New playtesting options likely to be explored in-house.
If you enjoy nothing more than mooching around the battlefield as Roadhog, hooking fools and dropping them with a single blast of your weapon, the good times may possibly be coming to an end soon.
Overwatch’s Geoff Goodman has been on the forums talking about a number of hero options over the last day or so (including a possible Wraith Form cancellation option for Reaper), and he’s also given some thoughts on Roadhog’s killer combo.
Asked whether Roadhog even had to be built around this one-shot approach, Goodman explained that this was not in fact the original design philosophy for the hero.
“There was a time where we tried an experiment with him where we allowed his victims to act first when they were hooked,” he began.
“This meant that hooking anyone with an escape button always got away, unless it was down. Some heroes would be able to use their ‘escape’ options but still end up dying due purely to the position change the hook caused (Mei Cryo-freeze, Reaper Wraithform, etc).”
“Overall this was obviously pretty terrible for Roadhog, but it was an interesting experiment. If we ever did anything like that to remove a ton of power from his hook, we’d have to change other things about him to make sure he was still viable.”
Our most popular Overwatch guides:
So if Roadhog’s fundamental combat move does get changed, it looks as though we’ll have to adapt to a buff granted to the character simultaneously.
Pressed by a commentator to consider simply allowing hooked “victims” to at least fire back during the hooking-in process, Goodman explained that this was something he’d considered in the past – but never actually got around to play-testing.
Turns out that might change soon:
“I had thought about this once before but to be honest we never actually tried play testing that version. It’d be pretty easy to try out though, its probably worth testing and seeing how it feels for both parties. “
Do you think there’s enough skill involved in playing Roadhog to justify his power level? Would you like to see the devs take a different approach to tweaking this hero? Let us know how you’d like the developers to tackle the problem in the comments.
