It’s been a year, the tank role is a mess and no real balance changes for 2-2-2 have come in. Nerfing barriers was a shortcut, rebalancing tanks for 2-2-2 was always going to need turning all tanks into maintanks. Turning shield tanks into offtanks is the exact opposite direction and has only turned offtanks into useless and the shield tanks into requiring double shield by definition since they’re offtanks now.
With relief not on the horizon, and tank balance generally not going in the expected direction, is this a sign that blizzard have moved onto openqueue as their next radical solution? Have they abandoned the belief that 2-2-2 can be balanced healthily and opted for letting players break double barrier with triple dps and whatever other creative means?
I personally think it would be a shame, but it’s been a year of doubleshield so I don’t see evidence of urgency on their part, so maybe they’re busy playing the game in another format as the beginning of doubleshield showed us when they were playing 321 while we wondered why tank balance patch had not arrived yet.
even i as someone who prefers open queue over role queue, i see ZERO reason why they would just abandon it…i honestly dont know why you would think anything of the sort
In short unlikely. If anything the move in OW 2 will be a return of 1-3-2. 2-2-2 has slightly broader support than OQ does based on what evidence we have.
Its OW 1 with extensions, but the game engine has limits to the point its too expensive to overhaul. According to the devs an entirely new engine would be needed. Think of OW 2 as a minor set of upgrades with the PVE content through a second engine using OW 1 as a portal. To get 2-3-2 “costs” a lot in terms of real money but changes to the engine and more importantly play-testing are profoundly more expensive.
OW1 is too limited in its engine for the PvE they want to add for OW2, which is why they needed to upgrade it. The technical issues for 7v7 is in OW1, not confirmed for OW2.
I am 95% sure you can find a direct quote from Blizzard on why 2-3-2 is not going to happen ever with this engine, upgraded or not for OW 2. I do not think the PVE content is an “upgrade” to the core engine, rather the shell that allows access to the PVP game, ie the engine you are thinking of, will allow access to the second game that is the PVE content living alongside the first PVP engine.
As I recall, they spent a lot of time and money getting the Archives event to work because it didn’t “play well” with the engine. I believe that experience showed them to do a true portal to PVE content was going to require effectively a whole new coded “game engine” alongside the PVP engine which cannot effectively do PVE play well enough for cost.
All I can say is I wouldn’t mind it, but i seriously, seriously doubt 2-3-2 is going to happen for a very long time, if ever. Even if you could make the engine work the cost per new character for play-testing goes up dramatically, and the entire roster would likely have to be re-balanced.
My money is on 1-3-2 because Papa Jeff seems enamored with it in all his discussions, is a tank main, and likes the idea of “level-boss” tanks in the game, and he hinted at ‘we can’t just do the same thing with OW 2’.
1-3-2 has alot of issues. You would have to do even more radical rebalancing than in 2-3-2. Solo tank also means every tank has to be reworked into a main tank. You get even less tank diversity if 1 tank is meta. Support feel way more exposed as they lack the second off tank which peels for them especially since they now have 1 more dps to worry about. Not to mention the pressure which is on the 1 tank having no one to cover for him.
Ok, that would explain why tank balance feels abandoned. The last time it felt this way was when they released 2-2-2 while simultaneously giving D.Va a goats nerf and failing to rebalance for the tank role in 2-2-2. Reaper and Mei kept their no longer necessary goats tankbuster buffs. Armour kept its no longer necessary goats nerf. And we all wondered why the hell it was taking so long. Then it turned out they weren’t playing the same game and suffering with us, they were playing 3-2-1.
So if that’s what they’re doing again, that would explain why tanks feel exactly as abandoned as they were back then.
I’d rather they just go ahead and implement 321 now if they’re not going to balance for 222. It’s obvious that this halfway point is not sustainable.
What is a “main” tank? Clearly it’s not barriers, because ball has none and is classified as one.
If you made d.VA or Zarya as durable as ball or Rein/Sigmarisa, imagine the misery of playing into their vastly superior defensive tools while they are also much harder to kill.
The 1-3-2 version of d.VA was lots of fun to play… As d.VA.
