That’s precisely why some people don’t like playing tank.
People want to be the carry on wins, and minimize their chances of being “caught” as the bad player in a loss.
I think of tanks like defensemen and/or lineman. It’s a thankless job when done well, but it’s really easy to point out bad ones.
I’m fine with a few tanks getting buffs. I’m not okay with turning them into independent juggernauts so that they can feel better to play, because this game is based around teamwork. And making tanks so broken they become the popular role isn’t going to make this game fun to play for supports and dps. Tanks are currently fun and tanks like Orisa and Winston just need some buffs. But not an overhaul of the tanks.
If barrier tanks become too strong, then the gameplay completely degenerates.
The strategic element of barrier play is incredibly sensitive to balance.
If barriers are too spammable, then the strategy degenerates.
If barriers are too budgeted, then you can’t carry with them.
Double barrier creates this extreme design challenge, and is the core reason why its impossible to have meta variety without some sort of periodically changing hero selection limitation system.
as I’m going through the thread, im realizing people don’t like barrier tanks because people prefer that sweet peel rather than a clutch barrier.
perhaps if rein had a self speed-boost to get him out of situations or assault those who are attacking the backlines he’d be more fun.
sigma could get an aoe on the ground, where enemy movement abilities are cancelled, and they are slightly knocked back, while allies can launch themselves into the air to escape a cqc.
orisa has the peel potential with halt, disrupting enemy shots. she needs fortify on resource bar and barrier on a faster cooldown imo.
just some ideas to increase apm, not saying they’re balanced.
Yeah, that’s exactly why I hate playing Rein but like playing Orisa and Sigma.
If I lose on Rein, it feels like my team didn’t capitalize on my barrier. If I lose on Orisa or Sigma (when they’re balanced properly) I could have aimed better, could have used abilities better. It feels like my success or failure is more up to me, whereas Rein just feels like checking the obligatory Rein box and then your team either wins or loses the game.
I know Rein has positioning and fire strike, etc. But they do not give the same feeling of player agency that having to aim a ranged weapon all game does.
Kind of. But another dimension of “carrying” would be when you have suboptimal compositions, or suboptimal teammates behavior.
I.e. If an Ana player isn’t getting Peels, they can go Moira/Mercy, maybe even Lucio/Brig.
If Pharah isn’t dying, they can go Baptiste/Ana and kinda Moira, maybe Zen.
Need more dead enemies? Moira, some clutch Ana abilities, or Zenyatta.
When BarrierTanks get similar problems, with the addition of a lack of heals.
There isn’t much they can switch to, to “carry a heavy team”.
I think the tank problem unfortunately ties in with every other part of the game. A lot of Overwatch is like this, and it’s why a lot of big problems never seem to get fixed. Because they can’t fix them. Some are fundamental to the game design.
Barrier tanks are necessary because Overwatch, with its long TTK and many abilities, is more a spam-based resource attrition game than a high skill aim game. But that level of spam necessitates the barriers or else the game isn’t actually fun to play: you’d just die in choke points over and over again, often to opponents who weren’t even aiming at you. This isn’t theoretical, we’ve all played that game in the pre rolequeue era when you get 4+ DPS in a match and your opponents have a real composition.
Tanks becoming less and less fun now is because they’ve tried to tone down the barrier stuff without toning down the spam. So your barriers disintegrate almost instantly and you rely on your healers to react quickly and efficiently. Managing your barriers relies on face tanking damage and trusting that you’ll immediately get healed up.
Unfortunately they can’t actually calculate a proper tipping point between god-tier spam (look at all of Junk’s dps buffs since the start of the game) and barriers because they don’t know if they’ll have 1 barrier or two. Which goes into the whole role-lock system vs. the open queue, and a whole other set of problems.
I’m foreseeing about 4 general solutions for that.
Yupp. We’re exactly on the same page there.
But where we aren’t on the same page is that, to me, this inability to swap to a carry is exactly why barrier/main and fatdps/off shouldn’t be separated.
Dva and hammond are throw picks
Kinda depends. It’s a viable strategy in Masters/GM/Pro. On specific maps/objectives.
Reddit would fight you on this.
That said, would it be less of a ThrowPick to not have a barriertank, if Ult charge from damage was only given for Kills?
But would that change if BarrierTanks had more “Solo-Carry compensating for weaknesses in your team” potential?
Ones that aren’t Reinhardt do.
But also? I don’t want to throw the rest of the game under the bus so it can kiss main tank butt harder. Main tanks should be played because they’re fun, not because you’re just better than everyone else.
This is really the obvious fix. But it’s what I meant when I said you’re flirting with the 2-2-2 problem. Because now it’s 1-1-2-2. Are you queuing as Main/Off? Or does it lock the other barrier tanks when one person picks one? And if so, it adds another layer of character switch restriction, which is another place the tank role suffers: before role queue, if your team was absolutely getting tooled on by a 1-trick and your DPS wouldn’t switch, you COULD, as the tank, decide to swap DPS and personally deal with the problem. This is another reason the role has become less fun: there are many characters that can just bully you, and you cannot swap to deal with it.
I guess, going back up to the OP and looking at ways to make the tank role fun, this would be a big one: the tank role needs more hard counter picks.
they could just lower the shield hp once two players on a team go shield tank.
The moment Overwatch can give a tangible mental reward for barrier tanking, it will become more popular.
And the moment that barrier tanks can fulfill the expectation that players have when they select “TANK”, it will also become more popular.
I mean ya’ll are joking about how some tanks are just fat DPS, but it hits the nail on the head. These are not really tanks, people who want to play actual tanks won’t feel like they are tanking with them.
So yeah, what do barrier tanks do? primarily, aside from Winston maybe, they protect teammates and hold objectives.
What do you notice of that? Do you get rewarded for this “job” during the game?
Let’s compare: DPS get flashy kill notifications in the form of a skull on their screen and a mention in the kill list. They constantly hear a sound effect when hitting enemies.
For supports, while not as flashy as DPS, do see an immediate impact of their gameplay role because some of them can kill pretty effectively (see: Zenyatta), and if they are healing, they see the health bar of allies go up with a nice sound to it, so that’s rewarding. That’s what makes people play and know they are doing a good job.
Tanks? Especially barrier tanks? They just play around with a barrier and… really it’s not rewarding. Because barriers are kinda weak right now, they melt so fast that your primary job isn’t being fulfilled noticeably. Current state of barriers is that the enemy only really needs 1 person shooting at a barrier to counter it and force a tank to get behind cover. Meanwhile, Barriers are often meant to protect 6 people. It’s literally a situation of 1v6 where 1 person is winning and able to force a main tank out of combat to have them WAIT for their barrier to recharge or come off cooldown. They have to WAIT before they can do their job again. Such fun and engaging gameplay to wait, amirite? Cool game design for sure.
But, you know, it wouldn’t be that bad if the barrier tanks were fun and engaging to play beyond their barriers.
But these barrier tanks are also extremely immobile most of the time, and IF they have a self-protective ability, it lasts a really short time.
All barrier tanks have some form of CC, but even THOSE got nerfed so they become ineffective.
Their primary weapon is often clunky and/or not lethal unless they are literally so close that an enemy fills up the entire screen.
That immobility and lack of lethality USED to be the tradeoff for having a crapton of staying power through barriers. But they got nothing back for their barrier nerfs. If anything they got nerfed further after those barrier nerfs because tanks were apparently not allowed to have fun and make plays.
And if you think that Rein getting 100 health converted to armor and Orisa 50 more armor is a good tradeoff for their lack of barriers and literally everything else in their kit… you’re so wrong. This game has a crapton of high burst damage with single shots or abilities, and armor helps NOTHING against that. Hell, even barriers don’t help against that.
And now with Echo in the game who can melt barriers AND tanks with an overpowered beam, yeah no… it’s not really a surprise that for the past few months you always get a loot box and credits for playing tank, and that people are also complaining they have no barrier tank.
… observations and rants aside, what can be done to improve without making barrier tanks overpowered?
Because sure, tanks were overtuned the moment Brigitte and Sigma became part of the game. GOATS and double-barrier just weren’t the most engaging forms of gameplay either, for anyone. Now sure, those comps no longer happen much, if at all, but it neutered the iconic barrier tanks HARD and a hard role that was unrewarding to play since forever, just became even less rewarding.
1: Limit it to 1 barrier tank per team. Then re-buff the barriers to their old stats and regen rates. You can still have 2 fat DPS tanks, but you can’t have a Sigma, Orisa, and Rein on the same team. If anything this will be future-proofing the tank role and enable the development of more barrier tanks in the future. It has literally no downsides and gives some power back to barrier tanks so they can actually use their barriers.
2: When playing a barrier tank, and protecting teammates, I would like to see some kind of immediate feedback for protecting them. This means getting assists for their kills, it means having a stat tracker for not just damage blocked, but mainly damage blocked for teammates, and give us significant on-fire points if we do that well. I would want to see “Saved!!” in big bold capital letters if we succesfully peel for a teammate who was about to die, in the form of CC-ing/killing their attacker or placing them behind a barrier where they get healed up.
3: Objective time needs way more presence in the game as a primary statistic that is displayed on-screen and not hidden on the tab screen.
Give players a timer that is displayed on their screen if they are increasing this statistic. Make it fancy and empowering, similar to a hitstreak counter in fighting games for example. Make it tied to being on-fire way more. Tanks shouldn’t need to kill, they need to protect and play for objectives, and if that is done, they need to be on-fire way more and not just when they dropped their ult and got a multikill. Because that’s the DPS job.
Of course they still need to get rewarded if they enable a big play and happen to kill stuff, but it should not be their primary means of being effective in the game and the game needs to be really clear about that not being a requirement to play a barrier tank.
i mean the reason of why they are unpopular is because not only half of the tank roster is incredibly weak, but also because they are simply too team reliant, and if they are good on their own, they get nerfed
and because tanks get no visual reward, like this person said above me
Those who play tanks right now are those who are counciously aware of the value they bring and actively enjoy it despite not beeing told so,
A lot of people are tanking right now for their lootbox.
Sad but true.
I think one thing barrier tanks are missing are attractive heroes. I think character appearance does play a huge role in attracting players regardless of their kit. Like if Winston and D.Va’s kits were reversed at design I think D.Va still would have been significantly more popular.
This particular issue can really only be solved through more hero releases. I think the Meka for D.Va was a brilliant decision as it let them place a small character into a role that requires a large hitbox and silhouette.
The best heroes I can thing of to help with this are Mauga and D.Mon. I believe Mauga is planned to be a new hero already.
I really don’t think people care. Right now the overwhelmingly most picked support is an elderly woman.