Based on feedback and experience of 1-3-2 so far, just throwing a few ideas out. Just food for thought, I believe that is more constructive than to rage one way or the other. To be clear, I personally enjoy 1-3-2 a lot as it is, but it’s easy to see that not everybody feels the same way to say the least…
#1: Go balls to the walls with balance changes in 1-3-2. Give tanks tons of extra health and armor to the point that it becomes uneconomical to take them down before the rest of the team. Maybe reduce shielding a little in turn. That way tanks become creators of space, which would perfectly suit some of the more fun tank designs like Hammond. Then upgrade supports to give all of them mobility options on par with Mercy and Lucio. Upgrade Mercy and Lucio’s combat abilities. Make supports some of the most fun and rewarding characters to play, because why not? They deserve it, and they don’t necessarily have to be the first to die.
There are a lot of reasons why I believe that such radical balance changes could work out well, but for now I’ll leave those to your imagination. The basic idea is to throw a huge bone to tank and support fans considering that 1-3-2 otherwise mainly benefits DPS players. In particular by increasing survivability of those roles, but also by making them more fun to play (focused on positive, rewarding actions).
#2: Stick with 2-2-2 but just remove the ability to queue up for a particular role. It would fix the queue times and give you a reason to experiment with roles you don’t usually play. Since matchmaking uses role based MMR, that should not be too unbalanced or frustrating. You could even add additional roles if you wanted to without negatively impacting queue times.
The obvious downside is that everyone would be forced to play each role. But it would solve the problem, it would be fair, and at least you’d know you get your favorite role about every third match. Leavers would be a huge problem though that would have to be solved somehow.
#2b: A milder version of the previous idea would be to not allow queueing up for DPS only. So at a minimum you have to queue for tank+DPS or support+DPS.
#3: Try 5v5. It could be 2-2-1, 1-2-2 or even 1-3-1. In any case the ratio of DPS would increase from 33% to at least 40% . Other benefits would be faster queue times in general and more individual impact for each player. While I’m a huge fan of 5v5 (e.g. in Paladins), I highly doubt that this would ever happen. But this is the kind of thing I’d love to see tried in an experimental card, just to get a feel for how it would differ from what we have.
Another thing that gets mentioned often is 7v7 which would also allow for better ratios, but it would also lead to longer queue times in general and even less individual impact on the result of a match. For those reasons I don’t believe it can happen, but it’s another thing that could be tried.
I think that’s enough to discuss for now, I’m curious if you’d prefer any of these options over the current 1-3-2 if you had to choose. Or can you think of other interesting options?
It’s pretty clear that Blizzard wants to solve the ratio issue somehow, and I also believe that it has to be fixed. Hoping that the player base will ever dramatically change and fix the issue by itself would be pretty foolish IMO. So the best chance not to end up with an option you hate would be to support alternative options that do the same thing but are more agreeable with you.
In any case I love that Blizzard is at least considering bold changes like this. I’m sure the game is still far from unlocking its full potential, and the experimental card is a great way to safely try out potential ways to go. It may not seem possible right now, but maybe one day we stumble on an approach that we can all agree on.