Have the matchmaker try to find a game where both teams have:
1 BarrierTank + 1 OffTank + -2DPS-2HEAL
If it the matchmaker can’t find enough BarrierTanks, instead both teams have:
2 OffTanks + -2DPS-2HEAL
Give people the option of which composition they would like to play, but make queuing for both compositions be the default.
Remove Hero Pools for Competitive, unless your want to keep it around strictly for DPS bans.
Reclassify OffTanks as the “Brawler Role”. With the goal of having as much excess DPS players in the Brawler Role as possible.
Buff Orisa/Sigma/Winston up to Rein powerlevel.
Sigma:
Experimental Barrier
Barrier health increased to 1500, up from 900
Orisa:
Protective Barrier
Barrier health increased to 900, up from 600
Winston
Jump Pack
Cooldown reduced to 5 seconds, down from 6.
Minimum landing damage increased to 40, up from 1.
The whole problem with queue times is convincing DPS to play Tank. Do that by making offtanks into “Big DPS with great queue times”.
Guaranteeing a game where you can go OffTank and not be automatically throwing, makes it a lot more attractive to DPS players.
OffTanks get to get their preferred hero almost every game, with room to experiment outside of classic barriertank pairings.
BarrierTanks get a full range viable barrier tanks to pick, instead of ONLY Reinhardt, occasional Dive at high ranks, and everything else being an offtank.
People may scoff at the reduced “theoretical choices”.
But if the developers have learned one thing, it’s that if picking a hero makes it a throw pick, then your ability to play that hero is severely limited. Unless you want to kick off a storm of toxicity that will probably lose you the game by itself.
I’ll take realistic variety anyday, over theoretical variety.
You know it, and I know it, that the realistic Tank variety is boring, and the queue times show it.
I don’t think there’s an tank main that wants to have only 4 options. It might be better to instead split DPS back into offense or defense but I don’t think splitting tanks would benefit that much. Issue is that main tanks arent that fun and there’s so few as well
I think Barrier Tanks are already very limited in their realistic options to basically Reinhardt 90% of the time, Winston if it’s Dive. And Sigma+Orisa during Rein ban week.
Realistically, this would INCREASE barrier tank options, by bringing up Sigma and Orisa to where they can be viable SoloBarrierTanks, on par with Reinhardt.
I think if you moved some DPS over to the Bruiser role, it might actually help. If you don’t, it’ll likely only make things worse.
I think fair candidates in the DPS roster (some may require light reworks) are Doomfist, Reaper, Mei, Bastion, and potentially even Torbjorn and Junkrat (they would likely be the ones needing a rework)
Doomfist with a bit of a damage nerf and health buff would work fine.
Reaper would likely require a light rework but I think he could make it there pretty easily. Same for Bastion, TBH. These are all heroes who have been pretty awful for most of their careers and are usually insta-rejected when they’re good enough to compete with traditional options, so moving them over to said role would probably be best for them.
Well, one thing which maybe is kinda buried in all the text.
This queue style has the critical assumption you will get lots of Double OffTank.
However if both teams are forced to have DoubleOffTank, then neither team is getting steamrolled by a good BarrierTank+OffTank team.
I think that’s misguided thinking.
Even if there was equal amount of heroes, you’d still have the problem of too many DPS players.
The “problem” is that playing barrier tank isn’t interesting enough to Damage players.
And it’s really hard to buff up barrier tanks to be interesting without making the whole game be boring with double barrier.
This change allows for Tanks to be giant powerhouses of buffs.
It prevent double barrier.
AND it solves queue times by making OffTanks more similar to DPS, and allowing for a lot of DoubleOffTank games to pull Damage players into the Tank queue.
When you had 1-3-2 it was a pretty easy thing to see that people LIKE to play tank when they don’t have to be bothered with boring tanking.
Brusier makes the problem worse imo. The whole problem right now is that there is a huge divide in numbers for categories. Making the issue even larger by sgerating an already lacking role numbers wise divided is not the answer.
Its not misguided. Especially when we are talking even projected ow2 roster size. Lets be a bit genrous and say they go up to an even 40 heroes for the launch of ow2. Which probably means that at least one more dps hero gets added. You aren’t giving people a chance to like tanks or supports if half the heroes you provide on a 40 hero roster are damage dealing. And we are going to be one or two heroes off of dps being half the roster when we hit the 40 mark.
Giving more tanks and healers gives more chances for a person to get into the role with a character they enjoy. Number balance is more important than people give it credit for.
You can’t just say it’s important without giving a single reason why it’s important.
Even if we had 20 Tank choices, it’s darn certain that people would have a STRONG preference towards killing things, rather than holding up a blue rectangle all game.
Considering they are having issues with 4 heroes a year, and we aren’t even getting that. Unless you’re in the mood to throw a few million towards Blizzard. Yeah, basically impossible.
As a shield tank main, I would like this. Would be easier to balance tanks without having to nerf for double barrier. And Sigma could be buffed to ba a viable solo main tank.
However, Jeff has already said that they do not want to do this as splitting the tank role would increase Q times further for DDs.
They don’t have an issue with it, it’s by design, look at the hero release then look at the skins release and you have a real summary of where the focus is in the studio man.
