That One Attack / Overwatch

• Brigitte's Shield Bash had been a source of misery ever since her introduction. The ability was an almost unblockable stun that lasts for 0.9 seconds, which can mean all the difference with the game's fast pace. What made this really infuriating and borderline impossible to play against is, along with only being able to be blocked by two abilities, the fact that she is protected from the front by her Barrier Shield when the attack is being used, along the ability casting near-instantly with no wind-up. Furthermore, the 50 damage it did, while low on its own, was the initiator of a 155-damage combo that could not be fought against once stunned. Although breaking her Barrier Shield disables it completely, its HP regenerates very quickly and at the time had 600 HP, making any window of opportunity very small. Along with all of that, the ability has a mere 7-second cooldown, and although that is much better than the original 5-second cooldown, it still meant her enemies will be stunned very often during a match. After several nerfs, including the loss of its ability to stun though barriers and the 155-damage combo, it became much more tolerable, though its low risk was still a minor source of ire. Brigitte's 2019 rework reduced the barrier's HP to 200 and the stun duration to 0.75 seconds, making it a strong attack but no longer enough to be so problematic.
• All of Hanzo's abilities can fall under this category:
  • The now-removed Scatter Arrow is not fondly remembered, to say the least. As an arrow that exploded into 6 ricocheting projectiles (with a potential of up to 450 damage, more than enough to kill anyone that's not a tank), it gained noterity for being very unbalanced and unfair to play against, since often times all a Hanzo player had to do to kill someone was to aim at their feet or be in a tight area, or in some cases, have completely dumb luck. It wasn't even seen as fair from a design standpoint due to its inherent randomness, and it was a big reason for his Season 10 rework, where it was mercifully replaced.
  • Storm Arrows, the above ability's replacement, allows Hanzo to shoot 6 arrows that do 70 damage each in rapid succession for up to 5 seconds. Because of its long duration and the fact that the ability doesn't shoot all the arrows at once, missing a shot is rather forgiving. Additionally, because it deals bonus damage on headshots, Hanzo is very strong in close range for the ability's duration and can deal massive damage to tanks and barriers from any range.
  • Sonic Arrow gives Hanzo and his team the ability to see enemy character models through walls in a generous radius for 10 seconds every 20 seconds. Unlike Widowmaker's Infra-Sight, this ability gives no vocal warning, as Hanzo's Sonic Arrow quotes are only heard by him and his teammates. The only way to tell if one of these arrows hit nearby is to observe its trajectory before it falls, as Sonic Arrows leave a different trail than regular arrows.
  • Dragonstrike: A slow, excessively powerful, wide attack that consists of two dragons slowly moving towards your team. Nothing else manages to reach the level of exasperation as listening to a bunch of Hanzos launch them over and over.
• Similarly, all of Ana's abilities can be this:
  • Sleep Dart is one of the best forms of crowd control in the game, putting an enemy to sleep for 5.5 seconds, rendering them unable to do anything but watch and effectively turning a team fight into a 5v6 for that amount of time. If it hits nano-boosted enemies or certain enemies using their ultimate, they can just say goodbye to all that hard-earned ultimate charge, because they likely won't be waking up with any ultimate duration left.
  • Biotic Grenade has earned a bit of ire among fans mostly for being one of the most loaded abilities in the game: with allies, it has great burst healing and grants a buff that raises healing by 50% from any source, and with enemies, it deals damage and blocks all their healing. A quick grenade-two-shots combo on an ally can heal a good chunk of even a tank's HP within a second, and the AoE healing buff was one of the instigators for the dreaded Triple Tank meta. It also makes reaching her with close-range somewhat dangerous, as one slammed-down grenade can trigger all of the effects at once, making it an effective clutch recovery tool. For an ability as loaded as this, a 10-second cooldown is rather short.
  • Nano-Boost resulted in the most broken meta of Overwatch since the early closed Beta. The intended use for it was to turn Weak, but Skilled characters (like Mei or Symmetra) into formidable opponents, but players realized that Nano-Boosted Tank is nigh-unkillable and deals damage equal to an entire team — especially Reinhardt. This created a Meta Game during Season 2 where the only thing that mattered was getting Ana full Ultimate charge, thus necessitating a Triple Tank team that is nigh-unkillable with at least 2 supports backing them up and feeds Ana her Ultimate at ungodly speed. She and her ult were directly and indirectly nerfed several times, including removing its speed boost, but she's still considered an absurdly dominant hero, and her Nano-Boost is nowhere near ignorable.
• Roadhog's Chain Hook. It's a stun move that also brings the victim in the point blank range of Roadhog's powerful shotgun. Even if one survived the shotgun blast, if the Roadhog is tagging along with his teammates they will easily finish the job.
• Genji's Deflect is extremely disliked, not only for being an incredibly useful ability (send anything shot at Genji that isn't a beam back to where he aims), but also because it suffers from a massive case of Hitbox Dissonance, where shooting anywhere near Genji can be deflected back at the shooter.
• Pretty much every Ultimate ability has the potential to become this:
  • Dragonblade: Genji whips out his katana, gains a speed boost, and goes to town, doing massive damage with each swing in a ridiculously wide arc. It's one of the most effective attacks for getting a team wipe, since enemies don't have to be bunched up because of Genji's dash being reset on a kill. It had gotten to the point where many competitive teams in early seasons were basically Genji vs Genji with a bunch of other characters to keep him alive and boost him while he slices the other team up. Some nerfs to Genji's kit, such as lowering the duration from 8 to 6 seconds, eventually knocked it down to a more reasonable level.
  • Rip-Tire. Junkrat launches a controllable exploding tire that guarantees a One-Hit Kill on even tanks that are in its blast radius. It's fast, can climb on walls, and can even recover health from health packs. However, it's possible to shoot it down before it can detonate... provided you can see it coming.
  • Soldier: 76's Tactical Visor and McCree's Deadeye can be summed up as "if you're in their line of sight, you're dead." Though the former's ult is the most dangerous of the two. In his ultimate ability, Soldier: 76 grants very generous aim assist that makes it almost impossible to miss anything in his line of sight. However, it's possible to take cover behind obstacles before he can unleash this attack... provided you can even find cover in a split second.
  • Reaper's Death Blossom and Pharah's Rocket Barrage. If you don't see them coming, they can easily wipe your entire team, or at least leave them low enough on health to make finishing them off trivial.
  • Winston's Primal Rage and Roadhog's Whole Hog. Neither of them do huge amounts of damage, usually, unless they manage to push you into a corner where the knockback is of no concern, in which case your health will get shredded into nonexistance. They can also be used to push you off the map with good positioning. Roadhog's is a lot more forgiving however, since it's still a projectile (and thus can be stopped by Shields, Ice Walls or D.Va's shot-down ability) as well as making the already slow moving Roadhog very difficult to control and a huge open target. While it can do huge amounts of damage, it's also a prime target for things like Ana's Sleep Dart, McCree's Flashbang or, indeed, an enemy Roadhog's hook.
  • Reinhardt's Earthshatter is one of the game's most dangerously effective crowd control abilities, able to near-instantly stun all enemies in a wide AoE for a very significant amount of time. However, unlike Zarya's Graviton Surge whose crowd control is arguably stronger, Earthshatter gets a lot more ire among players for being very buggy and inconsistent. Sometimes it stuns people WAY above its shockwave, sometimes it doesn't match up with the visual indicator, sometimes it goes through shields that usually block it, and sometimes it completely fails to register.
• One of the worst things that can happen to you involving Ultimates is wasting the entire charge, something that D.Va's Defense Matrix or Sigma's Kinetic Grasp can easily do. With one "bleep!", that Dragonstrike or Blizzard you had set up for a potential PotG or victory is gone outright, not even having a chance to do anything.
• Mercy's Resurrect is considered one of the most busted abilities in the game in terms of value, so much so that almost all of Mercy as a whole is balanced around how often she can use it the cost of everything else, including her own survival. It's this ability as to why she fluctuates so hard as a High-Tier Scrappy, as not only is it annoying in-game to deal with, but Meta Game-wise, she can only be a must-pick healer or a fragile liability, and there's no middle ground since the ability to simply press a button to instantly bring your dead allies back into the fight is just that innately powerful. Following a major rework to her kit, including relegating her Resurrect to being a regular ability, being single-target, requiring a channel time, and having a long cooldown, her new ultimate, Valkyrie has partially taken its place. It's a 15-second-long Super Mode that grants her beam extra range and AoE and (formerly) an extra Resurrect charge, and also straight-up flight. While how much supporting power it gives has been debated, it's generally agreed that she gets very annoying while using it, since her flight and Guardian Angel-boosts make her very difficult to focus and shoot down. Even high-division players and professionals have trouble killing her while in this state, and more often than not straight-up ignore her, acknowledging it's almost impossible to kill her unless they have an ultimate or two to spare, at least until her flight speed was reduced.
• Moira's damaging Biotic Orb can be really pesky for a lot of her enemies. While she has to sacrifice her also-useful healing orb, the damage orb does a rather substantial amount of DPS to any enemies within its deceptively large range, and since it moves at the same pace that most heroes normally walk in, it can chunk you down hard if you choose the wrong direction to try avoiding it. Lord help you if you're squishy and stuck in a tight corridor with one.

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