Hanzo occupies a weird place in the overwatch community. He's both hated for his "tree trunk arrows" and "bs headshots" and for being too effective in spamming down his shots fishing for kills. And, at the same time he's reviled for his place within the player's own team for not being effective enough with regards to everything from killing enemy players to taking objectives. This contradictory viewpoint is then extended with regards to the undocumented hitbox change in the PTR. Redditors have crowed in delight at the "death of Hanzo mains" and how they are going to have to "git gud" to hit arrows and at the same same time continue to espouse that Hanzo is a useless character made more useless. The latter is based on the notion that his projectile attack is not reliable damage. On it's face this seems a reasonable criticism at first, after all, projectiles have a travel time and so they'll land where they were aimed at whether the target is still there or not. Whereas, hitscan has an immediate effect as soon as you click on the target. To land an equivalent direct projectile shot, you not only have to aim at a particular point (a target), but also be able to predict where the enemy will be with regards to the travel time of the projectile. Projectiles use the same base skillset plus extras to hit the same target as a hitscan attack and thus are "less reliable." A basic tenet of game design is that if something is harder to do it should provide extra benefits in terms of higher impact OR some compensatory effect to counter balance the extra effort expanded to have an equivalent impact. To put it another way, a projectile either has to do a significant amount of damage/utility more or has to have a forgiving margin for error relative to hitscan(the infamous big hitbox). Now the conundrum in Overwatch here with regards to Hanzo is rooted in two main prongs.
One: People over value "reliable damage" as opposed to burst and utility as the meta in both the professional and pub setting has not recognized much less mastered the "economy" of the game yet.
Two: Overwatch balanced is too highly constrained with not a lot of wiggle room left over. Characters tend to lean more towards flavors of each other than having unique identities.
Chip Damage vs. Burst and 'Feeding' in Overwatch The common memes about Hanzo involve him haphazardly spamming and scoring random headshots he "didn't deserve." Of course you can aim with Hanzo, but people often retort that aiming with him is too forgiving because of the larger projectile hitbox. Hanzo's toolkit can support both these playstyles. His bow while relatively slow firing compared to Soldier 76's assault rifle, has no clip reload and can be shot early for less charge if need be, so over a period of time he comes out ahead in spam compared to other projectile classes as he never has to stop flinging arrows. Sonic arrow can inform you of the best places to spam your shots and the scatter can be shot in tight rooms to hit multiple people. Alternatively, you can take your time with fully charged shots on picked targets, use your sonic arrow to catch one person around the corner, or aim your scatter at someone's feet to one hit KO or severely chunk them. Either way, Hanzo's identity is more or less defined on burst and the nature of the burst being so severe is why Hanzo is the focus of these kind of frustrations as opposed to say Torbjorn's rivet gun.
In Overwatch, they are very careful about sources of overheal, and regen in this game (of which there are several sources) is capped at the max health of the character. What this means is that Overwatch characters are more resilient to be being chipped down by "reliable damage" then they are from burst. To illustrate an example, if you have a soldier 76 being healed by mercy in range of lucio's heal aura while standing on his own biotic field this is a LOT of hp per second you have to overcome. Another soldier would have to sweat pretty hard to bring enough dps to mulch past his opponents regen with enough spare change to kill him in a reasonable amount of time. A Hanzo however could simply shoot a scatter arrow at the feet and one hit KO the soldier no matter how much regen he had. If the opposing team came with two supports and two tanks, that's half their DPS gone in one blow in exchange for a 10 second cooldown ability.
This is the power and value a Hanzo brings to the team. In a game where the primary source of extra durability is health regen, burst has a unique value for damage dealing characters. This is why the damage dealers of overwatch have some sort of burst capability such as s76 rocket or tracer's bomb. This is also why when McCree had his fan nerfed he faded away from the meta. FtH was burst damage that finished the fight. The "reliable" laser accurate left click was not enough to keep him around when fan the hammer got bonked.
Some of you may already be thinking "but what if the Hanzo doesn't land his arrows? What if like all the Hanzo's on my team he just eats butt and can't do anything? If he was soldier he would at least hit some of his shots."
But what people don't understand is that chip damage or reliable damage or whatever you want to call it doesn't do anything if the opponent has enough regen to counter act it. In fact if you can't complete the kill it's actually a significant detriment because it feeds ult charge.
While Overwatch isn't a moba like Dota or LoL, most of the non-casual playerbase is at least somewhat aware that "feeding" of a sort does exist in this game. If you ever been on a team with multiple roadhogs, it can seem like there is an endless barrage of ults being blasted in your face because their high hp pool built in regen and big hitbox insures the enemy has plenty of target practice to build up charge. But what most people haven't realized is that you "feed" when you damage a character but don't kill him. You feed their supports ult charge when they heal them and in the PTR you feed some characters when they heal themselves with their own abilities. In pubs many people mistakenly believe as long as you are doing damage you are making some form of forward progress, but in fact you may be setting yourself for being at an ult disadvantage in the long run because you aren't finishing any of these fights.
Even the pros who play this game at a very high level haven't mastered being able to predict ult timing based on damage done and healing done with any accuracy. Most of the early tournaments are decided by the team with the better overall DM in the flurry of chaos rather than elegant surgical strategies. Pro's have top tier mechanics but even the ones who played during the private beta are still in a larval stage of development. As time passes these early tournies will seem as silly as TF2's first e-sports forays with random crits flying everywhere.
Anyone still reading may already be angrily typing. "But if Hanzo has all this value why isn't he being picked in pro tournaments with a high pickrate? Why do they prefer reliable damage? Do you think you know more than pros?" While I wouldn't presume myself to be superior than any pro of your choice, I have seen this kind of stuff happen before in e-sports in other games. While the guys playing this game for a living operate on a higher level than all the regular folks, they still have their own path of development and improvement and different players have different types of backgrounds. Many of them come from hitscan oriented games and so would trust hitscan oriented characters more. Others come from games where projectiles are the primary form of attack and thus those are their comfort heroes. I don't want to name any names for fear of going off an on a tangent, but if you have been watching some of these games it's not unusual to see a player put a clinic on S76 and McCree and then completely embarrass themselves on the Pharah not landing a single direct hit. The presence of a dark horse in game metas is not a new thing. In fact, in certain games like Dota, it can be the norm. A hero is slowly buffed over several patches until it crosses a threshold of power that cannot be denied even if it was already good before. Riki, an invisible character once thought to only work on low mmr noober kaboobers, emerged finally as the cancerous purple rat that my own personal stack of friends knew him to be after multiple buffs and two reworks. In TF2 the Loch n Load was at one point thought to be the worst demo gun in the game. It was a two shot grenade launcher that had high damage but no rollers. It was designed to land direct hits only. The old SPUF forums racked their brains trying to find a way to buff this poor gun including letting it reload both pills at the same time. Then all of a sudden it emerged as a "cancer weapon." Demo mains over time slowly but surely learned to hit things with direct nades instead of relying on the sticky bomb launcher only. Straight out of 2fort, scouts were getting one shotted left and right. Butts were pained everywhere and Gabe bathed his knife collection in the tears of blood that were shed. After literally years of languishing in obscurity the loch n load got a rework.
In my opinion Hanzo as of the current live patch is in a good spot mechanically. He is a misunderstood character and wrongfully maligned. A character that moves with the team and bursts enemies down quickly helps to stagger out both respawn times and ult timings building a solid advantage for your team.
The truth in pubs that people have to face about bad Hanzos, is that bad Hanzos are simply bad players. They gravitate to him for the same reason people gravitate towards snipers and spies in tf2: Cool factor and the promise of safety by hiding. If you bully them off of Hanzo you won't get better results. A bad Hanzo who can't land his arrows is not gonna land projectiles from any other class. He'll do chip damage at best with characters like pharah, junkrat, or s76 which as we already covered is placebic. He's not gonna land roadhog hooks or Rein firestrikes so he'll never have any kind of ult advantage. Even if you managed to force him or her to be Lucio under the hope that at least they can be an aura it would still be a mistake. A Lucio that can't land his bubbles will be at a severe disadvantage to one who can. And the Lucio gun is low damage burst projectile weapon that involves leading and tracking and is an order of magnitude more difficult than the Hanzo bow. Ya'll just gotta deal with the fact that not everybody can play the videogame and move on.
For pro games an increase of Hanzo is going to be rooted more in the pace of the games and how the modes are handled as well pro's gradually increasing familiarity with projectiles. Hanzo is a character that plays at his own pace for picks and wombo combos. Tournaments using stopwatch for instance will cause Hanzo to struggle since it's a character that doesn't want to be in a hurry. However, if other modes get added like say a one life arena mode; a character like Hanzo that can pick his own fights with his tool kit will emerge there sooner.
PART TWO Larger hitboxes are normal for projectiles in these type of games and healthier for Overwatch
So in the second prong I said that Overwatch balance is highly constrained and characters aren't all that different from each other. And if you look at the various stats, the base stats, on the wiki you will see what I mean.
Most characters barring a few like tracer and genji have the exact same move speed. Many are are built around the HP number 200 +-50. And, perhaps most glaringly, the damage values of the attack classes are more less just different flavors of the same gun. The junkrat grenade launcher has a fire rate of around 1.x seconds and hits pills that do 120 damage. The Pharah rocket launcher has a similar fire rate and hits rockets that do 120 damage. Hanzo bow has 1 point something firerate and does 125. The widow rifle when fully charged up at little over a second does 120 on the body. Even a character like soldier that uses auto fire has the same number. His shots do 5-17 damage. The average of this range is 11.5. His rifle shoots 10 shots per second. Ten times 11.5 is 115. Oh and his helix rocket? It does 120 damage. You see the picture forming here? If you look at the Overwatch characters in terms of their basic stats-not their special abilites- but their basic stats they are literally the same character with the same basic attack just with the beads on the abacus nudged this way and that.
Both before and after this change in the PTR many people bandied about how widow was just a better hanzo. And if you look at the damage numbers you can see why. Everyone's got the same basic attack but one is easier to land. But, imagine if no one had any passives or special abilities; widow would not only have the edge on Hanzo, but pharah as well. After all, if pharah were forced to waddle around on the ground shooting rockets that did no more damage than widow's bullets than why even bother with that even with the splash damage? Everyone would just be s76 and widow walking around like in call of duty but no sprinting allowed. Her flight and her concussive shot are what compensates for her using a slow projectile as opposed to instant bullets even though they do the same damage. The compensating effect for her disadvantage is her utility.
So what's the issue with Hanzo then you may ask? His utility is ALL IN on landing his basic attacks. Sonic arrow is a basic attack gives wall hack which helps landing other basic attacks, wall climb gives good vantage points for landing attacks, and scatter arrow is just a big chunky basic attack that makes tiny smaller basic attacks. Hanzo's toolkit revolves around shooting his arrows normally while Pharah's toolkit of high burst mobility COMPENSATES for her having to shoot her rockets.
The only thing that helps hanzo land his arrows versus a hitscan character is the bigger hitbox which despite the tears and crying is the norm in these kinds of games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wGcNzFd3as
Look how wide the collision hull is in TF2. Now in this video he covers some of the problems of how this box is handled. Namely it's locked to the axis of the map. But this collision hull is MUCH wider than the Overwatch hitbox in the live version. Look how far away the needle is from the head and still lands the shot. All the characters from the tiny scout to the fat heavy have this SAME EXACT collision hull.
In this video the huntsman is used against the collision hull
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx-YFFnruDs
As you can see all you have to do to land a head shot is to hit that big box. People complained about hitting the heads shooting at the side of the door jam but if a tf2 character was standing next to an overwatch door it would be a headshot shooting down the middle of the door not just next to it.
Here's the controversial part: There's nothing wrong with this design. In fact because of it's simplicity it's extremely solid and helps greatly in the balance of projectiles versus hitscan. TF2 for all it's bloat is still very robust in it's balance. Without these big hitboxes, demomen would be utterly helpless against scouts and even with them scouts still have the advantage in the match up.
So this is the problem: even with the current big hitbox many poopoo Hanzo's effectiveness versus widowmaker who's fallen away in the meta herself lately. If you make it harder to land a projectile attack by narrowing the hitbox closer to model and do nothing for Hanzo he objectively gets even harder to play. For those who are unbiased enough to not be okay with that may just say " Why not buff him then?"
Well this is the other big wall we run into. The simple design of Overwatch characters based on basic principles tweaked with flavor and ultimates while seemingly straight forward in a vacuum looking at each individual character, unintentionally creates extreme rigid complexity when looking at all the characters together relationally. Or to put another way: Blizzards balancing style has painted themselves in a corner to what they can do.
So why not Buff Hanzo's damage? Remember how we went through the basic attacks of several dps characters and saw they all did basically the same amount of damage with that magic number: 120? There's a reason for that. There are several characters in the game that boost damage against characters: Ana ult, mercy blue beam, and zen orb of discord. If your character's damage crosses a certain break point with these helpful buffs they start one shotting people. This is why Blizzard loves the number 120. A 50 percent bonus to this give 180 which will put a 200 hp class CLOSE to death but avoid one shotting them. If you buffed hanzo's damage to counter act for his projectile based attack you quickly put him a position to one shot 200 hp classes and beyond. The head box in live for his projectile, while larger than the hitscan one, is still smaller than a characters entire body. If people thought getting headshot was annoying they would be ultra pissed at getting dinged in the body for one blow after getting discorded.
So why not buff the firerate?
This suggestion was passed around before when people were wondering what it would take for Hanzo to enter the pro meta. And on the surface it makes sense. If you have more trouble landing arrows why not buff the firerate to compensate instead? If for simplicity's sake it was twice as hard to land an arrow but you made hanzo shoot twice as fast wouldn't that balance things out while keeping these "more accurate" hitboxes?
The problem with this change again deals with the relationship with other classes. Yes for a hitting a standard attack class with a small projectile hitbox getting an extra shot to hit would help despite it being harder to do so. But in the same way the damage buff causes a problem because of the interaction with supports, a fire rate increase causes issues with the interaction with tanks--by shooting them.
A fat tank is an easy target to hit even based on the character hitbox alone. Roadhog is much wider than tracer even if Tracer had TF2's big collision hull. Now all of a sudden you have twice as much hanzo arrows slamming into roadhogs at a minimum of 125 a pop. These arrows are also tearing that reinhart's shields from a distance as well. One thing that people forgot about Widow when she had 150 damage bodyshots was that it was actually pretty efficient for her to help to shoot charged shots on the Rein shield to help your team burst it down. A Hanzo with a Legolas buff would be hitting for 250 in roughly the same amount of time. This means all of a sudden he's entering Reaper's wheelhouse as a tank buster without having to take the same risk as reaper by getting in close.
Why not buff projectile speed?
This suggestion has also been seen and like the others it works on paper but the problem herein has to do with the fact there is no threshold of speed that works without crossing the Rubicon one way of the other. If the arrow isn't fast enough Hanzo doesn't compare with Widow well enough because while it may be easier to land than before at the end it is still projectile that does only 5 more damage than the widow bullet and has a lower head shot multiplier.
If you made the arrow so fast that were effectively bullet speeds like in hardcore war fps where you only notice a difference in extreme ranges, then all of a sudden Hanzo encroaches on widow's turf because now he's shooting a quieter version of her bullet that doesn't reveal his position with bright red line.
There's also a flavor issue. Some may scoff at this but boosting the speed of the arrow to compensate changes the character and diminishes the flavor of the class. Considering how characters are heavily templated this a significant problem.
So what's left?
Well the magic word here if you can't do anything with the damage is to add utility. Let's just spitball a bit here and say what if Hanzo arrows had a cripple effect. Yeah they are hard to land but if you hit somebody they move at a crawl making a follow up shot easier to land. This has team fight utility as well helping other classes land shots on the target so a Hanzo and Widow team would actually have synergy with Hanzo slowing a target down and Widow following it up with an easy headshot.
So what's what problem here? Well in an action fps utility is often a euphemism for really annoying mechanics. Already we are seeing the massive grief potential with Ana's sleep shot making someone completely helpless for 5 seconds. The mcree flashband during the fan the hammer days was already considered monstrous and it only lasted 0.7 seconds. There is a whole movement of hate on Mei for her utility as it can hurt her own team as well.
I've typed this all up in wordpad so I hope the formatting isn't a mess but these are my closing thoughts for any who stayed awake to read all of this.
Overwatch is a fun game but it's simplistic and casual approach to how characters are designed around a template where everyone shares the same basic magic numbers means there isn't a lot of wiggle room without stepping on each other toes. This template is modified by a set of abilities or a gimmick if you will that characterizes how they go about their role. The interaction of these gimmicks and how they apply their magic numbers creates a relationship of counters with other characters. Hanzo's toolset sets him up as a mid to long range burst character that counters health regen as a source of durability. As it stands currently I believe that's it's too early in the game's lifespan to determine if he's as weak as people say. As high level players get better at the game and as the structure of the game whether through the meta or through different gamemodes develops around say a slower type of pace, I believe we'll see hanzo come in on his own naturally.
Overwatch's simple character template, while making it easier to understand compared to other class based shooters, creates a deadlock in their own game design as each individual character must keep every other character in mind. This means that they are beholden to the magic numbers shared by everyone. This simple straight forward design demands a simple straight forward solution. If tweaking one character's numbers causes it to become so easily overtuned that it slights another character's role; and considering such, if each character is bound by this number, then characters who are harder to play to enact these same values must have compensatory relief that occurs OUTSIDE their own character balance. Which is a complicated way of saying that the big ugly projectile hitbox is the most comprehensive solution that balances projectiles versus hitscan both now and in the future.
Thanks for reading.
Ana's out?
