Blizzard Explains Recent D.Va Nerf on PTR – “Generally More Consistent”
A recent update to the Overwatch Public test realm (PTR) had made small changes to multiple heroes and one of them was D.Va. Blizzard nerfed her a little bit by taking down her armor a notch, but gave her more health, and lowered her weapons damage, but made them more accurate. Overwatch’s Principal Designer decided to explain the reasons behind her changes in a forum post on battle.net. Geoff Goodman explains,
“Keep in mind her spread didn’t actually change, but her shots ‘fill in’ her spread more evenly now, meaning her damage per shot is generally more consistent. For example, in the video provided from the live game, if you take that same shot multiple times you’ll see a greater diversity in damage results than you would on the PTR, because sometimes some of those bullets would just miss. Overall though, the change to her damage is intended to be a small nerf.”
Sounds great to us! More accuracy is always a good thing. He goes on then to address the health and armor changes,
“As for her health/armor, the bottom line is she’s intended to be weaker vs faster firing weapons (and shotguns), such as Reaper and Tracer. The game is a lot healthier when heroes have strengths and weaknesses versus other heroes. As she was, it was common to hear people ask ‘What do I do about D.Va?’. People often would try to use Zarya or Roadhog, since they both have the potential to deal high damage and pierce her Matrix, but even those answers were marginal at best. Heroes like Reaper that are generally supposed to be good at taking down tanks weren’t very effective because of all the armor they had to get through. With lowered armor, she now has more legitimate counters and she still counters many heroes and abilities in the game, especially considering her Defense Matrix wasn’t touched.”
D.Va doesn’t need all that armor, she is badass without it and making her a little more vulnerable isn’t a bad thing. That’s the point of nerfing characters, is to make things more fair, which is important in a competitive game. Goodman continues,
“I understand that people feel like she may be too weak overall after these changes, and if that turns out to be the case we’ll look at helping her out. That said, that help isn’t likely to come back in the form of a bunch of armor, since that would just put us back the problems we had to begin with. We’ll be watching her impact closely after these changes.”
Overall we feel like the changes will be a good thing and look forward to a new and improved D.Va! What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comment section below and follow DFTG on Twitter for all your gaming news! Love Overwatch as much as we do? Check out some more articles about this FPS below!
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