Im loving it dude. Zarya is an actual Raidboss and the dps can finally keep up with my chargehardt plays.
I’m sorry, but I did not like triple dps. There’s too much pressure on the tank player when I played a few games. When your not the tank, it feels like you are not safe, you don’t have any protection. And this kind of thing can pressure the dps players.
1 tank cannot do the roles of the off tank and main tank at the same time. You can’t expect 1 tank to do everything. Also, there is a reason why off tanks and main tanks existed in the first place. Main tanks protected the team. Off tanks peeled for their team. (since they can be compared as bigger dpses, which is why it’s kinda funny to see people argue about roadhog acting like he’s just a dps but bigger)
So, because of what I’ve experienced, I say this is a bad thing to add to the game. If you don’t agree with what I say here, which honestly had some fair points, then you guys will have to explain to me why exactly this is a good thing to put into the game (besides for lower wait times for dps role) P.S. (forgot to mention that if you have a crappy tank, there’s nothing your team can do to solve the problem, not really, unlike 2-2-2)
If they keep 1-3-2 its just going to be another gamemode I dont see why people are worrying about 2-2-2 being replaced. lul
Pros:
- (Presumably, bc I don’t know for sure) Lower DPS queue times
- Ability for ‘utility’ dps to be played more freely without the burden of taking up one of 2 dps slots.
- Easier for supports to keep up with their teammates with one less 500-600 damage sponge on the field.
- Certain tank mains appreciate the spotlight on their plays,
-Furthermore the changes to a few tanks in particular are much enjoyed and many think they’d actually do good in 2-2-2 with tweaks.
Cons-
- Many tank players agree that solo tanking isn’t very fun at all as you become the main target and don’t have the backup of another tank.
- There’s the perception (and to an extent, the reality) that whoever kills the enemy’s tank first wins the teamfight much faster.
- 1 more dps means support players are much more easily picked off.
- 3 dps players can defuse blame to the lone tank.
- The lone tank player has that much more pressure on them if things are going wrong.
- Unless your tank is playing a shield character, widowmaker, Hanzo, ashe and mccree existing makes playing feel (especially the wide open maps junkertown comes to mind immediately) extremely…hmmm… like target practice for them? Fore!?
I’ll be honest, in all of the 321 games I was in absolutely nothing exciting happened. I played DPS and support, we had a 3 stack, and rolled every game we played. Without the tank having someone else behind them to push the needle forward, and with all 3 dps off doing their own thing (each believing someone else was helping the tank), the healers split between the dps, they truly were some of the blandest games I’ve played.
I’ll admit it, I’ve played overwatch since launch, I think these were the only games I’ve ever felt bored in, especially since 2/2/2 meant that there was instantly a much better team dynamic on the whole. I do think the cons outweigh the positives for most people, including me.
While I understand the game is optimized heavily for a 6v6 environment, I do think that it would be a good idea to at least look into what resources would be needed to make it a 7v7. Several of the positives of both 222 and 321 would be in such a mode, while mitigating a lot of the negatives of them as well.
I’ve played 12 matches in 123 so far. For the first 10 I queued for all roles simultaneously. In all of the first 10 matches I’ve only been given Support. After that I filtered out Support. The 11th match was a DPS and the 12th was as Tank backfill 2 seconds before the Defeat screen. I’m primarily a Support player and among those heroes mostly Brigitte.
Supports should not have been left with their 222 nerfs for this experiment. I don’t understand how decreased healing output, survivability, etc. adjusted for 2 DPS and 2 tanks could be balanced in this setting. This is the most egregious mistake in implementing this experiment. Please consider trying some support buffs before you end this experiment.
Some of the tanks were not buffed enough. I don’t know if either supports should be buffed, tanks buffed further or both. It seems even with this chance to go crazy, you were still conservative with buffs.
With 213, the flow of the match has become something foreign. I don’t mean to say it’s bad, just something very different. Team kills have been much more frequent. A match I played in Kings Row stood out for me. We were on defense and could only properly defend when the enemy had to turn a corner. Our 3 DPS(Widow, Ashe and IIRC McCree) were spread out with varied sight lines. I was playing Brig with Moira as the other support. Our tank played Rein at the start then switched to Sigma. Our two support and the tank defended the point while the DPS punished peakers. They could not peak unless they lead with certain ults. The enemy tank was Rein and I would wait just around the corner to harass him while his shield is up, trying to bait him into attacking me. If he charged then I stunned, which left him down long enough for whoever was behind him to get picked off. If he swung then I backed up a little but never enough that I couldn’t harass him more. All the while he’s getting hit by any of my teammates at a different angle.
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I am an off-tank main, so I played five games as the (former) off-tanks, going 4-1. Here are my impressions.
- You are a raid boss. The game revolves around you. You do decent damage and have huge survivability.
- Roadhog challenges healers for gold healing. DVAs defense matrix ruins half the ults in the game. If this goes live the sea of tears from the other roles is going to be giant. Which means pressure to nerf. Which would be awful, but when has that ever mattered?
- While you are a raid boss romping around you are also incredibly one-dimensional. Flanking? Forget about it. You better be standing in front of the team, leading the death ball.
- Healing seems outright miserable. You either tunnel the tank or you are doing it wrong. This might be different with shield tanks (which I did not try), but I can’t see healers being happy when someone picks hog or DVA.
- Snipers. Are. OP. This game without shields but with snipers is going to be unfun for a lot of the player base in the long run. The “the game should be faster paced” crowd is going to regret it when the majority of the game is spent waiting in spawn and running back. Be careful what you ask for.
- Damage in general is insane. Like, crazy insane.
- In comp there is going to be huge pressure on tanks to play the-one-true-way™. Abuse for not following the norm is going to be through the roof. Something like this can be fun as a variation for QP, but the meta-or-bust crowd is going to be even more obnoxious than they already are.
- If this goes live, 1-1-4 seems inevitable. I can’t see enough people wanting to play healers in this environment to sustain 1-2-3. Healing already got the bonus rewards when I queued.
So in short you made healing even more of a chore. Tanks feel pretty good right now due to the massive power spike, but when the inevitable nerfs hit tanking will be miserable as well. The game feels very one-dimensional. Tanks are forced to play in the center, and healers are forced to hug them.
It feels like a case of winning the battle and losing the war. In the short term this will probably give the game a jolt. But it would likely accelerate the long-term decay.
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Played 9 games as DPS. Life was miserable for the healers. Didn’t see one defense hold. Felt like I was playing deathmatch FFA.
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Hello,
I want to say first that I think the addition of the experimental card is a great idea and thank you guys for making it. I am a console player and I am looking forward to trying out possible changes that are being considered before they go live.
My initial impressions of the triple damage mode is, well, I don’t really have much of an impression. What I mean is I can’t really form an opinion because aspects of the game that I find frustrating still exist and so I couldn’t really tell you the difference between 2-2-2 and 3-2-1.
In order to give you an example of what I mean by frustrating aspects I need to first explain my impression of how the game plays at my rank. At the rank I play at (which is pretty low, I am a casual player and I don’t play much FPS games) there is little to no coordination so often teammates do stuff like tanks going in by themselves (It’s not just tank players that do that though) or Supports not reacting to teammates needing healing. This results in some aspects (abilities, Ultimates, and weapon types) , which I would think is considered more balanced at higher ranks, being stronger and are more likely to get value at lower ranks.
An example of what I mean are abilities or projectiles that do high damage per hit (ex. Doomfist punch, Junkrat grenade, Junkrat mine, and Symettra photon…Ball?). these abilities/ projectiles are stronger at lower ranks because at lower ranks players have longer reaction times and don’t communicate/coordinate. This I feel results in some interactions feeling really unfair. It feels like if you spot a Doomfist or Reaper, or Junkrat you have to then stop what you’re doing and hope you can damage them enough before they get too close and all they have to do is not do something stupid.
I think lack of skill can explain some but not of all of this feeling. Widowmaker, for example, fells fine to play against. Yes, she can one shot kill you but her weapon is scoped and requires LOS at a distance. Also, Widowmaker is not great at much else other than the one shot kills so when and where she can eliminate you is limited. That does not feel like the case with Doomfist, he has a one shot kill punch that can only be blocked by a couple of characters (and I wouldn’t say it’s easy to do), he is very mobile with his abilities, he can cause disruption and knock-back, AND he gains extra shields though causing damage.
I have more examples but I will just say instead that also at my rank Mei is very, VERY strong.
like I’ve said previously, because of frustrating aspects like these I couldn’t really make out the difference between 2-2-2 and 3-2-1. From what I’ve seen from YouTube channels covering triple damage it seems like it’s a mixed bag.
And finally I would like to say that I would be interested in trying an experimental mode where Mei was moved to the tank role. I would also be interested in trying a competitive season where low ranks(bronze, silver, gold, plat let’s say) and high ranks have two different rule sets.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and making/maintaining what is (mostly) a really enjoyable game.
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First, I like the Experiment card a lot. Being able to test changes on the live server is great. Kudos for adding that to the game. Very nice.
As far as 1-3-2 goes, I played a fair amount of games across roles, including each tank at least twice (20-25 games?). There are some interesting ideas in it , but I think it’s an overall less enjoyable way to play.
Teams are too chaotic. Lethality is too high. Healing can’t keep up with damage or the positional chaos. Partially because of having more damage on the board, but also because of the healers lacking protection and being more easily killed/distracted (especially Zen). There would need to be a lot of balance changes to get 1-3-2 to work well, including improving healer self-sufficiency and lowering damage across the board.
The changes to Zarya and D.va didn’t make them able to solo tank. While they are fun to play like this, because they feel overpowered, they aren’t going to work as solo tanks. Zarya is a support tank who needs to keep allies in her field of view to bubble them, which she cannot do and frontline at the same time. D.va similarly needs to position properly right behind the frontline to use Defense Matrix and have the freedom to fly around to harass, both of which conflict with frontlining. Neither Zarya’s nor D.va’s kit feels right on a frontline hero. You can certainly buff the numbers until they can stand in the frontline with careless disregard for incoming fire, but that’s not good design.
Hog on the other hand, has potential. The gas cloud is a good tank skill, once you figure out that you need to use breather differently. However, he needs another ability that lets him push without building enemy ults and without leaving him vulnerable to CC. It doesn’t have to have a barrier per se, but he needs an ability that fills that role. If you merge his primary/secondary attack into a single attack that would free up a slot for another tank skill. For example: making temporary scrap metal walls, lobbing gas grenades that obscure enemy vision and slow projectiles, etc.
I’ll have more to say at some later point, but I think regardless of what happens with this experiment you should consider reworking Hog into a main tank. It feels good to play Hog on the frontline and it doesn’t ruin his familiar play style at all. It’s just kind of better, in my opinion.
Also, I think it’s worth trying the middle ground between 1-3-2 and 2-2-2. By which I mean having 1-3-2 or 2-2-2 queues with Tank, Support, Damage, and Healer roles. Where Support is Zarya, D.va, Sym, Mei, and Sombra. For 1-3-2, this would mean Support in the Damage queue; max 1 Support per team (to avoid GOATS 2.0) but you could have no Supports in your comp if you wanted. For 2-2-2, this would mean Support in the Tank queue and you’d have to have 1 Tank and 1 Support. Either would let you have something similar to 1-3-2 queues without making Tanks raid bosses, without double barriers, and without triple off-tank comps. Of course, the cost is a slightly more confusing hero select screen, but that seems not such a big deal to me.
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I won’t bother with the obvious balance issues that sort of make my head hurt (such as who thought aoe bubble or rein’s hammer suddenly doing more damage for no reason was a good idea).
The biggest problem I see right now is that EVERYONE, not just tanks or supports, has to change the way they play to be successful. This is especially true when playing with re-worked off-tanks. When you queue up expecting to run the same playstyle you were used to for 2-2-2, it doesn’t work as well.
Despite the preponderance of negative feedback, I think it could work, given enough time for people to adapt.
Should it? That’s a harder question. I think it’s a very bad slippery slope to start down randomly swapping out formats like this. Part of what makes a good competitive e-sport is stability in terms of rules and game format, above all else. Role lock was a necessary and positive change for the overall good of the game. This doesn’t mean the meta, this means what the “game” you watch played in professional matches is. Football doesn’t change the rules; so you don’t have to keep up on the latest weird rule about how the field is now twice the length it used to be or how there are now two balls and two quarterbacks.
That’s not to say the current system is not without issues. One of the major problems with 2-2-2 is that “off-tanks” and “main tanks” play very differently and have different responsibilities on a successful team, plus there is significant blurring between what an “off-tank” is and what a “damage” hero is.
Perhaps the correct solution to the problem is to genuinely create a new role, the “damage-tank” if you will, and move to a 1-1-2-2 format. An absolutely necessary factor here is that several heroes would need to be moved over to this role from BOTH the tank AND damage pools. This could include heroes like roadhog and zarya as well as mei, torbjorn, or reaper.
It would simply be a matter of adjusting the durability and abilities of the DPS heroes to fit the new role. As it stands, the DPS pool is significantly larger than the other two. Wouldn’t this be a more ideal solution, anyway?
Finally, allowing for a more easily understood conceptual change, you can then rename the roles according to what function they perform. Rather than “tank”, you now have your “front-line” heroes. The “damage-tank” would become your “mid-line” heroes and the remaining damage pool would become your “back-line” heroes. Supports can obviously be called “support line” or something similar.
Obviously, mobile damage heroes do not exactly fit with “back-line”, but it’s just a general idea.
Basically, there are a lot of ways you could approach the distribution of roles. I actually don’t think the old way of separating out offense/defense damage hero roles was terrible, either. But the game will never and can never be balanced as long as we are not clear on what the “game” is.
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I actually played it and to be honest it didn’t feel good. It felt like tanks were really difficult to kill and it felt like fights dragged out for too long. The game felt more annoying than competitive to me but if you want to share please do. If you want to read more about how I feel here you go-https://twitter.com/Agent2904/status/1218417039473287168?s=19
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I love the new tank reworks and I would absolutely love for them to find a way to incorporate them into the game somehow (I’ve never had so much fun trying to out heal the healers as hog). But I have to agree it’s just a mess. Solo tanking even as a buffer tank is just so stressful and healers are just to vulnerable with 3 dps diving them. Was a fun concept tho and again I do like the tank changes, just hate the way 1,3,2 plays. Kind of just appeals to the dps getting to rek everyone. But hey, queue times were fixed so there’s that lmao
I don’t think that’s a realistic option. It splits the players further, and more importantly, it mean maintaining separate balance for different pvp modes. That seems difficult to sustain over the long term.
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so you nerf tanks to the ground and now you want to make it so that theres only 1. You do know that 3 dps will melt a single tank regardless of what buffs you give them. Get your act together blizzard. seriously. Maybe start to rethink your creative staff rather than rethink Overwatch.
Rein and Zarya OP;
132 made the team hard to ensemble/call targets/regroup;
3 dps = more emphasis on individual performance than group work;
supports (especially ana & bap) find it hard to give heals when everyone is everywhere.
Feels like dps players having their fun, other roles being pressured a lot. I definitely will not main the tank role in 132.
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As a main tank it’s just plain awful. The best thing about 2-2-2 was the fact that you couldn’t be just completely shut out by everything. Start doing good as any tank and you will see (Mei, Sombra, McCree, Reaper etc) to stop that quickly, not to mention any other CC from the other roles.
If this is going to work at all, we need diminishing returns on CC (Please also add in the live version for the love of god!), and the tanks need to be buffed - some more than others. Orisa, the only one with any kind of CC resistance is unplayable.
Also, if one of your DPS is struggling at all it feels impossible to do anything (Some examples including: Uncontested widow. Being immediately burst down as a tank. Doomfist moping your whole team.) All while it’s impossible to counter pick as a solo tank, let’s say they have Widow, Reaper and Tracer - Can’t go Winston, can’t go Rein, can’t go Hog, can’t go DVA, maybe Zarya or Hamster, but then they swap the tracer for Sombra / Mei and then GG. (Please note Sigma and Orisa are unplayable.)
Really the game is mostly fine how it is, and it worth waiting for a balanced game that’s fun for everyone. How about instead trying a Reward system for que flexing as a DPS?
Example - 2 tank games from start to finish and be rewarded a priority que for DPS for 1 game. To ensure that people don’t try and stack these you could make the condition reset after a full-DPS game (not when they back fill for games where people have left), or if you quit early, then you would have to play 2 more tank games for the priority que. More people playing tank = faster DPS ques.
- Also I think we need to separate High-leveled Rank play from lower tiers and give it its own solution.
Tldr; **** this mode, might as well go back to QP Classic.
I’m sure there’s a more complicated, but better solution for DPS que time.
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I think a better solution would be to make the tanks be a bigger impact, clutch potential and over all highten the skill ceiling.
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If this 1-3-2 ever becomes the role lock for comp, I would 100% give up on Overwatch and move on to another game. Punishing tanks and supports because people want to play DPS is not the answer.
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