Blizzard hate defense heroes so much that when they knew they were obligated to add a new one, they deleted the defense class and had to merge with offense.
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I think it was a political move. People should be able to play any non tank non support in a DPS role. It probably also signals a potential development shift to make every character viable. This is good then.
I still say characters are defense because it just made more sense to me and that is what I am used to. But for real, why did they put damage in the middle? They could have perfectly fit the damage category in the space where offense and defense used to be. Then, we could have kept the tanks where they were instead of throwing them to the other side of the selection screen.
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Well it was kind of a pointless category anyway. Your right in that historically defence heros have been shafted, and some still are, but theres some love there now to, Junkrat is much better now then he was for most the games earlier lifespan, widow is doing pretty well for herself. Hanzo is the best dps in the game right now.
The current menu is messy though, we do need some kind of sub-categories for damage to break it up abit.
I think Blizzard needs to take a page from Paladins and Law Breakers in Hero design.
Paladins have some of the best healers in the genre because they don’t feel like they are a Princess \ Prince that needs to be rescued.
You try and gank me when I am playing Seris on Paladins i can either escape or actually have a chance 1 on 1 since I have great self sustain.
If I am playing Zenyatta though - you gank me - I literally have no hope. LMB RoF is way to slow to take on more than 1 unit. Which means I need to charge up my RMB and pray that it hits and they don’t kill me while I slowly charge up my shots.
Those who had a chance to play Lawbreakers Healer - will know how great she was. She was some one who can put pressure on the battle field and healed those in need.
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I wish they could’ve renamed it to something more accurate like “specialists”
my fear is that they’re going to homogenize the heroes into becoming less unique for the sake of being a little more viable for every situation
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It was because the lines between the classes were becoming increasingly blurred that they made the Damage category
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Being susceptible to being jumped is Zenyatta’s defining weakness. It’s the price you gotta pay for having the best utility and best ult in the game. Even then, you have to be weary when approaching a Zen if you don’t want to get domed.
Could you imagine if Zenyatta was difficult to kill because he had some BS on-demand escape or some other crutch like some of the other supports? They’d need to nerf practically everything that made Zenyatta Zenyatta just because some people didn’t like dying.
And Lucio actually has a pretty good chance to get away if you’re good enough with wallriding.
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I don’t think the defense class made any sense. Explain to me how, say, Hanzo is a defense hero while McCree is an offense hero. The distinctions were largely arbitrary.
I think a specialist category might make sense for heroes that are not really damage heroes but played for utility - Torbjorn, Symmetra, Sombra, plus maybe some more in the future.
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Which is why Paladins have better healers.
All the healers not only have better escape methods - they also can deal damage and have fantastic utility - yet all the healers are balanced.
So yes not only can I imagine it, it literally is proven viable in another game.
Also Zenyatta’s defining weakness is his low RoF - which makes him extremely weak to high RoF enemies.
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Blizzard doesn’t hate the defense class, it’s just that it was a conceptual failure. Overwatch has no room for defense heroes, that’s why they’re so broken and we have a majority dps roster despite a balanced comp being 222. Blizzard has resigned itself to editing all the defense heroes into dps assault heroes for the sake of balance.
The defense class made lots of sense. In general, defense heroes were more able to keep control of a zone that their team already controlled, and offense heroes were more able to move into an area controlled by the enemy to take it over.
To get their respective jobs done, defense heroes generally had long range weapons and low mobility while offense heroes generally had short to mid range weapons with high mobility. In addition, offense heroes had faster or easier to use weapons while defense heroes had weapons that required charge time or setup but hit harder than their offense hero counterparts after performing the prerequisite ceremony.
In the example you used of McCree vs Hanzo, McCree has no charge time on his weapon and is free to move around at full speed at all times, without any fear that he will round a corner into someone he can’t beat in a duel up to mid range. McCree is a hero who is very capable of moving into a new space that is controlled by someone else, using both his fast-reacting primary weapon and his flashbang as an I-win button in close quarters.
By contrast, pre-rework Hanzo wanted nothing to do with close quarters and would have a much easier time keeping watch over a large zone from far away, out of the effective range of heroes like McCree. It’s hard for Hanzo to cut a corner and invade someone else’s space without presenting a target at a range where he has a disadvantage, especially because of the charge time on his shots and his slow movement while charging an arrow. However, he’s much better than McCree at sitting back behind the protection of his team and pelting the enemy with high-damage shots as they try to push through a choke point.
The new Hanzo with storm arrow does blur the line between offense and defense hero, because it allows Hanzo to push into a new space without a movement speed or DPS disadvantage on a temporary basis. The reason the new Hanzo is so much more effective is because storm arrow and his new double jump patch up his former weakness. He no longer has an exploitable weakness, which was the original problem with the defense hero cast.
With the change in heroes like Hanzo and previously Junkrat increasing their mobility and short-range damage output, and the prior mobility buff for Widowmaker, the defense class starts to make less sense. The only heroes who actually still fit well into the defense category since Symmetra’s rework gave her so much more mobility are Bastion and Torb, and Torb is getting a rework.
So… rather than fix the defense category heroes to properly perform their role of out-performing offense heroes when guarding a specific zone, Blizzard has been converting defense heroes to damage heroes by removing their weaknesses. Thus, the new naming convention. They are all just damage heroes now, even if the separate categories previously did have a reason to exist.
Only one question remains: when is Bastion getting a rework?
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Then I’m confused, what is the purpose of other Damage heroes if every healer can pose just as much of a threat in a fight while also providing substantial support? If they’re all balanced in relation to each other, that just means that every one of them is absurdly broken. We got Brigitte in this game, now imagine if every support was like Brigitte.
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The purpose of damage heroes is to have higher sustained personal damage or mobility than supports or tanks at the cost of survivability. Brigitte is strong in duels, but her sustained damage output is actually very low in addition to being range-limited. Zenyatta is still a support, but he trades survivability and healing output for damage output. Soldier: 76 is the next step into the damage dealer category, providing even less healing but providing stronger sustained and reliable damage where Zen’s projectiles would miss.
Soldier doesn’t provide enough healing to sustain a team, while Zen barely does. It is between those two heroes that the line between support and damage is drawn.
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But then, it would just mean that every support in Paladins just borders very closely to being a damage character, but instead of sacrificing anything they just get healing and damage?
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t play Paladins, but the picture this paints in my head right now is horrible.
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I haven’t played a lot of Paladins myself, but I played enough to know that every hero regenerates their health very quickly after only a few seconds out of combat. Dedicated healers are not actually needed in Paladins. Instead, they’re more like damage dealers with slower time-to-kill that make up for it with burst heals that give their allies (or themselves) a longer time-to-live.
Overwatch’s healing model is entirely different. Healing is required for most heroes to recover health in a timely manner, and healing is generally low and consistent rather than inconsistent and burst-y like it is in Paladins.
The tradeoff is that Paladins healers are playmakers that can carry a team as well as any damage hero and Overwatch healers are not, while Overwatch requires a full team to work together and does not allow one person to carry unless they are grossly outperforming everyone else in the match.
Personally, though it is far from perfect, I think Overwatch made the better design choice here. It puts the team in team shooter.
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Defense was kinda just a catch-all category for everyone who didn’t fit in “Offense,” but the problem was a lot of Defense characters (Junk, Hanzo, Widow) were being used in basically the same way as Offense… You pretty much had three offensive DPS, an off-tank, and two troll-picks that very few people used. The category had kinda lost its meaning
They did it because the line between offense and defense was being blurred more and more to the point where offense heroes were being used more on defense and defense were being used on offense.
That’s what Brigitte is.
Healers are absolutely necessary in Paladins. It’s like saying you don’t need healers in OW because there’s health packs - sure, you can theoretically get your health back, but at any skill level beyond absolutely beginner you’ll be hilariously crushed if you don’t bring a support.