We’ve all been there where you are continuously shooting an armored Tank and their health bar is not even budging because of the enemy Supports keeping the Armor health topped up. If your team doesn’t switch to bursty damage sources to chunk down the Armor or be able to delete the whole enemy back-line, it’ll be a steamroll.
If Tanks needed more sustain, do it in a manner where burst damage heroes are not required in order to kill Armored Tanks. The current state of Armor + the DPS Passive being -10% healing on Tanks instead of -20% are compounding to make more 1-sided matches.
I recommend trying the following changes to Armor:
Armor flat damage reduction reduced from 10 to 7 per projectile.
Armor now has a 20% minimum and 40% maximum damage reduction per projectile.
Alternative to nerfing armor: buff how fast ultimates charge.
Ults deal the highest burst damage in the game, and were originally made for situations just like this (aka players having a difficult time with killing stuff).
Armor changes I think was the breaking point that it pushed DVA and Winston into meta because they are so hard to punish. They aren’t outplaying you but just can tank/block all your damage but still have enough burst damage to kill you is crazy.
Putting aside the fact ults still need to be charged & you’re definitely not gonna get yours first if you’re not putting in any work to farm charge…
I’m a legacy Overwatch player. Which means I remember what it was like when ults charged so fast that it was normal for most fights to see at least one ult being used. And I remember the three main game design elements that prevented ult spam from turning the game into a “press Q to win.”
Number one: Overwatch’s OG Ults (and most of the current ones) are highly telegraphed, giving potential victims a fair chance to anticipate/avoid the attack.
Any ult that could wipe your team either had a long fuse before it went off (e.g: Dva bomb, OG High noon) or required the user to position in a certain way that anyone with gamesense could spot an ult setup incoming (e.g death blossom, rocket barrage).
Number two: Tanks could block ults. It would completely drain all of their shields, of course, but sacrificing your ability to effectively block damage in the upcoming flight was a balanced trade-off for ensuring that your team would live to have an upcoming fight at all.
The reason tanks could block ults in the first place was because they had all of their sustain front-loaded into a single ability (4 second defense matrix, 2,000 HP Rein shield). They could block a lot of damage at the start of a fight; but as a general rule the more damage they blocked, the longer it took to completely recharge their shielding.
Number three: Supports could block ults. All of the OG supports had defensive “lifesaver” ultimates that could be traded with one or more enemy ults to prevent (or quickly recover from) a teamwipe.
It’s worth noting, however, that none of the OG supports had any burst healing or immortality abilities in their base kit. All of their kill denial was tied up in their ult, which was a definite trade-off but arguably a worthwhile once since having a dedicated “last line of defense” against teamwipes was incredibly effective at reducing the frequency of snowballing/one-sided blowouts.
… Okay, maybe the solution isn’t quite as simple as “just buff ult costs.” It would also require reworking nearly every tank & support in the game for the purpose of ensuring they have the necessary tools to keep ult spam in check.
But you know what? I still prefer the old ult-centric hero & combat design over what we currently have. It added a really satisfying buildup/payoff gameplay loop to every hero, which really helped with onboarding new players & keeping the existing ones interested in playing.
I’d rather try reverting the DPS passive nerf on tanks before nerfing tanks’ personal survivability. I’d actually go one further and nerf healing as and where needed instead of having it be a DPS passive, but that’s even less likely to happen.
No because we’d have tanks and healers flooding the forums 24/7 about how it was the 5% reduction on healing that made the difference in why they are stuck in plat and are constantly dying not the fact that they were sitting in the open with no cover.
lol they are never nerfing healers hps. across the board nerf for the loudest role in the game?
Isnt it amazing? How much the Support mains cry about the DPS passive but when it comes to the ultra busted damage reduction and how healing gets 40% more value … they remain silent?
And by “amazing” I mean hypocritical by the way.
Yes. Armor is busted. Max HP caps should have been adjusted and not only they werent but they were BUFFED. Hence the sad state we have now with FinalBoss Dva.
This isn’t happen since before season 9 where the game stalemates because of a lack of strong offensive pressure.
Burst damage doesn’t work on Tanks in general. Sustained pressure and focus-fire is what kills Tanks. Burst-damage is generally capped around 300 damage, it doesn’t get much higher than that unless you’re running an ultimate. There’s a reason why Ashe became a strong choice before Juno’s introduction, but she offers sustained damage, not burst-damage.
Burst-damage isn’t working on Tanks and never has.
Won’t change anything.
This is worse than a flat damage reduction.
Already available with the Damage-role passive.
Ultimates already charge pretty fast. I can nail Junker Queen’s ultimate within 30 seconds, and Reaper’s within 25.
Sorta, not every ultimate from the Damage-role is actually burst-damage, and you do have to enable your Damage-role heroes to actually get that ultimate to and not be countered by a random Sound Barrier or Sleep.
Winston doesn’t do burst-damage. D.va’s only form of burst-damage is from Self-Destruct/Call Mech.
Instead, they’re out-lasting you; which is what a tank is supposed to do. Out-sustain you.
Yeah, GOATS, and team coordination. OWL ran heavily on ultimate economies.
Already capable of doing this.
Already capable of this.
This is false. Transcendence granted immortality and high burst healing. Mercy’s Revive ultimate granted her immunity to all damage for the duration of the Revive cast; and Revive was a burst-heal. Lucio’s AMP is a burst-heal.
Ana’s Biotic Grenade healed 100 health. This was a burst heal.
Every single support has this, because it a core part of their kit. There is no Support from launch-roster that didn’t have some form of burst-healing. And every single Support has always come with at least two forms of healing. This. Has. Not. Changed.
More recent Supports, that is Illari and Juno, do not have any real defensive power to shut or withstand ultimates or ultimate damage. Whereas every Support in the past has had some defensive utility beyond healing to defend against ultimates and ultimate damage, whether that is Revive, Sound Barrier, Transcendence, Coalescence, Sleep, Immortality Field, Protection Suzu, Rally, and so on; the recent Supports don’t have that. So it is possible to run into a team where your Supports don’t have any tools to defend against an ultimate; let alone a combination of ultimates.
Headshot resistance was added during the damage reduction of 5 on armor, not 10.
10% is basically armor reduction for a lot heroes.
Junkrat’s popular because he’s great at shutting down very poorly coordinated teams and lacking defenses. He is also, one of the few heroes in the Damage-role that can run Rip-Tire and make it successful off any team. A coordinated, or combination ultimate can also make it really work well too. But so can a Gravity Surge + Barrage or Pulse Bomb.
Just one step maybe enough to fixing the problem. Bringing up the Damage-role passive on tanks would probably fix a lot of issues.
They’ve done it once in OW1’s final year. It was necessary, and they have tweaked healing before.
But the Damage-role passive already does a lot of work here; it’s just enabling the Damage-role to do their job that’s a bit of problem for a lot of teams; because it also affects them much more severely than it does the Tanks.
Most players don’t seem to be aware of how powerful healing is in general. Healing any kind of health beyond the base health, that is; armor or shield health, is much more beneficial and gains more value than base white health, because healing rates is never affected by the type of health that is recovering, but doing damage to it is.
To give an example; Mercy healing Reinhardt. Without the damage-role passive, Reinhardt is taking damage from Soldier at a rate of 19 damage per shot, or reduced by armor 10 damage per shot or 90 damage. Mercy is healing at a rate of 55 per second, so that Soldier damage is reduced to 45. Thanks to the Damage-role passsive, of 10 percent, Mercy’s healing is reduced to 49, and Soldier’s damage is now 51.
Once out of armor, though, Soldier will start doing more damage, but Mercy’s healing rate will still remain at 49. Soldier’s damage output will nearly double, to 171, or factored with Mercy’s healing, to 122.
So it benefits Mercy (and all Supports) to focus healing on armored health, because they have a much bigger impact than healing normal health.
It isn’t so much than armor is busted, but rather, Tanks were designed to take this kind of damage and punishment, and then swelled to these numbers because of all the perks they get.
So focus-fire has to happen, because that’s the only way you’re going to shut down a Tank being healed. Otherwise it takes too long and the Damage-role is just too fragile to do much of anything.
