I keep seeing people say “we can’t 5v5 because of tank synergies”, and that complaint seems strange. I think that if tanks were individually nerfed, that’d be enough to justify synergies covering for their weaknesses. We wouldn’t be in a situation where you’re on Monkey and just have to swap because you’re fighting a Mauga since another tank could help out Monkey there.
And you might be thinking “but then, another tank could help Mauga”, and my response is, of course, “good”. If Monkey has a hero like D.va protecting him, Mauga and his team would be at such a disadvantage that a second tank would be justified.
And, of course, double shields will always be an issue. But for some reason people are fine with Double Sniper or Double AOE healer comps, so I don’t understand. Speaking of AOE healing, I think that was the problem with Double Shields.
DS+DAOE would be fine if Shields or AOE healing had so long of a cooldown that you only get one shot to clutch once your close range shields are destroyed. Failing that, you should be rolled over or forced to back up because your line of defense was taken from you. In that case, double shields would be a fine comp, right?
I don’t know; the more I play, the less and less I think I understand Overwatch and its community.
I don’t think so. I think it was a big balance thing when we had double shield. They could always axe some aspects of a character to make it less oppressive but now that Orisa has no shield so eh
Double shield proved why this was a flawed concept
Sigma orisa were super strong together so the devs attempted to nerf both tanks individually. You know what that actually did? It just made playing either hero outside that specific duo substantially worse, unfun and more and more reliant on each other, further cementing their synergies. All of that whilst not actually fixing the frustrations of facing double shield
You cant nerf the power of tank synergies without nerfing those tanks outside that synergy too, which further reinforces the reliance those heroes have on their synergy partner
Except this assumes the fallacy that your other tank will go the perfect duo for you which often didnt happen. This is relying on your other tank going dva to perfectly match winston. higher chances are they go hog and leave you for dead
Playing tank in ow1 can be summarised as
• you get the perfect duo (rein zarya, dva winston, orisa hog/sig) and get an easy win
• you get stuck with a tank parter who wont play the tank that matches yours vs the enemy who are playing a proper duo and you lose in spawn
Anyone who thinks the tank experience was any better in ow1 is just lying to themselves
I legit just had that thought go through my head in another thread.
Granted, I wasn’t high ranked in OW1, I peaked low Diamond towards the end, I think, so my experience is more akin to an average player. But I cannot for the life of me remember ever thinking that tank synergies on principle were problematic. Playing against specific tanks that were individually designed badly? Yes. But like, broadly? Not really. Besides, in my ranks back then tank synergies weren’t a thing anyway. Except for Rein/Zarya because that’s just fun to play, but it was also not really annoying to play against so like… what’s the problem?
Tank synergies were less about the specific tanks, but how they played together. Rein and zarya were stupidly easy to play together, so that became the de-facto tank synergy, but you could have like roadhog and winston be a synergy if both tanks knew how to play off each other.
I mentioned my thoughts on double shields and possible solutions in the original post. Basically, I don’t think the issue was the comp, but the cooldowns of the abilities. And you know, Sigma really shouldn’t have had a shield. Or if he needed one, it should have been a 250 HP shield to work as a dedicated “extra” shield for the duo.
1.) We don’t worry about that with any other role.
2.) I think it depends on what you nerf.
That’s a player issue, not a 6v6 issue. “Players are bad, so we can’t do this thing” will only ruin games in the long run. I know that, back when I played 6v6 as a tank, things seemed to work well enough. Now you mean to tell me things are different?
Again, that’s a player/community issue. I don’t think we should tolerate bad design just because some babies might get upset with the alternative.
Double shield wasnt an issue, sigma was. Every time someone complains about double shield, what they are really complaining about was sigma. Rein and winston were in the game since launch, and nobody thought that combo was a boil on the behind of overwatch.
Because no other role relies on someone else to allow them to play the game lol
We’ve always had synergistic duos and combos exist in the other roles like hanzo ult & mercy dmg boost, or ana ult & genji ult but those individual heroes were never useless without that duo, they just got a power boost
Tank is like in a completely different world where rein relied on a zarya to play the game
NO!
You design and balance the game for how people actually play the game, not how you perceive they should play the game
If in 6v6 the tanking experience was problematic because players were too reliant on the 2nd tank picking the matching tank to be able to play, the answer isn’t keep forcing players to play that format. Thats how you get people to leave the game because they feel like they have no agency or ability to make decisions for themself
You design the game around how people actually play and thus removing the reliance of the 2nd tank is partly what led to 5v5.
It addressed queue times,
It addressed tank synergy issues,
It addressed tank design limitations,
Did 5v5 fix every issue or come without its own issues? No. But anyone pretending that 6v6 was this flawless experience must have been in a coma between 2018-2021 or just extremely ignorant to real history
Yes, it’s basically impossible to balance 2x Tanks without making Tank really unpopular, unless they just make Dive be perma-meta. So yeah it’s gonna be scuffed.
But they should do it anyways, since it would be dramatically effective free marketing
It also turns a lot of very vocal haters, into proselytizing champions of the virtues of Overwatch
Hype it up more. Get Content Creators to do a lot of the Balance. Make Live video content with it.
And if they could time that after/during the “Overwatch comes back online for China” event.
And also time it with some good Tank popularity increases.
Throw a bit of something else juicy to advertise and the game would be cooking on all cylinders.
i think the reason why they believed this is because tank was more relaxed in OW1, OW2 makes it a lot more stressful. it also places much more emphasis on other aspects like individual positioning and game sense, because you no longer have two tanks, choosing either one of them to hide behind or pocket.
you have to be much more aware of maps, angles and enemies, and squishies are much more vulnerable, especially since there is still an objective to play and you cant have one objective-tank and one off-tank, nor rotate them for healing in role q like was the case in OW1. you also cant just shield/guard both sides (front and backline) at the same time anymore
Yes but it was also an inevitable tank design issue which would have only gotten worse as they added more and more tanks
They could have gutted sigma but it would have only been a month before the next tank issue cropped up.
Tanks have always been the cause for the main problems with this game
Everyone loves to say it was supports but things like goats and double shield could only exist because of the strength of overlapping tank abilities. If you removed tanks from the game and left supports as they were, alone they would not have been able to create a goats or double shield meta with just dps. So it wasnt supports that were the reason why those metas existed it was tanks being able to rotate sustain abilities that was always the core problem
Double shield is just one problem of tank synergy, the actual core of its problem is two fold:
Combining and cycling sustain to become almost immortal, which don’t require a lot of skill
Combining and cycling offensive capabilities to make it too risky to hard engage
OW1 was all about ult economy to break that front line open.
You can’t just nerf the synergy, you have to nerf the tank, but that just makes the tank miserable
If we look back at 2CP: Capturing the second point was always an utter nightmare because how strong tank synergy was
But in effect, it also turns off a lot of people who came back to ow2 after quitting ow1 or only just started playing ow2
Going back to a game state which was the reason for why those people either left or never started playing doesnt seem like the smart thing to do…
The only thing going back to 6v6 would result in is the ow2 playerbase dropping off a cliff back to ow1 post-2018 numbers
Anyone who wants 6v6 back is literally arguing for the game to go back to its least popular state where majority had quit.
Its survivor syndrome.
The only people who had fun were them but they are extrapolating their enjoyment onto others, whilst ignoring the fact that everyone else quit the game
That’s because Tank synergies weren’t really that problematic at all. The only really oppressive Tank synergy was Orisa/Sigma - Double Shield. And for the vast majority of the playerbase Tank synergy wasn’t even needed or really a thing. Lower ranks wanted a shield more than anything (even though it wasn’t needed). And as long as they had one of them it didn’t even matter. You could honestly play whatever you wanted as long as you were decent enough on that hero
Having 2 shields would always be an option. But just look back then, you could play Orisa/Rein. But that was never seen as really a problem or that oppressive in any way. And that’s because while shields were strong - it wasn’t really why the Double Shield comp was as oppressive as it was. It was the sustain abilities behind them. You had Orisa with Fortify (which they at some point made it so you couldn’t do crit damage to headshots) and then you had Sigma’s Kinetic Grasp. And then you had Halt and Sigma’s Rock behind that as well.
And then you’re very right in mentioning the mass aoe healing that was then behind that as well. Bap and/or Brig made it extremely hard to punish - especially to Dive (which is what should have been strong against it in theory) but with the large aoe healing and the denial abilities (Shield Bash and Immortality Field) and all the sustain that I mentioned before - and now including Rally/Armour as well. It wasn’t punishable by dive. It was barely punishable at all.
These abilities/heroes needed to be reworked/addressed. On top of high aoe healing. And it never really was.
It should have been. And if we were ever to back there it should be one of the first things they address.
I don’t think people are fine with either of those things. People have complained a lot about both double sniper and massive amounts of healing being belched out, too.
