I don’t think any of that has much impact on making people want to play Tank, aside from maybe Mei nerfs.
No, they literally have nerfed power creep. In some cases too hard, aka Mei.
Dealing with power creep is a much broader issue than just trying to get people to play a particular role.
As for tanking, I’ll say this. As much as the CC sweeping nerfs have hurt Ana and McCree, they sure have made playing Ball better. And quite frankly, no tank likes getting CCed.
I don’t see how they can make tanking more palatable to the community. It seems to be the least desirable role, and no amount of changes will make it desirable. Unless they change every tank hero into raid boss mode, but that would change the entire game (ie. 1/3/2)
It’s pretty simple.
Make the least popular role more similar to the most popular role.
As to how to do it. My preferred method is increasing the kill potential on Rein/Orisa/Sigma. And the way to do it with the least side effects, is to just speed up the projectiles on those Tanks by about 20%.
- More shooting stuff in an FPS directly translates to Fun.
- Doesn’t increase the firepower dealt against Barriers. (Which would cause inflation for how durable they would need to be).
- Near useless at close range. And I figure the counter to DoubleBarrier should be at close range. Whatever they design it to be. But it’s probably going to be Dive.
Not such a simple fix, if you think about what each role’s intended goal is.
Tank’s goal is to soak damage and protect the squishier teammates.
Damage goal is to delete the enemies.
Being a protector is not as fun as being a deleter.
And if you make tanks more lethal, you push damage role into ‘pick whatever you want cuz the tanks will carry anyways’.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think your suggestion is so easily implemented.
Show me an example of any FPS that has a hero like that.
The way I figure, they mostly don’t exist.
And that that concept of “sturdy but boring” is trying to shoehorn RPG logic into an FPS.
(With clearly pretty horrible results, so far for Overwatch.)
The way I see it, the additional Tank players would have to primarily come from former DPS players.
Any other approach isn’t going to have a big enough effect to matter.
While I agree, to an extent, that the tank role in an FPS feels awkward, I don’t know any other way to see it.
Blizzard used that nomenclature ‘tank, dmg, support’ which is a direct relation to RPG. We, as gamers, are used to tanks filling the role as protector.
Making tanks peform more like dps will relegate the damage role to a ‘just play whatever’.
… I like Doomfist. Sometimes, you just want a little Street Fighter in your Overwatch! Two great tastes that taste great together.
Seriously. Fire up some Street Fighter II tunes and rock on with Doomfist. You’ll have a lot of fun. Super Street Fighter II Turbo Arcade Music - Ryu Stage - CPS2 - YouTube
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I mean, there’s plenty of examples of “Heavies” in other FPS games. Which is analogous of our current offtanks.
And also of there’s less pressure on DPS to play meta, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. However the higher the ELO goes, any advantage is going to matter.
But it might push the average ELO of Tank players up a bit. But tbh, there’s an extreme shortage of Tank players at higher ranks, so that’s not such a bad thing.
I can accept if the tank role was modified to be a beefier dps, or ‘heavies’, but the names would have to change.
We can’t call them tanks anymore.
I’d be ok if they radically switched up OW roles though. Remove the concept of tanking, and have ‘heavy dps’ ‘light dps’ and ‘support dps’.
Heavy dps are the slower dmg dealers that don’t have hypermobile abilities, but a lot of protecting abilities that can peel and save teammates.
Light dps are the faster hyper mobile dmg dealers that can’t save teammates, but mostly focus on deleting enemies.
and support dps, well function currently.
I forgot he did that. 
The way I see it
- Equal firepower for offtanks and barrier tanks.
- Less survival for barrier tanks when they aren’t using their barriers. Especially at close range.
- Stronger barriers (Which can be bypassed by getting into close range)
- (Optional) Decrease the cooldowns for OffTank peeling abilities.
I can’t say I agree, but I do understand what you mean.
I do think
these changes will make Barrier tanks too binary to balance.
Tbh, without some extensive gimmick, the only way I see a variety of strong SingleBarrier choices, without DoubleBarrier being meta. Is if DoubleBarrier is weak at close range.
Since it’s near untouchable at medium/long ranges.
Also by having a difference in close range survival of offtanks and main tanks. It ensures the usage of offtanks, and makes DoubleOffTank less of a throw comp.
Got a lot more detail on what I had in mind, if you’re interested.
I mean Jeff Kaplan doesn’t really have a clue what’s going on so I wouldn’t really take what he says too seriously. I have yet to see him say something insightful or intelligent related to this game. Kind of the problem with choosing a lead dev with zero background in competitive fps games to make the calls and is the reason balance is in such an awful state currently.
Hopefully one of those new heroes is a reworked Symmetra… lol
Genji
Shuriken
- General: Damage increased from 28 to 30
- Secondary Fire: Spread reduced from 12 to 9
Deflect
- Duration increased from 1.5 to 2 seconds
- Can now be cancelled manually
It wasn’t a tweet, it was an interview from a Thai gaming website that was posted on 15 Nov 2017.
You’d be on your own.
Jeff confirmed Echo was the final hero for this year.