The actual solution: The majority of the damage players that refuse to play the rest of the game actually start doing so or leave. Either way the rest of us get shorter queue times.
As much as I would love tank buffs, I feel that the community will not feel the same way. They feel like tanks should either be damage dealers, or barrier bots. The moment tanks can do both, they are overpowered. I know you felt the same way for some time.
Look at the current state of the game. Reinhardt is dominating the entire competitive scene. He has extreme pickrate, good winrate, and is a necessity in the OWL. Yet, people will say this is fine, and that it is healthy for the game. They say this because Rein is either all shield, or all damage. He cannot do both. When Sigma and Orisa had these stats, the community wanted them nerfed into obscurity.
Lets look back at Sigma for example. He was buffed in the PTR before his launch, and he came in with a bang. He could deal damage, he could protect, he had impact. I enjoyed playing Sigma. The problem was that he paired well with Orisa, a hero that could also protect and deal damage. She didn’t pair well with Rein, so she was able to slide under the radar. 2-2-2 also came into play, so players could not just pick more DPS to deal with the shields. Enter the double shield meta. People hated this meta, including you. 2-2-2 made the game rigid, while the 2 tanks used could both shield, and deal damage. They synergized very well.
Complaint after complaint, nerf after nerf. Now these heroes are severely weaker compared to their previous state. I quit playing Sigma. He lost all of his impact, became super clunky, and feels detrimental to my team. I don’t want to play the other tanks as they do not interest me. Thus, I’m not contributing to the tank queue at all now. I may be a drop in the bucket in terms of affecting the DPS queue time, but I know I’m not alone. Enough drops in a bucket will eventually fill it.
You also have to nerf their ult charge with all those damage increases. It’s already possible for Rei hardy to gain full charge within 6 seconds of using his ult. Increasing his damage only makes his ult uptime better making him that much stronger.
Simply increasing damage on tanks isn’t a solution - it only leads to damage creep. This has an inverse affect on supports who then bronze more difficult to play.
Tanks need to be interesting in how they tank for their team, not just high dps meat shields.
Tank buffs are fine, but they need to be to the places that are better for the overall game health.
Tanks don’t need damage buffs (god knows damage in this game is high enough), they need durability or team protection buffs.
Rein’s as must-pickable as he is because he pairs a good barrier (a necessity with damage as high as it is) with the ability to hold a solid front line. No other tank can do that nowadays: they’re all either too squishy to be the front line (Sigma, Winston), too bad at protecting their team (Orisa, Zarya, D.va, Hog) or just nerfed to uselessness for no reason whatsoever (Ball).
The tanks who are too fragile to do the main tank job they’re supposed to do need to be made more durable in order to fulfil that role. Bring Sigma to 500HP and make it so his barrier doesn’t drop when he’s hacked (instead it can just stay there like Orisa’s, unable to be moved or taken down). Allow Winston to activate Primal Rage during CC and cleanse CC on him when he uses it (keeping him vulnerable to CC during the ability). Maybe give him 600HP base or more armour.
The offtanks are generally okay, Hog will only be good if Orisa or Sigma become viable MT options, he probably doesn’t need any changes. Zarya and D.va are fine. Orisa needs some sort of buff to her barrier to make her better at protecting her team. She’s extremely durable but ultimately easy to ignore compared to Rein or even Sigma: one thing a main tank cannot be allowed to be.
Considering the game is kinda dead without fixing the damage queue times, I don’t see how the alternative is much better.
Sure it would change the stylistic quality of the game to be more “Kill Stuff oriented”, but that’s not inherently a bad thing in a FPS game.
To many people, having the game be more “Kill stuff oriented” would be highly preferable.
And the way you make them more interesting, to damage players, is to make them do damage.
Yeah, but a lot of that was based on the idea that you could stack 3 to 4 tanks if they were really powerful.
Also I figure if that means you get more double-barrier tank more frequently. So be it. A lot of people would find that version of doublebarrier highly preferable over doubleofftank.
That’s a really horrible way to convince DPS players to switch to Tank.
What does this accomplish exactly? More damage won’t change Reinhardt’s boring playstyle and make him more of a desirable hero to play,for example. You’d need to fully rework him.
More damage won’t make people dislike Orisa or Sigma less. Winston will hard counter Symmetra even more now and she’ll have much less time to react.
And these changes do nothing to address the “Off-tanks are just DPS with more health and utility” situation. Except now main tanks are included in it as well. So congrats on making the DPS role even more pointless.
Why don’t we just get rid of all role labels altogether at this point?
Making tanks op is not going to fix anything, the game has fundamental problem, and thats DPS players refusal to play anything other then DPS.
Until that is fixed, no amount of tweaking/buffing/nerfing is going to do anything.
Theres only one solution, force all players to pick minimum 2 roles to be able to queue up. Thats it, nothing else.
And for the argument that you will have dps players going full dps healers etc… we already have that anyway
I mean other games have that,but it’s a “soft role queue” in those cases so you’re not forced to play whichever roles you chose.
Overwatch’s RQ has an issue where if you queue up for two or more roles at a time,you’ll be given whichever role has the shortest queue time.
If you Q for tank and support,you’ll get tank. If you Q for tank and damage,you’ll get tank. If you do it for all 3 roles,you’ll be given tank automatically.
Even if you convinced them to suffer through playing things they didn’t want to play, you would have to guarantee if they chose two roles that they would get a 50/50 split on what they play.
That said, it sounds more and more like a chore than a game at that point, especially when the selling point for role queue was that you could play exactly what you wanted to play, and not be forced into playing something else.
I don’t believe the issue is as simple as, theres a lot of dps players because dps like to shoot and do damage.
Mercy used to be the most mained and played hero, by far. Because it felt like you’re doing something, you had a huge impact in the game. And that’s the issue. Tank players dont feel like they lead their team to victory. It’s hard to make space when you arent actually that scary. When I play tank, I don’t feel like a tank. I feel like a human pinball machine. I get hacked and then Doom slams me into a wall, Mei freezes me, Reaper pushes my team back, Parah fires rockets down and all I can do is stare up at her as Rine.
It’s not rewarding to play tank. You don’t feel an impact in the game. And so I think a better solution is not more damage. But some type of abilitie that causes a bit if fear in players. Like Roadhogs hook. It’s a great tank ability. Players stay back and try not to poke when they know you have your hook ready. You feel powerful in that moment.
This just creates more damage creep which negatively affects supports as more damage also means faster TTK.
The result of that will be the demand for more healing creep. It becomes a negative result feedback loop.
Look at what they tried with Baptiste - they tried to entice dps players to play a support role with a pretty decent damage - in the tank range which is high for supports, with lots of utility, and high burst healing which also requires aim. It really didn’t work.
Making tanks do more damage really won’t have the effect of pulling dps players to tanking.
Because I’m willing to bet DPS players don’t want to have to learn tanking fundamentals. A tank that solely focuses on damage and not learning the fundamentals of tanking isn’t much of a tank.
Look at Roadhog. He only works in the off-tank role when Orisa was really good because their synergies. When Sigma cameX Roadhog immediately was dropped because he offered more ways to help tank and did decent enough damage.
If you increase Reinhardt’s damage to entice dps players, and they just want to score elims like a dps because that’s their favored play style, and they don’t learn tanking fundamentals, then they will end up being a bad tank. They will get lots of negativity from players, and they will go back to playing dps.
It’s just not a viable solution to dps queue times.
I would have thought that smartly splitting the Damage category back up - not just damage and defense like before - but I a better way that splits of types of dps kits, that would reduce queue times. Apparently, according to Jeff, more. I let’s means longer queues.
I’m fine with the “consequences” of not lowering their defences.
I.e. Less offtank usage, and salty DPS that get wrecked by BarrierTanks and probably queue up as BarrierTank next round.
Means:
Less double offtank
Less DPS players in queue
More barrier tank players in queue
Better queue times
It’s not like this would be anywhere near enough to make people play Tank more than they play DPS.
Like that would be any worse than having two offtanks doing the same?
Some barrier, and good queue times
is better than
No barrier, and bad queue times.
And Tanks who go full aggro won’t climb much anyways.