We’re at the dawn of a new era for Overwatch‘s Roadhog. No longer will his hook plunge through walls with no resistance. No longer will it magically drag enemies who are clearly in front of us back around behind us. It’s time for Hook 2.0, Overwatch principal designer Geoff Goodman announced yesterday.
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But before we can enter the age of Hook 2.0, Blizzard has to test it out. And, oh boy, is there salt all over the Overwatch PTR.
Goodman’s post on the Battle.net forums explained that Roadhog’s hook will now undergo a “new persistent line-of-sight check back to Roadhog once the hook has landed”. Goodman explains that, “if this check fails, the hook breaks off and returns to Roadhog. So, if there’s a wall or environmental object between you and Roadhog, Roadhog will be able to toss out his hook, but it won’t hook you. It will “break” contact.
What will that look like? Well, like an army of cursed souls forever beholden to find flaws in Overwatch, the player base has gone to work on the PTR:
Here, on the new Oasis map, Roadhog can’t hook a Lucio from behind a tree:
OK. Hmm. I guess that seems fair. Maybe it’s a little sensitive now. But, hey, it’s just the PTR! Nothing to see here.
The second big change for Hook 2.0 is where hooked enemies will land. Currently, they can land anywhere from immediately behind you to a few metres above your head. In a perfect, Roadhog world, they will land in front of you, where you can punch them with your hook hand or shoot them with your scrap gun and they will die immediately. According to Goodman, the Overwatch team is now adding “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”.
Now, let’s take a look at the funhouse mirror Roadhog world that is the Overwatch PTR right now:
Hm. Looks like that thing you can’t do you can do. Players have found the Overwatch equivalent of Bowser’s “side-B” attack in Super Smash Bros, the height of cheap gameplay.
Here, a player pulls a training bot behind a wall.
This is fine. It’s just the PTR. It’s not like Hook 2.0 is launching innocent Mercys into orbit.
Oh. Hm. Well, if wasn’t for Overwatch‘s meticulous, bug-finding player base, what would the game even look like?
Comments
20 responses to “Overwatch Players Are Already Salty About Roadhog’s New Hook”
Blizzard balance. People complaining about something? Break it so that no one uses that thing and people stop complaining.
Seriously Hog is just not fun to play. They should have made all the changes accept the change if a player leaves line of sight AFTER being hooked, it breaks. Because you know if you get a rope around you, moving behind cover doesn’t unleash you magically. And it’s not like a person who leashed you can’t pull you around and out of cover.
That being the case for you doesn’t make it the case for everyone else… I’ve been playing Roadhog quite a bit lately and it’s pretty much always a blast.
The current hook is already incredibly broken with the way it works a lot of the time, and this is for both the user and those on the receiving end of it.
Some changes might actually fix a lot of the insanity on both ends, because they’d be absolutely hard pressed to break it anymore than it already is.
Logic. If you hook someone in an open area and they quickly move behind a pole. Why the fuck should the hook break. If the happened in real life you’d get your ass dragged from behind the pole.
But nope. That makes too much sense. And because shit players in master and below don’t know how to bait hooks.
While I agree that the hooks should never go through walls. If you got hooked in open areas and shit like gravity breaks hogs line of sight he should still be able to reel em in.
The only people having fun with hog at the moment are in diamond or below. Basically the people who didn’t know how to play behind a god damned shield. And didn’t know how to play hog to begin with.
Line of site to roadhog when the hook connects. Yes. The new positioning of the hook. Yes. The persistent line of sight check after the hook lands… just no.
I guess you’ll have to excuse the lowly peasants for having fun with a character. How dare they do such things without checking with you first so you could give them their opinion on what is fun and what isn’t.
I actually agree with you about the hook… But the ranting like everything you say is undeniable fact and as if you’re the chosen voice of the top players? Moronic.
You remind me of the ranked games that have that one person who is all “Its the meta!” and demands people change to only the heroes they declare worthy, just because they watched some pro games on youtube or twitch and now they think they’re the voice of god as far as Overwatch is concerned.
It can’t just be that people enjoy a character YOU personally don’t enjoy playing, right? No… They simply must all be lower ranked and bad at the game, simply because you say it is so and for no other reason but precisely that.
Ridiculous.
Enjoy the changes then. Get countered by literally anyone with a brain. It’s your choice.
So he isn’t picked in pro games? Oh, wait…
1. He’s good against Tanks
2. He’s the best character in the game for getting charge up on your mercy ult, since he’s constantly taking HP damage instead of shield
3. He’s arguably the most effective tank for dealing with Rein shields
4. Hook lets you basically one shot any squishy heroes, but with coordination your team can shred almost anyone that gets hooked out of position
5. He’s the only tank that can deal with a Pharah
6. He’s effective as a flanker
I mean… sure, he’s not great in every situation, but saying he’s useless when he’s seeing fair amounts of play among people that are definitely better than you just makes you seem silly.
Allow me to expand on your points. Before getting to the point that you are commenting on live servers when this discussion is clearly about PTR nerfs…
1. Roadhog is a very good tank buster. However this relies on his hook combo for most cases to save friendly targets from a distance and also as to not get into the fray and become victim himself. Nerfing a key part of his kit will reduce his effectiveness in this area. He wont be totally useless as his scrap gun does a metric truck tonne of damage, however Reaper is much more effective at tank busting with escape mechanisms that Roadhog doesn’t have and with the nerf to D.Va he will be right back into play again. Roadhog’s survival kit is kill or be killed and part of not being killed is hooking people from the thick of combat to a less frantic area and finishing them off with your team. With the way the hook works on PTR good luck with that.
2. I agree on this point. However I honestly cant remember the last time I saw a mercy in a rank game. She is objectively the worst healer of all 4 healers. Also with his nerf more characters will be able to fill his roll of getting the first pick and confirming kills more effectively which makes the whole healing thing a mute point.
3. He is not a tank, he is a DPS with a large health pool. with that being said, lets look at people who are equally good at shredding shields, Junkrat, Soldier, Reaper,Torb, D.Va. Starting to see what I am getting at here?
4. Yes! this is what the hook is designed for. However on PTR any number of stupid things can break and already landed hook. Bushes, poles, fences etc. Lucio, Genji, Tracer, Sombra’s movements and speed also render the hook busted because the way they move, roadhog used to be able to stop them in their tracks but now it seems like the hook just breaks as they move into cover AFTER being hooked. Last night i hooked Genji from the top on Dorado choke point and as he got stunned he fell below line of sight and the hook broke….working as intended.
5. D.va would like to say hello.
6. He is a great flanker providing you can punish the other team with the first pick. With the changes to hook it is much harder to secure that first kill because as stated in point 4, any number of stupid things will break a hook. Other great flankers that do an equally good job are Genji, Tracer, Reaper, Sombra all of which have escape mechanics if they fail to get the first pick of which Roadhog has none as mentioned in point 1, his survival mechanic is kill or be killed.
To finish up you seem to be taking all of your current points from live servers and not PTR. I play in GM and can say with confidence that most of these changes are view very negatively by many Roadhog mains (of which I am not, however I do enjoy playing him on live) I have also had a chance to discuss the changes with a lot of top 500 players (people who are objectively better than I am) and they are mostly negative about the changes but in the end like the Genji nerfs we will all adapt.
I guess my main point with my rants about this and i guess the Genji nerf too. Is that it seems when people complain about something being OP blizzard knee jerk and straight up nerf the living shit out of things. As per the Genji nerf, yes his dragon blade lasted to long and I think 6 seconds is a good time and brings it in line with other ultimates, but did they need to nerf his triple jump? Just like Road hog, yes hooking through space and time is BS and line of sight from Roadhog should be used when deciding if a hook lands or is missed, but persistent line of sight check after the hook has landed is just going to far.
And it will not stop there, soon the pros will find the next meta character and then that will filter down to GM and M and so on and so forth and all the people that a mechanically not able to deal with it will cry foul again until we end up with a lack luster character pool with no defining abilities. You don’t get better by calling foul over a mechanic you fall victim to time and time again. You get better by adapting your strategies and working on ways around those mechanics. That is what separates Masters, GM and top 500 from the rest of the community, we adapt and move on. but over nerfing characters constantly is not healthy for the game in general.
“Players salty because the can’t exploit mechanics of broken character anymore”…. must be a day ending in y
Gamers salty because now the hook makes sense? Yawn. The poor dears. Gamers are also salty because on a test server its buggy in different ways now? Lol.
I think it’s more that people are worried/annoyed that while it did need to be fixed, Blizz instead seem to have made the hook completely useless as it’s really easy to break free now.
It’s only on PTR so obviously it could change but at the same time, the whole point of the PTR is to test and provide feedback, slamming people for being “salty” when most are doing exactly what’s expected (providing feedback) is just inciting more arguments…
Man, that’s what I hate about the Overwatch community the most. Got some contstructive feedback? ‘You salty’ and and your feedback is disregarded. So fucking childish, it actually does make me salty.
But… it doesn’t make sense! Let’s say you get hooked and Roadhog jumps over the edge – just because you lose line of sight to him shouldn’t mean the hook magically disappears
If the hook is this easy to break, and so fickle, maybe they could reduce the cooldown by a second or 2 to compensate
Either that or make the hook/pull quicker so there’s less chance for people to just jump around a corner (or behind a tree) and break the hook.
Better head on over to the Overwatch forums, this gonna be good.
I love playing RH but if this “hook 2.0” is here to stay I will not be playing him anymore. I would understand the line of sight check when the hook hits another player, but that player should not then be able to move and break the hook after unobstructed contact has already occurred.
Bugs and cliff-drops notwithstanding, it really does look like it’s gone a bit too far in the other direction. Used to be BS hooks that made no sense, now it doesn’t even work when it looks like it should…and this is from someone who doesn’t much like playing as or against Roadhog.
The 94% of players below GM who don’t seem to know how to counter a hook. And let’s face it there are tonnes of ways to counter it. All they did was take to the forums to whinge.
If roadhog was so broken before then why didn’t people whinge about him at the get go. He is literally unchanged since open beta.
The only reason people have such a huge problem now is because of the tank meta. But with the dual nerf to ana and his hook. He will never be played in GM games again. Which is sad because he is a fucking fun character to play.
People have been complaining about Roadhog since the beginning, Jeff Kaplan’s even admitted multiple times since launch that the hook needed to be reworked as it was buggy as hell they just hadn’t found a working solution for it yet.
well congrats to them. They broke roadhog. Now on to the next character people cry foul on.
Btw nerfing a characters core ability to the point it is unusable when playing against anyone who remotely has a clue of how to exploit how shit it has become ie. any master play or higher. Is just bad problem solving.
While we are doing that let’s talk about genjis school bus sized deflection hit box. Let look at Reinhardt vacuuming people up with his charge …. yes even behind walls. Let’s also talk about fucking logs that fly through the air when Hanzo spams that headshot you when they hit your feet.
Let’s apply the bullshit fixes to those characters and watch literally ever play complain rather than the clueless players that don’t know how to avoid a hook.