✅ Can BarrierTanks more popular?

General Discussion
82

Orisa is incredible boring because she’s (or was) a barrier bot. If she doesn’t have 5 people standing behind her she gets run over by any kind of comp.

Her only play making ability is pull and that requires a decent amount of coordination. In lower elos I almost never see anas or widows attempt to combo with orisa and it removes her only skillful play.

She is so team reliant that if you put a gm in plat you probably wouldn’t notice it’s a Smurf.

Rein is threatening if you enter his space, his damage output isn’t dependant on his team (with the exception of bursting down a shield, which isn’t necessary, but it helps) at minimum he needs a healer to somewhat look at him. His ult is designed around out playing people, it feels amazing to land a 6 man shatter. It’s not like orisa where independent of how the other team plays you put it in set locations and again you need 5 people behind you to get value, shatter now needs some team work, but even without a ton of help from your team he still brings value with shatter.

Winston is somewhat team reliant. He still is team dependant, but it’s mostly on his off tank and DPS rather than healers. His plays aren’t as glory filled as other tanks but when someone actual notices, it feels nice.

I remember I was in primal vs a 76 and I was juggling him, did the triple hit combo (which is incredible annoying on 76 because of how his momentum shifts while running midair) and after he died he just said “holy s&#t that juggle was perfect”

Another one was pretty recent actually. Echo sticks me with her bombs, I jump towards her to deal the explosive self damage and she kills herself. Tracer sticks me, I use primal to get a jump reset and jump to where I know the tracer is recalling to. Kill her with her own bomb.

Small victories, but they feel good to pull off.

Hog and ball both are pretty fun because they’re self reliant but they have the same issue. Hog has hard counters in every role that remove his value entirely. Ball is unplayable into sombra.

Dva has solo play potential, especially with the ability to eat ults, she’s just kinda niche right now with how fast she gets bursted.

Zarya needs a ball or a Reinhardt to really be a functional character. She’s one dimensional at least imo, but people enjoy her because she’s basically a dps.

Sigma is this weird amalgamation of tanks. Has damage output so he isn’t a shield bot like orisa. Uses shield to block cool downs like a Winston. Has dm but more luck dependant. Basically a dps character like zarya.

He does everything other tanks do, but suboptimal. I get why people like him. I just don’t.

1 Like
83

In theory yes. In practice? By Blizzard? Probably not.

How can they be made more popular? Mostly… make them less team reliant, or at least make a few who aren’t team reliant.

Perfect example of this was actually pre rework Brigitte. Right before her rework, I actually played her quite a bit and would honestly rather solo tank as that version of her than any of our actual tanks.

Why?

She’s self sufficient.

My healers aren’t healing me? Not great, but I can deal. If I hit someone I can start healing myself. If necessary I can use shield bash to go fetch myself a health pack. If I really need to I can pop Rally and start stacking up extra armor.

No one wants to get this Reaper off my face? I’ll do it myself with whipshot. Or shield bash and whipshot.

People don’t want to stay behind me so I can tank for them? I can chuck them an armor pack and defend them anyway while I get my armored butt over there.

Most of the “real” tanks can’t handle those situations on their own. But those situations happen. and not super infrequently. No one likes to feel helpless, but on a lot of the current tanks… you end up feeling helpless frequently. This is the exact same reason why no one wanted to play Support during Dive meta.

84

Lol, all they gotta do is listen to me more :stuck_out_tongue:

85

Only map that requires shields to deal with snipers is probably havana. Lack of cover + monkey dva ball etc have a hard time diving widow because of how long the sightlines are.

Outside of that, the main reason you take shields is to mitigate ult charge. I ran a test a while back with gm level teams, we removed ultimates and the result was both teams were running double off tank by the end of the scrim on the majority of maps.

1 Like
86

Like buff D.Va’s defense matrix to 4 seconds and buff D.Va’s shooting penalty to 30%, buff zarya’s bubble’s being able to protect 2 people… but now the bubble only blocks 150 damage. Buff winstons, armor and bubble health. Buff Sigma’s shield to 1200, and buff Orisa’s shield to 1100, and buff halt a little bit in range.

Summary:

D.Va - Longer Defense Matrix up-time, faster shooting.

Zarya - Bubble Protects 2 people, less health to bubble, nerfed to 150 from 200.

Winston - More armor for body blocking, and more health on the bubble and it now last until Winston deploys another.

Sigma - Shield buffed to 1200, deployment buffed from 1.0 to 0.5 seconds

Orisa - Shield buffed to 1100, halt pull range buffed

Now your thinking, this could add double shield back… no, now theres a rule where when 1 barrier tank is choosen the other ones are locked.

Hammond and Roadhog moved the DPS.

87

Alright, I wasn’t gonna say anything about the title, but you said it again in the post!

88

lol.

Anyway… in my opinion how do they fix this? Well there’s some things they can do.

First, we need more shield HP on tanks could actually use the stuff. Zarya and Sigma are the only two tanks who have Shield HP and they have no way of getting away from danger ever. They can delay it, but not get away. Meaning… they really can’t make good use of the fact that part of their health pool starts coming back after a bit. Honestly I’ve wanted them to replace 200 of DVa’s normal HP with shield HP for a while.

Second, we need more tanks that have both mobility and a barrier. Yeah, Winston exists, and is great… but… he’s the only one. Also he hasn’t been viable for… how long now? Yeah. Mobility goes a long way towards making people not feel helpless because there’s a better chance of them being able to get out of whatever bad situation they got into.

89

Well, the extra heroes thing isn’t happening until OW2, and this problem needs fixing before that launches. So that’s out.

I’m foreseeing about 7 general solutions for that.

  1. Orisa MainTank, Sigma OffTank
  2. Oriss MainTank, Sigma MainTank, but they are weak at close range
  3. Some rule that makes DoubleBarrier bad
    • I.e. Slower regen/cooldowns on DoubleBarriers
  4. Maximum 1 BarrierTank per team
    • A. With minimum 1 BarrierTank per team
    • B. With minimum 0 BarrierTank per team
  5. Turn all tanks into BruiserTanks
    • Find some way to deal with why not having a barrier is so penalizing.
  6. Turn all tanks into main tanks
    • Kinda like what they did with 1-3-2, but somehow good.
  7. Turn Mei into a Tank
    • Gets a bit of a boost to Tank players who want “almost a DPS”, but can still block ults and bypass chokes
    • Lol, I’ve even entertained the idea of maintank Symmetra
90

Well giving DVa and maybe Hammond as well some shield HP would be possible. One could let Zarya’s bubbles give speed boosts and rebalance her accordingly. People have wanted a “gallop” passive for Orisa for a very long time.

1 I don’t play Sigma, but I have zero confidence in Blizzard’s ability to rework anybody in a healthy way. There have been way too many reworks. So… this could work but it also could explode badly.

2 aren’t they already weak at close range?

3 has issues with “Oh hey, because of something my teammate did, I’m now significantly weaker than I was. How FUN!”

4 seems arbitrary and ham handed, much like 2-2-2 lock. Also I’m not even certain it would fix it. Overwatch was having Tank be the least popular role even before all of the Goats Nerfs started rolling out.

5 would probably alienate all of the current tank mains that really don’t want to be forced to shift off of actually being able to defend their team to being essentially fat dps.

6 probably has the most potential to actually fix this issue but requires a lot of work and would probably butcher some of the tank’s play styles. Especially Road Hog.

7 honestly has similar issues to the first idea that required a rework of Sigma. Though… weirdly enough you could almost give Mei 400 total HP and move her and call it a day… so maybe this would work. Symmetra has also always been more about controlling space which is really a tank thing than what either of her previous roles were supposed to be good at… so… maybe that’d work too. idk. Maybe they’d revert Brigitte’s rework, make Inspire self only and put her in the tank role too.

91

Well, the one that currently has my attention is 4B.

1 maximum BarrierTank, 0 minimum BarrierTank

✅ 1x BarrierTank Role Queue design

And yes, I know the graphics need to make it more obvious it’s not
1 maximum BarrierTank, 1 minimum BarrierTank

92

Huh, just occurred to me, maybe it’s fine if Tanks have more impact than DPS.

Since equalizing for impact was mostly an Open Queue concept.

But for RoleQueue, you almost need to equalize for Fun.
And the more boring the playstyle is, making it more impactful can offset that.

93

In all honesty, tanks currently do have more impact than DPS and always will. Every objective in every match of standard 6v6 Overwatch boils down to “Stand in this particular spot for a certain amount of time and keep the enemy out of said spot.”

DPS can’t do that. They’ve never been able to do that. Tanks can though, so… you pretty much always need at least 1 tank.

94

Right, but I guess the main criticism people had about buffing Tanks was “omg le powercreep, tanks can’t be more impactful”

But even if you doubled the impact of tanks, you still might have more people queuing DPS

95

I just took a long time to read it all, but I finally did it.

I guess barriers are too good because they can potentially be used by 6 players, it’s a TEAM composition buff and, as a team utility, it also requires a team effort of focus fire to take it down (more or less I’d say, depends on the barrier). That’s like the AoE heals problem the game has.

That being said, the sum of these factors:

  1. Average player don’t coordinate that well to always focus fire it.
  2. Rein’s barrier is the only self defense the character has, he’s melee and he doesn’t even apply damage while it‘s up, so it can’t be too low for the character to be viable.
  3. “Long barrier uptime with low mobility” metas make the game a “breaking barrier simulator”, specially if flanking these Deathball playstyles are too hard to get value.

These problems need to be look at, right?
1 Barriers can’t be too strong to the point average player take too long time to deal with them.
2 Rein always get to has the strongest barrier because of his design.
3 We don’t want a “breaking barrier simulator”, flanking needs to be more viable.

So the best option I see to increase tanks’ fun and popularity is to make flanking more viable again + releasing more mobile tanks that can flank, create distractions or disrupt a deathball formation.

Barriers may be necessary to deny kills, but if too strong then we would always be stuck playing deathball comps staring at each other while Brawling or trading Spam damage.
Mobility allows flanking and sniping as an alternative to counter these cluttered comps, but then the game feels like trading kills instead of avoiding kills.

96

With expected zero heroes coming out in roughly the next six months, I don’t see how that’d work.

97

I acknowledge that they won’t release more heroes until OW2 comes out.

But then bring mobile tanks’ viability back up for now, I mean Hammond and Winston that are more Anchor than DVa.

Make 1 barrier tank + 1 mobile tank more viable too.

And 2 slow moving barrier Tanks less viable unfortunately.

98

I guess, but from my perspective, they gotta fix queue times before OW2 launches.

Otherwise when people come back, they will quickly leave.

So we’re kinda stuck finding a solution for the existing heroes.

99

But I also wonder if they release another mobile barrier tank like Winston if there could be a double barrier mobile tank meta.

100

Or better yet, make the main tanks off tanks because main tanks have no place in a fast paced shooter.

101

Blizzard have built their game around big blue rectangles. You’d have to rework the entire game.