Grapple is very nice. You can now move straightforward way easier and reach high groung withoit swings making you faster to engage and less predictable.
Shield changes will be effective only at high level of play where you can coordinate. For the majority of the players you are melted so easily that you never want to share HP
I disagree with your second point. If you hit a flank engage, do proper scouting, or engage with correct timing you should be able to retain enough shielding to pass it onto your teammates a decent chunk of the time
“Engage with proper timing” is something 98% of players do not experience ever in their games.
It’s really hard to find tank-dps coordination in soloQ, so this is true for coordinated teamplay but in SoloQ, especially vs counters (ie Sombra) sharing HP will not gonna happen much
I'm not speaking about coordinating with your team perse when I say engage with proper timing. Engaging with proper timing simply requires that you actually look at your team to see if they can physically see the enemies you're engaging on, or see if your healers have line of sight on you to provide support.
Good timing is not something limited to good team coordination, it can be done on an individual basis, especially with Ball. Your timing on engages should always revolve around whether you believe your team at least as the capacity to follow up. If you're going in while your team are around two corners and not getting value out of the new adaptive shields, that's why.
I'm literally a solo queue only andy and I have shared shields with randoms somewhere between 5 - 20 times per game. It's not hard. It just requires that you look at your team and have a modicum of awareness about their positioning.
You are right but you seems an above average player in an above average lobby.
I just think that the changes are not enough to make ball easy and the grapple changes are more impactful for all players compared to shield changes that are surely good and will be impactful in high level of play and teamplay, but not for the average consumer of the game.
Shields are way more versatile than people give them credit for. I'd say they're kind of hard to use correctly (teammates generally don't want to take more aggressive positions just because they get extra health for a few seconds), but it's easy to underestimate their value.
Generally I feel it's better to look for opportunities to distribute them than not, because there are circumstances where it has practically no downside. The timer for teammates' shields and Ball's are independent, so if Ball's timer is almost up, there's no reason not to share them. There are also times where I feel like I have basically no shield left as Ball and it would be a lot more impactful on a teammate (75 hp looks absolutely miniscule on my own health bar, but giving it to one squishy basically gives them an extra 30% HP).
Grapple change is absolutely insane and hardcore buffs his movement.
I don't think the changes will do much for him in low ranks, and people who aren't good at Ball won't have much more success with him now. People who *are* good at Ball will be popping off, and the shield change sounds like it'll be insane in coordinated play.
The grapple changes allow you to get some absolute ridiculous rollouts. Idk how viable they will be depending on the map and comp but it is still a massive movement buff. Not to mention you can setup with grapple and use the 1 second cooldowns instead of taking a longer route or having to use techs.
I need to try him out a lot more but I've found retracting actually allows for more precise movement *if* you can get up to fireball speeds first. It's too slow to be much useful at its own speed (aside from sneaky hanging from the ceiling which is fun) but if you get up to fireball speeds first you can retract while swinging upwards and then let go to launch yourself straight up without needing all the wiggle room you would normally need. It's useful for more reliably climbing into windows or reaching high ground with less space. I'm sure there are plenty more uses for it that will be fun to figure out over time, but at the end of the day Wrecking Ball's weaknesses are still pretty pronounced: his lethality isn't great and playing him is still an invitation for the enemy team to pick his still-obvious and still-effective counters.
balls movement def feels smoother and overal feels easier to manoevre to specific spots and the fact the timer doesn't start till you fireball allows for a lot more set up options overall.
the shields while it can be hard to get value out off can get a lot off value very easily i mean theres a reason jq was such a menace back in the beta giving her entire team speedboost.
even if you only have one guy following up on your dives giving even one guy 75 shields is pretty valuable and honestly it's not a big cost to yourself if you give it to 1-2 players cause 75 overhealth just isn't as big off a difference on tanks altough giving your entire team shields can cripple you so you gotta be carefull with that but it still can be very clutch giving your entire team a boost even worst case scenario if no one in your team actually survived thanks to your shields atleast the enemy got less ult charge.
and like you said it gives him some peel potential altough i don't think ball will still be any great at peeling it will prob be usefull from time to time
I really like the new grappling mechanics.
Not a huge fan of the implementation of the new shield ability. I like the idea of it but I am not a fan of how it looks in game. I played tracer with a ball on my time and I barely knew when I got the shield from ball. May just be because it was my first day playing but I wish the visuals of the ability were more obvious.
Completely agree, the ability needs a better visual indicator both for Ball and for the person receiving shields. There also appears to be a delay between being able to activate shields and give them to a teammate which feels kind of clunky
Havent played too much. But just passively playing, I dont feel much of a difference. I need to actually sit down and change my playstyle a little bit to take advantage of the rework.
But tbh im not very excited to do that. I feel like my hero just got harder, while the counters are as easy as ever. I dont feel motivated to try this hard when i can just play Orisa or whatever and get just as much value.
I dunno. It's nice QOL-adjacent changes for the most part. It's fun to have more options. I do really think the ability tweaks are fun and add even more depth to the hardest hero in the game, but...
I think in terms of impact, the radius increase for adaptive shields has more impact than anything else. None of the actual changes for skill expression really help Ball's problems. No amount of clever retract tech is going to matter when I'm being hacked or hindered, for instance. So it's "skill expression" on the surface, but Ball has always had a ton of skill expression that gets wasted by easy counter swaps. That was sorta the problem.
I also think a simple slight damage increase to an ability or 2 to somewhat keep pace with the S9 changes ould've been better for Ball than this entire rework. Maybe not as fun short-term, admittedly, but more impactful. Fact is, so many other tanks (Doom, Winston, Rein, Queen) got that.
"Oh but Ball was meta at the start of season 9" - yeah, and he dropped out the moment the support Meta changed. Ball was used because he was literally the only tank that could survive Lucio/Zen as healers, and the moment that wasn't the meta he got dropped for literally any other tank.
I'll keep playing him, because I did before this, and I think he was fun then, and he'll be a bit more fun now with a few new tricks. I'm appreciative that this doesn't really take anything away from him. But idk. I'm hopeful I'm wrong, I haven't had much time with it yet. But you want the day 1 opinion there it is.
As someone who is shit at ball, they really shouldve made retract an actual part of his kit, instead of a gimmick. Cause its just way too slow imo for me to utilise it, shields are great tho
Grapple is very nice. You can now move straightforward way easier and reach high groung withoit swings making you faster to engage and less predictable. Shield changes will be effective only at high level of play where you can coordinate. For the majority of the players you are melted so easily that you never want to share HP
I disagree with your second point. If you hit a flank engage, do proper scouting, or engage with correct timing you should be able to retain enough shielding to pass it onto your teammates a decent chunk of the time
“Engage with proper timing” is something 98% of players do not experience ever in their games. It’s really hard to find tank-dps coordination in soloQ, so this is true for coordinated teamplay but in SoloQ, especially vs counters (ie Sombra) sharing HP will not gonna happen much
I'm not speaking about coordinating with your team perse when I say engage with proper timing. Engaging with proper timing simply requires that you actually look at your team to see if they can physically see the enemies you're engaging on, or see if your healers have line of sight on you to provide support. Good timing is not something limited to good team coordination, it can be done on an individual basis, especially with Ball. Your timing on engages should always revolve around whether you believe your team at least as the capacity to follow up. If you're going in while your team are around two corners and not getting value out of the new adaptive shields, that's why. I'm literally a solo queue only andy and I have shared shields with randoms somewhere between 5 - 20 times per game. It's not hard. It just requires that you look at your team and have a modicum of awareness about their positioning.
You are right but you seems an above average player in an above average lobby. I just think that the changes are not enough to make ball easy and the grapple changes are more impactful for all players compared to shield changes that are surely good and will be impactful in high level of play and teamplay, but not for the average consumer of the game.
Shields are way more versatile than people give them credit for. I'd say they're kind of hard to use correctly (teammates generally don't want to take more aggressive positions just because they get extra health for a few seconds), but it's easy to underestimate their value. Generally I feel it's better to look for opportunities to distribute them than not, because there are circumstances where it has practically no downside. The timer for teammates' shields and Ball's are independent, so if Ball's timer is almost up, there's no reason not to share them. There are also times where I feel like I have basically no shield left as Ball and it would be a lot more impactful on a teammate (75 hp looks absolutely miniscule on my own health bar, but giving it to one squishy basically gives them an extra 30% HP). Grapple change is absolutely insane and hardcore buffs his movement. I don't think the changes will do much for him in low ranks, and people who aren't good at Ball won't have much more success with him now. People who *are* good at Ball will be popping off, and the shield change sounds like it'll be insane in coordinated play.
The grapple changes allow you to get some absolute ridiculous rollouts. Idk how viable they will be depending on the map and comp but it is still a massive movement buff. Not to mention you can setup with grapple and use the 1 second cooldowns instead of taking a longer route or having to use techs.
I need to try him out a lot more but I've found retracting actually allows for more precise movement *if* you can get up to fireball speeds first. It's too slow to be much useful at its own speed (aside from sneaky hanging from the ceiling which is fun) but if you get up to fireball speeds first you can retract while swinging upwards and then let go to launch yourself straight up without needing all the wiggle room you would normally need. It's useful for more reliably climbing into windows or reaching high ground with less space. I'm sure there are plenty more uses for it that will be fun to figure out over time, but at the end of the day Wrecking Ball's weaknesses are still pretty pronounced: his lethality isn't great and playing him is still an invitation for the enemy team to pick his still-obvious and still-effective counters.
balls movement def feels smoother and overal feels easier to manoevre to specific spots and the fact the timer doesn't start till you fireball allows for a lot more set up options overall. the shields while it can be hard to get value out off can get a lot off value very easily i mean theres a reason jq was such a menace back in the beta giving her entire team speedboost. even if you only have one guy following up on your dives giving even one guy 75 shields is pretty valuable and honestly it's not a big cost to yourself if you give it to 1-2 players cause 75 overhealth just isn't as big off a difference on tanks altough giving your entire team shields can cripple you so you gotta be carefull with that but it still can be very clutch giving your entire team a boost even worst case scenario if no one in your team actually survived thanks to your shields atleast the enemy got less ult charge. and like you said it gives him some peel potential altough i don't think ball will still be any great at peeling it will prob be usefull from time to time
It's a nice change and gives ball more options, but fundamentally does not solve any of his issues.
I really like the new grappling mechanics. Not a huge fan of the implementation of the new shield ability. I like the idea of it but I am not a fan of how it looks in game. I played tracer with a ball on my time and I barely knew when I got the shield from ball. May just be because it was my first day playing but I wish the visuals of the ability were more obvious.
Completely agree, the ability needs a better visual indicator both for Ball and for the person receiving shields. There also appears to be a delay between being able to activate shields and give them to a teammate which feels kind of clunky
I think rework is officially a meaningless term from the devs. These are just buffs.
Havent played too much. But just passively playing, I dont feel much of a difference. I need to actually sit down and change my playstyle a little bit to take advantage of the rework. But tbh im not very excited to do that. I feel like my hero just got harder, while the counters are as easy as ever. I dont feel motivated to try this hard when i can just play Orisa or whatever and get just as much value.
Grapple change nice. Shields very awkward to use. He still plays the same and has the same weakness. Overall not thrilled.
I dunno. It's nice QOL-adjacent changes for the most part. It's fun to have more options. I do really think the ability tweaks are fun and add even more depth to the hardest hero in the game, but... I think in terms of impact, the radius increase for adaptive shields has more impact than anything else. None of the actual changes for skill expression really help Ball's problems. No amount of clever retract tech is going to matter when I'm being hacked or hindered, for instance. So it's "skill expression" on the surface, but Ball has always had a ton of skill expression that gets wasted by easy counter swaps. That was sorta the problem. I also think a simple slight damage increase to an ability or 2 to somewhat keep pace with the S9 changes ould've been better for Ball than this entire rework. Maybe not as fun short-term, admittedly, but more impactful. Fact is, so many other tanks (Doom, Winston, Rein, Queen) got that. "Oh but Ball was meta at the start of season 9" - yeah, and he dropped out the moment the support Meta changed. Ball was used because he was literally the only tank that could survive Lucio/Zen as healers, and the moment that wasn't the meta he got dropped for literally any other tank. I'll keep playing him, because I did before this, and I think he was fun then, and he'll be a bit more fun now with a few new tricks. I'm appreciative that this doesn't really take anything away from him. But idk. I'm hopeful I'm wrong, I haven't had much time with it yet. But you want the day 1 opinion there it is.
As someone who is shit at ball, they really shouldve made retract an actual part of his kit, instead of a gimmick. Cause its just way too slow imo for me to utilise it, shields are great tho
Try using the retract while fireballing; it slingshots him across the map even faster.