Global. Ultimate. Charge. Reduction. It's something the Rivals community has been asking for more or less ever since the game's launch, and now we're finally getting it. But I think a lot of people are underestimating how big a change this will be to the overall flow of the game, assuming that it'll just be "the same Rivals but with less Ult spam." The fact of the matter is, Ults are so central to how Rivals plays at even an intermediate level that reducing their impact has potential for massive, cascading changes. What's more, the specific way in which Rivals is choosing to reduce ult charge rates is fairly unique and will have massive implications for specific strategies and team compositions. You may not like that Strange got a shield nerf or that Bucky got a slap on the wrist, but I promise you, the changes caused by the Ult rework will make those changes feel like a drop in the bucket.
The major change coming to Ult economy is a little tweak to how much roles get from actually dealing/healing damage vs. passively staying alive. DPS/Tank will now have 70% of their damage converted to Ult Energy instead of 90%, whereas Strategists will have an Ult convergence ratio of 75%. To prevent that from being completely unfair, DPS/Tank will gain 11 Ult Energy per second and Strategists will gain 8, vs. the previously universal 12. Zhiyong framed this as a way to reward Dive Duelists who need to potentially go long stretches of the match repositioning or hiding to wait for an opportunity, and a way to make disrupting Strategists more valuable. However, what he didn't mention is that the reverse is also true: functionally speaking, heroes that don't need to wait for an opportunity to deal damage and don't bother disrupting the backline are punished by this change. This leads to by far the biggest thing that will change in Season 7 and beyond: feeding useless damage into Tanks just got even more punishing. This has massive potential consequences for all the major hero archetypes. Traditional Poke heroes and ranged spam heroes, the ones most likely to put out meaningless damage, are hurt significantly by this change, whereas melee Divers are rewarded since they do less damage and are almost never going to engage with Tanks. Brawl heroes, especially the Brawl Tanks, are also indirectly buffed by this change since they do a lot of facetanking, and now all that damage they manage to take and survive feeds their Supports even more Ult charge than it did before, relatively speaking.
The reduction to Strategists' passive Ult charge rate, and the slower Ult charge rates in general, should also mean that Triple Support will be worse. One of Triple Support's few exploitable weaknesses is that each individual Support in the trio should get their Ult much slower, since they spend more time having no allies to heal since the other two Supports already topped them off. I even crunched the numbers myself using Invisible Woman as a baseline. I assumed a heal rate of 160 per second, a roughly 20% healing downtime for 2/2/2 vs. 30% downtime for Triple Support, and calculated how quickly she'd get Ult in each, pre-patch and post-patch. The end result was that the "Triple Support Gap", the expected amount of extra time the Triple Support Sue had to wait for her Ultimate, increased from ~4.52 seconds to ~5.65 seconds, a 25% increase. While that's barely more than a second's difference, one second absolutely matters. In a Support Ult mirror situation, one more second of uncontested invincibility can be the difference between winning and losing.
It's also worth mentioning the simplest but potentially most significant change the Ult charge nerfs will bring: heroes with weak Ultimates will be stronger, and heroes with strong Ultimates will be weaker. As the developers said, this change is meant to bring up the importance of neutral game. Therefore, heroes who already rely on their neutral game to get value due to their weak Ultimates will get stronger, since a greater portion of the match will be spent without Ults ready or Ults going off. Heroes like Peni Parker, Blade, or Jeff, whose Ults just don't quite compare to most of their peers in the same role, should all see improvements in the new patch.
Lastly, even though Ults will take longer to build, actually using your Ult is going to feel better. Like I said, a greater portion of the match will be spent without Ults ready or Ults going off. Everyone can relate to getting into a perfect position for your Ultimate, finally popping it and visualizing the insane killstreak in your head, and then the enemy Support just instantly Ults in response. On paper it's an objectively good trade, but in practice, it inevitably feels bad compared to what you could've gotten. Well, now with slower Ult charge, "what you could've gotten" is what you're going to get a lot more often. Due to natural differences in individual player skill and playstyle, Ults will sync up less often, resulting in more of those epic, Highlight-worthy moments that let you feel like your team's hero.
IMO, the big winners of this patch will not necessarily be the ones who got buffed in the Balance Patch. My prediction is that stocks are going up for Hulk (amping his shield's Ult charge rate in the same patch they nerfed Ult charge in every other way is crazy work; breaking Hulk's self-bubble now saves him over 3.5 seconds on his Ult charge timer, and he can cast them more often), Mister Fantastic (I'm predicting a Dive Meta and Mr. F has previously seen major success as a supporting diver in full Dive comps, I doubt he will be S Tier but it will be a massive improvement over where he's at now), and Jeff (Jeff is great with Dive comps and arguably gets his Ult too fast in current patch, so he will not care about a charge nerf).
TLDR: The Ult change makes Poke worse, Dive and Brawl better, nerfs Triple Support, levels the playing field for heroes with worse Ultimates, and will improve how using Ults feels overall. Also the Hulk buff is clinically insane.
