Blizzard is finally nerfing the best thing in Overwatch: Roadhog’s hook. It’s about time — despite the hook’s awesome power, it is most definitely broken. On Blizzard’s forums, Overwatch principal designer Geoff Goodman announced the details of “Hook 2.0,” soon to be released on the PTR.
Players have complained for months that Roadhog’s hook defies known laws of physics. It hooks players through walls. It hooks players through the payload. It hooks players through several walls. It hooks players through other players. Sometimes, those hooked players land behind or to the side of Roadhog instead of in front of him. It’s just a mess.
In October, Blizzard told Kotaku that “Roadhog’s hook is basically a sphere that he throws out and searches for targets as it moves. If the hook finds a target, it will pull them back to you.” A representative added that the Overwatch team was considering various changes so Roadhog’s hook wouldn’t grab players “out of line of sight or unable to reasonably be moved back to Roadhog.”
Those changes are finally coming to the PTR, potentially this week. Goodman’s post yesterday explains that Blizzard first tackled the issue of where Roadhog pulls his hook victims. Goodman said they will now land in front of Roadhog, “rather than just a straight line towards him,” adding that there’s now “a cap on how far ‘to the side’ you can be pulled, so you can’t just hook someone, spin 180, and dump someone off a cliff.” That’s good — when I played Overwatch last night, hook victims landed behind me twice.
Goodman continued:
Secondly, the line-of-sight check to see if a hook should connect or not is now checked from Roadhog’s position, instead of the hook’s position. This basically means the hook can’t connect to targets that Roadhog himself can’t see.
Lastly, there is a new persistent line-of-sight check back to Roadhog once the hook has landed. If this check fails, the hook breaks off and returns to Roadhog. This means if you get hooked and move out of LOS quickly (either you dashed, were falling, were pushed, etc), the hook will now break early and not pull the target.
Unfortunately for me and other insane Roadhog mains, Goodman claims that Roadhog will likely be weaker now. If that’s the case, the Overwatch team, as they do, and may continue to do until the end of days, will make adjustments.
Comments
16 responses to “Blizzard Is Finally Nerfing Overwatch’s Roadhog”
As long as I can still hook people into the well on ilios I’m cool. “I don’t always play road hog, but when I do it’s on ilios”.
On a side note… Has anyone else noticed an increase in smurf/alt accounts on PC..? Since the price cut for Christmas I’ve come across a lot of surprisingly good low level players who have an extraordinary grasp of characters given how long they’ve been playing….
On a final note, how much fun is Oasis? Awesome, first control map I enjoy as much as the payload maps…
Yep definitely an increase in Smurfs.
Could be addicts like me. God this game is fun
Could also be console Overwatch players who’ve switched to PC.
Seeing plenty of smurfs on Xbox One too.
Seriously, Blizzard should just ban people that do that. Just because you can’t hack the intensity of games at the high rank your main account is at doesn’t mean you should make a second account and intentionally tank its rank then make life hell for people not as skilled at the game.
Ok, I like the hook nerf, but they really didn’t address the biggest problem with Roadhog: his insane health and armour ratings. A skilled hog player will adjust to the hook change but till his real problems are addressed, people will still insist on playing him on every single god damn map
People like him because of the hook (just look at Dota where the Pudge archetype originated)
Other than the hook, he’s a slow moving, giant target with a flak cannon with a small clip. He needs the health.
He’s got no armour. His high level health is used to absorb incoming fire. Dva now has the highest HP at 600, and she absorbs incoming fire using Matrix, without taking damage. I find that Dva is much harder to take down than Roadhog.
Roadhog’s the only tank that has no shield or barrier to absorb incoming fire. This is why his breather cools down so fast: Get up in the enemy team’s face, get a quick kill or two with the hook & shotgun, which draws enemy fire away from the rest of your team. Then retreat for a breather & repeat.
Roadhog will go down fast if half the enemy team focus fire on him, but he’s all about shock & awe to disrupt the enemy.
He melts to a, 76 and if you’re using a, Mei for CC then you’ll destroy larger enemies that can either escape or heal themselves
I eat roadhogs as solider and reaper, not hard.
This is actually not so much a nerf, as it is a fix. This is very similar to how they fixed Zarya a couple of months back. The problem with Roadhog is that the hook feels weird to both parties more often than not, and this should actually be better for Roadhog considering some characters (tracer/Genji/Lucio) cause the hook to do some ridiculous things. The fact that the hook breaks when LOS is removed is kinda silly though since a chain doesnt just break when you go round a corner. But if it means people are happier with how the hook operates, we’ll wear it.
Why not just allow hooked players the ability to keep functioning?
So… still no fix for getting one shot by hook/shoot in the face every 8 seconds? Ugh.
Pretty only happens to sub 200HP characters and even then if you got a competent Support person providing heals whilst hooked you’ll always survive, even with a Lucio trickle heal.
Why call it a nerf (and bring all the negativity that surrounds such a claim) when it’s clearly a fix.
cause it’s definitely a nerf. go watch videos on it. the los thing is a bit ridiculous.