Yeah, there’s probably a better word than “carry”.
Tanks can definitely carry if you DPS and Healers coordinate with you.
But what I’m describing is how Tanks really can’t do anything when either your DPS or Healers aren’t coordinating with you.
You just lose.
There’s no “I’ll use this hero to cover this gap in our team composition”. Nope lose.
More unique tank designs that maybe address some of these issues would help. That’s the point of having more tanks. More options to change the outcome of a game, more play styles to choose from, and more synergies and combinations to discover.
But it’s not really an issue of the raw number of choices.
We have plenty of Tanks, but very few choices.
It’s more to do with game balance, and that Tanks could use some “power creep” to keep up with the self-determinism of other roles that have been “power creeped”.
More tanks BY DEFAULT means more choices.
More raw choices isn’t the same as more worthwhile choices.
That should be obvious with how dominant Reinhardt is.
And HOW did Rein become so dominant? Because at any given point there are only ever 2 tanks that work well together and a few that don’t even have a partner they work well with yet. A problem we only have because of a limited roster. And every time a pairing sees too much play the mob decides to get them ruined to make way for the next pairing. You’ve been playing as long as I have, how are you not noticing this?
Getting stomped all over the top of because:
It wont be a good result.
Look, picking up a new hero can be good. And I recommend people have a few they can play decently. But, just rotating through so you can ‘play all the heroes’ is not going to end in good games for you or the people you are playing with.
True, but that is kind of true for everyone. Damage needs the tanks doing their job as well. In the end, if your going to have a bad time if any part of your team is not doing their job.
Dps gets all the show. Typically they get the PotG. They get the kill feeds. But most of the time a dps ‘pops off’ you can look back and see that it was the tank that opened it up.
That is not entirely true. There are some options. Sure, we could use a few more. I don’t disagree we need more tanks options. But, I still maintain that it wont help que times.
Yes, more options would be good. And we will get them. But, those options wont significantly change the number of players playing the roll.
Agree. Technically Bastion is a choice…just not a good one.
My entire goal in this forum had been to increase the number of viable heroes, versus the raw choices of heroes.
I.e. Getting Junkrat, Mei, Roadhog out of trash tier.
And I’ve been kinda focused on barrier tank balance since November.
So I’m painfully aware that raw choices, and worthwhile choices aren’t the same thing.
Much less that it’s not worth discussing the idea that we even could use raw hero choices, because we got zero hero releases for roughly the next 6 months.
Exactly - there are plenty of available playstyles and options among the tank role, but they’re hardly all viable at any given time because of how easy it is to deny them alltogether. It would be a monumental disappointment if they added more tanks with extremely unique (and in return, easily countered) playstyles only to have them be cast aside as “useless” for months at a time.
I mean, looking at it now objectively - the playstyle difference between winston, dva, hammond, roadhog, zarya, reinhardt, sigma and orisa are all massive. On paper, that’s a lot of options for influencing the battlefield.
But many those options are largely ineffective for a wihle.
Well if the options aren’t there to begin with then how would we ever know? I’ve been playing since day 1 so I have a basic understanding of how most heroes play. Mind you I seem to have a mental block on playing snipers, Tracer and Genji so I just don’t play them, but that doesn’t matter because I still have 13 other damage heroes to choose from. I main 5 tanks so I personally don’t have a problem changing it up from time to time but I’m not the rule. I’m considering the player that maybe wants to play tank but doesn’t like playing shield, or maybe doesn’t like projectile heroes, or maybe they don’t like hyper mobility, or maybe they do. Instantly their options drop from 8 to 4-5 with any of these. And even then heros are very unique in this game, what happens when they decide they don’t like the 8 options they have to choose from? They just go back to the damage queue.
It would have helped if they, ya know, didn’t ruin Orisa and Sigma
Or overbuffed heroes like Ashe, and McCree adding even more burst damage making Winston moot
Or nerfing Baptiste into the dirt to kill him off, and refusing to give Mercy 60hps that she has needed for 2 years
Great. That is good for you. And having multiple heroes you can choose from is a good thing. But, lets talk about what you need to have happen to get the que times to change.
You need to get damage players to change the very style and goal of the play. This in and of itself is not something that is really going to happen with a new hero. Then you have to ask them to learn more than 1 new hero so they can fill the tank roll when their first choice is taken or countered. So, you are asking dps players to basically start over.
And it has been born out with OW’s history as well. Adding the new tanks has not created a shift in the ratio of players. What happened was existing tank players switched to playing the new tank. Damage players didn’t.
While it does come off as spammy at times I do appreciate your effort. But you are just the minority, if the mob decides they don’t like a hero that hero is getting gutted. Especially if it affects OWL. Even the current suggestions from you and many of us is still just an attempt to salvage the chain reaction of angry mob nerf witch hunts that never seem to consider the effects of certain changes to the game as a whole as far as heroes are concerned.
I don’t think there was an obvious way to make it so multiple barrier tanks are viable at the same time, without causing DoubleBarrier.
And believe me, I tried looking at it from any angle I could think of.
It really bothers me how true this is. Echo wasn’t kept as a support because her Ult was “too much a dps thing.” Jeff says that the dev team has lots of ideas for healers and tanks but why aren’t we seeing them?
Take Baptiste and sigma for example: Sigma’s kit was originally going to Mauga, a tank concept that they couldn’t get to really work because they struggled at designing non-dps
Then there’s Baptiste, another hero who originally had different abilities (he was going to inject something into the hole on his chest armor) but again, they couldn’t make it work.
I know the devs aren’t perfect and heroes go through many iterations in development but why do we see more impactful, big-play making dps than tanks or supports?
I mean Double Barrier only sprang up because of the synergy/ counter play between Sigma and Orisa’s kits
Don’t forget just how insanely powerful Sigma’s ult used to be, where not only did it do 50 damage plus the 50% of max health damage, it used to start faster, have an insane amount of slowdown when you landed, AND it couldn’t be blocked by ANYTHING.
The problem came when they started to hit their defensive abilities without looking at what offensive abilities they had; which then caused them to rely on eachother more and more because of it.
If they hit Halt and Gravitic Flux first, then tuned what needed to be tuned after that, it would have gone a lot further at breaking why they were so meta.
Heck it’s the same kind of problem that happened to Baptiste. Outside of Masters, he was a pretty average pick. It was actually the MOST balanced time for Main supports it has ever been in January before they nerfed him too much
Because we never see hero abilities until they are basically ready and go on the PTR.
That is entirely spin. And inaccurate. They were designing it to be Mauga but decided it did not fit the character from the lore so they made a new character to put the kit on. That was entirely a name change to fit the lore. It didn’t change the kit.
They try lots of iterations. Genji and Hanzo were originally a single hero. Bastion’s ult was at one time shoot through walls. Genji used to be able to stick to walls. Torb used to have a trap. Etc, etc. The fact that they change ideas to make a hero more balanced is not new. And it is a good thing.
In truth, that is largely a perception issue. The dps are the ones that get in the kill feed. They are the ones getting all the flash. But, I would argue tanks and healers make the difference far more often. Most of the time a dps ‘pops off’ if you go back in the game you will see a tank setting it up. And many times you will see a healer saving his bacon right before it as well. The game does a poor job of highlighting it, but tanks and supports make the big plays happen more often than not.
people were asking for more tanks/supports before the mistake of role queue was added to the game.
lol quite lying theres only 3 tanks in the game. any other tank is a throw pick
And then they throw it all away by making another hero SO MUCH BETTER than them, that you can’t play them at all.
I’d love to play, say, Wrecking Ball. But I can’t because the balance is trash. ALL the new tanks are bad!