Gibraltar

@ZeptikkHueA lot of what you're saying simply isn't true... He's not significantly wider than Pathfinder for instance in the context of peeking corners - in terms of a visual queue if not hitbox he's probably narrower than Wattson because of her stupid shoulder pylons. He has to move slower to ADS? So does everyone?

If I paraphrased what you've said to try and communicate to you how it reads : "He moves the same speed but he's actually slower". You're really trying to stretch the meaning of the word slow here mate.

There are less than 200 people in the world who have 140+ S2 wins. The guy I'm talking about isn't an above average player, he's good and he's won most of his games ranked and unranked with the character you're saying is a joke against people using M&K while he's using a controller. He plays xbox and PC (like the majority of eager, higher end console players). Both he and I have 20 bomb and 4k badges on our mains (His being Gibraltar :P). This isn't a brag, but I'm trying to speak your language to make the point that as far as statistical credentials go I know that we're not speaking from a position of total ignorance when we say that Gibraltar isn't redundant. Gamers, especially PC-exclusive gamers, often like to reduce things like this to binary "trash/OP" categories, and it's a way of looking at things that dominates all discussions on gaming media. It doesn't mean it's correct. Modes of thought that are barren of any nuance rarely are.

If Shroud or someone else of that ilk turned around tomorrow and started playing Gib and getting a bit creative with his tactical, he would become meta in 5 minutes without anything having changed in the game to make it so.

My gib maining buddy is currently in the top tier of players as far as statistics (which I grant you are only a starting point) will go to provide evidence for. If Gibraltar was as bad as you're saying : this would be impossible. He simply would not survive in ranked games and we wouldn't have him playing a deadweight legend on our teams :S

I will concede that if a character isn't being used at the ABSOLUTE top level of e-sports then there are probably disadvantages innate to the character that can't be overcome by any amount of skill. Imbalance. I will qualify that however by saying that these disadvantages are very often so microscopic that to regular players, nomatter how good - they barely have any impact.

For players like you and me - there are so many other things that factor so much more into whether we do well or not than the small disadvantages that someone playing games in competitions for a living would make a lot of noise about. A lot of very good players who are not professional competition players (i.e paid/paying their mortgage by gaming) love to side with the best in the business and affect the same sort of contempt for 'trash tier' legends etc, but in reality even most of the people in AP aren't playing at e-sports level. They're just good players and they'd do fine with Gibraltar if they played to his strengths and tried to mitigate his vulnerabilities. I say this because I play with someone who does it infront of me.

Trying to be pragmatic for a second - GOOD players will go for headshots and land them. Most players might go for headshots and miss a lot of them. Gibraltar's shield extending to his head AND being buffed would just be ridiculously OP. He would undoubtedly see use by the pr0s then, but the cost to the overall game would be more elements of glaring imbalance when the goal should be to eliminate it.

If they implemented your suggestion : for the OVERWHELMING majority of players - Gibraltar would be OP, without the change having increased the skill ceiling of the game. If keeping him how he is means that he's used more at lower level games and less at higher level games, then that in and of itself is a useful thing to have in a game where the difference between bronze and AP league is so vast.

Balancing these games is beyond tricky to start with so I can't understand at all why they've made characters different sizes. It provides absolutely no positive aspect to the game, at all. It's something they've tried to counter-balance (instead of fix) and bungled, and continue to bungle because you can't undo a knot by pulling it tighter.  I wish you and I weren't even in a position where this conversation could happen.  I wish we all had characters that looked like the red Crash Test Dummy model from the training mode 😛