honestly given the way their design decisions have put them in this inescapable hole of balancing map control vs. teamfight ability, that might be for the best
I go into it a bit earlier in the thread but there really isn’t any way for blizzard to balance this game “correctly” without fundamentally changing the leveling structure, which they already changed from traditional mobas by making it a team-wide measure
it just doesn’t work, really. centering the entire team’s power level around a single EXP pool while SIMULTANEOUSLY centering an individual’s contribution to that power level around traditional moba mechanics removes any ability to find nuance in the way that an individual contributes to the team other than how much damage they did in the teamfight. it doesn’t allow one person to overly exert their individual skill past a certain point by getting fed and it also doesn’t give players the opportunity to really understand what they’re doing wrong outside of the bombast of 5v5 teamfights
(and this is all despite the fact that soak and PvE interactions in general are incredibly important)
and you can really see how this dissonance manifests through blizzard’s design decisions on everything that isn’t strictly hero vs. hero - they’ve removed tower ammo, changed XP from proximity to minion death to these XP globes, tried to reclassify heroes based on their contributions to teamfights (zagara as ranged assassin lol), added catapults to fort kills, etc. etc.
none of those decisions really makes any sense because there’s no framework with which you can judge them on. hero balance changes are much easier to understand because the framework you’re basing those decisions (and evaluations) on is centered around how the heroes interact with each other. but there’s no real central philosophy you can look at for how PvE interactions work and thus it looks arbitrary
which is why I don’t really care about the moba aspects of this game anymore. they were super interesting when I first started playing because they hadn’t really centered their design philosophy around ONLY PvP interactions, and that’s how you got heroes like abathur or sgt. hammer or w/e. but ever since the overwatch heroes entered it’s really evident where their design focus was and that’s probably why the balance seems so out of whack