Are tanks and healers terrible now or is it just me?

General Discussion
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This is a continuation to my echo rework suggestion. A lot of you guys disagreed with the rework to healer thing which is good, because I was definitely wrong about that. The problem in my opinion is how weak tanks and healers have gotten. Not in damage output, I mean by survivability. Of course being able to survive is based off skill most of the time, but it’s quite hard sometimes when you get instantly shredded by a reaper, hanzo, genji, or basically any dps hero that excels at tank busting ( Almost all of them ) .

One basic philosophy of overwatch is that every hero should have counters, and every hero should be able to counter. The thing is, I feel that tanks have too many counters. It’s not always about positioning, sometimes your going to be killed by a random reaper, no matter how many healers you have on you, the probability of them knowing to kill your healers before you is high, which they can do very easily. If your healer doesn’t utilize their defense ability correctly ( Mercy’s Pistol, Ana’s Sleepdart, Baptistes Immortality field?, Lucio’s Boop ) which happens often, Your healers and eventually your team are all dead. You can’t always protect them, it’s hard for tanks to fight off dive heroes and protect their healers at the same time. It shouldn’t be.

Tanks need to have more impact then damage dealers…but all they do is “make space for them” while that is true…who really does more when it comes to carrying? You rarely even see tanks carry their team anymore, it’s always the damage dealers. That doesn’t make tank players bad. It’s the tanks and healers failure to survive, because of the damage dealers easy kill and escape. I just want tanks to be able to tank. They should be able to sustain a reaper, genji, or mccree, but even with healing it’s still hard.

Healers have a lot of survivability issues when being dived as well. Let’s say an Ana is being dived by a reaper, she lands a sleep dart, and does the insta-kill combo. Since reaper has 250 health, he can sustain it. If he is naded, he can just wrathe (Sorry if I spelled it wrong) Out of that situation, go get healed before the sleepdart cooldown is over and retry diving her. If a tank gets involved, which rarely happens even when calling out for help, they’ll just ignore the healer. You might think this is a communication problem, (Of course it partially is) But the reaper shouldn’t be able to survive that insta-kill combo in the first place. If an Ana lands a sleep dart, they should be dead assuming the Ana knows how to insta-kill. It might seem unfair, but it’s her only viable defense ability. This applies to other healers defense abilities as well, If you think about what would realistically happen every time a mercy pulls out her pistol, a lucio boops and runs, a baptiste panics and uses immortality, it’s usually unsuccessful. They did the right thing but where outplayed simply because their defense abilities are almost always useless against dps escape/dodge abilities.

I’m not trying to seem arrogant or you know, better than anyone else, so sorry if I come off that way. I’m really just trying to have fun. I miss being able to have true fun with Winston and D.va, my most played heroes. I want every class to have equal opportunities, not have to be insta-killed and switch from the hero they want to play every single match because of the unfairness of the meta. Please keep it respectful in the replies, as I never intended any harm. Your opinions are definitely wanted on this topic.

Thanks for reading - Concerned overwatch player

4 Likes
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Tanks… yes.

Healers… no.

Well, not all of the tanks.

Winston/Ball/D.Va/Hog suffer from other characters getting power crept, and there ability to kill harder.

Wanna know why?

Healing creep and power creep.

1 Like
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Depends on who you ask:

If you mean easier for DPS to beat and have more impact over then you’d say they’re fine.

If you’re an Ana main you’d say they’re fine.

If you’re a Rein main they’re fine.

Basically anybody who benefits from off meta/ and the “unacceptable” tanks and supports being bad or weak is going to say they’re fine.

To anyone without bias, they are weak.

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Thanks for not being too harsh lol, I’m pretty worried about the responses. But yeah, I feel like tanks are having more problems

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If you think the only thing tanks do is make space for damage dealers to carry then your fundamental problem is not understanding how tanks carry. But I’m not surprised considering:

You are using off-meta heroes.

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It is just you. The strongest role in the game by far is still tanking. Healing is still very strong so yes it is just you.

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That seemed like a dumb example ( I meant my example ), but I meant to imply that I like playing them but I can’t, because of the meta. I’ve tried to play orisa more because of the shield meta.

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If you’re just trying to say tanks aren’t balanced relatively to each other then of course you’d be correct. Character imbalance exists across the entire game.

If you’re trying to say tank class as a whole is weak, you’d be dead wrong. There’s a reason why GOATS meta exists (and still exists in Open Queue). And it ain’t because DPS is the strongest class.

3 Likes
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It’s hard to explain but I’m trying to show that I think tanks should do more, they are weak but they aren’t the worst class, I don’t really think there is a worst class, I think there are classes who impact less then they should though like tanks. I see were your coming from though, good point.

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I think they should do something like this:

[✅] Abbreviated Tank Changes

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Definitely! I wish that the development team ( Sorry if I was vague ) See that.

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Tanks are split between “Unkillable” and “Useless”. To say tanks as a whole are terrible now is misguided as there’s a hard line between Reinhardt/Zarya/Sigma/Orisa and D.Va/Roadhog/Ball.

The same goes with healers. Ana/Brigitte own the show. Zen/Moira/Mercy are liabilities.

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I think the Tank class as a whole is unpopular. And they should buff Tanks to the point they are at least as popular as Healers.

Since fixing queue times is more important than almost any other issue in this game.

And also it’s impossible to have 3-4 Tanks on a team with 2-2-2. So there’s no reason to balance to protect against that.

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Tanks can carry with good teammates.

AnchorTanks are the group of heroes least capable of compensating for bad teammates.

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With the exception of Genji, DPS is a useless role.
Tanks are the carries and Supports make them better. DPS does nothing

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Thanks for sharing, I agree that tanks and supports can be used to carry if played correctly. But I respectfully disagree about the useless dps thing, yes genji is in a odd place right now, but the dps roster is more appealing currently than tanks and healers based on my experience. More people will want to
Play dps, rather than healer or tank, so there will be more hard carry dps players than hard carry tanks and healers.

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The DPS roster is bigger than the support + tank roster combined. Of course there will be more people wanting to play that roster.

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There’s a reason why GOATs is still the meta in open-queue.

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Tanks are fine, but I think they’re hard to play. Why? Because they need to focus in 3 things every single combat situation (mitigate damage on their allies, keep the team on objective, keep the enemies away from the objective)

Every tank has some hard counter, but they can pretty much deal with almost any threat almost every time(if your timming skills are great and your knowledge about your opponent it’s great too). Almost every tank can’t go solo(not because they can’t, but because he is too valuable for his team) or have to do that(because it’s better to go as a group instead as solo) Wreckingball, d.va and winston are the ones who have mobility for that, even when they go solo they have to keep these 3 things in mind (mitigate damage on his team, keep their team on the objective, keep the enemy team off the objective).

About healers I think they’re fine too. But they’re not that easy to play. Why? Because they need know the perfect balance between damage output and keep your tanks alive. They’re the real “scale” where the team lacks and they need to “be more proactive” to inform if the DPS aren’t good, swap to another role or support to add more raw damage or more healing throughput, if their tanks aren’t playing well (too suicide or barriers on ghosts).

DPS are de easiest one to play(where most of the players wanna play), but one of the most hard roles to master(where most of the players aren’t good at). Because everyone can cause damage, but know how and when cause that damage it’s what really matters. If any DPS doing great without any skill, your tank and healers aren’t doing a good job, if the game is balanced then everyone is doing their best, and the match will be awesome.

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Yeah, but in addition to that dps aren’t particularly bad right now, like I said, I feel like they are too dominant. So of course the biggest roster along with being very dominant would have more attention and I’m assuming better players, dps aren’t useless, which is what captain Hammond was saying.