So Varian is counted as a tank for QM and i really do not like playing him as a tank. However it seems every time i pick him i am thrown into a QM game with no other tank and no healer… This makes playing his DPS builds near impossible in QM.
I understand that they do this because it would be possible for the enemy to not have a tank if you chose taunt.
I admit i don’t play taunt almost ever, is it really a viable solo tank build? Seems to me like he would be more of a bruiser?
I think QM algorithm should be changed so that he is counted as a bruiser in QM. That way he is matched against other bruisers and the balance wouldn’t be as bad if Varian chose taunt since most bruisers are rather tanky anyways.
He should count as tank if you pick him from warrior tab and bruiser if from assassin tab with the other ult(s) locked out. Then again this dev team was never into common sense so doubt it would ever happen.
That was back when Taunt Varian was a legitimately broken hero (also, he was never counted as a bruiser, but rather an assassin, making it far worse). Nowadays he’s an off-tank at best, and I get the impression that Blizzard wants to keep him there to avoid the balance nightmare he’s been.
I didn’t think that bruiser was a category back then, was it? Maybe i’m mistaken but i thought they just counted him as an assassin in the past before they changed him to tank for QM.
Thought it was just tank, specialist, assassin, support with the bruiser only added recently. Again i could be mistaken.
If he is considered an off tank even with taunt then it makes even more sense to label him as a bruiser for QM.
This is actually the reason why they won’t make any more multiclass (Though I don’t understand how they didn’t see this coming) But in their defense. Team comp rules in QM were a lot weaker when Varian came out.
Basically, if the enemy team has any super squishies (Tracer, Falstad) or divers (Butcher, Genji) then taunt is the way to go.
At level one, If you pick "overpower’ your heroic strike gets refreshed every time an enemy hero attacks you, and buffs it by 30%. Taunt forces them to attack you.
If there’s any of your team mates near you when you taunt a Tracer, it’s a guaranteed kill. Taunt is also the only way to easily secure a kill on Heroes like Fenix, Medhiv, Genji, Tassadar etc. who have a get out of jail ability.
It’s also a good tool to peel for allies since the cooldown is really low for a heroic (That you get on Lvl 4) It’s the only early game taunt effect in the game.
He actually was a bruiser, not an assassin. The bruiser rule was created at the same time Varian was reclassified, that’s the reason why he was reclassified in the first place.
There were other heroes classified as a bruiser at that time as well such as Alarak and Xul.
Here’s proof.
Despite what Volun wants to say about me I do have a partially eidetic memory. It’s nice almost never needing to study.
The Varian changes coincided with the bruiser role reclassification.
Fair enough. I was but a noob when Varian was released.
Still, Taunt Varian was incredibly powerful on launch, and remained that way until his minor talent overhaul that removed the extra Parry duration. I don’t think he’d be too troublesome as a Bruiser nowadays. Hell, he was marked as a Bruiser at Blizzcon (and I think he may have been matchmade as one briefly before Blizzard revoked the matchmaking changes).
Well, he was also classified as a tank during that time.
Only twice has Varian been a bruiser in QM. After the bruiser rule was created for a short period of time and after the QM composition update which was recently undone.
This is the 3rd time Varian has been officially classified as a tank in QM.
The fact that Varian is a Multi-Class hero has given the matchmaker fits. In Quick Match he was not counted as a Warrior but instead an Assassin, but that meant he could end up being the only (potential) tank in a 10-person match, giving his team an unfair advantage. When this was changed with the D.Va patch, this also caused the opposite problem, where people would choose his Assassin Heroics and leave their opponents with the only tank. Even worse, there is no statistical way for the matchmaker to place Varian correctly, as (according to the replay-analyzing website hotslogs.com) players split roughly down the middle in terms of choosing his tank ability versus the two DPS Heroics. Either Blizzard must nerf one of his two classes into oblivion or must live with the fact that, if he is properly balanced, he by definition cannot be sorted properly by a matchmaker. (They appear to have decided that the real lesson is to never again release a multi-class Hero; when the classes were reassigned at the end of 2018, he became a Bruiser.)
The bulk of this was written at the time. You can excuse confusing Bruiser and Assassin roles together, but the order of events says he was not a Tank at that point, and was instead switched to main tank as he is currently.
Get someone else to queue with you and you can solve your problems. Also you don’t need to go for tank all the time, even when your team hasn’t another tank. It’s just like that some players will blame it on you when the game is lost. (noobs always need someone else to blame and somehow Varian makes it very easy for them)
Last season i had almost an 80% winrate in QM with Varian over 40 games and i mainly played with the meme-blades/win-blades. (i queued with a low MMR friend who was following me with Morales and got a lot of stimmdrones up in my *** ^^)
