Half serious on this one, but it’s an interesting concept.
Since it would probably have the desired result of
Encouraging SingleBarrier
Discouraging DoubleBarrier
DoubleOffTank isn’t a throw comp.
Win win win, right?
EarthShatter, unable to be blocked by barriers. Except Zarya and Winston. Since it goes underneath the barriers.
Zarya, bubble very briefly does the “MultiTarget” Zarya bubble from 1-3-2, for like 0.1sec for the secondary bubble targets.
* Zarya bubble cleanses EarthShatter and Bionade
Roadhog, Take a Breather puts out an AOE cloud that cleanses EarthShatter and BioNade.
Hammond, Barrier does something similar to the Zarya bubble flash when used near teammates.
D.va… I have no idea what, but yeah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The threat of EarthShatter would force the need for an OffTank, and makes DoubleOffTanks pretty legit if they fix the ult charge feeding issue.
I’ve thought of this as well, but my approach was to rebalance Earthshatter around this attribute, rather than your method of rebalancing all the tanks basically to have a counter to Earthshatter. If you made every tank have some decent option to prevent Earthshatter, except Rein himself, I don’t think you’d make for a very fun Earthshattering environment. It’d basically always get prevented or cleansed, and I really don’t see any reason why Earthshatter stuns need to be cleansed, especially with these big AOE effects that would almost certainly recover entire teams from even the biggest shatters, short of shattering literally everyone at once.
I think it’d be wiser to just lower Earthshatter’s stun if balanced around bypassing barriers. The idea behind Winston and Zarya being able to block it still is kinda silly, because I mean, why can’t Rein just put his shield “underground” and block it? And doesn’t Orisa’s barrier slightly go into the ground? Sigma’s can be aimed like that, too. It seems kind of inconsistent to let some barriers block Earthshatter but not others, based entirely on “how underground” the barriers can go. The only one that makes sense is Zarya bubbles since, well, those already protect heroes from most CC, so I’d only imagine it’d still block Earthshatters, at least for the one inside the bubble.
But otherwise, just lower the stun duration. The ultimate now poses a strong threat of being able to surely interrupt people, but there’d be less of a window for Rein’s team to make easy follow-ups. His team would have to already be in position to make the most of this quicker stun. Assuming this now makes the stun too weak, they could also buff its range or speed up its animation to compensate. Pretty much any direction to keep the power out of the stun itself so that its reliability and size are its ultimate features.
But even with that said, I think this sort of dumbs down the ultimate to a state that isn’t very fun or feels very interactive. Maybe instead, Earthshatter should do tons of damage to barriers – even if the barrier prevents the stuns, at least the ultimate could rattle barriers and put teams in a tight spot. This could even prove punishing to double barrier comps, since even if the stun gets blocked, Rein can still force out big shield damage all at once across multiple barriers. Buuut that’s starting to look like raw buffs to Reinhardt at this point, which isn’t really needed either.
This almost makes it to where Reinhardt is the most played which is already is throughout the ranks. I’m just not a fan of it. Winston can’t compete right now and Zarya favors rein.
I’m not gonna lie: I dont think it would make much of a difference being able to cleanse it or not. Roadhog just isn’t worth playing right now, ever. Teams would still run Rein/Zarya because it is way more consistent and more team oriented at the same time. Hog would have to pull some super silly stuff out of his pockets if he wants to be relevant.
yea i dont like the idea either, rein is in a pretty good state atm and this would force every team and the meta to have rein in the lineup. maybe if they gave offtanks some sort of shield-ignoring ability. actually this would be a good idea give every tank that doesnt have a shield the ability to shoot through them or ignore them?
Also an interesting idea for a Mei nerf to her Icewall, if EarthShatter destroyed the wall.
Since I’m sure at some point she’d get a ton of nerfs and buffs to reshape her role.
For instance, another Mei nerf I had in mind was to make it so that Frozen targets had 50% damage resistance, but make the Icicile do more damage to frozen targets.
Of course, these would be countered by buffs, so it’s not all nerfs.
The fact that if the barriers are doubled up, they’re both going to take this theoretical massive damage at once. My theory in general has been that if the game had more barrier-specific damage, then a reliance on barriers would be punished by being more susceptible to this bonus damage, while alternative forms of blocking/tanking would be encouraged since there’d be no/less risk of this bonus damage being relevant. A barrier would still be necessary for most comps, and teams could still run double barrier if they wanted to take that risk, but an enemy team could read the double barrier and swap to heroes that are guaranteed to wreck through barriers with their abilities. This would increase damage against barriers while keeping damage against heroes the same.
I think that’s a little over the top, especially considering three of these heroes would be countering Earthshatter reactively, not proactively, which is a less interesting interaction and a more dissatisfying one for Rein. It’s not very thrilling to see a huge shatter play out, only for one untouched hero to appear and undo it with a single ability. I also can’t help but think this would really bolster Zarya’s position in the meta when she really doesn’t need it, since being able to both proactively block Shatter as well as reactively cleanse it is just too difficult for a Rein to call out. It’d really make the Rein-Zarya combo more vital to have, now that Shatter is generally more consistent at making openings while Zarya is in the back ready to undo it.
I also don’t think it makes much sense for Wrecking Ball in particular, that an ability meant to be used in the middle of enemies would also have this application meant to be used in the middle of allies. Not to mention I think it’s weird that these abilities only cleanse Earthshatter… and Bionade, for some reason. I think it’d be a bit confusing for players that these abilities only cleanse two specific debuffs, but do nothing for other debuffs, even similar stuns. Like, if I use Adaptive Shields to recover my team from an Earthshatter, and then later try to use it to wake up a slept teammate, or quickly recover someone knocked down by a Sigma rock… that wouldn’t very well feel right if I couldn’t help them. It’d feel especially arbitrary that these abilities only cleanse these specific debuffs.
Like, can they not get allies out of Gravitons? Or Fluxes? It just seems a bit mean to Rein if it’s only his ultimate that a whole slew of tank abilities can just undo after the fact.
DoubleBarrier rarely ever deploys two barriers at once.
You’d almost need to make it so that EarthShatter destroys barriers AND puts a Hack status on barriers AND hacked Orisa barrier means airborne barrier-projectiles disappear.
They didn’t wanna shake up Tank meta for whatever reason for OWL. (Which is over in 1 week)
They got some massive tank rework on the scale of 1-3-2 and didn’t feel like investing time into redesigning tanks when it’s gonna get swapped out anyways.
Not always true because teams do occasionally make mistakes, sometimes, and will sometimes misdeploy a barrier, or maybe Rein catches both barriers out and sees a chance to remove them both. This argument doesn’t really work because it implies near-100% perfect usage of barriers, which frankly doesn’t happen. Across most levels of play, especially those getting the most mileage out of double barriers, both barriers are definitely deployed within shattering range of each other.
So I don’t think a bonus Hack on barriers would at all be necessary. If Orisa has an extra barrier pocketed ready to deploy, that’s just part of her barrier’s strength that she can deploy a new one – it’s an inherent strength she’s designed to have after all. The fact that you could force this pocketed barrier out is still a pressure worth considering, it’s not like Orisa will be in a keen position having to immediately redeploy a barrier.
Could be. My personal view is they’re caught up in the influencer/pro driven focus on Supports.
It’s an echo chamber of discussion where everything gets twisted into being presented as a Support issue. If that’s the community they’re in, and it happens here and on Reddit too, then it becomes hard for the developers themselves to extract themselves from that discourse.
Maybe it’s because of Covid-19, I don’t think they’re back in the office yet, but there are a lot of things that are happening that are very regressive in terms of support for the game.
Maybe. Honestly, aside from the weirdness with Moira Fade, I like the Moira changes. And I look forward to whatever buff she gets in the trade.
For instance, if they don’t do the Fade stuff.
What if the Damage Orb applied some sort of Anti-Heal?
Or maybe make it so that Matrix/Grasp can’t absorb Yellow orbs.
Or maybe give her two charges of Fade, that have half the duration.
But still though gameplay balance on tanks has been a barren wasteland since November 2019. So there’s gotta be some weirdness going on about that.
