Bastion has proven to be an incredibly difficult Overwatch hero for developers to balance, but a new rework idea to his Sentry Mode could be just what the Omnic needs to be viable at all ranks.
In the upper tiers of play, Bastion seldomly gets used due to his boom-or-bust nature. The vast majority of his power comes from being in Sentry Mode – a turret form that outputs insane amounts of firepower at the expense of being unable to move.
This trade-off often isn’t worth it, and normally leads to Bastion being forced out of Sentry Mode by an opposition dive or well-executed focus fire. It takes a team with coordination to bring him down, and if they have that, then Bastion’s usefulness is negated.
Meanwhile, in lower ranks, Bastion can be a bit of a nightmare where the coordination and skill isn’t as great. As a result, Bastion’s firepower can easily overwhelm teams and become overpowered in those ELOs.
A new suggestion for Bastion has received a bit of traction on the Competitive Overwatch Subreddit, where user ‘jenksanro’ presented their rework concept.
By turning Bastion’s Sentry Form into a cooldown-based ability that lasts for six seconds, while buffing the Omnic’s Recon Form, he’d get the best of both worlds.
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“Instead of allowing Bastion to transform at will, make his turret form a cooldown in the same vein as Torbjorn’s Overload, so that the Bastion had to choose his moment to go into turret mode and deal maximum damage rather than sitting in it constantly,” the poster proposed.
“I think this change would make Bastion more dynamic and thoughtful to play, but still keep his core fantasy/design, while greatly lowering the frustration of playing against him,” they added.
For the most part, Bastion’s Recon form is rarely if ever used as his hitbox is relatively large and just lacks the firepower needed to compete against Recon.
While jenksanro didn’t go into how they’d buff Recon, one possibility could be to transfer some of his Armorclad passive to Recon to further reduce damage – it currently only applies to Sentry and his Tank Ultimate.
Hopefully, someone at Blizzard sees the post and pitches it to the folks who can actually try out this change so we could see it in our ranked games in the future.
