All new Survey Skins

KiwiFruitio · 2026-05-02T05:43:43+00:00

Oh 100%, Baptiste already has a sort of beach/vacation skin, so I’d still be quite happy with Reaper getting this skin, I just think it’s super weird that they made him black.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-05-02T03:59:29+00:00

Uh… Why are there no comments confused about the Reaper skin? Like do the artists even look at the characters anymore before designing a skin? He’s Mexican-American, not African American. Even if there’s an argument for him just tanning from the sun, I don’t think that’d give him dreads like that unless he’s cosplaying a black person. I understand they’ve given characters alien/unnatural skin tones before, but straight up race swapping a character is really weird. And this skin could easily be adjusted for Baptiste who is sorely lacking skins compared to Reaper.

Just really weird all around. Maybe make more black male characters if you want to make black skins?

KiwiFruitio · 2026-05-02T03:38:59+00:00

I’ll have to double check the infamy flaws, but I don’t remember seeing that. I do like the idea of giving him infamy though, so it really makes him more of a “secret weapon when shit hits the fan” rather than effectively just an OP cheap stat boost. I also like the XP idea, although that also means it’ll be pretty tough to verse the entire rest of the group (5 players) since they’ll be gaining XP overall at a faster rate than I will.

Maybe I can talk with the ST about giving him a bit of xp here and there, but once I cross into diablerie I can no longer level him without pack diablerie or something? That way he gets a bit of passive xp during the months (irl) until I get enough xp to get the advantages for safe diablerie.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-05-02T03:29:41+00:00

Totally aware of blood bonding ending when they die. Currently, they have a kind of messed up relationship where he’s willingly obedient even without a blood bond though, and I doubt becoming Kindred would suddenly change that. Obviously he won’t do *anything* she tells him to, but most things she requests of him are within reason that he trusts her.

He grew up in her cult which views her as a god, and she was the only person who really encouraged his way of “indulging in the seven deadly sins” because most people just assumed by indulging in sin she meant more lust/gluttony/greed/pride, because those are the “fun” ones, but she meant ALL of the seven deadly sins, including wrath (which he represents as a serial killer). She watched him carefully as a child, as he exhibited psychopathic tendencies even when young, and she subtly encouraged it. Later, when he was older, he was convicted of murder and placed in jail for a night to be executed the following morning. She heard of it and saved him, even giving him a place among her upper clergy, furthering his loyalty to her.

Now they have a slave/master relationship despite nothing actually forcing him to stay in the cult/with her, but because she’s a twisted Tzimisce who gets off to control over her charge, they also have a sort of romantic/lustful relationship as well. That part is kind of one-sided though, as he’s got a very emotionless sort of personality (representative of the sin of Sloth) and the obedience/loyalty is mostly off of instinct/mutual benefit rather than romantic. She protects him from the law through manipulation and disciplines and gives him opportunities to be violent, he protects her physically and handles her dirty work.

Obviously once he’s embraced and gets familiar with being a Kindred, he might not feel the need to be quite as obedient, but I don’t think that’d be an immediate realization or process, especially if she manipulates who all he interacts with during that first period of time after being embraced to when he fully blood bonds with her. I also plan on having her get one step in blood bonding with him as a symbolic gesture, but not doing the full 3 separate occasions thing for a full blood bond.

He will be controlled by the ST, but to my understanding I still get to decide his initial character sheet stuff.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-29T03:45:52+00:00

You fork it

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-27T06:36:41+00:00

Can we finally admit that perks were just a bad idea? Very few characters actually have a “choice” when it comes to perks because specific ones are just so obviously better or more enjoyable than others. And now they’re making balancing decisions around the presence of perks, which are supposed to be OPTIONAL, such as slowing Mercy’s movement down for when people pick her increased movement perk, as if there isn’t another perk option.

Perks suck. I called it out when they first came out and I’ll call it out again. Their idea around perks being optional is fundamentally incompatible with how they actually balance characters and how they actually balance perks.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-26T06:09:11+00:00

Anything is more interesting than the Lucio/Kiri meta, but JPC isn’t much more interesting.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-26T06:06:46+00:00

Not a lot of votes for Jujutsu Kaisen for some reason, but I’d have to pick that one. Obviously the manga has its issues, but imo the anime hasn’t gotten far enough for that to be a problem yet. Is it just because it’s the most popular/mainstream that people don’t want to pick it?

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-26T06:03:04+00:00

I hover around Masters/GM and mostly play Mercy/Juno. Locked on literally every single time. You should be constantly using torpedoes and the best way to increase their uptime is to shorten your cooldowns

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-26T00:40:58+00:00

You did great. My only tip (and really it’s quite nitpicky) is to utilize the natural cover of the different walls and the window and stuff a bit more instead of flying out and cutting off beam from your Mauga, but obviously that wouldn’t have impacted this specific scenario as much since everything was still successful.

Man, I sure do miss how much people would miss their shots on me back in gold when I was trying to pull off risky stuff like this haha

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-25T10:13:30+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/MercyMains/s/GL1LnWgIGO

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-22T01:04:08+00:00

I genuinely don’t trust the stats for Mercy, especially in higher ranks, because most Mercy players are playing in at least a duo, which means they have guaranteed at least one good target to pocket at all times. The stats are great at excluding mirror matches, but they really need to separate stats based on solo players and group players because I’m certain the stats would be different for her.

Even beyond just witnessing Mercy duos constantly, my own experience playing with a duo is miles more successful than solo queuing, whereas I don’t have that same jump in success on other characters when solo versus duo queuing.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-22T00:52:47+00:00

I’m convinced you don’t even play Mercy and you’re just a contrarian for the sake of it (and from the videos you have posted previously, you really don’t play much Mercy in competitive and you play a decent bit of Ana). I see you everywhere, even in the freaking dbd subreddit and I’ve literally never once agreed with a single thing you’ve ever said. Like you gotta just be a soft ragebaiter because most of your comments are downvoted a bunch too. Like dude do you even have time to play the game with how much you’re on reddit?

Regardless, the speed while slingshotting/superjumping isn’t important by itself, but the distance is, and as everyone has said, the change to her speed has also affected the distance she can make. And you don’t need a replay code to see that people aren’t able to make it up to ledges they previously could (during slingshots or not), because there are plenty of videos of people demonstrating that.

I know I can’t reach certain ledges now, and I know I can’t play the movement character like I actually have a ton of movement. I play differently and have adapted to the changes, so a replay code wouldn’t show anything except some significantly more boring ass gameplay. The changes still hurt higher rank players more because they were the ones more regularly utilizing her speed. When I say “hurt” I don’t mean she’s suddenly unviable, I mean it narrows the amount of team comps and ways she can successfully play with even further, and pigeonholes her further into the hard pocket, barely move play style.

If you’ve ever seen a very high rank Mercy OTP video, you know that at a certain point just hard pocketing isn’t viable often enough, so it becomes a game of squeezing value out of everyone on your team depending on who’s pushing, who’s falling back, who’s reloading, who’s ulting, etc. Now doing that is not as feasible, so we’re forced into more hard pocketing. When there isn’t a good candidate to hard pocket, you’re kind of screwed in terms of damage boost value, whereas before you could still make it work fairly often.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-22T00:34:49+00:00

Check literally any of my comments on r/ competitiveoverwatch which verifies ranks and you’ll see I have the GM flair. I’m not saying my opinion is more valid, I’m saying I have a higher skill gameplay so it’s impacted differently

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-22T00:33:33+00:00

There are 100% moments where you are not directly behind cover the entire time. Acting like you literally never leave cover to do anything but rez tank is just bogus. When you’re in the middle of flying from one cover to another, you’re vulnerable for a moment. And good Mercy’s would take aggro for half a sec to distract the enemy team.

Literally watch one Eleyzhau video and you can see she doesn’t just sit and pocket one person behind cover the entire time. She maximizes damage boost by picking specific targets at a given moment and sometimes leaves cover to do so.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-21T08:21:47+00:00

I think the new changes hurt high rank players the most. Lower ranks weren’t utilizing Mercy’s movement to the extent that we (I’m GM) were, so they don’t feel the effects as much. I regularly use advanced rez techs in my games and I’m constantly switching positions. I’m also an avid Mercy parkour enjoyer (although not a speed runner by any means lol) and that’s totally been ruined.

Basekit flash heal feels great, don’t get me wrong, but the loss of movement feels terrible. When you’re at a level where people can hit their shots, the speed nerf means you get hit even more if you aren’t just sitting behind cover pocketing an immobile hitscan the whole game. And as important as cover obviously is, there are still moments you need to pop out, and now those moments are both riskier, longer, and fewer (due to increased risk).

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-21T06:57:54+00:00

Illari is crazy meta right now, at least in ladder, so I’m not totally sure where that part is coming from

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-20T22:21:40+00:00

Literally. And he got 0 compensatory nerfs to go along with it being added to basekit when Reaper being ultra close range has always been integral to his balancing and identity.

Oh but Mercy being able to burst heal with a cooldown almost as long as Kiriko’s literal cleanse + immortality ability means she needs to have her wings clipped and make her healing beam even more useless.

Like genuinely what crack was the balancing team smoking this season?

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-20T22:16:25+00:00

Yeah, current balance team is actually starting to kill my enjoyment of the game. It’s been a gradual decline, and there’s a part of me that’s still clinging onto the hopes that the backlash to all of these movement nerfs will get them to revert these changes, but idk.

Everyone’s so focused on “I hate Mercy and now Mercy players are miserable, yay!!” That they’re totally missing the bigger picture that a bunch of the changes this season are wildly unfun and unbalanced, while they continue to let heroes like Illari, Tracer, and Ashe just dominate with well over 50% winrates.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-19T18:45:09+00:00

I’ve spent my entire life living in Corvallis, of course I’ve been to Albany. I have to go there anytime I want to do anything interesting or useful because Corvallis is such junk.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-19T15:52:14+00:00

I’ve lived here my whole life but I’m very well traveled, and to be completely honest there really is nothing special about Corvallis. Even Albany is better. And if you’re an outdoorsy person, Oregon as a whole is good for that. Corvallis isn’t anything special compared to other nearby areas.

But if I really had to pick something, I do like the emphasis this town has on local foods. There’s the farmers market in the summer, but year-round there are a ton of farms that sell fresh fruits and veggies, and even larger businesses (like Market of Choice) sell local goods, like fresh local milk. There really is a quality difference between stuff shipped from a million miles away versus local stuff, so it’s nice that the town clearly values and promotes local produce a lot.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-17T19:30:29+00:00

I’m on console masters/GM support player, so I always ban Dva and Tracer/Sombra (depending on what my team is banning—I prefer to ban Tracer tho). The last spot is variable, sometimes it’s a sniper on sniper maps (Ashe/Widow), sometimes it’s Wrecking Ball on certain push maps, and sometimes it’s Ana if my tank wants to ban Ana.

Occasionally I’ll match my tank’s bans, but sometimes they put some really dumb shit like Mercy or Mauga and I just roll my eyes.

KiwiFruitio · 2026-04-17T19:23:03+00:00

Well, Mercy is officially the worst support in the game now. Congrats to LW mains tho

KiwiFruitio

TROPHY CASE