[❗️] The truth about Overwatch

General Discussion
1

You can jump to the conclusion, but it’s best to read it all.

Let me try to be simple and not write a wall of text:

The game is an attrition between mechanisms to secure kills and mechanisms to deny kills.

Securing kills is more rewarding, it raises excitement to play and watch (on OWL) specially when it requires skill expression and stuff, that’s clearly the highlight focus of OWL.

OWL excitement recently became one of the biggest weights of influence on Devs’ balancing decisions.

[I dare to say that Echo’s design was highly weighted thinking about watching her on OWL as well]

The majority of the playerbase wanna watch or play characters that use skills to outplay the denying-kills-mechanisms to obtain the reward = kills, worth of positive feedback. They want this to be achievable.

They give importance to that and they dislike when characters that have high reward easy-denying-mechanisms beat the other harder heroes.

That’s why characters such as Moira, old Brig and Release Sigma were so disliked and brought a negative impact to the game’s largest portion of the playerbase.

We can easily notice privileged heroes on Devs’ minds from the DPS roster:

  • Widow, Ashe, Mccree, Tracer, Genji, Hanzo.
  • Soldier, Pharah, Echo, Doomfist, Torb, Sombra, Reaper, Junkrat.
  • Less privileged: Mei, Symmetra, Bastion.

Conclusion:

And now what I wanna say with this is that

First: Some of their balance decisions force the game into mirror matching instead of a rock-paper-scissors counterplay possible strategy, which in turn creates a meta fatigue depending on how much strong those changes are to affect competitive and even casual play.

And secondly: Tanks and Supports suffer the most from this because they have abilities that play more into the denying kills side for the team and those abilities are generally low effort and/or low risk.

Any buffs to the denying side lowers the effort or the risk or raise the rewards, which in turn still does not build up excitement for the majority to watch and denies more the effort of those “harder” heroes, so not worth it.

The only way I can see them not upsetting the majority of their playerbase is making Tanks and Supports get more abilities with mid-high effort and/or risk, designs like Zen, Lucio, Winston and maybe Ana, while designs like Sigma and Baptiste are tricky because of multitasking, the powerful denying side of their kits still lessens the effort or risk they might have even though they seem more similar to mechanically demanding heroes.

2 Likes
2

I wouldn’t really say the devs themselves are privileged to Genji considering he never got buffs until 3 and a half, 4 years after the game came out. I feel like this more of an attempt to shake up the meta just like they did with Brig, without realizing the consequences of power creep.

3

Every official gamemode we have pushes the attack vs defense mechanic of the game, it was only until those OWL dollars came in is when it was suddenly started to push in one direction.

4

That’s why I said they end up pushing the game into mirror matching, that’s weird, they should allow some sort Trinity like: Meta, Anti-Meta and Off-Meta heroes, which anti counters meta, meta counters off and off counters anti, you know?

5

And people keep wondering why I’m pushing BarrierTanks to be more DPS-ish as “Heavies”.

Instead of fulfilling the RPG archetype of a “Tank”.

1 Like
6

I guess the problem is that barriers are low risk and some can even be low effort for the reward they provide, so it lessens any other effort or risk their damage mechanics may have if you don’t add proper trade-offs to increase the risks.

I guess mid/long ranged tanks with a barrier kind of have less risks than close ranged ones, you know?

7

Well,

  1. Make it so that Ult charge feeding is based off of fraction of maximum Health. (I.e. 66% less Ult charge feeding for Roadhog vs Soldier.)
  2. Bionade blocks 50% of healing
  3. Zarya bubble cleanses EarthShatter and Sleep

Which still leaves the sniper issue, but most snipers suck below Diamond anyways.

And comps get more strict above Platinum.

8

i hate how people over-analyse everything to the point it doesnt even make sense, when i play overwatch i turn on the computer (console for some people) hit queue play the game have fun then maybe play something else. guess im not an owl player or masters + :laughing:

9

I’m afflicted with the idea that the devs sometimes listen to what I say.

10

they only listen to the people on their super secret discord, the one where everyone knows the existence of aliens, ghosts, bigfoot and who shot jfk

1 Like
11

Guess it’s just a coincidence then :stuck_out_tongue:

12

If we look into a sequence of events for higher ranks:

  • Burst damage is effective in the hands of accurate players.
  • Snipers provide burst in an open field and long LoS.
  • Spammers provide burst though narrow chokes.
  • Barriers have high uptime and they try to deny those and buy some time to go through those spaces.
  • The counter to Barriers, then, is flanking, because Barriers would still protect some angles, but not all of them.
  • Then Powerful and/or AoE healing and easy CC denies the value from flanking.
  • They buff flanking to be more bursty and nerf healing and CC.

That’s what I see they doing in the game, but that doesn’t change the fact that barriers are a necessity because at the moment you stop using barriers, the enemy can swap back to a sniper and get value.

So if you stack Barriers, powerful healing and CC while you can fight back and secure kills you will be able to answer to more stuff and that’s how you create a single combination that has minor swaps when needed and that is more complete and prepared to answer stuff and the game goes into mirror matching.
The game lacks the rock-paper-scissors thing.

13

The problem with snipers is the risk vs reward. Generally snipers should be weaker in close combat but ever since the Hanzo rework they’ve gotten better escapes or can do tons of damage in close combat as well. So even if you wanted to counter a sniper, you generally need more then one character if you want to remove them from a fight and that puts you at a numbers disadvantage. More so if one of those characters that is sent to counter the sniper is a tank.

1 Like
14

Well, I did figure something interesting about some math.

Let’s say instead of Rein having 200armor, 300hp.
What if he had 300Armor, 100HP.

But we go with that version of Armor which is a flat 20% damage resistance.

With that, Rein would be almost as good or better against long range attacks as he is now.

But weaker against close range attacks.

15

What do you mean by that?
What’s the idea behind this?

Also

Good point, I don’t know what else further to say. What do you think they should nerf close range sniper combat?

16

Please, as soon as Symmetra started getting kills, they dumpster’d her. There’s no logic behind Blizzard’s balancing methods.

17

Mostly that the way you get around the whole “Barriers offer an unchallenged advantage at all ranges” is to give them a range they aren’t that good at.

Same as usual.

I’m just happy I was able to compact the Rein HP nerf in there, because it was a weakness of my overall idea for other changes.

Since it feeds into that UltCharge reduction idea.

18

“The truth about OW” How many times have I read that in here.

19

Burst damage, especially long range burst damage, needs to be slower. The RoF is far too high for sustain damage to compete. The damage can be just as strong but you need longer gaps inbetween bursts so that (in the case of snipers) you can take them on, in close range, with non-burst options.

20

Honestly i kinda hate rock paper sizzors games, counters should exist but you shoudlnt be able to deny most if not all value from a person just becasue you picked the right hero.

Mirror matches ar abd as well tho but imo it does a better job of saying who the better team was