tl;dr at the bottom.
These are not new ideas by any means, even before role queue was a thing these came up constantly. I thought it was an appropriate time to bring them up again since queue times have shown the community that tanking cannot be a chore.
Reduce CC.
CC has its purpose in the game and no one is saying “let’s remove them all”. However, whatever CC is supposed to do, it also makes every map play like bouncy castle simulator for the biggest hitboxes who are supposed to sit there and deny these attacks.
The knockback patch essentially buffed every last goshdarn boop:
Now let’s reduce knockback strength back. Simple as that. The knockback patch is interesting because it mades CC more consistent, okay, that’s good, but there’s no reason knockbacks needed to be increased. Nerf them all down, every single goshdarn one, by how much I don’t know, start with 30%, see where it goes from there.
Then there’s some specifics CCs that could use tweaking. Yes, I am talking about nerfing half a dozen heroes that have CC in their kits. I’m going to give examples, but I’m not married to them as is, nor do I mean all of them at the same time or that we should limit ourselves to them, they’re just examples to argue we can reduce CC without hurting the game.
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Zarya’s right click: Spammable AoE CC chain limited only by reload time. It flat out shouldn’t exist. Let Zarya rocket-jump as usual but remove the CC effect for enemies. Don’t just reduce it, delete it straight to hell.
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McCree’s Flashbang: Reduce radius a bit, just so being caught from behind corners isn’t such common occurrence.
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McCree’s Flashbang 2.0: Decrease duration. Currently it’s 0.7s, cut it to 0.5s. Then, allow McCree to shoot/recover faster after he uses flashbang, so his combo isn’t too affected.
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Brigitte’s Bash: Same as above. Brigitte’s current stun duration is 0.7s, reduce it, decrease recovery time.
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Earthshatter: Reinhardt can start to build his ult as soon as the “getting up” animation of the shatter effect ends, so any Rein can get a big percentage of his next AoE stun just by cleaning up his own shatter. Add an internal cooldown, take the duration, add a couple of seconds, it would reduce the use considerably.
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Junk’s primary fire: Same as Zarya’s right click. Doesn’t need to exist.
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Pharah’s primary: Same as Zary’s right click, delete it, keep the rocket jump.
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Reinhardt’s swing CC: Spammable chain CC. You guessed it, delete it to oblivion.
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Lucio’s boop: Have it use ammo again. Lucio can CC basically off-cooldown, it’s often not a good idea but it means the CC is “free”. Not good. If his boop used ammo, like it used to, it would put more consideration on its usage, rather than “use it just cause”.
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Mei’s primary fire: The slow effect lasts for 1.5s after the last tick of Mei’s blaster hits. Reduce that as much as possible so we get to at least de-frost faster while Mei is reloading, in block or just died (this is just the slow, the complete solidification is a different effect).
I would also like to point out a “diminishing returns mechanic” for stuns (not boops) might be an extremely beneficial QoL. I don’t know how feasible it is, or how much of a technical challenge it is to implement, call it a pipe dream. Lets say 50% stun duration reduced for 2 seconds after a stun on said hero ends. Mind you ultimates and abilities that are cancelled by stuns are still cancelled regardless of the duration of the stun, so no, heroes will not be unstoppable after getting stunned.
These are nerfs to some heroes that might be crap. I don’t care. I welcome compensation buffs, I welcome buffs to some regardless, I’m just not gonna bother coming up with them myself, that’s another thread and I figure that conversation would only derail this one. There’s a bigger issue at play here given the queue times and that’s the idea behind these.
Revert the global armor -3 nerf.
A nice idea at the time, the global armor nerf has been made redundant to beam weapons and proved utterly insignificant to heroes that it should have helped.
Here’s how the nerf affected heroes at the time:
Beam weapons, such as Winston’s, Sym’s, Moira’s and Zarya’s are now taking 20% damage cut instead of the -3 “per bullet cut”, which means a -5 increase will not affect them at all.
Of the remaining heroes influenced by such change, I would say the biggest change came to Sombra, Soldier and Orisa. Despite benefiting from this buff, Sombra and Soldier could not secure a more viable place in the game regardless. It did not affect their pick rates or win rates, from Bronze to GM or OWL, Sombra and Soldier’s usage remained the same. It did not help them. If they need help - and sure looks like they do - then they need help, keeping a global mechanic nerfed for them would be misplaced, even if it helped (which it didn’t). They are as irrelevant with -3 as they were with -5 armor.
Orisa, on the other hand, has seen a great increase and is basically dominating right now. Good for her, there’s many reasons for that. Whatever those may be, she doesn’t need ~33% damage buff against armor to be strong as she is now. Mind you this was a two-fold positive change for Orisa. Despite also having armor, she relies on her own HP pool much less than the other main tanks.
Besides the sustained x burst damage issue, armor was also problematic because:
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Brigitte’s Rally bug: It dramatically increased Rally’s damage reduction and made armored heroes look vastly tanky than it actually were without Rally’s armor.
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GOATS: 3 tanks with massive heals and added armor from Rally making them unkillable for anything that wasn’t a Barrage.
Both of those things are literally no longer in the game. We have a 2-2-2 lock and Rally has been fixed.
So all the armor nerf managed to accomplish only one thing: Decrease tanks “tankyness” and make them even more reliant on healers to actually to their job. The intended idea of balancing burst x sustained damage failed miserably and the downside is not worth it. We need to find an actual solution for that, but the first step should be to admit what did not work.
Revert some of the GOATs balance changes.
This one should be least controversial and the most obvious suggestion. 3-3 is impossible, thus the changes made for it should go away. They are no longer relevant, nor needed and remain as nothing but detriment.
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Lucio speed changes: Blizz tried their best to change Lucio’s speed boost for the GOATS meta without affecting his own gameplay too much. Fair enough, but goats is gone now. Lucio not only is a support himself, but his speed is paramount to tank variety. Rein Zarya basically doesn’t exist without it, Winston Dva dive could use him as well. Variety is the spice of life and tanks lack that most of all (yes, more so than supports even though there’s more tanks, but I digress). Partial revert done as of patch 1.41.0.0. Good. Go for the full revert now.
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Dva nerfs: Another set of GOATS related changes. I realize DM is problematic but maybe the changes done aren’t suited for role locked Overwatch. Both DM changes could be looked at, I reckon the range nerf could be reverted asap.
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Reaper’s everything: Jeff himself spoke about how Reaper was supposed to be a natural counter to 3-3. 3-3 no longer exist. Need I say more? Reaper can be quite successfully shutdown by any team with half a brain (or maybe not given his OWL presence), that is true, but why would anyone in their right mind choose the be the tank in that equation? One of the most unattractive parts of being a tank and support player is the overly-reliance on other players. Overwatch is a power fantasy and there’s nothing more depowering than being helpless hoping others can do something. Reaper is not a balance problem necessarily, but he certainly is a design problem.
tl;dr: Less CC + global armor revert + revert some 3-3 balance changes = more tanks = better queues.