As it was already mentioned 1-4-1 was tested and scrapped because of how bad it was. Prior to 2-2-2 I almost quit tanking because I found myself in this situation a lot as a tank and it felt hopeless most the time.
I dedicated an entire season to learning WB just so I could put up with the dps heavy, no healing teams I’d get day in day out. This is from a person who generally has always preferred lower mobility heros (Orisa was my favorite tank prior to WB). It just so happened that I fell in love with his playstyle and he became my main and kept me tanking knowing I always had WB to fall back on if my team comp was god awful.
It doesn’t have to be that pressure on the solo healer if they will change some small things. Like enabling out of combat passive heal, and increasing drastically the number of Mega Health Pack.
I don’t think 1-4-1 would work because without an additional tank to peel for the solo support we get a lynchpin problem with the game as a whole. And a solo support trying to heal 2 tanks while getting hard focused is too demanding. However solo tanking is an option and makes sense because the solo tank gets the focus of two healers rather than healing get split by two tanks, creating a more harmonious game for the supports and the tank because then the tank has more uptime and dies less so everyone in the match is technically playing more of the game during the match.
Ok see… there are lots of reasons why Medic is able to solo heal for 11 people and OW supports aren’t able to solo heal 5 people.
Average max health is lower. Sure Medic’s medigun heals at 24 HPS but most of the Mercs have 125 HP… not 200. Tankiest guy out there is the Heavy at 300… not 600.
Medic gets INSANE out of combat healing bonuses. Like we’re talking it legit goes up to 72 HPS if your target has been out of combat for 15 seconds. Mercy wishes she could ever hit that kind of healing.
Health packs feel much MUCH more accessible in TF2 and it’s much less punishing to run and grab one because 11 v 12 is not nearly as unbalanced as 5v6 is. Also no one death balls anyway because there’s no shields or max range auras so 12v12 fights never really happen so having one guy go MIA to get a health pack usually doesn’t matter.
Even though Medic is the only proper “healer”, there’s other sources of healing… such as Dispensers, Heavy’s sandvich, Soldier’s black box… etc.
The Quick Fix exists. This thing gives +40% more healing, or 33.6 HPS. If you need more healing, you have this as an option.
You really believe having more damage hero’s in a game, which will make tanking and supporting even worse… is going to fix the low amount of tank and support players?
Being able to do your job and have fun is probably the big one, and playing solo-support means doing your job is never fun since you’re priority target #1 for 4 enemy dps and a tank.
Same for tanking in that setup. The reason it didn’t work before 222 is because 4 dps can blow up any tank almost instantly. And when your job is simply to be difficult to kill, getting blown up instantly is the opposite of fun.
People need to realise that clearly the tanks and supports will need to be rebalanced to be able to solo tank / support.
The tanks and supports would need to beefier, for one thing. They’d need to be able to deal with 4 dps. The balance would be between 4 dps vs the opponent’s tank and support.
The problem there would be that if it gets to a point where the 4 dps need to coordinate to beat the tank / support, then that would destroy solo / low tier game play, which typically has little communication and coordination.
In practice… a lot of these things in TF2 exist and work because of large differences in Map Design and the number of players on the team, and the fact that the different mercs can run different loadouts. Most of those things would require massive overhauls of a bunch of stuff. The only one that could be easily applied is the out of combat healing bonuses… but it is debatable if it would even work. In Overwatch if somebody’s been out of the fight for 10s… and a fight has been going on… their team lost. 100% guaranteed.
With significant buffs to the tank and support roster to accommodate that balance, yeah. The support will have to be able to heal their entire team, and tanks will have to be able to protect their entire team.
Means lots of new mechanics, like damage debuffs etc for tanks, and lots more passive healing by supports. The skill floor will drop considerably either way for both roles, but at least the majority of players would be able to play.
Not even just for the people that “refuses to play as a team”. Have you seen how long a Rein barrier lasts against 4 dps(and I mean, ANY 4 dps)? Have you seen Moira’s, or Ana’s healing against the focus fire of 2 dps? It is laughable. People won’t last, period. The two classes would be literally useless.
The only ones that want 1-4-1 are DPS only players(with the odd one or two tanks or supports), and we know this because… Well, they do not know those things that were(thank god it is over) so basic for any tank/support that played qp.
FFS. People lack vision. They see one change (ie, 1-4-1) and immediately assume that’s the only change and how broken it would make the game.
If the game was MADE with 1-4-1 in mind, people would accept it as acceptable. The game originally was intended for 1-4-1 usage. But people had other ideas because they liked having 2 tanks and 2 supports.
UNTIL they make more tanks and supports, temporarily having it as 1-4-1 and rebalancing the tanks / supports such that one tank and one support can function in a game adequately would be a way to go until they get more tanks / supports in. Then they can change it to 2-2-2.
I think 2-2-2 is good. I see why some DPS-only players are upset at the queue times. I’ve queued as DPS and it would suck to play that all the time. And I get that it’s not as easy as just having DPS go another role. That leads to unhappy players, and can bring about toxicity in some players. But what can you do about a game with SO many more people queuing up as DPS than support or tank? Someone is going to have to wait their turn, unfortunately…
Ikr, that’s what I’m saying. All this change would do is enable the people who refuse to play the game as it was intended to be played in the first place. The worst part is, it wasn’t even just a quick play problem. The vast majority of the player base wants to dps, and nothing else. They want to play the game like it’s call of duty. Naturally that means the average player in comp is just like that.
It took 3 supports and 3 tanks working together with goats just to keep some of the dps hero’s in check. You would seriously need to buff Rein to be a raid boss to get him to be viable in a 1-4-1 forced meta.
