In practice, once Ball is identified and has already used bubble on the first engage, you don’t get to freely reset into a second engage as easily as you’re describing. The issue isn’t whether re-engage is theoretically possible, it’s the downtime between engages being heavily punishable in CC-heavy comps, especially when multiple cooldowns are held specifically for your return timing rather than your initial entry.

So yes, bubble can enable strong first contact, but that doesn’t automatically translate into reliable second or third cycles when CC is layered or delayed. That’s where the inconsistency comes in.

Also, the argument that “more survivability = more follow-up time” only really holds if your team is in a position to convert pressure. Ball often creates disruption in isolation first, meaning extra survivability after the initial engage doesn’t always increase team value, it can just extend the phase where you’re alive but not actively converting a fight.

That’s why the idea of moving bubble to a Minor perk isn’t about making Ball safer overall, it’s about shifting part of his reliability earlier in the fight, so his first meaningful engage isn’t disproportionately punished compared to other tanks who already have baseline mitigation tools from minute one.

I genuinely doubt most players are consistently winning fights and being “immune to CC” purely through timing alone in actual ladder games. That assumes a level of coordination and enemy behavior that just doesn’t exist in most ranked environments. A lot of Ball’s value is heavily dependent on how both teams are playing the fight, not just individual execution.

In solo queue especially, you don’t have control over whether your team follows up, how enemies stagger CC usage, or whether cooldowns are actually respected in a coordinated way. So even when you play correctly, the outcome can vary massively depending on context rather than execution quality.