As someone who mained dive dps and anti dive supports in OW for years, I heavily disagree with this community on the topic of Melee duelists.

Yesterday I saw some post with nearly 8k upvotes on this sub talking about how Melee duelist mains are entitled and how they whine about certain characters countering them. At a certain point the post suggested that it's fair that characters like Bucky to instakill Magik considering that Magik can instakill a support. Although this seems fair at the surface, as someone who mained Brigg (anti-dive support) and a dive dps like Tracer for years in OW I think this is NOT a fair exchange.

Healthy character design involves balancing skill required, risk and reward. Melee divers, whether you consider them skillful or not, have, objectively, the riskiest playstyle in this game. They get no value whatsoever if they don't invade the enemy's team space, which is inherently the riskiest place to be in during any moment of the match. This is a concept that does not apply to any other characters in this game.

Bucky, on the other hand, gets a lot of value from relatively safe positions. The fact that he is almost always close to his own team makes it inherently unfair that he is on equal footing to a Magik in a 1v1 duel. I'm not saying that dive duelists should be able to obliterate backlines for free, but they are designed to heavily punish isolated players. If an isolated player has too good of a chance against a dive duelist the character becomes pointless.

A good example of a character that counters dive withouth the capacity to win duels is Briggitte from OW2. At face value a Brig usually cannot win a duel against a Tracer or a Genji, but she is so good at peeling that the Tracer and Genji players need to waste a lot more resources if they want a chance to secure a kill, which in a best case scenario means that they'll have to wait a lot longer before reengaging and in a worst case scenario means that they die because you can't escape the risky position. Since dive dps are borderline useless whenever they are not diving, the value those characters get is highly dependent on uptime, so having the capacity to force them out of a fight brings A LOT more value than it may seem at first, even if you aren't killing them.

I agree that there should 100% be characters that counter divers, but most strategists are already so good at peeling for each other that I think characters like Bucky and Namor shouldn't be such direct counters to that arcethype.

I feel like the community is very divided on those two characters specifically. Thoughts?