[✅] Basic Rehaul of the Tank Role

General Discussion
1

So here’s what I got today. The usual attempts at dismantling DoubleBarrier while encouraging SingleBarrier.

As well as some OffTank changes.

Armor

  • 20% damage resistance (I.e. Tracer/Reaper damage on armor goes up 30%, but a lot stronger vs snipers)

Reinhardt

  • Health = Changed to 300armor,100hp.
  • Firestrike = 20% faster projectile speed
  • Barrier = 2000hp

Orisa

  • Fortify reduced to 20% damage resistance
  • Halt! = No Slow effect (or very brief duration)
  • Primary Fire = 20% faster projectile speed
  • Barrier = 900hp on a 8sec cooldown
  • Gallop Passive = Walking forward for 3sec while not using abilities/attacks/ult, grants 20% speedboost, until cancelled by using an ability/attack/ult.

Sigma

  • Kinetic Grasp = Does not grant TempHP, repairs his Barrier up to 500 barrierHP., and can overheal the barrier to 1400hp.
  • Accretion = No Stun, replaced with a Boop
  • No self damage from attacks
  • Primary Fire = 20% faster projectile speed
  • Barrier = 1100hp

Now let’s throw in some Tank changes for Tanks that aren’t AnchorTanks.

D.va

  • Health = 300armor, 300hp

Winston

  • Health = 300armor, 200hp

Hammond

  • Health = 300armor, 300hp

Zarya

  • Projected Barrier = Cleanses against Sleep and EarthShatter, and preemptively blocks Hack status from EMP.

Roadhog

  • Take-a-Breather = Emits an AOE cloud that provides 20% damage resistance to teammates, and cleanses antihealing.
3 Likes
2

Rein changes are bad,
Orisa’s are good,
Sigma’s are unneeded.

D.va, Winston changes are fine.
Hammond changes are very bad.
Zarya changes are unneeded.
Hog changes are good but shouldn’t cleanse anti.

9 Likes
3

Rein is just as much a part of DoubleBarrier as Orisa and Sigma. This change makes it so he’s roughly the same against ranged damage, and firestrike is better at range. But more vulnerable against Reaper/Tracer.

I figure having some variety in SingleBarrier Tanks is good.

Since +90% of the players in Comp play SingleBarrier or DoubleOffTank.

Also makes the heroes a bit more desirable to DPS players. Which is good for queue times.

The goal here is to provide a battering ram against AnchorTanks to make it “problematic” to go DoubleBarrier.
They would survive a close range brawl a lot better than AnchorTanks.

These changes are a bit more complex. Largely aimed at removing some of the weaknesses of running DoubleOffTank.

As well as providing some tantalizing utility you’d have to give up by not having an offtank.

1 Like
4

I’d say that it would be bad for queue times, seeing as “dps players” in this context don’t actually want to tank and just want to shoot things. They’re only playing tank in an “ugh, FINE” context, and pick the most dps-like tank as a consolation.

So now you have a supposed “tank” on the team that’s not tanking at all. They’re actually a dps player, playing a psuedo-dps… when what the team really needs is a tank.

At the same time, making tanks more like “dps-like” makes them less like actual tanks, and therefore less appealing to actual tank players.

Which means even more of the (very few) tank mains that we have left get fed up, and quit.

The end result: you have even worse tank queue times than before, with only a small consolation prize of dps players being a bit more willing to “bite the bullet” and play a role they don’t want to play in the first place.

6 Likes
5

I fully and completely reject the idea that this game should be designed like an RPG, instead of an FPS.

The entire game and the entire franchise is dead if Tanks aren’t more popular. And we aren’t going to be able to magic players out of thin air. They have to primarily come from the DPS player pool.

6

You’re too late, chief.

Most of Overwatch’s heroes weren’t designed like FPS characters to begin with. That’s what got it so much widespread popularity in the first place - no matter which video game genre you enjoy, there (used to be) an Overwatch hero that’s practically a love letter to that genre and you’d have a blast with them.

I’m really unhappy that blizz seems to have thrown that away in favor of cramming as many heroes as they can get away with into “more fps-like” mold. Sure, there’s a place for fps heroes in a first person hero shooter, but there should also (still) be a place for all the other kinds.

Converting the rpg-like heroes into “tradional fps” heroes flips the bird to a large part of the playerbase and tells them “you’re not welcome here anymore. This game is now for hardcore FPS-players only, byyyyeeeee!”

6 Likes
7

Don’t care.

Some people won’t like the change, but the vast majority will.

Because shooting stuff is fundamentally more engaging and fun, than standing in useful locations and not dying.

8

Are you sure about that?

Sure, a lot of people have fun with the power fantasy of mowing enemies down as an unstoppable force. But just because that’s some people’s idea of fun, doesn’t mean that it’s everyone’s idea.

For some people - for tank mains - their idea of fun is feeling tanky.

It’s the fantasty of being their team’s protective knight in shining armor, it’s being the unmmovable object to the enemy’s unstoppable force. It’s the power fantasy of wading into the fray, and taking hits but not dying despite the enemy’s best efforts to take you down.

I even could try to hyperbole this with “being a juggernaut is fundentally more engaging and fun than pointing a cursor at the enemy and clicking”.

Different strokes for different blokes, dude.

6 Likes
9

Absolutely. I’ll take losing 1% of the playerbase any day, over the entire game dying because of queue times.

Besides which, most of them will come back when OW2 is here, and if queue times suck when OW2 launches, the differences in players lost now vs then would be traumatic.

10

Just as bad as the first twenty times I read it.

20% damage reduction is nothing at all in this game. May as well not even be an ability.

1 Like
11

Que times are so high because what used to be at least 20% of the playerbase has dwindled down to 1%.

We need more tank players. The way to do that is to make Overwatch’s tanks more appealing to tank players. We need to entice the old tank mains to come back to the role, and attract new tank players to the game.

(Technically, the goal is make tanks appealing again. Overwatch’s tanks were drowning in player appeal in their first year, until they started getting shifted away from tank playstyles).

1 Like
12

You can’t magic tank players into existence from nowhere.

They have to come from somewhere.

And it’s kinda obvious they should come from the largest portion of the player population.

13

We’re not talking about making hommunculi in a lab, dude. We’re talking about demographic appeal.

Right now, Overwatch has low appeal for gamers who like to play tanks.

14

Yeah, and it’s bizarre to think it’s easier to recruit inactive players to play Tank, instead appealing to active DPS players to play Tank.

Especially since I don’t see how “Be a better slab of HP with a blue rectangle”, would really pull in a ton of inactive players.
It’s not a great sales pitch.

15

There’s actually a lot of ex-tank mains in Overwatch that are currently playing dps right now.

They stopped having fun with the role they liked best, so they left it for the role that’s not quite as appealing (for them)… but at this point, it’s the only role left that hasn’t been nerfed into the ground. And even then, they’re still tank players at heart.

Those are the ones you want to convince to play tank.

Don’t try to convince the “I’ve mained snipers since the game came out” dps players.

Try to appeal to the “I used to be a tank main, but then the fire nation attacked my main got un-fun changes that made them much weaker at tanking and turned them into a psuedo-dps” players.

Plus, making tanks feel tanky again and restoring the “tank playstyles” to the role will make the game naturally better at picking up new players who want to play tank.

If there’s a game where only one role is perceived as “fun” and the rest are just watered-down versions of it, then you’re not going to have a lot of success finding new players eager to try out the other roles.

1 Like
16

So I’m not really understanding why making Tanks that behave a bit more like DPS would be unappealing to those types of players.

17

Because of the trade-offs that are nessecary to make tanks/healers behave more like DPS.

You can’t have tons of lethality and have massive survivability at the same time, it’s too overloaded.

You can’t deal tons of damage and have impressive healing at the same time, it’s too overloaded.

The defensive traits that tank and healer mains enjoy - high personal survivability (for tanks) and the ability to gift teammates with higher survivability (for supports) - are the first ones to go when making them more dps-like.

It also shifts them away from having the slower, strategy-oriented defensive playstyles that many tank and healer mains absolutely adore.

Most tank and healer mains are “defensive-oriented” players. They get more enjoyment out of protecting their teammates than going after the enemy. They enjoy taking a measured, methodical approach to every situation and carefully cataloging the goings-on around them. They enjoy hashing out and executing contingency plans and long-term strategies.

Being “more dps-like” means having faster, more aggressive playstyles that don’t leave much (if any) time for that kind of gameplay.

It also means putting a lot more emphasis on mechanical aiming skills - which is something that many tank and healer mains don’t enjoy as much, or are even physically unable to have as much success with.

Not all of us are able-bodied 17 year olds with lightning fast fingers. Reaction times naturally slow down as you age, and you don’t have to be legally handicapped to be affected with things that play havoc on precision aiming - shaky hands, arthritis, and vision problems won’t handicap your effectiveness when playing strategy-oriented heroes that don’t require much aim, but they will certainly hold you back if you’re playing an aim-reliant hero that demands a physical level of hand-fitness that you haven’t possessed for many years.

A good example of this principle is Dva: at the beginning of the game, she was a “high tankiness, low lethality” character. A lot of players loved her for her tankiness and defensive-oriented playstyle.

As she got more and more dps traits, she became less and less tanky, and her playstyle shifted more and more away from the defensive “bodyguard experience” that many players originally mained her for.

Sure, nowadays Dva can be plenty lethal… but at the cost of her mech feeling like it’s made out of wet cardboard, and the cost of losing the option to prioritize defending teammates over anything else.

4 Likes
18

i feel like this is a nerf more than anything…? wouldnt this just make hammond weaker in close range as well…when he is suposed to be in there?

what if it did x% CC resistance including a reduction to the duration of effects like anti

19

It’s more of a typo, because I didn’t know how much his current health is.

Kicking it up to 300/300.

1 Like
20

Sigma is the main problem in double barrier and you only made him stronger. Whether it’s Rein or Orisa double barrier, Sigma is the constant. He either needs his barrier removed and replaced with something else or it needs to be far less freely repositionable, with additional changes to make him a main tank.