This is a very mean way to put it, but yes, it is inarguable tanks have mechanically more impact and ability to resist impact in this game. This was probably done to avoid the woes of old tank players that “playing tank is boring” and there used to be good arguments for this. Like being a shieldbot.
However, trying to make a single player (the tank) of equal value to two people is pretty questionable to fairness.
In a full 6v6 team fight, losing one teammate was sustainable because you still had at least one tank to hold the line.
Today in 5v5, if your tank dies, the enemy tank shifts posture to being a dps and pushes hard, like in a 0-3-2 configuration. And with tanks being dps juggernauts in 5v5, it’s much easier to overwhelm squishies and score a team kill or spawn camp. If a support dies, your tank is next. If a dps dies, your support is next. So go the dominoes.
I gotta say: I personally believe the main problem of 5v5 is 5v5 itself. It is simply not the way to go in Overwatch, and the sudden increase of “stomps” can be considered one of its consequences.
I’ve mentioned this before in another thread, but I did say to some prominent people that the major thing about 5v5 is the ‘removal’ of concepts. By that, I mean something much greater than reducing numbers was done: combining two fat HP pools into one and lowering the uptime of shields and other defensive abilities.
Besides healing, Tank is the only role that has something which directly gives durability to their other team members. The resolution, a good one, is giving the other roles more broadness than “damaging” and “healing” to help what is missing like team durability.
Problem is, Support and DPS are so niche that it’s basically all they do and “make healing better” isn’t a great answer and any answer that is “give people independent agency” does not fix problems in the teamwork related way.
Yup. And the funny part is that if Blizz made it 6v6 right now (except maybe bring down tank health just a little bit) this game would be fantastic because they already fixed just about everything everyone complained about in OW1 with regards to hero balance and the effectiveness of shields.
But noooooooooo Blizz had to overcorrect and now we have this 5v5 busted Arcade mode as our main game.
Not going to lie, I’ve stopped playing Overwatch for a little bit because I’m tired of waiting 6+ minutes to get into a game when Paladins takes like 30 seconds or a minute.
There could be a discussion about all of the balance changes, whether or not they are good or bad, but I definitely agree that an immediate return to 6v6 would make things better.
This is true i used to enjoy tanking in ow1, i was a rein main who played him even when he was punching bag, cause there was lot of stratind games and when you pull a play it’s such a high, i still remember those photographically in my memory the time i smashed in ot on a coaling moira to slam Lucio to winning that fight out of nowhere.
Or juking enemy rein zarya in a kingsrow room and murdering their whole team.
With ow2 rein is more powerful than ever but i don’t get the feel to play him at all, it feels cheap.
I enjoyed playing Tank in OW1 because even though I was bad, I had a backup that was hopefully better than I was. I also enjoyed following one tank and dps while the other support helped the other half.
The other thing is (in my opinion) all the numbers except HP for tanks were mostly balanced for 6v6, so things generally die quicker (in my experience) when we get overwhelmed.
No they couldn’t. They were always at a disadvantage.
Healing can mitigate burst in this game. Healing can’t cover one-shots, but it can mitigate burst damage.
Up until role-queue, the biggest the impact for the various roles ended up being the Tank and Support roles. That’s how GOATS happened. Later, when the role-queue arrived, Tanks were still predominant along with Ana as a Support have the most impact (with Zenyatta being another).
In 5v5, the issue is again, Tanks having the most impact. It’s clear that Tanks are far more forgiving and far less difficult to play for most players than anything else; and it helps that they’re also some of the most powerful heroes in the game.
It really is going to depend on the effective “skill” of each role. There is a limit to how much one can do in each role, but it feels like, for most players, that the Tank is going to be the key here.
Assuming all roles were equal.
Statistically, there was overwhelming evidence indicating that Tanks were the biggest reasons for the game’s imbalances. Simply put, there were able to do a bit of everything and still hold fast against multiple targets.
But once their defenses were down or exhausted it was easy enough to just focus-fire them to make a kill. For some Tank players, this was seen as an error or a weaknesses in the Tank plays.
Of course there were a bunch of other issues. One is that they were easy targets of crowd control, and since they were so resilient, it was easy enough to continue stacking crowd control upon crowd control on them and juggle them endlessly in stuns without retaliation. For a lot of non-Tanks, the crowd control was powerful enough to guarantee a kill or elimination, but for Tanks, being stuck in a perpetual limbo wasn’t fun.
Wasn’t really fun for Damage and Support roles either.
Most of the crowd control was also coming from the Tanks, so it made sense to remove one Tank from the equation as a way of balancing out crowd control and their immense power and defense.
Sorta. Losing a Damage-role hero wasn’t a big issue. If you lost a Support, it would be difficult to maintain parity, though still possible. Losing a Tank was pretty critical to overwhelming the enemy and taking advantage of the opening.
Tanks have always been great damage-dealers. Pressing the advantage is always been something they could do, but now they can do it faster and more reliably since there are fewer defenses available to stop them. Especially a lot of crowd control removed from the non-Tank roster.
Nah, you’d just have Tanks dominating again; just like before. And it would be in a worse situation then, because your only sources of control are found in the Support and other Tank roles.
Zarya and Ramattra. Junker Queen and Reinhardt. Roadhog and Orisa/Queen. Zarya and Queen. Queen and Ramattra would be incredibly powerful combinations and you would begin to wonder why anyone would even bother with the Damage-role; especially since Supports would be compelled to be supporting their Tanks over everyone else.
This is a reason, although there were many reasons that I think all intertwined with each other.
Tank synergies which had to be forced due to meta which had to be enforced due to shields which had to be enforced due to CC which had to…(etc)
Tank did not have a good means of handling CC and balancing because a resolution wasn’t found. Except when the game, either now or before, realized certain decisions like giving tanks more CC immunity, lowering ALL shields in game including making Sigma less oppressive entirely, removing Orisa’s shield entirely, and much more.
Tanks were considered unfun before because you had to be forced into being protective WHILE squishy and vulnerable without the damage of a DPS. So they were considered literally slow and immobile while crawling around to not be, for example, juggled or bursted to death.
I think they could have and still could even more now find a good resolution to not make tank synergy not as detrimental as people complained about.
They had the damage, but you had situations where highly-coordinated teams would exploit those openings and bring down those tanks immediately. This is why Zarya could be incredibly powerful and useful as she could rotate in Projected Barriers for Tanks and allow them to go on the offensive briefly and get some serious damage in.
Only really in the sense of going up against Tracer who, in the final days of OW1, was a dominate pick also because of Zarya and Tracer’s Pulse Bomb combo.
Yep.
Always seems to be the strategy after a long metagame.
GOATS? We buffed Tanks to be able to move faster, after implementing Role-Queue. OW2? We buffed Tanks to do more damage and have more health and also buffed armor to be more resilient, which in turned buffed Tanks, since Tanks are the near exclusive heroes to get armor.
This is true and most people forget that being able to stay alive longer in a fight also means more damage. When I say vulnerable, more as something is “scary” to them and they have to do a lot more than a simple mouse click to make it disappear.
It is true I hear a lot of problematic combinations with Zarya. It’s a shame, but also something I feel like they could have been able to work around and just didn’t get the light bulb to click on what.
I was more speaking towards I would say… 2020 and onwards? and mostly speaking in vague terms of tactics. Such as Rein slow shield hoping for his team or whatever else. Whether I believe if it was true or not, players in the community once discussed “What makes tanks boring right now?” and one of those opinions was that they were extremely reliant on their team just to live and be pocketed to basically soak damage or mitigate it.
Still strange Zarya causes a meta issue and the resolution to solving it is too difficult to be able to solve yet they have scripts for specific abilities to function uniquely depending on what class you were. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility to make bubble work on a tank differently or fix it for flankers with high mobility options.