(Blizzard)
UPDATE: Jeff Kaplan responded again today and said what they are aware of when it comes to Reinhardt:
Following up from an earlier post, here is where we are at with reported/known/reproducible Reinhardt bugs and issues.
A few of the addressed issues (Fire Strike hit box, for example) were fixed before 1.13. The rest have either been fixed or iterated on in 1.13. All of these fixes should be available on the PTR by this afternoon.
Addressed Reinhardt Issues
- Fire Strike hit-box was too small
- A host of hammer swing issues affected by high network latency have been addressed
- We’ve also increased Reinhardt’s hammer swing speed by 10% in general in 1.13
- Several animation cancelling bugs (also high network latency related) have been fixed
- Fire Strike and Charge animations now synch correctly regardless of network latency
- Charge reliably pins targets instead of knocking them back (Note: we fixed a number of issues and all of the issues we were reliably able to reproduce. Because charge is a cone-based attack and latency is involved, there might be other issues that surface. Providing us reproducible steps or video clips will help us if additional issues arise)
- Charge reliably pins targets when moving up steep stairs/ramps (see above note)
Remaining issues:
Earthshatter isn’t picking up targets under certain circumstances. We intend to fix this issue in the next patch.
Original Post Below:
You may have noticed Reinhardt hasn’t been working properly as of late when you’ve been playing Overwatch. No, you haven’t just gotten bad overnight (maybe you have), but it turns out that many players are reporting issues with the popular Tank hero.
Battle.net forum user Tedex posted a thread trying to address the problem and six days later, we received confirmation that Blizzard is looking into the issue. Tedix writes that many of Reinhardt’s skills are just not working the way they are supposed to.
To simplify, all of Reinhardt’s abilities incorporate a very significant delay. His charge, firestrike, earthshatter and melee swings have become heavy, making it extremely hard to time attacks. Furthermore, progressively with each patch his kit has become worse. His charge seems to grab random people (or not grab anyone at all), his firestrike hitbox has shrunk and his earthshatters are a coinflip.
Today, in the same post, Jeff Kaplan responded by saying the Overwatch team is looking into the issues. He also encourages players to post in the Bug Report section of the forums to get the problem noticed quicker. If you search “Reinhardt” in the Bug Report forums, you won’t see a whole lot of people reporting issues there. After long radio silence from Blizzard, it’s reassuring to see the issue being acknowledged.
A Reddit thread today by user GameyBox has brought the problems into the forefront yet again with a Play of the Game post that shows the problems that plague the character.
The issues have been following Reinhardt since at least the Horizon Lunar Colony patch and they possibly date as far back as a few months. Back in April, Overwatch Central, a popular Overwatch channel, posted a video saying Reinhardt is broken and showed many of his problems. Earthshatter is one of the issues that stand out the most. If a character’s Ultimate ability doesn’t work as planned, that’s definitely not good for the character’s long term viability.
It’s possible we could receive a fix with the Doomfist patch but we can’t confirm anything for sure. As for right now, Reinhardt’s Ultimate ability is too hit or miss to reliably depend on him in Competitive Play.
A post on Overwatch’s forum has been created encouraging players to post their video evidence of Reinhardt issues. For right now, this seems to be the best way to get Blizzard’s attention if you want to see a hotfix for Reinhardt soon.
