High hello I’m an AngryPuck and today I would like to break down some aspects of OW and for why they do or so not work as a whole.
HERO COUNTERS
Honestly the idea of hero specific counters as game design goal, failed the moment they decided they were going to consistently add new heroes to the game.
As not only did every new hero add a whole host of new mechanics, but in turn created an environment where the number of counters a specific hero can have would dramatically change with every release.
Ya sure this works for TF2 however that game only had to balance around 9 playable roles, with little adjustments here or their depending on weapon loadouts.
Even then their were heroes such as Torb and Sym who quite frankly failed at countering anything, AS both were designed around elements of TF2’s Engineer.
Were elements like his auto-aim turret and teleporter provided consistent utility and defense from the game flankers.
However overwatches flankers never had to worry about about these mechanics as one skipped space all together with blink and rewind while the other could simply turn torbs damage against him, while at the same time simply dash past the effective range of Sym’s turrets. Meaning that the game had no real way to counteract mobility.
This became even more problematic when Dive became a full on composition, as when people started combining abilities such as winstons bubble and d.va’s DM. they could effectively shut down what ever weaknesses they would have otherwise.
For example winston’s bubble + shield dancing made it pretty much impossible for him to be frozen by mei, while diva’s DM kept mei from using her ult or getting much ult from her alt fire. (This of course changed years down the line)
This of course was a consistent issue for years as new heroes followed that same mentality as Sombra, Orisa, Moria, and eventually brig were all designed to counter act dive to some point. most which either failed or in Sombra’s case made it even more prevalent, While brig was such an heavy handed attempt in completely that she more or less killed the comp as a whole. (At least outside of some niche dive focused maps)
This of course is still an issue to this day as heroes like sigma, was still designed to counter act the likes of bunker. But in turn created double shield in it’s wake.
And quite frankly this is just not that healthy for the game as a whole, as it dramatically swings playstyles, hero viability, and the very basics of how we interact with the game.
Yet OW has shown that their more then capable of designing heroes that don’t completely change the meta at hand. Baptiste, Ashe, wrecking ball, and echo all released and made solid additions to the cast without fundamentally changing how we interact with the game.
And blizz should not really have a hand in the meta and let it grow naturally with of course not being afraid to adjust some over/under performer heroes here or their. Ya things like the hero reworks were necessary overall, yet we really didn’t need a full shutdown of comps entirely.
Edit: My apologies forum mod