Tanks are back to being broken even though it’s the role on which by far people throw the most (partly due to the nature of the role and partly due to tank players not being very win-oriented, in fact I’d say tank attracts the least win-oriented players by far)
Rein is way too strong and basically unkillable 1v1, even if you are another tank. Below Masters, Rein is bonkers and you can literally walk 1v6 into the enemy team and you will likely never get punished as you have too much HP and armor.
Dva having 300 armor is just ridiculous, it makes flankers and heroes like Soldier not great when they are already struggling.
Baptiste is just flat out broken and main responsible of this Rush meta (other one being Rein): he does too much dmg (120 DPS, for comparison Tracer, a DAMAGE character does 111), heals too much (13k/10 in GM, on par with Moira, a PURE healer), has the best cooldown in the game (Immo Field) which also rewards people for overextending and being bad. Also infinite mobility (same as Genji or Hanzo basically) with NO cooldown. For reference, Hanzo does ~100 DPS because he pays for utility like Wallclimb.
Many DPS that should never be meta (because they are extremely polarizing for the 6v6, or unfun to play against, or both) have been buffed into oblivion (Phara, Genji, Symmetra) to the point that nowadays with less than ideal supports or tanks, countering them is extremely tough.
Come to talk about support, support balancing is back to being in a terrible state, comps like Ana + Mercy, or Mercy + Zen, which used to be good, pale in front of Bap comps. On support if you wanna win from Masters+ you have to play meta which involves playing the same hero game after game which is extremely grindy and boring.
Bap is the best hero in the game and if you don’t run him and the enemy team does you will have an extremely hard time. Incidentally, this creates toxicity whenever your supports are too stubborn to swap as you need to basically hope the enemy team is bad, can’t even carry anymore when the enemy has Immo Field on cooldown and you have Anti-Nade once every 2 minutes which gets cleansed with Zarya bubbles.
Game is full of boosted players also. Heroes like Mercy should not be in the game in their current state. “But not every hero should require mechanics to rank”. The problem with this statement is that as soon as Mercy (here used as an example) shifts out of the meta, these players are still 3.8k+ and unable to play something like Baptiste or Lucio at that level. This ruins games and creates toxicity. The core of the game is flexing and playing different heroes and in spite of this, most people 1 trick on key roles like Support or Tank where you normally win through the right hero pick. To elaborate on this, climbing as support and tank is trivial, all you need to do is play a meta hero and try to do very basic stuff like block Earthshatter, have good Immo Fields. Compared to what you need to do to win as Genji (say), this is extremely trivial and can be mastered in a few hours.
Private profiles: encourage hacking and boosting players. Boosted players are MUCH worse than smurfs because a smurf can always be counterpicked or outplayed. A bad player can’t be carried. Boosted players and hackers create toxicity.
Bad matchmaking: what’s the point of shortening queue times if not only you get players offroling, but you also get a 3.7 tank in a 4k game? Stuff like this creates inconsistency. People don’t know how to play and what to expect anymore. Is your Rein gonna be aggressive or passive? Does your Rein have a general knowledge of what to expect from a 3.7 Lucio player? And how to play vs a 4k Zen player? The 3.7 tank next game can very well be put into 3.4 lobby btw.
Flex Queue: bad for obvious reasons.
What’s worse: pointing out all these issues ingame (for example having a 2900 player in a 3500 lobby) who is on Lucio and does nothing AND doesn’t swap is, according to Blizzard, toxic and bannable. Pointing out that someone had their account boosted (I ascertained this through VOD review the last occasion it happened to me) is also apparently toxic and I got a warning for asking people in the lobby to report the boosted player (in this case a Mercy main with private profile who suicided repeatedly into Hog hooks etc. and took 4 min to build ult). Blizzard wants you to enjoy throwers and not be allowed to ask ANY ounce of responsibility from teammates. Everyone should play the hero they like and it doesn’t matter if they underperform or not, unless it’s HIGH top 500 lobby, people don’t care about underperformers at all.
I am almost quitting the game, whenever I play this game, after 5-7 matches I ALWAYS get angry, in comparison CSGO, Valorant etc. are chill games and FUN games.
Why?
Well there are many reasons, but the core reason is one: in those games there is a link between personal performance and results. In Overwatch there isn’t, in fact sometimes you even get punished for playing well by an impossible team.
Incidentally, on EU, top 500 on DPS this season is 3600. The 500th spot is held by a MERCY main who never plays DPS and has like 8 hrs on Echo. In Combined, there are only 40 players who played more than 30 games on all 3 roles AND have SMS verification in the whole EU server.
Sincerely,
A flat 4k player who is about to quit the game and go back to CSGO/Valorant.