This a sledgehammer suggestion for reducing the effectiveness of burst damage and goes against what armor is intended to provide a defense against. Most burst damage is difficult to land, it would be undervaluing the accuracy of these attacks if any amount of armor meant losing out on 20% of their damage. Playing as a sniper or other burst-focused hero would feel terrible if their difficulty is rewarded with massive damage reduction, all because Rein in that micro-moment had his health healed 1 point back into armor territory.
I think there’s plenty of other, less-sweeping changes they could make to lower the efficiency of burst damage or double barriers. A change like this requires far more adjustments to interactions than you seem to accept. We can disagree I guess but the devs clearly intend for burst damage to not be as deeply affected by armor, again, if this weren’t the case, they would have never pushed out armor in this design.
Have you considered that they don’t want Reaper to walk through Rein’s barrier and left click him for 280 damage with a headshot? Even with your 20% reduction suggestion, that’s Reaper getting over 200 points of damage just for walking up to a slowed target that’s intended to be an anchor for the team, bypassing his defense entirely.
Now you have a 150 hp tracer that can be one shot by Ashe, flash killed by cree, slept by Ana, one shot by bap (that’s harder to land) killable by zen, oneshotable by mei, can be rolled by soldier, etc. now there’s counter play.
To be honest, the only thing ever stopping me from having my way with their supports was armor and Torb turret. Unless that Ashe is good, I can just sort of do whatever I want. With armor out of the way, I think I can reasonably manage to play around the turret.
If the Ashe isn’t good you aren’t at an elo where tracers can consistently oneclip people. It’s not hard to consistently get tracers to hop off as Ashe. Cree even more so.
Well, but yes I can, actually. Rofl. It depends on your definition of consistently. If you mean can you do it when they are not being peeled for… yes. If you mean while they all turn on me… well, no.
With current Armor Pack she does Zen’s job better than Zen. She literally beat him at his own niche, and she gives Armor, and she’s an AoE healer, and she has 250hp, and she has a stun.
Her niche was supposed to be a brawler snowball sort of effect. She wasn’t supposed to replace the Flanker supporter at his only job…
If we want Zen to come back, we have to get Brig out of his niche.
We’re currently at a state of the game where is dominated by ranged burst damage, as has been for the last 2 years.
(Or rather it’s been such a crippling threat since the inception of GOATs, that every meta since has been focused on spamming barriers)
And as somebody who has probably put more thought into dismantling the synergy of DoubleBarrier than most of the Overwatch community combined. Unless you got some strange gimmick, the only way they get out of this dumb DoubleBarrier meta and actually have more than 1 worthwhile SoloAnchorTank besides Rein, is if DoubleBarrier is vulnerable at close range.
Because DoubleBarrier sure as heck isn’t going to be vulnerable at medium/long range.
Double barrier has been an option for quite some time and we’ve had playarounds to it then, with compositions focused on ignoring barriers or making a reliance on barriers costly in exchange for other tank utility. I don’t think we need to uproot foundational mechanics, which very well still have a reason for being, just to weave around one composition, a composition that frankly has every right to at least exist and be effective in its own ways – at least in my controversial opinion, I suppose.
And this is especially so if we’re talking about the ease, specifically, of rebalancing the game to solve this one issue. If we want an easy solution to barriers and armor, there’s always the normal approach of just weakening their value and putting that power in other parts of kits. That’s way easier than having to retune hundreds of interactions around big rule changes.
It should exist. But it shouldn’t be dominant. And if it’s gonna be almost invincible at medium/long range, then it should have a range that it’s not good at.
I.e. Close range
Also just because devs haven’t done anything substantial to barrier meta for 6 months, doesn’t mean the status quo is ideal.
Also, honestly, if people aren’t thinking Tanks need some foundational changes, then they aren’t taking queue times seriously.