Blocking Damage
Last night, I found myself with a few minutes and was glancing over my stats and comparing them to the stats of other people I know that have gotten farther in the ranks than I have. (I know that this isn’t something that can be taken at face value but it can still give some important information if proper context is taken into consideration.) Something that I noticed when playing with D. Va is that my damage blocked is pretty low. I hadn’t thought about it before that moment but I never really use her to block damage outside of absorbing ultimates and high damage abilities like Fire Strike and Biotic Orb. I normally don’t even use defense matrix just to make sure that I have it ready at those times or whenever I need to save myself. It just occurred to me a moment ago when I was warming up in quick play that there’s opportunities to keep damage off of teammates that I’ve been outright ignoring.
I can definitely see how I got into the habit; I’m not used to having reliable teammates and I’ve always had to do any significant amount of damage myself. Aside from blocking particularly dangerous abilities and protecting teammates with channeled ultimates like Reaper and Pharah to make sure that they’re doing their damage, I usually only worry about using Defense Matrix to keep myself alive.
Given that my play style is going to have to start changing to be more team oriented, this is definitely something that I’m going to have to look into. With only two days left in the season, though, I don’t have time to take away to practice it. I’ll have to use the down time between seasons for that. I’m going to start with trying to figure out how much damage I should really be blocking over the course of a match. Of the players that I was inspecting, they were almost all primarily active before Defense Matrix was nerfed. It’s entirely possible that it’s no longer feasible to try to hit the numbers that I was seeing.
