Reaper’s “Buff” On The PTR Has Made Him A Lot Weaker

The most recent Overwatch patch that hit the PTR included a fantastic buff for Reaper that has dialed down is damage by quite a bit. Now, this might seem strange as a buff usually means that the hero will become better and not worse but something has clearly gone wrong.

The buff in question is a consistency buff that was worded as such:

Reaper

Hellfire Shotguns

• Spread randomization reduced by 50%

Although spread randomization was not really clarified by Blizzard the idea behind it is not really too complicated. It basically means that when shooting with the shotguns, more bullets will not hit towards where you’re aiming instead of randomly going into other directions. This sounds like it’s definitely supposed to be a huge buff to the damage that Reaper can output as more bullets are supposed to hit the target which means an increase in DPS, however, his DPS actually seems to be lower now.

Multiple posts appeared quite quickly on the Overwatch forums as well as on Reddit that compared how his damage on live stacks up against his damage on the PTR and its safe to say that he definitely does a lot less damage on the PTR.

Here is Reaper shooting a bot on the live servers posted by u/McManus26.

And here is Reaper shooting a bot on the PTR.

Although it’s not a perfect test, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the Reaper’s damage on the PTR lower than his damage on live. It takes more shots to kill a target than before.

Another Redditor, called u/NSKuber, found another interesting result that explains exactly why. He compared the spread on Reaper’s shotguns with 8 shots on both the PTR and live servers.

This is Reaper’s current spread.

This is Reaper’s spread on the PTR.

The difference is night and day. Reaper’s spread is definitely less random but it’s also a lot worse. His new spread is a lot more like a circle and which means that the outer bullets will always miss the target whereas, with his current spread, bullets that are going in random directions still have a chance to hit the target.

There definitely seems to be something going wrong here. This could be a bug that might be fixed in the future but it could also be that this spread was what Blizzard intended to create but was simply not communicated clearly with the players. Another possibility is that there was a disconnect in the communication between the balance team and the developer team when the balance team wanted to reduce the spread of the shotguns.