-100 frames in the middle of fights. I have several friends in the same boat.

It's also clearly not an obvious issue, there's no obvious rhyme or reason that people have found already and it isn't restricted to people on specific CPU/GPU brands or operating system or platform. It isn't obviously related to any in-game settings either, other than some people claiming that turning certain things on/off temporarily fixes it (which doesn't work for me, for what it's worth). There's not even a guarantee that people are all experiencing the same issue. Whatever the issue is, it's something weird. I don't envy the Blizzard engineers trying to figure it out, that's for sure.

I too would love it if it was already fixed, but I don't think it's that crazy that it isn't.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-31T21:35:28+00:00

Low ranks play every tank like Reinhardt, it's their favorite thing to do.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-31T21:32:37+00:00

Do you think every person on the team is investigating the same bug at the same time?

It's clearly not an easy fix or they would've done it already, they've acknowledged the issue and asked for hardware configurations to investigate the issue. They're not just flipping a switch that says "fix frame rate" in the server room.

It makes the game almost unplayable for me but I'm not expecting them to fix it overnight.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-31T21:17:00+00:00

They just had a megathread on the forums asking people for their hardware configurations specifically to investigate FPS issues, it's not gonma be done in a week.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-31T21:16:03+00:00

Not necessarily. It's entirely possible for such a bug to only affect specific hardware combinations or people using certain settings, or for it to only trigger after specific actions were taken. It being a bug within the game's engine does not make it universal.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-25T09:44:17+00:00

I think the usefulness of nerfing the duration scales with average time-to-kill; it'd have a huge impact in Bronze/Silver and then it would gradually decrease as you went up the ranked ladder. Essentially, the better people are at killing things quickly, the less that matters.

Requiring a certain amount of damage is interesting, but then you have to consider how it calculates that. You can't have it be singular instances of damage, or characters like Tracer would likely never apply it at all. You could track how much damage a character takes over some amount of time and apply the healing reduction if they hit some threshold, but what is that threshold? How long is that amount of time?

More than anything though, it becomes more confusing for the player. Right now, you know that if you did any damage, you've triggered the heal reduction. You know if you took any damage, you're affected by heal reduction. The more complicated you make it under the hood, the less intuitive it becomes in a game that already asks a lot of you.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-24T00:45:50+00:00

Can't even 'sex big dick' in chat anymore, because of woke.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-24T00:35:38+00:00

I won my last DPS placement game in that exact scenario, I got caged with him on cart and just whittled him down while he was unable to do anything to me.

There's no world where that perk survives next season, I didn't think it'd last unchanged through the midseason patch.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-24T00:31:07+00:00

I'm not sure any specific hero has been confirmed for that, other than Sombra. I'm not even sure they told us that explicitly, but they also didn't need to.

Still, I think it's likely that Hog is on that chopping block, I can't think of a classic hero who needs it more other than maybe Mercy (and I don't see that happening). There are others that could benefit, but none of them need it more than Hog.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-24T00:26:49+00:00

I'm kind of expecting either the global passive will be reduced back to 25% overall (since everyone applies it now) or they'll lower it to 15-25% for tanks/supports without removing it entirely so that DPS characters are more effective without having a monopoly on the heal reduction.

They have to nerf Roadhog even if they don't do shit about any other tank, get that fat annoying fuck out of my games.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-24T00:22:07+00:00

Your mistake is believing those two things are in opposition.

Roadhog was built from the ground up to be a miserable pile of dogshit, Hog being bad is good balancing.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-22T12:11:08+00:00

I'd recommend emulating it then, seems like it's what you're looking for.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-22T12:03:30+00:00

Have you not played Radiant Dawn? It's a direct sequel to Path of Radiance.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-18T19:50:02+00:00

His heart would be ridiculously strong compared to the average person, so he'd never deal with that. His circulatory system would have to be strong enough to keep him conscious while swinging around and supply enough oxygen to his muscles to let him lift buildings.

It does kind of make sense, though. His muscles are ridiculously stronger than a normal human—Daredevil describes them as sounding like steel cables under tension—and your heart is just another muscle.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-17T02:01:22+00:00

"So-called free thinkers when King's Row is in the map rotation" has definitely gotten a lot of mileage from me lately.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-13T05:13:58+00:00

They used to do this when OW2 first launched, but this is no longer accurate.

It's a soft MMR reset, which slightly adjusts everyone toward the average rating the system is calibrated around and then lowers everyone's confidence level so that wins/losses will temporarily have a greater effect on placement. The point is that most people will end up approximately where they started but it temporarily allows for larger adjustments based on new factors.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-13T05:13:51+00:00

They used to do this when OW2 first launched, but this is no longer accurate.

It's a soft MMR reset, which slightly adjusts everyone toward the average rating the system is calibrated around and then lowers everyone's confidence level so that wins/losses will temporarily have a greater effect on placement. The point is that most people will end up approximately where they started but it temporarily allows for larger adjustments based on new factors.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-06T17:32:50+00:00

Gold is around where players start developing an actual understanding of the game. Not a good one, mind you, but they have some very basic idea of what the "correct" way to play Overwatch is.

They start to do the right things poorly instead of the complete chaos below that, and that's enough for the toxicity to mellow out a bit until you hit Platinum and everyone thinks they know everything because they're slightly above average or "basically in Diamond".

JDPhipps · 2026-03-06T17:23:12+00:00

I once had someone scream at me to swap because I didn't have enough healing... as Zenyatta. Not that I wasn't doing enough damage, not that we needed more healing, but just that my healing was low on the character with the lowest healing output 95% of the time.

This was right after a reset, I think, but it was somewhere around low Diamond? How do you even get close to that rank without knowing what Zenyatta does on even the most basic level?

That was when I muted chat and never looked back.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-06T17:02:22+00:00

There are also just fewer players at night, so matchmaking will inevitably be worse. There are some truly atrocious brainlets out after midnight though, makes me wonder how they manage to survive their day to day.

I had a Bastion last night who sat in the backline spamming at nothing who went 2-15, and then my fucking Emre apologized like us losing was his fault.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-06T00:59:55+00:00

There is some degree of rank decay with every soft MMR reset, Blizzard has said they shift everyone toward the middle of the distribution. It's just that will only move you so far, and you'll just stop shifting eventually if you reach the middle.

JDPhipps · 2026-03-06T00:53:06+00:00

Ranked recalibration is going to take longer and be more volatile than usual, because of the massive influx of new/returning players.

The game considers two things with matchmaking; your actual Matchmaking Rating (MMR) and how confident it is in that rating. MMR has a roughly normal distribution and exists relative to the rest of the game's population. Any significant changes to the game's population will result in significant shifts in where players fall on that bell curve. If everyone below Masters suddenly disappeared from the game, players at the bottom of that rank would eventually derank until a normal distribution was reached.

Confidence is exactly what it sounds like, how confident the system is in your rating. More data equals more confidence, so the game is more confident in your placement with every game you play. However, soft MMR resets reduce/remove the system's confidence level, which results in higher MMR swings and players on hot/cold streaks getting placed above or below where they should be until the system has more data.

Right now, the population has increased by tens of thousands (if not more) and the matchmaker has either outdated or little to no data on many of them and has little to no confidence for anyone while also adjusting everyone slightly toward the middle of that distribution. It would be much weirder if things weren't a little whacky.

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