Barriers are so strong because they are must haves and they are must haves because they are too strong.
They are strong in largest part, because they deny ult charge to the enemy team, they lighten the load of your healers, and the guard against burst damage.
Barriers should be balanced so that tanks like Roadhog, Hammond, Zarya and Dva can be more than just support tanks and fat DPS.
Barriers are also not a great mechanic, they make shooting not matter in a FPS. Even abilities don’t go through them.
Without nerfing barriers we will be limited to comps that focus around the barrier tank and this is dry and uninteresting.
Winston will be for Dive compositions
Rein will be for Deathball compositions
Orisa will be for Bunker compositions.
If they ever add another barrier tank that’d be a 4th. This is bad design. Barrier’s suffocate many other interesting ways to play the game because not having one is too much of a handicap.
This should be fixed, by giving a % ult charge for hitting barriers. This does several things:
It incentivizes teammates to hit barriers, because frequently people just don’t even bother.
It makes barrier tanks have to think about where and when to barrier, rather than just keeping them up as often as possible.
It will let tanks like Roadhog come into their own as a tank.
It makes the game less about just being defensive and living until ults are charged as there’s a penalty for turtling behind shields.
The % should start around 20% and increase or decrease as needed so that we can have more diversity in the game, where tanks tank, instead of being “tanks” but actually just a fat DPS.
There are 4 main tanks. 3 with shield and 1 without. Of course there will be shield tanks everywhere. And Hammond is a perfectly viable main tank too. You don’t necessary need a shield. Hog, Zarya and Dva have always been off-tanks.
Barriers exist to counter other barriers. Especially Rein.
What counters a 6 man shatter? Barrier.
What counters D.Va bomb in dive? Bubble.
What counters Bastion Bunker? Break barrier, hook him out.
DPS just work to distort the backline or to help break down the counterplay to a main ult. It’s not the barriers that are OP, it’s the ults that follow.
It takes Widowmaker .7 seconds to kill some heroes, that is not a long time. Just one example.
The things that slow it down are healing and barriers. Widow can’t kill that fast if you use a Rein barrier for cover. D.va isn’t gonna get a great bomb off if you have a shield. Etc etc.
Not having a barrier gives the other team ult advantage, which is why barriers need to add ult charge when you damage them.
It takes Rein 3.5 seconds to kill 6 people with 3 swings. That is not a long time. Just one example. And it’s faster if you firestrike them all first.
Your example is bad. Can doesn’t mean do. Just like Rein isn’t always next to 6 200 HP targets, neither is widow hitting every headshot or in position to do so. In fact her real world stats at high levels of play have her moving around the map a lot to position more than shooting and when she does shoot it’s 1 in 5 are critical, and a lot of those are on tanks so it’s not fatal. So your example is so absurd it’s actually just wrong from any practical standpoint.
A lot of that moving around is her finding angles against barriers.
I didn’t state she was getting a kill every .7 seconds. I stated she could as an example of the kind of fire power barriers protect against. You’re the one that changed it. I also listed some ults.
Some heroes excel at shield break, IE zen, Bastion, Junk, Cree, even soldier to an extent. They’d entirely focus on shooting a Rein barrier to come out with some of the most powerful DPS ults in the game.
It would dumb down play to a vast majority of DPS heroes in the game. To the point where they’d only shoot Orisa barriers to farm ults to win fights. No skill needed.
Line of sight on the maps and the amount of hard cover, she’s constantly moving to get drops on all of it. She also loses most fights unless she gets that lucky 1 in 5 because anyone hitting her knocks her aim, and she’s easier to hit than anyone in the game while scoped. Meanwhile everyone else can full ADAD spam in z formations and be incredibly hard to hit.
That isn’t true because farming ult off shields is less valuable than getting kills, and less valuable than damaging people. It would however give other tanks and metas a chance to develop and shine. And it would make barrier tanks more even in pick rates instead of one of them being must pick depending on which meta is on top. Unless you’re ok with just playing OW one of three ways the rest of your life then this has to happen.
She plays pretty far back. Learning to move around barriers is an essential skill for Widow to learn. And barriers are a counterplay against her.
In fact, barriers block a lot of damage. There is a lot of stuff in this game that would be total bs if you couldn’t use one at any time. Hammond comps don’t work on every map.