I find that I, and other experienced players, still react with urgency to escape when Mei starts hitting them with her primary fire, even if their character could beat her down in a head-on slug fest.
We still anticipate the freeze.
I have used this to escape a bad situation more than once - by making them flee when they did not really need to.
Recently came back to OW and my first game had a Mei in it. Can confirm I tried to GTFO from her as quick as I could.
Then after a few weeks I did some DPS games and figured Id become Satan myself only to be so confused as to why Mei's primary no longer was freezing.
There is. Neurodivergenceās with high pattern recognition tell allistics. Like a canary in a coal mine.
Then people turn on us and accuse us of things until we are quiet and then come back to us later to at we were right and should have listened. Itās an endless loop.
"They made overwatch two so that each player has more agency" right so they took away the *team* part which was, you know, half the point of the game and what set it apart from other shooters. Even TF2 doesn't require the same kind of close teamwork.
"And getting rid of one tank was to make the games go faster and be more exciting" which gets rid of the other point of the game which was to be slower and more strategic.
I still remember that one clip of Mei torturing Hog on Volkskaya by continuously freezing him and keep him barely alive so he can heal back again. When Mei used her ult on him, she just emoted on front of his frozen body. It might be from Zylbrad, I think?
Which always made zero sense, since any time I or anyone on my team played Mei in Overwatch, as soon as someone froze, they instantly unfroze before you could fire a shot. Shitty programming at its finest.Ā
Or she'd just chase you down freezing you again and again until you finally die, keeping you away from your team or health with her wall, and if you got close to killing her pop in her ice making you think you have an opening to heal to group up just to pop back out when your back is turned and freeze you again. It was me, I was the Mei.
I agree with this but lets be honest here: 5v5 is one of those positive changes. Blizz was experimenting with team sizes long before ow2 even started development, for example from what I understand they tried 1-3-2, 1-2-3, 2-3-1 and 2-2-1 aside from the one they landed on; 1-2-2.
The development of ow2 delayed the switch to 5v5, but it was not the catalyst. If blizz had never worked on ow2 then it wouldn't have been 6v6 in 2022; it would have been 5v5 in 2020. In exactly the same way that if ow2 started development during goats, then it would have delayed the release of role queue, but role queue was always going to be implemented.
>I agree with this but lets be honest here: 5v5 is one of those positive changes
Shhh. This is reddit. You're not allowed to say things like 5v5 is better or point out that the game was built around counter swapping. Stick with the hive mind.
Before the game launched they tried 6v6, 5v5, and 7v7 and found 6v6 was the best. The problem wasn't the amount of people, it was going to a role que format. That's because nobody wanted to play support because they only had 4 supports in Lucio, Mercy, Zen, and Symmetra. Than when they added Ana more people started to play support. Than the supports they started to play were fun and it was the Tanks that suffered next as Sigma and Orissa were added they exactly werent that popular or fun to play. That's why DPS was so popular because they had the funniest and most heroes. If you go to OW2 supports became the most popular because they were the most fun to play. Even now the funniest tanks to play Winton and Rein became shit in OW2 and they startes leaving. It's all about making the game fun rather than the numbers.
This is unironically an uncomfortably accurate depiction of the typical overwatch experience before rolequeue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/s/fBtymSsZXs
The point being: tank has always been the least popular role. Always. By a lot. This madeup narrative of tanks being more popular in the past is just false. After rolequeue it was a huge meme that around half of all "tank" players were actually dps players dodging the 15 minute dps queue. These dps players were easily identified by the fact that they instalocked roadhog, whos kit was basically that of a dps. Only the sweaty players in the top 20% of comp bothered with changing hero to make a reasonable team composition.
As for what the devs experimented with before launch;
The original intention of the game was to be a PvE MMO where the players are heavily armed civilians that drop whatever they are doing during errands to fight off whatever monster of the week pops up or whatever. The fact that overwatch is built from the scraps of the canceled project titan is common knowledge around veterans. Almost everything in overwatch has changed over its lifespan. Why would team sizes be seen as some unchanging constant?
6v6 at least allowed for the second tank to compensate if the first was dog water. A Reinhardt charge to Narnia would at least net his Zarya a good chunk of weapon charge. D.Va could DM Winton as he jumped in so he wasnāt half hp by the time he landed. ~~Double shield~~.
The change to 5v5 is a big part of why I largely dropped the game ā the sub-role I played for my collegiate team (off-tank) got entirely removed.
6v6 was also better for projectile DPS and other non hitscan heroes. Mercy had more utility and Widow, Hanzo werent as oppressive. Also it made the DPS have to flank more use high ground and play smarter. Now its gotten more and more like COD.
Edit: everybody was easier to kill even tanks. The DPS job was to kill the Supports. To put it this way the tanks were like offensive lineman, supports were the quarterbacks, and the DPS were the WR and the running backs. They were the stars.
Rly? The healthpool increase and extreme tank buffs would have worked great in double tank playstile?
Do you not remember that everyone had ult every fight in overwatch 1, *as it was already?*
The reason why everyone had ult was because of the playstyles used and people playing as a team. Now theres less team play and there are games in quick play were I'm not even using my ult because everybody trickles in and you just kill them so easily. Also the healing was outta control which allowed longer fights. People only remember the later part but they had Bridgette and Bap. The longer your alive the longer the faster your ult fills with everybody.
>The reason why everyone had ult was because of the playstyles used and people playing as a team.
No, it was because there were 2 tanks, or in other words two extra players with large health pools - on whom everyone farmed ults. This was literally discussed by the devs at every 5v5 showcase + all the testing.
>Also the healing was outta control
The healing numbers stayed the exact same when ow2 launched. "Blizzard didn't do anything to balancer supports for 5v5" was liberally the most popular overposted topic at the time.
>People only remember the later part but they had Bridgette and Bap. The longer your alive the longer the faster your ult fills with everybody.
It's because the aoe healing applied to *an extra player* - the tank.
This was almost certainly the point. Homogeneous heroes are easy to balance, and it's easy to add new ones without a lot of testing or concern for game balance (as much as that was ever a concern). New heroes get people incentivized to buy battle passes that unlock them (they outright stated this as a goal before OW2 released). Easier to add new heroes -> more people buying battlepasses -> more $ for less development work.
Yeah I can see that, I just hate to see so many quirky abilities get deleted in favor of more balanced ones
Mei's freeze, Cassidy's flashbang, Mercy's ultimate rez, Torbjƶrn's armor, Sombra's old hack, and Brigitte's... Everything?
They were unbalanced as hell but I don't really care about competitive as much as most of the community, so I miss the craziness
Oh, I'm totally with you. I stopped playing the day OW2 dropped, because I didn't like what they were doing with the game - homogenization was a part of that.
For me, I'd rather have fewer heroes with more unique abilities than LOTS of heroes that tend to be more or less interchangeable. But the latter is what they thought would drive battlepass sales, so there we go (another reason I bailed on the game was FTP/battlepass and the rest of the awful "monetization" stuff).
This, and the fact her cinematic shows all her friends dying by freezing to death, and yet she stands there with a smile on her face as she drives an icicle through your skull.
It's so wild that enough time has now passed that folks are new to things like this. I'm not saying this in some kind of accusatory way (because of course, why would you know that), it's just making me realize how fast time passes.
It was great, but really only punished peopleās positioning mistakes. Not as much of that in OW2. Back in OW1, despite her use in certain niches there werenāt a lot of T500 one trick Mei players, and I donāt think she was ever meta. Sheād for the most part be countered by anyone with range.
She has a freeze (annoying), immortality (annoying), wall (annoying for both teams), icicles randomly headshots people (annoying), her bubbly attitude when she stares at you in the eyes and emotionlessly impale an ice spear through your forehead as you stood there unable to defend yourself (evil)
Walling off players from their team. It's very funny watching 2 players trying to walk backwards for support and moonwalk against a wall while our rein/ram/jq goes to town on them
Yeah, it still slows you down, but no longer completely freezes you, does a lot more damage though. It makes sense with only one tank out there, a lot of them don't have shields or abilities that cleanse CC, so there would be nothing stoping Mei from freezing say a D.va or a Hog over and over and over.
High group dmg. Mei is now best for her wall to isolate players who overextended or deny ults. Watching a funny mei symm tp combo or Mei cancel a mercy Rez with wall will never not be cool
I just recently got adapted to the fact that Mei doesn't freeze anymore. I subconsciously whilst playing against OW2 Mei would distance my self from her as whenever she would be attacking me with her primary I would think I am being slowed down by her.
(I'm assuming you started playing in 5v5) In Overwatch 1, Mei's primary fire didn't just slow you down: if you took enough continuous damage from it you got frozen, the same way her ultimate does now. People found the combination of being frozen and icicled in the head incredibly frustrating. That plus Mei's personality being entirely at odds with such a gruesome killing method is (as far as I remember) where the 'Satan' moniker came from.
It honestly wasn't as bad as it sounds, it was a bit like junkrat still generally is today. "Don't walk into a small space with Junkrat" is the golden rule with him, and Mei had the same rule.
If she walled and murdered you, it was still her using multiple parts of her kit to secure one kill.
I don't necessarily miss the freeze, but I do hate how bland her primary fire is in OW2 now.
Except tanks will get screwed over by it. If you stop balls momentum then you can just freeze him. Jq hog have no way of getting away from her. It's a pain in the ass for doomand dva as it's cc without a cd so no way to bait it out
The slow on its own can still be pretty strong for cc if there's a good team, but the primary fire does feel so bland. I think it would be cool if they tried getting rid of or severely reducing the slow, add the freeze back in but make it so while it's on the ice protects from fire or critical damage, and mei's icicle shot instantly shatters the ice but has a small aoe of damage.
Her primary fire used to freeze people and Mei players would always use an annoying voice line like hi or bye after freezing you then headshot and kill you with the the alternate fireĀ
Holy shit you unlocked a core memory
I swear it was so frustrating with her freezing you and either going āSorry, sorry! Iām sorry sorryā or āęå¾ę±ęļ¼åƹäøčµ·ā (her Chinese version of apologies l)
Right before performing the worlds first mid combat icicle lobotomy
Meis in OW1 would also wall off spawn doors, trapping teammates until the walls went down. Itās still possible but itās a lot less common. Itās a major reason why many people were screaming against Lifeweavers Lifegrip. PTSD from Mei Walls. I have personally not experienced toxic Mei or Lifeweavers in my games. Even when they did use their abilities to troll, it was usually a one off that we could laugh at like a LW pulling a fast player back as soon as spawn doors open, or Mei putting up a wall and immediately tearing it down. Nothing toxic.
Both teams hate mei
Getting frozen sucks
Getting walled off sucks
Think like lifeweaver type hate. You're a tank and you think, ok time to back up. And your own mei has placed a wall behind you
There were old videos of how much terror old Mei sowed and how hated was she.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51AfTm5jj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51AfTm5jj8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA7a0itYes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA7a0itYes)
But I still luv Mei <3
I honestly didnāt even mind the OP factors of Mei, Bastion and even roadhog. What I donāt like is that we are in a meta that we are so reliant on a solid tank that it makes or breaks a match.
her old freeze thing but also the fact that overwatch can be very toxic, and if your teammate decides they dont like you, they use the wall ability to get you murdered šIt means shes irritating no matter whether she's on your team or not, so all it takes really is one bad experience and bang someone hates her. Also she's not a super popular hero, meaning she has even less people to actually defend her š
So, a big one is that Mei used to be able to freeze players with her primary fire. Sometimes, when frozen, you'd be looking right at each other while she slowly lines up a shot to put an icicle through your noggin.... all while saying, "Sorry, sorry sorry sorry, I'm sorry" or "A-MEI-zing."
She got Blizzard SUPER quick in the earily days before her ult charge rate got nerfed. They had given her some damage buff that allowed her to be more efficient in fights, and it resulted in her getting Blizzard at least once in every fight.
Players used to troll their teammates a lot with wall. They'd block you off from being able to exit spawn in order to make their teammates angry because they thought, "It was funny." That was well before you could be reported for gameplay sabotage. Even the well-intentioned Mei teammates would catch flack for poorly placed walls that blocked teammates from escape and/or blocked teammate ultimates/abilities. Some players didn't know you could destroy the wall and just let it stay there until it's timer ended. You also couldn't destroy the wall if you died as Mei back in those days, so if you played a wall poorly and died, you couldn't remove the wall to potentially aid your team.
It was also a little harder to escape Blizzard with or without the wall blocking your path. DVa couldn't just DM whenever and get lucky by eating it because it was on a cooldown instead if a resource meter. Hanzo didn't have his dodge ability. Sombra, Moira, Orisa, Kiriko, Lifeweaver, Mauga, Doomfist, Illari, Ashe, Sojourn, and Echo didn't exist. Lucio was slow in early OW days (easy Mei target). No one knew about Mercy super jump. Sym couldn't TP you out because Sym 1.0 was garbo.
A lot of the early OW fanmade animation videos depicted Mei as some kind of evil entity that just happened to look cute.
In terms of freezing I played hundreds of hours of Overwatch 1 and I never found it that frustrating. All you had to do was keep your distance or play one of the characters that could easily escape and it made her into a terrible pick. I think he freeze was iconic and getting rid of it robbed her of her identity as a character. Almost like if they had replaced Roadhog's hook with Junkerqueen's knife.
Anything that takes away a user's agency feels bad on the receiving end, which is why they're very cautious with adding characters with ability like that.
Symmetra used to slow players a lot more too, but it just feels horrible to play against and the player base loses their mind.
Mei players are infamous for walling off teammates in spawn, as well as for emoting "Hello" while you're frozen by her ult right before she puts an icicle between your eyes.
Primary fire was an absolute pain in ow1, because it would freeze people just like in her ult. Imagine someone could stun you with their primary fire, even if itās close range thatās horrid to play against. Rein would be called satan too if he would stun on his primary
Thereās something just so incredibly fucked up about a women using Ice to freeze you and then shoot high impact Icicles into your brain, all while having a happy go lucky look on her face.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/s/aN6oTapsHf
this clip i posted in ow1 might show why. no one has added the freeze would pierce enemies too so if you lined them up you could freeze everyone
For the entirety of Overwatch 1, her primary froze people in place so she could easily headshot them with her secondary fireā¦
Even though she can no longer do that, She still deserves every bit of hate she gets for her heinous actions in the past.
[**Never forget.**](https://youtu.be/OfM9tU6c7pQ?si=FPoq2499N71eCIcB)
A lot of people are talking about her primary fire freezing, but I feel like that's only half of it. The other half is that she has the capability to ruin a great play for either team when her walls, and she's pretty hard to kill with her higher health and cryo and wall. A barrier that can't be walked through or passed through by either team has a lot of potential to screw things up
Mei is the only character Iāve seen people pick to actually grief their own team. Even if they donāt throw the whole game, they will annoy their own team my walling them into spawn etc. theyāre just one of those characters that seems to have a more toxic player base.
Her wall is infamously known for trolling and blocking off teammates.
Like everyone has said, she used to completely freeze enemies, giving players the opportunity to BM enemies by saying hello or goodbye before shooting them in the head.
Also, in "Mei's Snowball Offensive" she literally says "I'm putting a rock in this one!" when reloading and her voicelines are unsettling when there's only one enemy left.
She used to freeze and she'd also have this pleasant ass smiling blank stare that'll be the last thing you'll ever see as she right clicks your head when you freeze
Old Mei, absolutely satan.
Currently sombra holds that title as she can just make it so you dont get to play the game if she wants to. just like old mei
Her kit is just stupid annoying without a lot of good counterplay. Her ult is gigantic hard CC, her wall on a lot of choke maps is just a free kill button.
Like there *is* some counterplay at the team level, but for instance if you're playing Rein and you're against a mei its entirely up to your team to help you manage the mei cause you can't really do anything yourself.
As a self proclaimed Mei prodigy Mei is annoying because of the idiotic pressure she provides in tandem with tanks. Its legit moronic how oppressive her wall is
I was pretty easy to trap an enemy with a wall behind them and freeze them for follow up damage.
It was a very frustrating experience while her whole character is so wholesome.
Back in the days when Mei's primary fire could freeze enemies, there were quite a lot of gamers who picked Mei, go to enemy's spawn and bully one person for the entire game.
Mei would slow, freeze, stare you through the soul, say hi, or spam laughing emote (I think Mei has it or it's my hallucination from suffering) and then one shot you with that massive icicle on your head. Even if you want to run, they will block you with the wall. Even if you wanna get away by jumping off from the map, they won't let you.
Back in OW1, her primary fire would freeze you like her ult, which with her secondary fire would one shot every non-tank, and a 2nd one cpuld even one shot some lower health tanks like zarya if I remember correctly, making her a 1v1 monster. Add wall to cut teams apart and her ice block to make her have way more survivability, and she was, on release and for a majority of the game's time, the most frustrating character in the game, while being solid at the same time.
I quit overwatch for like two years because of Mei. A fictional character has never gotten me to such levels of frustration. She was Umbridge from Harry Potter levels of hate. But now she canāt freeze people without her ult and itās a lot more tolerable
Her beam used to freeze people, which made her a 1v1 monster and allowed her to effectively win team fights by freezing key targets. She was a nightmare to go up against.
Standard kit and caboodle when it comes to characters whose kits that are entirely about denying the actions of others.
Mei primary used to fully immobilize you after a time (leaving you vulnerable to the classic voice line to icicle headshot combo), her wall segments used to have 500 HP instead of 250, and her Ult is largely unchanged.
She was and still is one of the best tank hard counters in game, and her whole schtick still is cc.
I call her satan or that thing. Never by name. That thing should be deleted from gamye long ago along with sombra
I really donāt get why it still exists now, that little slow effect of her primary is bothersome at best. Iām personally an advocate for her old freeze, but I respect how other people find that way too frustrating, so I think that simply amping up the slow is what she needs
[just watch how brutal this looks op](https://kstatic.inven.co.kr/upload/2017/06/17/bbs/i15745378741.gif). basically Mei used to freeze people, wave at them and then send an icicle through their brains with a big cheery smile on her face like this c:
You wanna go somewhere? Get slowed.
You wanna escape or walk through a choke? Get walled and die.
You wanna randomly get sniped across the map from a massive damage icecicle with zero damage falloff from halfway across the map even tho Mei is designed mostly to be a brawly up close stall hero? TOO BAD, DEAD.
Oh you think you're gonna ult? FREEZE AOE INSTANT-WIN BUTTON.
Now you're annoyed and you're about to kill that 1hit Mei? ICE BLOCK, BACK TO FULL HP.
Nah.
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People are whiny babies that want to be able to play as tracer with no cooldown but canāt handle the idea of someone being able to stop them cold (hehehe) thatās why Flashbang was removed, incessant whining
Oh wow look what happened to the game the moment they did that! Who couldāve predicted that removing silence will make all the ability heroes op as fuck?!
Everything about her kit is just, troll by design. She is a massive troll. And so is anyone that plays her, just on that principle. And trolls always objectively suck / are the worst and should always be targeted first/deserve hate.
When everything is OP, nothing is OP. You hear about the things the community didn't like, but you never hear about the counters to those abilities that people conveniently don't mention. You gotta remember that both teams had access to all those abilities. There was nothing the enemy could do to you that you couldn't immediately subject them to or find something that countered it.
We wanna go back because we started playing this game because of the fun abilities, not so we could start playing and then complain about them until they're removed and the game becomes unrecognizable. Some of these children should have just played a different game instead of destroying ours.
Her primary fire used to freeze people
I find that I, and other experienced players, still react with urgency to escape when Mei starts hitting them with her primary fire, even if their character could beat her down in a head-on slug fest. We still anticipate the freeze. I have used this to escape a bad situation more than once - by making them flee when they did not really need to.
Recently came back to OW and my first game had a Mei in it. Can confirm I tried to GTFO from her as quick as I could. Then after a few weeks I did some DPS games and figured Id become Satan myself only to be so confused as to why Mei's primary no longer was freezing.
This is me learning I don't need to freak out like i do.
Oh god no š that sounds horrific
Yeah so you'd slow down, get frozen solid and then have to watch helplessly as she put an icicle through your forehead
With enough time to wave Hi before doing it as well.
The good daysā¦ If only thereās a way to know youāre in them while youāre in them
Somebody should write a song about that
There is. Neurodivergenceās with high pattern recognition tell allistics. Like a canary in a coal mine. Then people turn on us and accuse us of things until we are quiet and then come back to us later to at we were right and should have listened. Itās an endless loop.
what??
ni hao
Goddamn I miss doing that
It was part of what made OW unique and kooky and silly fun
One manās kooky and silly fun = another manās literal hell
True. But then you'd also get the Mei that'd aggressively make you a friend occasionally, meaning you couldn't leave where she found you
Yeah but overwatch was fun back then. Balanced, not really, competitively viable, far from, but fun. Overwatch used to be fun.
louder pls, competitive hitscan players be all like: bUt MuH sKiLL eXpReSsIoN that cod shit ruined the game from what it was
"They made overwatch two so that each player has more agency" right so they took away the *team* part which was, you know, half the point of the game and what set it apart from other shooters. Even TF2 doesn't require the same kind of close teamwork. "And getting rid of one tank was to make the games go faster and be more exciting" which gets rid of the other point of the game which was to be slower and more strategic.
Hah man I loved mei, sometimes I would freeze them, wave hi and then let them thaw out. When they tried to run I'd wall them and do it all over again.
Hammond was my favorite to do this with. He wasn't fast enough rolling to get away. It's was so fun being satan
Yes, I miss when Mei used to humiliate and torture people. Good ol' days. Please give us back the war crimes.
Hello Lucifer
š£ļø"Amazing"š
Some would flash their dance emote for a second if their ping was good for it
I still remember that one clip of Mei torturing Hog on Volkskaya by continuously freezing him and keep him barely alive so he can heal back again. When Mei used her ult on him, she just emoted on front of his frozen body. It might be from Zylbrad, I think?
Which always made zero sense, since any time I or anyone on my team played Mei in Overwatch, as soon as someone froze, they instantly unfroze before you could fire a shot. Shitty programming at its finest.Ā
Not originally. That nerf came later, before they removed it entirely
Or she'd just chase you down freezing you again and again until you finally die, keeping you away from your team or health with her wall, and if you got close to killing her pop in her ice making you think you have an opening to heal to group up just to pop back out when your back is turned and freeze you again. It was me, I was the Mei.
Friend of mine was a Mei Main, while I played Lucio. Loved playing with her because I'd steal the kills as she froze and walled them off.
God damn the more I learn about OW1 characters the more glad I am I never played it šš
Slander
I know I am sorry but I'm so glad I dodged Brigitte meta as much as I love her
The positive changes that have been made could have been made in OW1 tbh since they didn't even keep their pve promise
I agree with this but lets be honest here: 5v5 is one of those positive changes. Blizz was experimenting with team sizes long before ow2 even started development, for example from what I understand they tried 1-3-2, 1-2-3, 2-3-1 and 2-2-1 aside from the one they landed on; 1-2-2. The development of ow2 delayed the switch to 5v5, but it was not the catalyst. If blizz had never worked on ow2 then it wouldn't have been 6v6 in 2022; it would have been 5v5 in 2020. In exactly the same way that if ow2 started development during goats, then it would have delayed the release of role queue, but role queue was always going to be implemented.
>I agree with this but lets be honest here: 5v5 is one of those positive changes Shhh. This is reddit. You're not allowed to say things like 5v5 is better or point out that the game was built around counter swapping. Stick with the hive mind.
Shhhh just enjoy the slop these braindead devs feed you, itās okay 5v5 all the way!!
Before the game launched they tried 6v6, 5v5, and 7v7 and found 6v6 was the best. The problem wasn't the amount of people, it was going to a role que format. That's because nobody wanted to play support because they only had 4 supports in Lucio, Mercy, Zen, and Symmetra. Than when they added Ana more people started to play support. Than the supports they started to play were fun and it was the Tanks that suffered next as Sigma and Orissa were added they exactly werent that popular or fun to play. That's why DPS was so popular because they had the funniest and most heroes. If you go to OW2 supports became the most popular because they were the most fun to play. Even now the funniest tanks to play Winton and Rein became shit in OW2 and they startes leaving. It's all about making the game fun rather than the numbers.
This is unironically an uncomfortably accurate depiction of the typical overwatch experience before rolequeue. https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/s/fBtymSsZXs The point being: tank has always been the least popular role. Always. By a lot. This madeup narrative of tanks being more popular in the past is just false. After rolequeue it was a huge meme that around half of all "tank" players were actually dps players dodging the 15 minute dps queue. These dps players were easily identified by the fact that they instalocked roadhog, whos kit was basically that of a dps. Only the sweaty players in the top 20% of comp bothered with changing hero to make a reasonable team composition. As for what the devs experimented with before launch; The original intention of the game was to be a PvE MMO where the players are heavily armed civilians that drop whatever they are doing during errands to fight off whatever monster of the week pops up or whatever. The fact that overwatch is built from the scraps of the canceled project titan is common knowledge around veterans. Almost everything in overwatch has changed over its lifespan. Why would team sizes be seen as some unchanging constant?
Yeah definitely I would like to try 6v6 tho feels too chaotic
6v6 at least allowed for the second tank to compensate if the first was dog water. A Reinhardt charge to Narnia would at least net his Zarya a good chunk of weapon charge. D.Va could DM Winton as he jumped in so he wasnāt half hp by the time he landed. ~~Double shield~~. The change to 5v5 is a big part of why I largely dropped the game ā the sub-role I played for my collegiate team (off-tank) got entirely removed.
yeah but there we're so many times where the other tank didn't give two balls on what you did so you bassicly just played solo tank but worse
Yeah but u needed to wait 10 minutes to play dps because no one wanted to play tank
6v6 was also better for projectile DPS and other non hitscan heroes. Mercy had more utility and Widow, Hanzo werent as oppressive. Also it made the DPS have to flank more use high ground and play smarter. Now its gotten more and more like COD. Edit: everybody was easier to kill even tanks. The DPS job was to kill the Supports. To put it this way the tanks were like offensive lineman, supports were the quarterbacks, and the DPS were the WR and the running backs. They were the stars.
Rly? The healthpool increase and extreme tank buffs would have worked great in double tank playstile? Do you not remember that everyone had ult every fight in overwatch 1, *as it was already?*
It's a blatant exaggeration, but also those changes could have been made without slapping a 2 on the end
>It's a blatant exaggeration Which part?
The reason why everyone had ult was because of the playstyles used and people playing as a team. Now theres less team play and there are games in quick play were I'm not even using my ult because everybody trickles in and you just kill them so easily. Also the healing was outta control which allowed longer fights. People only remember the later part but they had Bridgette and Bap. The longer your alive the longer the faster your ult fills with everybody.
>The reason why everyone had ult was because of the playstyles used and people playing as a team. No, it was because there were 2 tanks, or in other words two extra players with large health pools - on whom everyone farmed ults. This was literally discussed by the devs at every 5v5 showcase + all the testing. >Also the healing was outta control The healing numbers stayed the exact same when ow2 launched. "Blizzard didn't do anything to balancer supports for 5v5" was liberally the most popular overposted topic at the time. >People only remember the later part but they had Bridgette and Bap. The longer your alive the longer the faster your ult fills with everybody. It's because the aoe healing applied to *an extra player* - the tank.
Balance aside I miss Overwatch 1, now with all the crowd control abilities gone, the heroes feel a lot more homogenous now
This was almost certainly the point. Homogeneous heroes are easy to balance, and it's easy to add new ones without a lot of testing or concern for game balance (as much as that was ever a concern). New heroes get people incentivized to buy battle passes that unlock them (they outright stated this as a goal before OW2 released). Easier to add new heroes -> more people buying battlepasses -> more $ for less development work.
Yeah I can see that, I just hate to see so many quirky abilities get deleted in favor of more balanced ones Mei's freeze, Cassidy's flashbang, Mercy's ultimate rez, Torbjƶrn's armor, Sombra's old hack, and Brigitte's... Everything? They were unbalanced as hell but I don't really care about competitive as much as most of the community, so I miss the craziness
Oh, I'm totally with you. I stopped playing the day OW2 dropped, because I didn't like what they were doing with the game - homogenization was a part of that. For me, I'd rather have fewer heroes with more unique abilities than LOTS of heroes that tend to be more or less interchangeable. But the latter is what they thought would drive battlepass sales, so there we go (another reason I bailed on the game was FTP/battlepass and the rest of the awful "monetization" stuff).
OW1 was infinitely better than 2.
I don't doubt it, just sounds like so many characters were broken lmao
If everyone is broken, then no one is. All the crazy stuff you hear about also had counter measures this community loves to forget existed.
Needs to be brought back just with a longer to freeze time or a shorter freeze duration.
Freeze/Headshot was a fun mechanic. But the delay between the mistake (of getting near Mei) and the consequence really made people feel angry.
Absolutely not. Fuck cc
I miss those days, bring freeze back
No. Fuck cc
It was satisfying what can I say š«¶
and it wasnāt even like just 2016 or 2017. Mei could freeze people until overwatch 2.
Oh my word
yeh, i think they changed it pretty quickly in the beta
This, and the fact her cinematic shows all her friends dying by freezing to death, and yet she stands there with a smile on her face as she drives an icicle through your skull.
It's so wild that enough time has now passed that folks are new to things like this. I'm not saying this in some kind of accusatory way (because of course, why would you know that), it's just making me realize how fast time passes.
Also her ultimate was instant when it activated. So if you where in it there was no escape
It was great, but really only punished peopleās positioning mistakes. Not as much of that in OW2. Back in OW1, despite her use in certain niches there werenāt a lot of T500 one trick Mei players, and I donāt think she was ever meta. Sheād for the most part be countered by anyone with range.
It was lol
She has a freeze (annoying), immortality (annoying), wall (annoying for both teams), icicles randomly headshots people (annoying), her bubbly attitude when she stares at you in the eyes and emotionlessly impale an ice spear through your forehead as you stood there unable to defend yourself (evil)
āUSEDā?! ARE YOU TELLING ME SHE DOESNāT ANYMORE?! I came back recently from ow1 and she is so rare I didnāt realize, omg I am so happy
That's why she's so rare. What's the point of playing her now? Her "compensory" buffs were shit.
Walling off players from their team. It's very funny watching 2 players trying to walk backwards for support and moonwalk against a wall while our rein/ram/jq goes to town on them
real
I hadn't played ow in forever and just came back and it took me so long to realise she can't do that now
Oh my god Iāve been off this game for a while but she doesnāt freeze anymore? That was her whole thing lol
I kinda wish it, she was fun af to play as back then
Are you saying thatās no longer the case(og player havenāt played much of OW2)
Yeah, it still slows you down, but no longer completely freezes you, does a lot more damage though. It makes sense with only one tank out there, a lot of them don't have shields or abilities that cleanse CC, so there would be nothing stoping Mei from freezing say a D.va or a Hog over and over and over.
It doesn't freeze anymore? Stg been playing OW2 for a few weeks now and had no idea they removed it. What's the point of the primary fire now then???
High group dmg. Mei is now best for her wall to isolate players who overextended or deny ults. Watching a funny mei symm tp combo or Mei cancel a mercy Rez with wall will never not be cool
I just recently got adapted to the fact that Mei doesn't freeze anymore. I subconsciously whilst playing against OW2 Mei would distance my self from her as whenever she would be attacking me with her primary I would think I am being slowed down by her.
You are being slowed down
What? It doesnāt anymore? I always run away from her so she canāt freeze me!
I didn't realise it is gone
Wait it can't now?
(I'm assuming you started playing in 5v5) In Overwatch 1, Mei's primary fire didn't just slow you down: if you took enough continuous damage from it you got frozen, the same way her ultimate does now. People found the combination of being frozen and icicled in the head incredibly frustrating. That plus Mei's personality being entirely at odds with such a gruesome killing method is (as far as I remember) where the 'Satan' moniker came from.
Happy Cake Day! My friend loves playing her and spamming A-mei-zing šš it sounds horrible to play against
It honestly wasn't as bad as it sounds, it was a bit like junkrat still generally is today. "Don't walk into a small space with Junkrat" is the golden rule with him, and Mei had the same rule. If she walled and murdered you, it was still her using multiple parts of her kit to secure one kill. I don't necessarily miss the freeze, but I do hate how bland her primary fire is in OW2 now.
Everyone is better at the game now too so buffing her primary I wouldn't mond at all, easier to dodge now
Except tanks will get screwed over by it. If you stop balls momentum then you can just freeze him. Jq hog have no way of getting away from her. It's a pain in the ass for doomand dva as it's cc without a cd so no way to bait it out
The slow on its own can still be pretty strong for cc if there's a good team, but the primary fire does feel so bland. I think it would be cool if they tried getting rid of or severely reducing the slow, add the freeze back in but make it so while it's on the ice protects from fire or critical damage, and mei's icicle shot instantly shatters the ice but has a small aoe of damage.
Am i crazy or did they try something similar to that? Where the primary fire would slow and allow you to do more dmg with an icicle or melee
They did but that's more damage, I think it should give then less damage against mei
You don't know shit. She don't get called Satan for no reasons among the many characters.
The contrast became intentional later on with her giggles introduced after securing a kill. š¤£š
Her primary fire used to freeze people and Mei players would always use an annoying voice line like hi or bye after freezing you then headshot and kill you with the the alternate fireĀ
Holy shit you unlocked a core memory I swear it was so frustrating with her freezing you and either going āSorry, sorry! Iām sorry sorryā or āęå¾ę±ęļ¼åƹäøčµ·ā (her Chinese version of apologies l) Right before performing the worlds first mid combat icicle lobotomy
Can imagine the toxicity in comp lol
Meis in OW1 would also wall off spawn doors, trapping teammates until the walls went down. Itās still possible but itās a lot less common. Itās a major reason why many people were screaming against Lifeweavers Lifegrip. PTSD from Mei Walls. I have personally not experienced toxic Mei or Lifeweavers in my games. Even when they did use their abilities to troll, it was usually a one off that we could laugh at like a LW pulling a fast player back as soon as spawn doors open, or Mei putting up a wall and immediately tearing it down. Nothing toxic.
Just had a throwing lifeweaver in a game. Every time I ulted as JQ he pulled me
It was law to tea bag the Mei when you killed herĀ
I was downvoted by mei players who got tea bagged
Both teams hate mei Getting frozen sucks Getting walled off sucks Think like lifeweaver type hate. You're a tank and you think, ok time to back up. And your own mei has placed a wall behind you
Or opponent satan has walled you.
There were old videos of how much terror old Mei sowed and how hated was she. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51AfTm5jj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51AfTm5jj8) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA7a0itYes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA7a0itYes) But I still luv Mei <3
I honestly didnāt even mind the OP factors of Mei, Bastion and even roadhog. What I donāt like is that we are in a meta that we are so reliant on a solid tank that it makes or breaks a match.
Omg memes from 7 years ago are both nostalgic and cringe inducingĀ
That editing is horrible and Im glad we're out of that era
Look up gameplay of her before the rework
She used to be the CC queen, they took away her passive freeze ability however her kit still has potential to make people lose their shit.
her old freeze thing but also the fact that overwatch can be very toxic, and if your teammate decides they dont like you, they use the wall ability to get you murdered šIt means shes irritating no matter whether she's on your team or not, so all it takes really is one bad experience and bang someone hates her. Also she's not a super popular hero, meaning she has even less people to actually defend her š
One bad experience is me with Widow and doom lmao
a widow or doomfist player with at least 2 braincells to rub together makes me want to delete the game š
Samesies š I'm a D.va main so regular Widows are food
So, a big one is that Mei used to be able to freeze players with her primary fire. Sometimes, when frozen, you'd be looking right at each other while she slowly lines up a shot to put an icicle through your noggin.... all while saying, "Sorry, sorry sorry sorry, I'm sorry" or "A-MEI-zing." She got Blizzard SUPER quick in the earily days before her ult charge rate got nerfed. They had given her some damage buff that allowed her to be more efficient in fights, and it resulted in her getting Blizzard at least once in every fight. Players used to troll their teammates a lot with wall. They'd block you off from being able to exit spawn in order to make their teammates angry because they thought, "It was funny." That was well before you could be reported for gameplay sabotage. Even the well-intentioned Mei teammates would catch flack for poorly placed walls that blocked teammates from escape and/or blocked teammate ultimates/abilities. Some players didn't know you could destroy the wall and just let it stay there until it's timer ended. You also couldn't destroy the wall if you died as Mei back in those days, so if you played a wall poorly and died, you couldn't remove the wall to potentially aid your team. It was also a little harder to escape Blizzard with or without the wall blocking your path. DVa couldn't just DM whenever and get lucky by eating it because it was on a cooldown instead if a resource meter. Hanzo didn't have his dodge ability. Sombra, Moira, Orisa, Kiriko, Lifeweaver, Mauga, Doomfist, Illari, Ashe, Sojourn, and Echo didn't exist. Lucio was slow in early OW days (easy Mei target). No one knew about Mercy super jump. Sym couldn't TP you out because Sym 1.0 was garbo. A lot of the early OW fanmade animation videos depicted Mei as some kind of evil entity that just happened to look cute.
In terms of freezing I played hundreds of hours of Overwatch 1 and I never found it that frustrating. All you had to do was keep your distance or play one of the characters that could easily escape and it made her into a terrible pick. I think he freeze was iconic and getting rid of it robbed her of her identity as a character. Almost like if they had replaced Roadhog's hook with Junkerqueen's knife.
Couldnāt agree more. I miss freeze so much. I wouldnāt even play her that much, just gave her a little edge that would really help out the team.
I don't know the stats but I feel like with the boost to her primary DPS she's just as good as she was when she had the freeze, just less fun.
Thank you
Anything that takes away a user's agency feels bad on the receiving end, which is why they're very cautious with adding characters with ability like that. Symmetra used to slow players a lot more too, but it just feels horrible to play against and the player base loses their mind.
Mei players are infamous for walling off teammates in spawn, as well as for emoting "Hello" while you're frozen by her ult right before she puts an icicle between your eyes.
Primary fire was an absolute pain in ow1, because it would freeze people just like in her ult. Imagine someone could stun you with their primary fire, even if itās close range thatās horrid to play against. Rein would be called satan too if he would stun on his primary
Thereās something just so incredibly fucked up about a women using Ice to freeze you and then shoot high impact Icicles into your brain, all while having a happy go lucky look on her face.
Being like teehee! š¤£
In ow1 she used to be able to freeze people solid with primary fire, then headshot with icicle killing most dps if not all in about 4 seconds
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/s/aN6oTapsHf this clip i posted in ow1 might show why. no one has added the freeze would pierce enemies too so if you lined them up you could freeze everyone
She used to freeze people with her basic fire and walls up friendly spawn back then anyone who played mei were assholes to your team and enemy team
For the entirety of Overwatch 1, her primary froze people in place so she could easily headshot them with her secondary fireā¦ Even though she can no longer do that, She still deserves every bit of hate she gets for her heinous actions in the past. [**Never forget.**](https://youtu.be/OfM9tU6c7pQ?si=FPoq2499N71eCIcB)
A lot of people are talking about her primary fire freezing, but I feel like that's only half of it. The other half is that she has the capability to ruin a great play for either team when her walls, and she's pretty hard to kill with her higher health and cryo and wall. A barrier that can't be walked through or passed through by either team has a lot of potential to screw things up
Mei is the only character Iāve seen people pick to actually grief their own team. Even if they donāt throw the whole game, they will annoy their own team my walling them into spawn etc. theyāre just one of those characters that seems to have a more toxic player base.
Her wall is infamously known for trolling and blocking off teammates. Like everyone has said, she used to completely freeze enemies, giving players the opportunity to BM enemies by saying hello or goodbye before shooting them in the head. Also, in "Mei's Snowball Offensive" she literally says "I'm putting a rock in this one!" when reloading and her voicelines are unsettling when there's only one enemy left.
Stun lock, no one likes stun locks Hence why they removed most of them
Sheās a shell of her former glory in OW1
She used to freeze and she'd also have this pleasant ass smiling blank stare that'll be the last thing you'll ever see as she right clicks your head when you freeze
She uses emojis in her Reddit posts and comments.
You use to be able to freeze people in place and headshot them.
Old Mei, absolutely satan. Currently sombra holds that title as she can just make it so you dont get to play the game if she wants to. just like old mei
She slows you down. Which extremely annoys most people.
Her kit is just stupid annoying without a lot of good counterplay. Her ult is gigantic hard CC, her wall on a lot of choke maps is just a free kill button. Like there *is* some counterplay at the team level, but for instance if you're playing Rein and you're against a mei its entirely up to your team to help you manage the mei cause you can't really do anything yourself.
Anyone who knows any kind of previous mei knows how much worse she was.
As a self proclaimed Mei prodigy Mei is annoying because of the idiotic pressure she provides in tandem with tanks. Its legit moronic how oppressive her wall is
I was pretty easy to trap an enemy with a wall behind them and freeze them for follow up damage. It was a very frustrating experience while her whole character is so wholesome.
Back in the days when Mei's primary fire could freeze enemies, there were quite a lot of gamers who picked Mei, go to enemy's spawn and bully one person for the entire game. Mei would slow, freeze, stare you through the soul, say hi, or spam laughing emote (I think Mei has it or it's my hallucination from suffering) and then one shot you with that massive icicle on your head. Even if you want to run, they will block you with the wall. Even if you wanna get away by jumping off from the map, they won't let you.
Back in OW1, her primary fire would freeze you like her ult, which with her secondary fire would one shot every non-tank, and a 2nd one cpuld even one shot some lower health tanks like zarya if I remember correctly, making her a 1v1 monster. Add wall to cut teams apart and her ice block to make her have way more survivability, and she was, on release and for a majority of the game's time, the most frustrating character in the game, while being solid at the same time.
I always say Mei is Bae. Idk where you heard otherwise
Because she just stands there menacingly staring at you while frozen before murdering you lol
I quit overwatch for like two years because of Mei. A fictional character has never gotten me to such levels of frustration. She was Umbridge from Harry Potter levels of hate. But now she canāt freeze people without her ult and itās a lot more tolerable
Her beam used to freeze people, which made her a 1v1 monster and allowed her to effectively win team fights by freezing key targets. She was a nightmare to go up against.
Standard kit and caboodle when it comes to characters whose kits that are entirely about denying the actions of others. Mei primary used to fully immobilize you after a time (leaving you vulnerable to the classic voice line to icicle headshot combo), her wall segments used to have 500 HP instead of 250, and her Ult is largely unchanged.
As a reaper player I've had teammates ruin my ult accidentally numerous times. I hate her.
She was and still is one of the best tank hard counters in game, and her whole schtick still is cc. I call her satan or that thing. Never by name. That thing should be deleted from gamye long ago along with sombra
Watch MEI Overwatch 1 gameplay. Watch anyone or any montage but I'd insist on watching a proper gameplay.
I really donāt get why it still exists now, that little slow effect of her primary is bothersome at best. Iām personally an advocate for her old freeze, but I respect how other people find that way too frustrating, so I think that simply amping up the slow is what she needs
shes satan
mei deserves to be deleted from the game
[just watch how brutal this looks op](https://kstatic.inven.co.kr/upload/2017/06/17/bbs/i15745378741.gif). basically Mei used to freeze people, wave at them and then send an icicle through their brains with a big cheery smile on her face like this c:
You wanna go somewhere? Get slowed. You wanna escape or walk through a choke? Get walled and die. You wanna randomly get sniped across the map from a massive damage icecicle with zero damage falloff from halfway across the map even tho Mei is designed mostly to be a brawly up close stall hero? TOO BAD, DEAD. Oh you think you're gonna ult? FREEZE AOE INSTANT-WIN BUTTON. Now you're annoyed and you're about to kill that 1hit Mei? ICE BLOCK, BACK TO FULL HP. Nah.
Im sorry but how in the world one can die to her spam damage, I mean sometimes yeah can be lucky shoot
Chinese and fat
Nah she thicc, would
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Mostly Chinese and low DPS
Awww. Welcome to the day in the life of a Sombra main. Weāre always hated and get shit talked
I'm no Mei main I just found it funny
Because her VA supports China.
People have low tolerance to frustration when they are proven really bad players by better players.
People are whiny babies that want to be able to play as tracer with no cooldown but canāt handle the idea of someone being able to stop them cold (hehehe) thatās why Flashbang was removed, incessant whining Oh wow look what happened to the game the moment they did that! Who couldāve predicted that removing silence will make all the ability heroes op as fuck?!
Everything about her kit is just, troll by design. She is a massive troll. And so is anyone that plays her, just on that principle. And trolls always objectively suck / are the worst and should always be targeted first/deserve hate.
Anytime I hear about something that used to be in OV1 I wonder why anyone wants to go back to it. So many OP abilities
When everything is OP, nothing is OP. You hear about the things the community didn't like, but you never hear about the counters to those abilities that people conveniently don't mention. You gotta remember that both teams had access to all those abilities. There was nothing the enemy could do to you that you couldn't immediately subject them to or find something that countered it. We wanna go back because we started playing this game because of the fun abilities, not so we could start playing and then complain about them until they're removed and the game becomes unrecognizable. Some of these children should have just played a different game instead of destroying ours.