DPS Q times are the reason the game is dying, lets face it

General Discussion
507

That reasoning kinda falls flat for WoW when you realize that:

  1. Ever since WotLK or Cata (I forgot the exact expansion), you can have 2 specializations between which you can swap on the fly.
  2. for the longest time, the most efficient way for leveling was spamming dungeons, meaning that leveling tanks or supports was actually faster than leveling a DPS (since your queue times would be very short). That only changed a few years ago when they revamped the leveling system and now with shadowlands they implemented some system that allows new characters to basically skip almost the entire leveling process.
  3. specifically for tanks: there have been several xpacs/patches where tank specs actually did more damage than damage specs.

ps: yeah I know, I’m late to this thread, but it’s still going on for some reason.

The evidence for that is every game ever that has the DPS-tank-support division.

508

It doesn’t fall apart for WoW.

Look at the number of classes you can DPS with. Compare that to tank or Support.

Again, there is a CRAZY difference in build options between the 3.

More so, they very much suffer from “a lot of people start as support, and then drop out to become DPS”, you compare the number of tanks / support in the low level areas to the mid level ones. Where did the tank and support players go? Well, grinding content for them is a lot slower. Yes, they can raid, but, the PvE situation is pretty dire.

Like when I was building match makers for MMOs the thing which struck me the most was that there was a LOT of players who started tanking and supporting characters, but the drop off rate of people playing them was massive.

It wasn’t that people didn’t want to play them, because the new hero numbers showed that they did, it was that you couldn’t keep them playing them.

Early Overwatch was like this as well, it was FLOODED with Mercy players. It was a serious problem that you would end up with a lot of games where it was “we have 3 mercy mains… GG”

But we couldn’t keep them. the difference between Tank and Support and DPS queues kept getting worse as time went on, which is how we got PriQueue.

The point is, we can’t keep them, because early / mid game sucks so hard for them.

They are extremely team dependant, but, if you don’t have teams which work well with them, then you are going to have a bad time of it.

That sucks if you are going to balance the game around the areas where you can rely on teams. Because yeah, you will nerf the hell out of them to make them average in GM / OWL, but below that where the teams just don’t work as well together? Well, they won’t be fun to play.

So we lose them. Which is why we have priqueue now.

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509

That is one of the reasons why I wasn’t against the 2-2-2 limitation if it would be OWL/Contenders only (and maybe Comp), because they were the only ones that could actually make use of multiple tanks in the same team.

As pretty much anyone who ever played Reinhardt for any extensive amount of time can say, the matches where you have a Zarya coordinated with you, or a main healer focusing on keeping you alive make the whole tank role a blast to play.

It start sucking when you notice that people are walking in front of your shield and don’t follow you when you push against the enemy team. When that happens, you swap to tanks that requires less team coordination to work, which is where characters like D.va, Zarya, Roadhog and Wrecking Ball become popular.

It don’t help as well when after you witness one of those kind of fights and swap off Rein, suddenly everyone on the team is complaining that you swapped off and put the blame of the lost teamfights on you.

510

The trick is to never pick him in the first place.

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511

We actually could, but…certain rework happened.

Mainly because we pushed to make heroes more similar, while at the same time trying to make game faster. Which meant many nerfs to tanks and supports, that slow game down.

It’s fine to have support depend on individual players(I still remember when 60 hps were enough to help my 76 win fight against clearly more skilled 76), but once you try to make them depend on multiple players, everything comes crashing down.

More players have to work together for something, less probable whole scenario becomes. Queue times issue wasn’t unavoidable, it was direct result of balance policies.

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512

You guys do realize the game was “dying” like 2 years before a “dps queue” even existed right?

We can argue about the state of the game…w/e…but the dps queue is not THE reason…

It’s got deeper issues and most people aren’t capable of realizing that they have more to do with US than the game itself

The dps queue is only a problem because people insist(ed) on playing the game a specific way…it only exists because blizz decided to cave to people selfish demands

Like the very people that think the dps queue is a huge problem are more than likely the reason it even exists in the first place

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513

Every game, starting two weeks after their launch, is in a perpetual state of “dying” until eventually it happens for real.

514

2-2-2 needed to go into the game for everyone because how would OWL players practice in Ranked if it uses a completely different system than they were using in the OWL? They cannot spend every day in scrims. There was literally no other way to do this.

GOATS was an issue because they added Brig into the game. I just don’t think Brig is a well-designed hero for a game like this, and she absolutely was beyond OP when she was first put in. Her healing mechanics, the way her bash interacted with other characters (bashing through barriers/shields), the way her armor persisted, the fact that her personal barrier was too strong, etc.

There could be no GOATs without Brigitte. She enabled that, and once it popped up there is nothing they really could do to stop it because fundamentally she was just too strong in those types of comps. This is why GOATS persisted despite nerfs. All the nerfs did was make the comp more susceptible to being countered by DPS stacking comps - assuming the DPS were elite-level on those picks.

I am not sure OWL was any more entertaining to watch under 2-2-2 when teams were running Mei/Reaper or Mei/Hanzo and double barrier or Orissa/Hog… It was still boring AF.

515

Tank is only boring if you’re bad.