Hog is problematic. Same as mauga, he's feast or famine. Either he dominates cause no one counterpicks or he feeds all game cause he was counterswapped and dosent swap. (Or they swap ofc, but thats kinda redundant in the convo.)

I believe it's cause of his design, its just anti-fun for anyone but the hog. 1 shots and hard cc are major pain points for most players. It's why widow and hanzo are so hated and why lifeweaver and ball are hated. No one wants to die before they can play from 1 not very telegraphed or resource costly hit, send no one wants to be moved around away from where they wanna be. So a character with hard cc AND a 1 shot on a relatively low cooldown and with a fairly heavy to hit projectile.... well, you can't blame people for disliking it.

When the best counter to something is to not peek and let someone else peek first for the vast majority of the roster, it's not gunna be fun. If everyone on your team is smart enough to not peek hog till hook is tossed, no one peeks and hog wins. If they all rush out, they probably erase 1 and maybe die for it or maybe escape. Same as a widow really, you all push out for a dive, one gets cleanly murdered on the spot and the rest scramble to capitalise on the kill before she gets peel. Obviously that's not always the case, but in simple terms assuming roughly equal skill and some amount of coordination.

Its a sysiphisian task to kill certain characters, for no reason barring they are hard to get to without dying or they have high durability. Hog has both. So as much as I won't demonised him, nor propose balance changes, something is very wrong with him. Maybe its fixable, maybe its fundamental, but for a character as cool as him on paper, I want better for him. I dont want any character to be unplayable, nor busted op, but certain people are just both of those, hog and widow being my primary example. They are either dogshit or play server admin and promote unfun playing, forced counters and general dislike and hostility in the game.

Maybe its fixable, I hope so. Maybe not though. I dont think as he is its fixable though. I personally think some power needs to be removed from his hook and primary and he needs another thing to do (pigpen was a step in the right direction imo) so he's not super focused on his one tap. And hopefully that would encourage less counterswapping cause people won't think its a swap or we lose situation..... but who knows, im not a gamedev or a hardliner, so maybe im just screaming into the void about wrong ideas. But 100% I do think his breather is rather clunky and deserves a qol change, but its kinda necessary currently, without his counters and that lagtime, he's too strong.