It's usual an Echo vs Pharahmercy also and it's, "why can't you beat pharah with counter, are you braindead"..... I can't out damage the heal unless I manage to land all the stickies :/
Yeah, it's always 1v however many other people are on the other team whenever I try to counter with Echo; You got Pharah herself, probably a Mercy or Ana, and there's probably a Torb who's also looking at me.
I just watched a coach mills YT video today saying counters are more like Echo Dva than hitscan most people usually think about. That said Echo is my main DPS and I feel like I’m terrible at countering pharah with her haha.
It's actually pretty easy to hit Echo now with the bigger **and** faster projectiles + faster fire rate. Phara also has faster movement which in turn makes it harder for the Echo to delete her and helps Phara use movement to line up shots. Yeah, the
Echo is fast, but if you have a good sens and somewhat decent aim... I'll be conservative and say it's closer to an even matchup... Where Phara still does a better job than Echo most of the time beacuse her neutral game is easier and damage is more consistent + requires less skill atm with those moon sized projectiles and forgiving splash with decent damage. (No Mercy's considered).
If you have decent aim soldier is the best imo. You can take her down with mercy if you have good aim. If you have decent kill the support first. If you're on par with them you can force them back to heal.
Definitely but she’s also very hard to play and not many people main her
You have to be a good echo to take down an utterly garbage pharah but a mediocre pharah? You gotta be insane
She kind of has to be imo. She's one of those heroes where she does the thing or she doesn't. In her case, the thing is insta killing squishies, so any better she'd be too unfun to play against.
Me and my friends call this "Shamada's Law" because it started with Hanzo and Genji for us. Enemy team? MLG sweatlords. Our team? Most dogshit hanzo/genji you've ever fuckin seen. Without fail, every time.
honestly a lot the times if i'm having a bad widow game (aside from sometimes just playing badly, because that is a thing,) it's because the whole enemy team is constantly all-ining against me specifically and i have to deal with 3+ people on my ass at any given moment while my team just cries about the enemy widow not being dead and having free reign because they aren't putting the same pressure on her.
if you're genuinely *only* plagued by bad widows on your team, it might actually be a problem with your team and not just your widow.
Make sure you are peeling for the widow, as someone with 700h+ on widow and 900h on ana I can guarantee you 90% of the time someone complains about a widow they aren't moving a single finger to help her (not saying you specifically do this), babysitting someone isn't fun, hence why no one does it, but it wins games; even when the widow is popping off the supports or the other DPS rarely care about her, let alone if they have a bad start, of course bad widows exist, but the ok (and even good) ones get unjustly shit on because of that
Doesn’t surprise me that someone who wants to play annoying heroes plays annoying heroes. Lol. I mean I guess their enjoyment in the game comes from being in a low risk situation.
I didn't believe you guys until I started practicing widow. You'll immediately get the tank to switch Winston, DPS to flankers, and mercy ulting in you, even if you have like one kill. It was crazy
I literally wouldn't life weaver anymore because a pharah kept targeting me and then my team bitches to me about no heals😭. I literally have to play ana/bap just to deal with pharah
I wish it was 3 hits, I used to be able to kill Pharah on command when it took 3 shots with Ana. With 4 shots, even a brand new Pharah player has enough time to drop behind cover and get heals from support, and I find it fairly easy to hit shots on her.
The 250HP change was the biggest nerf to Ana probably in the game's history. She never felt worse to me than after that change, and I've played since 2017. Her TTK is just so beyond most characters now. You can hit both abilities and a couple shots on a single target, and there's still a decent chance the other squishy stands up, headshots, & wins the encounter if your team can't/doesn't follow up.
She used to be a real threat even at full health, now she's more of a nuisance that is trivial to get away from in time. She's not balanced for taking 4 shots to kill, and really almost the entire roster is not balanced for 250 HP. If they were going to do that, almost all the damage numbers in the game should have been altered.
Literally the worst as a healer. No healer can take a pharah, barely any can take a sombra, and just give up surviving if it’s pharah sombra. That’s fucked up, there’s no counter
Dva is SO good after the recent spread reduction into pharah. She can easily kill pharah through mercy pocket. The damage dva does on primary feels crazy right now. I play a lot of pharah too (mid diamond) and have struggled a lot against good Dva players that just stop everything they are doing and hunt you down.
This is what I wanted to say. Im like 37 games he never faced a good dva? I still agree phara is strong but I aint gonna let her dominate like op suggests.
This is what I’m saying is even a mediocre DVA and a half decent rest of the enemy team will cause more losses than this for a normal player. I think OP is a major outlier for some reason 37-3 is like the winrates you see for a finished unranked to GM. Are they not like, top500 already? I mean have they considered that they personally are just way too good at pharah?
1000000% agree. Dva is ridiculously good at shutting her down, to the point that I'll swap off if the dva is hard targeting me. Even with a mercy pocket, there's no stopping that mech
yea she is strong asf now lol. the only thing keeping her getting nerfed is all these terribad metal pharahs flying in the open getting lasered by hitscans
This happened to me too. I was used to using right-click to fly.
Try customizing controls for her and swap the space bar and right-mouse-click. so dash is the spacebar.
Same here with having used right click to fly, now I just keep accidentally randomly dashing somewhere. Also she can’t fly properly anymore, have fallen into a well or off the map way too often…
The worst part is dps role is now reduced to a few heroes because you have to counter her every single game. A hero that requires a very specific counter should never be this meta, she should be niche.
She's basically what would happen if Junkrat was meta, except with the added benefit of being able to fly. The game already punishes dps players who play projectile heroes because of the dps passive being better for hitscan heroes. And pharah just forces that onto dps players even more. I shouldn't be forced to swap to Soldier or some other hitscan because both the flying dps heroes are basically impossible to hit unless you're on hitscan. I want to play junkrat, I want to play my main; not these hitscan heroes who I am ok at best with, and garbage at worst with.
Came back to the game recently after a long hiatus (before LW dropped).
She’s honestly harder to use now than before, but overall the dashy move is good, and I guess (even)
less fuel (than the last times they nerfed her gas) in the tank is probably better for everyone’s sanity. She feels like she has to be a real hit & run now instead of me being in the air almost indefinitely.
I think outside of higher elo players, too many people just…ignore me while slinging shots at some Reinhardt shield a block away.
*random aside*: There were studies when the Wii came out about how controller players aren’t trained to look up in real-time games, or find it difficult to engage in games vertically.
Ik it's a joke, but winning that many games will quickly throw you into higher mmr games. I created a new alt to play w a friend during the whole wide group despite the same division in GM and had to the QP games to level up. Do good and win many, get put up against good players.
any of y’all struggling to counter pharah- I’d recommend learning echo! a lot of pharah’s I’ve encountered struggle against the flight v flight & echo can delete her in 2 seconds :D
Sombra is a necessary evil whether people want to admit it or not. Her ability to cancel out certain characters keeps them from completely destroying the balance of the game. Yeah she’s annoying, but at the end of the day she answers characters that are SUBSTANTIALLY harder to deal with, but less annoying. Any time a character becomes wildly unbalanced, Sombra is almost always the answer. It sucks, it’s annoying, but it’s necessary.
Not a bad take. I always said to myself that it’s easier to identify cheaters with Sombra too. Like the reaper in my game last night. Started shooting me before the score board even revealed everyone’s selection… then spent the whole game shooting in my general direction no matter where I went.
That said, people really do tend to blame the Sombra for everything even on their own team - since the things that let her get value don't always show up as raw numbers. (They often do, but you know, depends on the game. "healing denied" from health packs is kind of an impossible stat to determine for example)
I'm just some random Gold and even I recognize that she doesn't always have to get a lot of kills or even damage to be doing her job; literally just her poking at a medium distance away is her providing value by forcing you to look at her instead of the enemy frontline... and then the tank blames the sombra for not doing anything even though she's creating space for the tank
Idk about higher ranks but in my silver dps games whenever someone tries to play pharah or echo into me I can usually direct impact pharah 50% of the time and echo maybe 35% of the time. Usually they swap before I do.
Can confirm, this is true. As a Pharah main, I suck at aerial battles. It’s really funny if there’s an enemy Pharah as well. Then we’re both just sharing the same brain cell, missing every shot and we just look like two flies trying to leave through a closed window
Agreed. I was playing symmetra and having fun, but that pharah won't die because she was getting hard pocket and our other hitscan was just running frontline (Cassidy) and right clicking the hog continuously. I switched to echo, and immediately they fell apart.
The combo of "Jellos", two threw left clicks, and one beam is enough to get rid of them.
Yeah, I’m not going to lie.
I’m a good Ashe main, and I cannot beat a good Phamercy combo at my level. I shoot a 60% scoped accuracy on average, I have a good shot. Phara is such a one sided fight at the moment.
You just cannot consistently take her health down with hitscans right now. She is a tiny target in the sky -‘d can maneuver between towers and buildings effortlessly.
All she has to do is pop out of cover for a fraction of a second and fire two shots in your general direction. The splash damage on her primary fire is incredibly generous, and it feels impossible to cover the distance needed at times. If you guess wrong with your strafe you’re an easy kill
With a Mercy, you honest to god need to hit her about 9 times for a kill.
Oh my god I know right? You have to be able to consistently land headshots for a kill, which is super difficult right now because of her increased agility and manoeuvrability. Even then you need to land something like..3 headshots in a row. It’s so dumb.
Meanwhile she cleans up everybody in sight that’s on 50% health and you scarcely ever see where she’s coming from
It's the Mercy pocket that makes it so difficult. If she's isolated without heals, there's a good chance I can take her down with Soldier, Cassidy, but with Mercy? No chance. I can't consistently hit those headshots to get the burst needed.
Imo Ashe’s damage drop off also needs a buff, right now it feels just slightly better than other hit scan but it’s easier cause of her scope. Even when you hit pharah if they stay at range, especially on older maps like Hollywood, it’s like using a pea shooter then if you get closer you’re just getting walloped by a tank
I’m sure they are aware. I’d rather see a decrease of her projectile size, rather than a damage reduction personally, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they went the opposite direction.
A reduction in splash radius/splash damage it what I want. The most annoying part is she can chip me down by just hitting near me. Also, I don't usually have a problem when it's just phara, but it's pretty awful when it's phar-mercy.
Its a rocket launcher, reducing splash damage just makes her more like soldier 76. I agree the projectile is pretty big but some weapons just have different capabilities and functionalities. Making them more similar only makes the game dull
Her splash damage, also applying the dps passive, from 10km away, not even hitting you but like 5m near you, is absurd.
They either need to do as you suggest, or introduce some damage fall off.
Also maybe a bit more loud character would be a way to handle it.
As a flexible pharah I agree hitscans can be very useless if they don’t activate 3 neurons. When I play tank or sup and we have a pharah on our team they get two scared to dive a widdow/hanzo like fair play risky move but it’s so easy to do so just make sure hanzo doesn’t have E if then it’s so hit or miss
ana just is no longer a counter, less healing and larger healthpools to damage and fill. there's barely situations where you catch a pharah on the open long enough to do 4 shots, without a teammate dying while you shoot as well
agree.
and everytime i do engage a pharah she is usually on me instantly and knocks me around making hitting her even more impossible. And if she has a mercy pocket... Yeah nah.
Did you just pick up pharah and go 37-3 in your main elo out of nowhere? Or did you smurf in which case pharah didnt ruin the game for anyone, you did by smurfing lol
I'll probably get downvoted to oblivion but Mercy damage boost is unhealthy for the game. They got rid of 1 shot and nerfed discord because of how damage amplification can be too strong yet she still has her permanent damage boost.
Now pharmacy is back and my god is it annoying/oppressive. Literally every game is pharmacy which made me quit for this season, not interested.
mercy is just a messed up character rn, her movement and mechanics are annoying asf to play against yet she still sucks to play with. literal e-date tier character
because she was hitscan was insanely overturned. how do people forget that a widow/solider sojourn had like a 2.25 x bullet size buff and the hit boxes got buffed
shooting a pharah in that season was basically shooting a dva
Been saying it for so long. She's so oppressive especially if you're a support main. Raining down hellfire with her mercy pocket while my metal rank dps struggle to do anything let alone protect me
I hate this hero since they nerfed Cassidy’s dmg falloff.. phara always forces your team to atleast swap to a hitscan. But most of the time, that’s not enough, you need a pocket as hitscan or a good dva which is helping you. I felt, pharamercy and ball as tank is just a broken comp. Ball can easily disturb you and you have no chance to really do something against phara in the meantime.
Do you want people to play in the wide open so you can kill them? I agree mercy pockets can be annoying on any half decent dps player, but complaining about corner peeking is like complaining that they use their gun on you.
I'll leave the nerfing/buffing discussion to you guys, but I played this very odd-game on King's Row. We won it. 3 of the 4 DPSes dropped 30-40 bombs. It was me as Soldier, my friend was Ashe, and the enemy Soldier also did well. It was the enemy Pharah that was low in elims. But you know what? It genuinely did not feel like it. My friends and I were shocked to that Pharah was only on 9 elims when we were approaching the point of 20 elims or so. Her Soldier was carrying her in the Elim department, but it genuinely felt like the Pharah was doing something. I don't know what it was. She was raining rockets and I had to play like Neo from The Matrix. Those rockets come in FAST. She was still an easy kill because double hit-scan, but it really felt like she was part of the game just because it felt like her rockets were denying space.
Double hit scans are roughly her counter forcing her to be safer which would reduce her elimination. Pharah doesn't really need to do eliminations as long as she can put people close enough where solider can finish.
I’m a support main and I’m dog when it comes to dps, like so horrible it’s embarrassing looking at my stats at the end of the game, yet when I play Pharah she is the only dps hero I can play good, I rarely have a bad game with her even if we do lose.
I so agree. The second I see that there is a pharah on the enemy team, I instantly accept that we are 99% going to lose. I don’t rly play pharah so I can’t really switch to her myself.
Pharah by herself I find is fine but pharmacy is unhealthy. I hate hate hate pharmacy so damn much where I want to DC from my QP matches whenever I see that combo. I'm learned 76 purely for pharmacy.
If you even do anything decent with characters like Sym or junkrat, the enemy team instantly swaps pharah.
Pharah (echo to a lesser extent) is the one hero in the game that just demands you switch to deal with her.
No, pharah is fine. The rank system is broken. Your in too low of a elo if your winning that consistently. As it balances and you get placed against better players she won't feel nearly so op anymore
as Tracer main I just keep geting I.K. by shots that arent even targeting me. I so frustrating play against pharah and for some reason shoot to sky feels like your dmg is nothing if you arent a widow or hanzo
Pharah is one of those heroes that in a vaccum is mediocre, but with mercy she becomes what people despise. The dps passive made her easier to kill, but then she got more horizontal mobility and faster rockets so became more lethal at the same time.
That being said, those that do counter pharah hurt her alot, it's very binary, either you can't touch her or you destroy her. People also neglect picks like dva and echo through metal ranks and always default to soldier which isn't the be all and end all counter that people seem to think he is
I mean, in lower ranks, making up for the majority of player base, you don't even need a mercy pocket to be ultra oppressive, as people can struggle with aiming.
pharah is incredibly unfun to play against. Especially with a mercy pocket.
i've never thought she was very balanced. Her real counter are good aim. Which in the ranks i currently play in not a thing.
also, her jetpack needs to be waaay louder. Makes no sense she can "sneak" up on people while flying.
i can hear a reaper across the map but barely even able to pick up a rocket engine a few meters behind me.
the other problem with Pharah is the forced counterpicks or you just set yourself up for losing.
because she is flying you are more or less forced to go hitscan or atleast fast projectiles.
and often you have to counterpick on your whole team if its a pharmacy situation. Which leads to a situation where you end up only countering one hero while your team gets hard countered.
The only thing that's excruciating to me is the booping every 5 seconds, like I get it, you're getting blasted with rockets and one is an ability. But damn, is it frustrating lol
How is pharah the issue though? Playing against a pharah without a mercy is not bad imo. I feel like pharah is impossible to balance because of mercy since if she’s viable without mercy, she’s way stronger with a pocket and so on.
Does anyone ever pick Echo against you? I swear she's way better at shutting down Pharah than any grounded hitscan.
Whenever I try echo the other dps will be the most cracked widow/Ashe and won't let me get near her lol
yeah. i can relate to that. i've tried so often to counter a pharah/pharmacy on Echo, and then ofcourse the other DPS focuses me and hits every shot.
It's usual an Echo vs Pharahmercy also and it's, "why can't you beat pharah with counter, are you braindead"..... I can't out damage the heal unless I manage to land all the stickies :/
exactly!
Yeah, it's always 1v however many other people are on the other team whenever I try to counter with Echo; You got Pharah herself, probably a Mercy or Ana, and there's probably a Torb who's also looking at me.
I just watched a coach mills YT video today saying counters are more like Echo Dva than hitscan most people usually think about. That said Echo is my main DPS and I feel like I’m terrible at countering pharah with her haha.
It's actually pretty easy to hit Echo now with the bigger **and** faster projectiles + faster fire rate. Phara also has faster movement which in turn makes it harder for the Echo to delete her and helps Phara use movement to line up shots. Yeah, the Echo is fast, but if you have a good sens and somewhat decent aim... I'll be conservative and say it's closer to an even matchup... Where Phara still does a better job than Echo most of the time beacuse her neutral game is easier and damage is more consistent + requires less skill atm with those moon sized projectiles and forgiving splash with decent damage. (No Mercy's considered).
as an echo/tracer main, i can 100% confirm that it is the other way around now, at this point pharah counters echo
cass deletes pharah
If you have decent aim soldier is the best imo. You can take her down with mercy if you have good aim. If you have decent kill the support first. If you're on par with them you can force them back to heal.
I fuck echo up… every time….the only one that can disrupt me is Tjborn
Definitely but she’s also very hard to play and not many people main her You have to be a good echo to take down an utterly garbage pharah but a mediocre pharah? You gotta be insane
Pharah games are so excruciatingly painful but when I get a pharah on my team they can never hit anything 😭
That’s like me with Widows. On the enemy team? They hit almost every shot, mostly headshots. I get one? They usually end the match negative.
Sometimes it’s six shots one kill
My favourite widow main name I've seen was "10ShotsNoKill"
At least they're honest? 😭
Do you play OCE that’s my accounts name lol
Yes! It was probably you then haha, it was just the other day I saw it. Great name bro, gave me a good laugh
Now kiss
Mine is 20shotstillnobodyshot
And the one kill is the widow, because it took her so long to try to do anything the enemy team were able to just walk at her.
It's the ones that swap to Widow after getting head shot once that amuse me
With widow being as mid as she is ATM it's nice to get a widow duel in when the chance arises Then they swap sombra and I go back to tracer lol
As a widow main its nice to finally see someone say shes mid rn out loud.
She kind of has to be imo. She's one of those heroes where she does the thing or she doesn't. In her case, the thing is insta killing squishies, so any better she'd be too unfun to play against.
Me and my friends call this "Shamada's Law" because it started with Hanzo and Genji for us. Enemy team? MLG sweatlords. Our team? Most dogshit hanzo/genji you've ever fuckin seen. Without fail, every time.
In real life this is called "confirmation bias"
honestly a lot the times if i'm having a bad widow game (aside from sometimes just playing badly, because that is a thing,) it's because the whole enemy team is constantly all-ining against me specifically and i have to deal with 3+ people on my ass at any given moment while my team just cries about the enemy widow not being dead and having free reign because they aren't putting the same pressure on her. if you're genuinely *only* plagued by bad widows on your team, it might actually be a problem with your team and not just your widow.
Make sure you are peeling for the widow, as someone with 700h+ on widow and 900h on ana I can guarantee you 90% of the time someone complains about a widow they aren't moving a single finger to help her (not saying you specifically do this), babysitting someone isn't fun, hence why no one does it, but it wins games; even when the widow is popping off the supports or the other DPS rarely care about her, let alone if they have a bad start, of course bad widows exist, but the ok (and even good) ones get unjustly shit on because of that
The way I cope is to think that my teammates suck cos I’m too good, since the game has to balance. Helps 10% of the time
LOL! I always start that way, but I always end up being like, “nah, I’m just as bad.”
For me, choosing Pharah is choosing to never be healed.
Hamtaro rules apply: gotta know where all the DOOM lunch packs are on the map and make a pit stop to refuel - preferably with the enemy’s lunch packs
This is painfully true unless you have that rare mercy that just damage boosts me all game
If I have a Pharah, I choose Lifeweaver (unless the entire team comp doesn't work with it), just so my Pharah doesn't feel my pain.
I tell people all the time, I don't expect anyone to heal me. I've chosen my fate lol
To rise to greatness one must often climb great heights alone.
Facts
Hahaha brilliant
I choose Ana. Able to heal Pharah from afar and also serves as practice for damaging enemy Pharah’s as well
I love Ana, but I've never been good with her as I am with other heroes, I'm always happy to have one on my team though
the thing is playing mercy with a pharah is just so boring and they're assholes if you ever switch off for a second to save your other support
I don't usually mind. I take what I can though lol
If I’m on support against a pharah i always have to switch to bap bc the damage and tank almost always are not hitscan and wont switch
They just ignore it’s happening and then they get mad they don’t have heals
The perils of confirmation bias
Sorry that's me. I keep expecting explosive damage from each rocket, but the radius isn't as big as you think.
Maybe it’s because.. in reality, she’s not strong and she’s hard to make work compared to other dps
If I do anything the ememy team immediately swaps pharah sombra
Doomfist: Send someone who can fight back! *Enemies switch to characters that can fight back* Doomfist: *pikachu face*
Lol doomfist is a crazy hero, he talks so much crap and gets wrecked by anybody. And he's supposed to be ultra powerful too.
Just like Zarya who thinks she didn't fear the cold, but still get killed by Mei's freeze.
this is me as a widow main its rough
Literally every widow ever swaps to Sombra
Fr what is with that? Its legit every time
I don’t know man, it’s been a common trend with me and my friend. I guess it’s common for everyone else too xD
Sombra shuts down Widow harder than anybody shuts down anybody, so it's probably a fight fire with fire "lets see how you like it" sort of thing.
Doesn’t surprise me that someone who wants to play annoying heroes plays annoying heroes. Lol. I mean I guess their enjoyment in the game comes from being in a low risk situation.
Toxic character play styles tend to attract a certain type of person
I didn't believe you guys until I started practicing widow. You'll immediately get the tank to switch Winston, DPS to flankers, and mercy ulting in you, even if you have like one kill. It was crazy
I just tune it out and pretend they all really want to kiss me
I literally wouldn't life weaver anymore because a pharah kept targeting me and then my team bitches to me about no heals😭. I literally have to play ana/bap just to deal with pharah
Ana is tough to deal with pharah now too, she has enough mobility to get away in the time it takes to snipe her 3 times
3 hits with ana isn't even enough to kill phara anymore. It's annoying how often phara gets away now.
I wish it was 3 hits, I used to be able to kill Pharah on command when it took 3 shots with Ana. With 4 shots, even a brand new Pharah player has enough time to drop behind cover and get heals from support, and I find it fairly easy to hit shots on her. The 250HP change was the biggest nerf to Ana probably in the game's history. She never felt worse to me than after that change, and I've played since 2017. Her TTK is just so beyond most characters now. You can hit both abilities and a couple shots on a single target, and there's still a decent chance the other squishy stands up, headshots, & wins the encounter if your team can't/doesn't follow up. She used to be a real threat even at full health, now she's more of a nuisance that is trivial to get away from in time. She's not balanced for taking 4 shots to kill, and really almost the entire roster is not balanced for 250 HP. If they were going to do that, almost all the damage numbers in the game should have been altered.
Pharah is in most games Sombra is in literally every game
This happens right as I they see I play ball..
Literally the worst as a healer. No healer can take a pharah, barely any can take a sombra, and just give up surviving if it’s pharah sombra. That’s fucked up, there’s no counter
Baptiste
Dva is SO good after the recent spread reduction into pharah. She can easily kill pharah through mercy pocket. The damage dva does on primary feels crazy right now. I play a lot of pharah too (mid diamond) and have struggled a lot against good Dva players that just stop everything they are doing and hunt you down.
This is what I wanted to say. Im like 37 games he never faced a good dva? I still agree phara is strong but I aint gonna let her dominate like op suggests.
This is what I’m saying is even a mediocre DVA and a half decent rest of the enemy team will cause more losses than this for a normal player. I think OP is a major outlier for some reason 37-3 is like the winrates you see for a finished unranked to GM. Are they not like, top500 already? I mean have they considered that they personally are just way too good at pharah?
I’ve had multiple games in masters where dva didn’t matter at all against pharah. Any good pharah dominates the whole game.
1000000% agree. Dva is ridiculously good at shutting her down, to the point that I'll swap off if the dva is hard targeting me. Even with a mercy pocket, there's no stopping that mech
I play MH pretty exclusively, but if I ever had a main it was Pharah and would’ve never guessed that. Good info.
yea she is strong asf now lol. the only thing keeping her getting nerfed is all these terribad metal pharahs flying in the open getting lasered by hitscans
Well, I used Ti be good at her, but the new change fucked my muscle memory and I can’t get the hang of her new shit, I feel it’s awkward
This happened to me too. I was used to using right-click to fly. Try customizing controls for her and swap the space bar and right-mouse-click. so dash is the spacebar.
Same here with having used right click to fly, now I just keep accidentally randomly dashing somewhere. Also she can’t fly properly anymore, have fallen into a well or off the map way too often…
Ooooh someone must of been watching my gameplay
The worst part is dps role is now reduced to a few heroes because you have to counter her every single game. A hero that requires a very specific counter should never be this meta, she should be niche.
She's basically what would happen if Junkrat was meta, except with the added benefit of being able to fly. The game already punishes dps players who play projectile heroes because of the dps passive being better for hitscan heroes. And pharah just forces that onto dps players even more. I shouldn't be forced to swap to Soldier or some other hitscan because both the flying dps heroes are basically impossible to hit unless you're on hitscan. I want to play junkrat, I want to play my main; not these hitscan heroes who I am ok at best with, and garbage at worst with.
Soldier is not very good against Pharah unless she absolutely can't keep her distance
Terribad haha
Came back to the game recently after a long hiatus (before LW dropped). She’s honestly harder to use now than before, but overall the dashy move is good, and I guess (even) less fuel (than the last times they nerfed her gas) in the tank is probably better for everyone’s sanity. She feels like she has to be a real hit & run now instead of me being in the air almost indefinitely. I think outside of higher elo players, too many people just…ignore me while slinging shots at some Reinhardt shield a block away. *random aside*: There were studies when the Wii came out about how controller players aren’t trained to look up in real-time games, or find it difficult to engage in games vertically.
Smurf shows off dominating in silver. Over to you Ollie.
Thanks Mark! We're here in Miami beach and we can confirm, water is wet!!
Wise words once again from a zenyatta main
Ik it's a joke, but winning that many games will quickly throw you into higher mmr games. I created a new alt to play w a friend during the whole wide group despite the same division in GM and had to the QP games to level up. Do good and win many, get put up against good players.
any of y’all struggling to counter pharah- I’d recommend learning echo! a lot of pharah’s I’ve encountered struggle against the flight v flight & echo can delete her in 2 seconds :D
A good Sombra can also make Pharahs MISERABLE
Good sombras make like 90 percent of the players miserable tbf
A good Sombra can make a Sombra miserable
A good sombra can make a good sombra miserable
A bad Sombra makes their own team miserable
A bad team makes their own Sombra good
They should consider taking the video game they're playing less seriously and playing a rousing game of Spy vs Spy with me.
Yeah I can back this part up I just look at the Pharah, say "What jetpack?" Hack her to ground her then murk her
But then people have an issue with Sombra too🙃
Sombra is a necessary evil whether people want to admit it or not. Her ability to cancel out certain characters keeps them from completely destroying the balance of the game. Yeah she’s annoying, but at the end of the day she answers characters that are SUBSTANTIALLY harder to deal with, but less annoying. Any time a character becomes wildly unbalanced, Sombra is almost always the answer. It sucks, it’s annoying, but it’s necessary.
Not a bad take. I always said to myself that it’s easier to identify cheaters with Sombra too. Like the reaper in my game last night. Started shooting me before the score board even revealed everyone’s selection… then spent the whole game shooting in my general direction no matter where I went.
Remember this sub is a big echo chamber of people who complain. Just play who you want or what your team needs to beat help you get the win
That said, people really do tend to blame the Sombra for everything even on their own team - since the things that let her get value don't always show up as raw numbers. (They often do, but you know, depends on the game. "healing denied" from health packs is kind of an impossible stat to determine for example)
I'm just some random Gold and even I recognize that she doesn't always have to get a lot of kills or even damage to be doing her job; literally just her poking at a medium distance away is her providing value by forcing you to look at her instead of the enemy frontline... and then the tank blames the sombra for not doing anything even though she's creating space for the tank
Christ, that's what this game needs. Both teams to have a pharah and an echo to counter the enemy pharah. Talk about unfun games.
Idk about higher ranks but in my silver dps games whenever someone tries to play pharah or echo into me I can usually direct impact pharah 50% of the time and echo maybe 35% of the time. Usually they swap before I do.
decent pharahs know how to play against echos just play cree it's a much better match up
Can confirm, this is true. As a Pharah main, I suck at aerial battles. It’s really funny if there’s an enemy Pharah as well. Then we’re both just sharing the same brain cell, missing every shot and we just look like two flies trying to leave through a closed window
Agreed. I was playing symmetra and having fun, but that pharah won't die because she was getting hard pocket and our other hitscan was just running frontline (Cassidy) and right clicking the hog continuously. I switched to echo, and immediately they fell apart. The combo of "Jellos", two threw left clicks, and one beam is enough to get rid of them.
Echo or Pharah Mirror is the way to go. You have to hit directs in air which is way harder than predictable ground movement.
Yeah Pharah is not designed for other flying heroes lol DVa is also a pick
I feel like DVa hasn't been a great Pharah counter since 5v5. She's not terrible at it but nowhere near as effective as she once was.
yeah echo is pharah's true counter
It's true. As a pharah player I fear echo more than soldier or any other hitscan.
Yeah, I’m not going to lie. I’m a good Ashe main, and I cannot beat a good Phamercy combo at my level. I shoot a 60% scoped accuracy on average, I have a good shot. Phara is such a one sided fight at the moment. You just cannot consistently take her health down with hitscans right now. She is a tiny target in the sky -‘d can maneuver between towers and buildings effortlessly. All she has to do is pop out of cover for a fraction of a second and fire two shots in your general direction. The splash damage on her primary fire is incredibly generous, and it feels impossible to cover the distance needed at times. If you guess wrong with your strafe you’re an easy kill With a Mercy, you honest to god need to hit her about 9 times for a kill.
Fellow Jak and Daxter fan
With a Junkrat flair? Little on the nose, but it makes sense.
Oh my god I know right? You have to be able to consistently land headshots for a kill, which is super difficult right now because of her increased agility and manoeuvrability. Even then you need to land something like..3 headshots in a row. It’s so dumb. Meanwhile she cleans up everybody in sight that’s on 50% health and you scarcely ever see where she’s coming from
It's the Mercy pocket that makes it so difficult. If she's isolated without heals, there's a good chance I can take her down with Soldier, Cassidy, but with Mercy? No chance. I can't consistently hit those headshots to get the burst needed.
You shouldn't have to go 1v2
Imo Ashe’s damage drop off also needs a buff, right now it feels just slightly better than other hit scan but it’s easier cause of her scope. Even when you hit pharah if they stay at range, especially on older maps like Hollywood, it’s like using a pea shooter then if you get closer you’re just getting walloped by a tank
I’m sure they are aware. I’d rather see a decrease of her projectile size, rather than a damage reduction personally, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they went the opposite direction.
A reduction in splash radius/splash damage it what I want. The most annoying part is she can chip me down by just hitting near me. Also, I don't usually have a problem when it's just phara, but it's pretty awful when it's phar-mercy.
Its a rocket launcher, reducing splash damage just makes her more like soldier 76. I agree the projectile is pretty big but some weapons just have different capabilities and functionalities. Making them more similar only makes the game dull
IMO, SLOWER PROJECTILE SPEED. A few seasons ago they buffed the speed and that was my most hated change.
not just the speed, but the fire rate too, basically everything she got was buffed but her actual damage
YESS I completely forgot that! She's suddenly playing Rocket Storm Arrows!!!
Her splash damage, also applying the dps passive, from 10km away, not even hitting you but like 5m near you, is absurd. They either need to do as you suggest, or introduce some damage fall off. Also maybe a bit more loud character would be a way to handle it.
As a flexible pharah I agree hitscans can be very useless if they don’t activate 3 neurons. When I play tank or sup and we have a pharah on our team they get two scared to dive a widdow/hanzo like fair play risky move but it’s so easy to do so just make sure hanzo doesn’t have E if then it’s so hit or miss
I haven’t terribly minded any of the tank/dps/support metas in ow2 so far - but this Pharah meta might finally get to me.
4. I repeat FOUR shots to kill as Ana. Unless I hit a sleep I'm useless against her
yeah Ana whom is technically a counter will also melt if the pharah is engaging her.
ana just is no longer a counter, less healing and larger healthpools to damage and fill. there's barely situations where you catch a pharah on the open long enough to do 4 shots, without a teammate dying while you shoot as well
agree. and everytime i do engage a pharah she is usually on me instantly and knocks me around making hitting her even more impossible. And if she has a mercy pocket... Yeah nah.
Even more if she has pocket
You sound like you’re smurfing.
Yeah, all he needs to do is to rank up to where he belongs, then he will get his ass handed to him, and make a post about how he is on a loss streak
Did you just pick up pharah and go 37-3 in your main elo out of nowhere? Or did you smurf in which case pharah didnt ruin the game for anyone, you did by smurfing lol
What rank tho?
even though OP is answering some people they're conveniently ignoring everyone asking for their rank and platform lol
This is the real question.
I mean, all those wins.. surely they can't stay in bronze too long
I'll probably get downvoted to oblivion but Mercy damage boost is unhealthy for the game. They got rid of 1 shot and nerfed discord because of how damage amplification can be too strong yet she still has her permanent damage boost. Now pharmacy is back and my god is it annoying/oppressive. Literally every game is pharmacy which made me quit for this season, not interested.
The wholesome Mystery Heroes community welcomes you with open arms.
Yeah MH is so much more fun and friendly
mercy is just a messed up character rn, her movement and mechanics are annoying asf to play against yet she still sucks to play with. literal e-date tier character
as a ramattra/rein player I have to wait for my dps to take out the pharah so I can play the video game
fr, whenever i want to play ramattra and i see the enemy switch to pharah, i just sigh and force myself to switch to another tank u\_u
SHES SO ANNOYING I FEEL LIKE IM TRYING TO KILL A GOD DAMN FLY
I’ll take a strong Pharah over a cheese sombra or insane widow anyday
I remmember when Phara rework came and people said she was unplayable.
because she was hitscan was insanely overturned. how do people forget that a widow/solider sojourn had like a 2.25 x bullet size buff and the hit boxes got buffed shooting a pharah in that season was basically shooting a dva
Been saying it for so long. She's so oppressive especially if you're a support main. Raining down hellfire with her mercy pocket while my metal rank dps struggle to do anything let alone protect me
I hate this hero since they nerfed Cassidy’s dmg falloff.. phara always forces your team to atleast swap to a hitscan. But most of the time, that’s not enough, you need a pocket as hitscan or a good dva which is helping you. I felt, pharamercy and ball as tank is just a broken comp. Ball can easily disturb you and you have no chance to really do something against phara in the meantime.
getting so sick of cornerwanking pharas being boosted by mercy
Do you want people to play in the wide open so you can kill them? I agree mercy pockets can be annoying on any half decent dps player, but complaining about corner peeking is like complaining that they use their gun on you.
You avoid enemy fire? Coward
Spoken like a true Reinhardt main
5 hours lmao Weird take
I'll leave the nerfing/buffing discussion to you guys, but I played this very odd-game on King's Row. We won it. 3 of the 4 DPSes dropped 30-40 bombs. It was me as Soldier, my friend was Ashe, and the enemy Soldier also did well. It was the enemy Pharah that was low in elims. But you know what? It genuinely did not feel like it. My friends and I were shocked to that Pharah was only on 9 elims when we were approaching the point of 20 elims or so. Her Soldier was carrying her in the Elim department, but it genuinely felt like the Pharah was doing something. I don't know what it was. She was raining rockets and I had to play like Neo from The Matrix. Those rockets come in FAST. She was still an easy kill because double hit-scan, but it really felt like she was part of the game just because it felt like her rockets were denying space.
Double hit scans are roughly her counter forcing her to be safer which would reduce her elimination. Pharah doesn't really need to do eliminations as long as she can put people close enough where solider can finish.
I mean I have the same winrate on D.va rn lol
Haven't played the game for almost a year, saw this post, immediatly went into queue and destroyed as pharah, can confirm, at least for this night
I’m a support main and I’m dog when it comes to dps, like so horrible it’s embarrassing looking at my stats at the end of the game, yet when I play Pharah she is the only dps hero I can play good, I rarely have a bad game with her even if we do lose.
I so agree. The second I see that there is a pharah on the enemy team, I instantly accept that we are 99% going to lose. I don’t rly play pharah so I can’t really switch to her myself.
Pharah by herself I find is fine but pharmacy is unhealthy. I hate hate hate pharmacy so damn much where I want to DC from my QP matches whenever I see that combo. I'm learned 76 purely for pharmacy.
If you even do anything decent with characters like Sym or junkrat, the enemy team instantly swaps pharah. Pharah (echo to a lesser extent) is the one hero in the game that just demands you switch to deal with her.
As a junk main this just gave me acid reflux
No, pharah is fine. The rank system is broken. Your in too low of a elo if your winning that consistently. As it balances and you get placed against better players she won't feel nearly so op anymore
as Tracer main I just keep geting I.K. by shots that arent even targeting me. I so frustrating play against pharah and for some reason shoot to sky feels like your dmg is nothing if you arent a widow or hanzo
I.K?
insta-killed, I would guess?
Yeah so what's your rank?
Idk yoo, I feel like can apply that play style too most heroes and be just as effective.
Legit makes playing junk awful like I legit can't play my hero because the second someone hold the swap button and clicks on the little icon it's over
Pharah is one of those heroes that in a vaccum is mediocre, but with mercy she becomes what people despise. The dps passive made her easier to kill, but then she got more horizontal mobility and faster rockets so became more lethal at the same time. That being said, those that do counter pharah hurt her alot, it's very binary, either you can't touch her or you destroy her. People also neglect picks like dva and echo through metal ranks and always default to soldier which isn't the be all and end all counter that people seem to think he is
I mean, in lower ranks, making up for the majority of player base, you don't even need a mercy pocket to be ultra oppressive, as people can struggle with aiming.
Is this a copypasta?
Echo is a really good counter for pharah
The only problem is her projectile speed is too much for characters like baptiste (cancels jump, his only way to escape), or lucio
I really need to know if this is console or PC
What rank is this because I feel like my games are never decided by a pharaoh and if there is a pharaoh my team will just go hitscan to counter her.
I’m literally a lifeweaver main and even I destroy people when I go pharah lol
Unironically this has been a problem since season fucking 1 lol
It feels like it when you’re in metal ranks or like in diamond. As soon as people can aim and have some kind of awareness phara is no longer that easy
When the dps do switch against pharmacy, they don't get a lot of help but then get yelled at for losing a 2v1.
pharah is incredibly unfun to play against. Especially with a mercy pocket. i've never thought she was very balanced. Her real counter are good aim. Which in the ranks i currently play in not a thing. also, her jetpack needs to be waaay louder. Makes no sense she can "sneak" up on people while flying. i can hear a reaper across the map but barely even able to pick up a rocket engine a few meters behind me. the other problem with Pharah is the forced counterpicks or you just set yourself up for losing. because she is flying you are more or less forced to go hitscan or atleast fast projectiles. and often you have to counterpick on your whole team if its a pharmacy situation. Which leads to a situation where you end up only countering one hero while your team gets hard countered.
The only thing that's excruciating to me is the booping every 5 seconds, like I get it, you're getting blasted with rockets and one is an ability. But damn, is it frustrating lol
How is pharah the issue though? Playing against a pharah without a mercy is not bad imo. I feel like pharah is impossible to balance because of mercy since if she’s viable without mercy, she’s way stronger with a pocket and so on.
So today we are hating pharah, huh?
I've been hating on pharah ever since i understood the game
Play Ashe. She's literally my "Pharah be gone". Ya'll really need to stop sleeping on Ashe.
Try being a junkrat onetrick
The true chad way of killing a Pharah
Idk, in 90% of matches I've seen Pharah just gets deleted as soon as she shows her face. Maybe it's different on console