Overwatch’s Bastion

If there’s a single character who I’ve seen more complaints about more than anyone else in Overwatch, it’s Bastion. But are these complaints justifiable or is it just whinging?

Bastion is an unusual take on the high damage, low mobility character who is seen most of the time on defense, anywhere that you need a gigantic roadblock to hold the enemy back. He has three main modes of fighting; his recon form allows him to run around like anyone else, his sentry form increases his fire power but turns him literally into an immobile sentry gun, and his ultimate ability turns Bastion into a tank for 8 seconds, with the ability to fire rockets with a 4 meter blast radius. Much like Torbjorn and his sentries, Bastion’s strength lies in protecting your team’s territory and covering objectives.

The obvious thing to do is compare Bastion with a sentry or something, but his play style, apart from the tank ultimate, is actually a lot like playing a Brass Beast Shotgun Heavy. Your recon mode, or your Shotgun Heavy mode, lets you move around, catch people unaware and deal some damage, but most of your time is spent patrolling the objectives you have to defend.

There is a big difference between Heavy and Bastion though. Heavy is very strong in close range, as his minigun shreds you to bits, and loses accuracy and damage at high range. Bastion though is actually very accurate at high range, on top of his high damage while in sentry form. There is damage falloff, but it isn’t as extreme as it is with Heavy. On top of that, Bastion has a submachine gun when in recon mode, again with falloff, but it’s still pretty strong. As with all heroes, Bastion has no reason to worry about ammo, apart from reloading.

His E ability is actually a heal. Bastion’s Self-Repair heals 25% of his health per second and has a rather small cooldown. Of course, like the Sandvich, you have to stand still to heal yourself and you can’t fire or anything, but the ability only has a one second cooldown if you interrupt yourself, so you can heal yourself in tiny little bursts. It’s not effective but during lulls in combat, it’s very useful. Even more so if you’ve managed to get yourself into a good position.

Bastion’s tank form is pretty interesting. You swap hitscan weapons for some pretty damn devastating rockets. At around 200 damage each (assuming you get a direct hit) that can wipe out some of the weaker heroes quite easily. Plus you get 150 armour. Really, it feels like an ultimate you use when things start to fall apart, and you need to be able to get the fuck out of there. The tank’s rockets provide some very nice cover fire, especially with their large, 4m blast radius. You can deal self damage to yourself though, so watch out for that.

Bastion does have a weak spot though. While in his sentry form, he has an area on his back where he takes double damage. This area also counts as a headshot-able area, so those with headshot bonuses can take advantage of that. Of course, a smart Bastion will put himself in a corner, making sure that his weak spot is hard to hit. It does help emphasis Bastion’s main weakness though, which is being flanked.

As to whether Bastion is overpowered or not, I’m not sure. He is definitely on the stronger side of things though and is clearly a bit of a pub stomping hero. He’d probably be easily fixed with some number tweaks, like for example making him far less accurate over long range. Still, it can get tiring seeing so many plays of the game where a stationary Bastion kills a bunch of people, which is what 99% of the Coop VS AI mode consists of.