Jason and I aren’t the only ones complaining that Overwatch‘s turret-builder Torbjörn is frustratingly overpowered. Today, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan told players that the bearded fellow’s annoying turrets will soon be getting a significant damage nerf on consoles.
“In an upcoming patch, we will reduce the damage done by Torbjörn’s turret by 30 per cent on Xbox One and PS4. PC will remain unchanged,” wrote Kaplan, chiming in on a lengthy Reddit thread complaining about the character. “ETA — Mid to late July depending on 1st party certification times.”
Console players are generally less accurate than PC players, who are aided by the precision of mouse and keyboard controls. The thinking has been that because Torbjörn’s turrets fire with pinpoint accuracy, they break through the skill ceiling in a lot of console matches and help Torbjörn players dominate, especially when playing defence.
I’m pretty sick of dealing with three or more Torbjörns every time I’m on attack, so hopefully this nerf starts to shake things up.
Comments
58 responses to “Overwatch’s Torbjörn Is Getting A Nerf On Consoles”
Or how about you work as a friggen team? How about someone shields up with Reinhardt and Pharah stands behind him to blow up his turrets? How about you counter your opposition with appropriate heroes? How about you play the game the way it’s intended instead of trying to teleport forward as Reaper for that magic play of the game moment setup that Reaper players are apparently only interested in?
Yer personally i don’t understand the nerf – torb is very easy to counter with a little group synergy (d’va ult is also a good way to clear it – any sniper with reinhardt or phara shit even two soldier76 w/ his rockets). Not sure how controls has anything to do with it as the turret is 100% stationary (unless it’s crafted on moving platforms), so it must be lack of communication – or plain refusal to switch characters.
Hell you don’t even need a team. If it’s just you and the turret you can pretty much kill it all the time. I’ve destroyed plenty of turrets as Lucio. Hell, I’ve even stopped healing idiots as Mercy and focused on shooting down turrets because nobody else knows how.
I should clarify i meant >1 torb. If one torb is locking down your entire team – stop playing the game. It’s not for you 😀
I’ve seen teams get locked out of the game by a single turret. Like, really?
and if the team has three turrets, or four, then a bastion or two, creating nothing but a perfect kill floor? what then genius? sure there are ways around it but its like watching paint dry and is extremely unfun. just because you have never had an issue doesnt mean the issue doesnt exist. yes there are million ways to counter them but currently the spamming of them is used by people who cant win a control match using multiple characters with flawless autoaim
I think the issue of multiples of characters is a separate issue. One Torb is easy to counter. 3-4 not so much. Once competative starts that’ll take care of the multiples…
then you send in two dva ults and laugh as the rest of the team steam rolls them
To be fair… for some reason, mercy seems to be more powerful at taking them down. As a few other characters i struggle, with her? Sinch!
@joeyjojo and @neo_kaiser, for context which platform are you guys playing on?
Both – primarily pc but one night a week i play with console friends. Not arguing that torb isn’t a popular choice on consoles. They just don’t really pose much threat to us (group of four). We’ve seen defenses with 3 torbs and 1 bastion with rienhardt and mercy and sure we’ve lost a few games to it but i’d say we’ve won more. We’d almost always go with two d’va, lucio and hanzo/genji to counter it (combine ults).
If I had to guess I’d say it’s due to the controls. The difference between a turret’s reaction time and a player’s is important, and on the consoles player reaction times are capped a little by use of the gamepad. So it might not be about making the turret worse as much tweaking it to better suit gap between the console player’s reaction times and the turrets.
It’s always an on-going thing with automated weapons in these games. They tend to require a low on the fly skill level, with players learning where to put them on which maps quickly rather than learning what actually makes a spot effective. It means I can get competitive level results with something like a turret pretty easy, which in turn means the only way to keep competitive level results out of non-competitive matches is to nerf the things until they’re so bad you can’t use them competitively.
It’s one of those mechanically unbalanced things like how World of Warcraft is constantly flipping between pathetic Death Knights and over powered Death Knights. Paladin’s and Frost Mages are good or bad, they’re either absurdly strong or pathetically weak.
I have no problems with the controls. Reaction time is meaningless when I’m taking cover. Then just pop and shoot. Simple.
It’s usually not that simple. Sure if you’re dealing with one Trollbjorn it’s fine. But if you’re dealing with say 2-3 plus a Bastion, those Reinhardt shields go down pretty quickly.
So, counter them more? Like, get a second Reinhardt or a Winston. Hell, a single Genji can borrow Bastions bullets and kill all other turrets.
and if it’s really that much of a problem then switch to Junkrat or Zarya and lob grenades around cover.
So instead of balancing the game, which Blizzard clearly agrees with because their going ahead if the nerd, your response is to counter more and ‘git gud’. So one team is allowed to put minimal effort in a game by playing three Trollbjorns, while the other team have to expertly coordinated because the other team just want easy wins.
Welcome to online gaming. This is pretty much how it works majority of the time. Either get good or suffer through losing.
Nerf Warlocks!!!
Console player’s, nuff said.
lol
Console player is, nuff said? Is what?
who says people dont play as a team, who says they dont know the tactic you speak of? they are all good in a perfect world were only turret exists or maybe two but any more than that the players are just pathetic trolls.
working is easier said that done in pick up teams, so sorry we arent all luck humans like you to have the most awesome gamers friends ever.
PS the game was created on PC, and was in beta testing for a year or so before launch. The consoles only had about a month or so of testing, so of course any smart person wouldnt do all that “play the game as intended” they would realise that PC and consoles require two different skill sets and balancing. which funny enough the devs agree with us, not you.
1 dva ult will clear it – you don’t need a team to do it (unless they have pretty perfect synergy of turret placement and cover so the ult can’t hit them all).
really never thought of that, lol, do what do you suggest a player do for the 3-4 minutes waiting for the ult to charge? maybe just surg their stats? there is heaps of ways you could clear it, but the quality of enjoyment of those games is less than nil.
more than two turrets on consoles equal an absolutely painful and eye rolling tedium, then times the fact this seems to be happening maybe 2/5 games I play each day. Then so many of streamers I watch it happens to them to. it has nothing to do with individual counters it is do with the game itself.
Ult takes around a min to charge depends on how much dmg u do – 100 sec at most (don’t know where u pulled 5min from). Which should give u plenty of tries at it to break their line.
I do think the console needs tweaking. McCree and Soldier need better magnetism with appropriate blooming to offset it. But this nerf will not fix the problem. People are still going to rush in and get shot to death, then beg for another damage nerf.
Yup cos we all have 5 friend who we can jump into the game with at any given moment. Its PS4 random players and everyone who is on a mic is in their own chat party. think before you type
Try being on attack facing against 4 torbjorns on defence of an area defence, no amount of teamwork help you then. Glad to see the nerf.
I’ve gone up against 6 and easily broke through to claim the following zone with no contest.
I think Hanamura is the only place I see Torbjorns make real trouble, and that largely stems from the fact that there is really no way to attack the turrets except by getting through the gate first. Even then it’s not so much the turrets that are the problem, it’s that you’ve got all the other enemy characters in addition to the turret. While I agree that a team that goes heavy on Torbjorns is easier to counter, having a couple of Torbjorns on the enemy team with good turret placement essentially give the enemy two extra players. No imporssible to get past, but makes it a lot more difficult. What I usually do depending on who I’m playing will be to sneak in and then wait in the shadows until I see the turret focus its attention on another player, then go for it. The great thing about Turrets is they have no threat assessment mechanism. They’ll happily fire at a Reinhardt shield in the distance while a Reaper is blasting them from 2 metres away.
I think the nerf will be welcome, but 30% seems a little harsh. I would have kept the damage but added an ammo count so that after 20 shots the turret has to reload, just like Torb’s main rivet gun.
I’m really not sure what your point is here. Do you think something doesn’t need to be dialled back until it’s literally unbeatable? Like, was this the argument when people complained about Widow on PC because she could just body shot people to death? Did you answer “stop playing Tracer and Zenyatta and just pick Winston you noob!” Don’t you see the problem with this?
Torb has something like a 67% win rate on consoles. His pick rate is insane. The problem isn’t that it’s totally unbeatable, the problem is that it’s fucking boring. He destroys the majority of the cast on console. This means you’re locked into playing a narrow range of heroes in order to counter play him, and even that only works if your team is willing to play along.
Short of having a flail about how easy it is for you to destroy tjorb strats as Mercy when you’ve “even stopped healing idiots as Mercy and focused on shooting down turrets because nobody else knows how.” (really? You can beat mass Tjorb strats all the time despite having teams that don’t kill turrets? Just Mercy 1v6 wrecking them?). Are you really trying to argue that this is how you want the game to play? One team picks 1 hero 3-6 times because it’s much easier to execute than it is to counter. The other team then must pick from about 4-5 heroes, whilst the rest of the cast is locked out. Even though MLG people like you exist, who can counter this strat, the very fact it’s happening and the numbers it returns are reason enough to nerf it.
Sometime I go Reinhardt. I’ll be standing in front of a turret, completely blocking its fire and waiting patiently for pharah or soldier 76, bloody ANYONE to just shoot the damn thing. JUST SHOOT IT FOOLS.
Hanimura is impossible when facing 2 Tor’s, fyi. No amount of RH shields with Pharah hoping to blow them up is helpful, because RH will face his back to half the open space and get torn to pieces by the second turret/opposition before the first goes down.
Damage is fine for Tor, would love to see Genji’s deflection get a buff against turrets though. The damage they do is not proportionate to the damage they receive in deflection. Swift strike is abysmal against them too.
I know, even Winston struggles to take down a level 2 turret, and that’s even after he’s popped a shield.
Genji isn’t really supposed to be able to take on turrets. One of his weaknesses since he can chew up a Bastion in a single block.
The only issue I have with the turret is that it has a 360° lock on. Make it so it can still turn 360° but can only lock on in a 180° arc in front of it and I’ll be happy
Agreed! That would make turret positioning a bit more strategic and make them useful in choke points rather then just spamming out in the open. A 360 turret is just a strange idea.
about bloody time. three of seven games today had mass turrets and six of those games one of them got POTG. Its got to the point when the fun of defeating a group of Torb losers is no longer but just pathetic trolling.
As yes I was on teams who know how to counter them but consoles its is just beyond lame and extremely unfun.
My issues with them are the speed they lock on (especially god like when a few are attacking at once), the way a lot of maps are set up its impossible for snipers to get line of sight but when they do, it is within range. There should also be a delay for recasting. Not unlike DVA has when her Mech goes down. make it more high risk if he loses it.
I just wish they didnt lock on so quickly for any platform version of the game :/ Even when I am Pharah strafing in and out from behind a wall I still get shot in that tiny second :/
Wow, console players have it rough.. Never had issues with trollopbjorn on PC..
Wooooooooooo!! Thank the Gaming god! Fuck Torb!
Although i would prefer an increase in the turret lock on time.
Yeah, I agree. You should not be instantly dead as soon as you see a turret sees you through some little gap in cover. And even if you do manage to destroy it, he just puts up another and can upgrade it fairly quickly, and it takes a fair beating. And then half the team picks him on defense and it ruins the flow of the game and turns it into a boring game of attrition.
Yep Totally with you on that. Fuck Torb Teams
If you’re using tanks to fight turrets and bastions, you’re doing it wrong. Game has snipers and Junkrat to for the very purpose of breaking fortified positions.
d’va as well but that’s a tank 😛
D.Va does alright, and Winston can barely scrape through 1v1. A pity Roadhog can’t hook turrets and drag them out into the open.
D.Va perhaps but pitting a tank against a turret generally makes your team tactically weaker as it’s not a good trade. You lose your tank (or are about to anyway assuming the other team have half a brain each) for a rebuildable turret, and Torbjorn is still shooting nails from hell at you.
Had a horrific game last night on Gibraltar defence against a team of Reinhardt, 2x D.Va who were double-teaming stuff, a mercy, a Hanzo and a Tracer. I think they beat us in about 3 minutes flat.
I don’t see the point you’re trying to make. Their composition was better than yours. You guys didn’t lay out a good defense plan. Unless you’re going to say your whole team was bastion/torb, I don’t see the point in relation to the argument. That team also still had a Mercy (very good paired with D.VA and Rein) and Tracer and Hanzo, both who are also good at tackling fortified positions.
Wasn’t really trying to make a point 🙂 Multi D.Va + Mercy is nasty, I guess…
Ah nerf debates… this takes me back.
To the bad old days of WoW.
Nerf Rogues!!
If they’re nerfing torts turret, incoming slowdown of tracer… that bitch moves way too fast for consoles.
Nah, I’ve hooked many a Tracer as Roadhog on Xbone, so she’s fine as is.
I don’t think a 30% damage nerf is the go here. Maybe a slight delay as the turret locks on instead? Or limited ammo after which Torbjorn has to manually reload it?
Do any of the “disrupting” type weapons affect turrets? Like the cowboys flashbang or pharahs Get Back bolt? That might be a way of balancing it more by giving tools to players to defeat the turrets.
Nerf Shaman!!
McCree’s flashbang affects Torbjorn’s turrets, I believe, but Pharah’s knockback doesn’t.
We had one game where three trollborns set up turrets and two players were reinharts with shields up infront of them. No idea how you would even counter that…