6v6 was more chill and tactical, I prefer a more chill playstyle and it clicked with me.
5v5 has it’s moments but kinda meh after 2-3 games per log in.
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I wouldn’t even call 6v6 chill. I don’t feel more pressure from OW2 as much as I feel more mindlessness from it. 6v6 was about calculations and tactics, and you had a lot of setup to do, that’s what made it great. You had so much to do before, during, and after fights. Now it’s a shootfest with 0 teamwork needed.
Sure it’s “faster” but if you’re going there, just remove all the objectives and make a giant deathmatch instead of OW. It’s already halfway there.
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I like it, i feel like its the optimal player count for a moba style game, afterall, all moba games are 5v5 , why does Overwatch somehow needs 1 more on each team, even though OW is a mix team-shooter, it just feels quite right.
The BIG issue, obviously is that tank play is still the most important but much more noticeable now when its up to only 1 player to carry the whole role and its role balance is ridiculously important and off right now.
6v6 was better, IMO.
5v5 means Tanks had to be wildly overbuffed for balancing reasons, which means Tank diff is a bigger factor than ever–and there’s no second person to average it out. While sometimes that works in your favor, it also means there are a lot of instances in which I felt powerless to flip the tide of a battle or match because my team’s tank, unfortunately, either was just not as good as the opponent’s or was playing a hero who wasn’t an ideal pick (i.e. Doomfist, Hammond, JQ).
Tank diff and fewer players on teams also mean a lot of matches tend to be very stompy. In the matches I played, very few games felt reasonably well matched–I would guess around 80-90% of them were a flat-out domination by one team or the other. That’s not overly interesting to me. Some of that is attributable to the matchmaker, but also, a lot of it is simply that having fewer players on your team means losing a player is more critical. Overwatch developers promised more impact, but the asterisk & small text they neglected to mention is that this includes your ability to negatively impact your team, and 5v5 only further magnified that from 6v6.
5v5 also lends itself to weird match flow. You’ll get lots of action, then long periods of nothing really happening. While you could get that in 6v6, team fights tended to last longer and have more back-and-forth, which I find infinitely more interesting than “roll in, merc or get merc’d, wait for the next encounter.” That’s again related to tank diff & having fewer players–losing a player, especially your tank, means your team likely folds pretty quickly. I guess it’s “faster paced” in that team fights are a lot quicker, but overall it feels like there’s less interesting stuff going on during the match.
Also, again, tying back to Tank diff & the conversion of Tanks to a state suitable to 5v5… having a single tank has also adversely impacted the Support & DPS roles, for a few reasons. Now, the optimal strategy probably 4/5 times is to just throw all your Support abilities at your Tank & let it go to town. DPS can’t kill the Tank in this way, which feels bad, so they’re incentivized to go after Supports, who received relatively few meaningful adjustments to deal with that problem. That feels bad for Supports. The reduction to one Tank also means supports have no secondary partner to peel as the Tank generally is running to the frontline, which further aggravates the problem, and pushes the onus for peeling onto DPS (who are incentivized to flank & go for Support picks) and your partner Support (who is incentivized to be focusing on the Tank). You wind up with this very gnarly scenario, then, where DPS & Supports both often feel like they’re not receiving the proper team support, and the Tank is more-or-less dictating the outcome of the match.
Looking retrospectively, which is of course useless because Blizzard rarely will admit a mistake, it would’ve been better to focus on making CC adjustments & also targeting specific points of burst damage/transferring tank defenses from barriers to stronger transient defenses, both of which basically happened anyway with 5v5 but didn’t require the shift to 5v5. That alone would’ve rotated the game from being barrier slugfests to something more akin to the 2018-era pre-GOATS deathballs & rush comps that were common in most ranks, which I think most people would’ve found acceptable. That also wouldn’t have created the dramatic and negative fluctuations in Support players experiences which now, unsurprisingly to anyone with more than two functioning neurons, are leading to yet another Queue time bottleneck despite this game supposedly having more players than OW1 ever did, if Blizzard is to be believed.
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If the only problem is “tank diffing” all they gotta do imo, is focus on the tank balance, its not necessary for them to be this strong for the game’s balance and the overrall enjoyment of the game.
I’d argue that has been the case since the move to RQ really all the way back, but less noticeable since it was in the hands of two players still and people kinda just turned their brains off when playing the game, to realize such issues.
Think about it, why was it that they even moved to a 2/2/2 game mode?
Well, the sheer amount of players now compared to the end of OW1 is testament to the popularity is 5v5. It’s not like much else changed, and there are way more o people playing now .
That’s kinda where I was going with my simple comment lol
In a sense, yeah, RoleQ means that inter-role balance is no longer as important as intra-role balance… however, I think Tanks do need generally outsized impact to function from an enjoyment perspective in 5v5. One of the most common frustrations in OW1 was that Tanks felt like they couldn’t stand up to the enemy team & simply melted, and I think nerfing Tanks runs the risk of conjuring that issue again. You could argue for reductions in Tank offense, too, but Blizzard did actually try that in an experimental (amazing that they actually tested an idea such as that with the community). It wasn’t an overly popular direction–while Tank players liked being able to actually survive a few hits, they didn’t like feeling like they couldn’t kill anything & were stuck as stalling sponges.
Overbuffing Tanks is kind of a necessary evil in 5v5, unless you basically want to undermine the entire reason Blizzard argued the shift to 5v5 was necessary. And while I do think you could address some of the issues with 5v5 by weakening Tanks & reducing Tank diff, it’s not a silver bullet and still leaves a considerable part of the core issue unsolved.
According to Blizzard, because of long-standing requests to implement some kind of role limit system over frustrations with bad match quality wherein players would play too many or too few of a given role (famously, too many DPS). A lot of people think it was GOATS, but if you are to believe Blizzard about their own timeline of when they began working on RoleQ, it started before GOATS was a thing–Jeff indicated it started in around April 2018, and GOATS didn’t really show up in a meaningful way until a couple of months later. While I’m sure you could make a pretty convincing argument to not take Blizzard at their word–I wouldn’t blame you–the reality is by their own claim, GOATS wasn’t a factor until they had already decided to implement the system.
Despite seeing the flaws, I still prefer it to 6v6. Mostly because of less barriers in play, and because playing as the tanks is more fun.
Well of course it’s more popular…
IT’S FREE 
I made a friend a month ago in OW2 and they said they thought OW1 looked interesting and had other friends that played it but didn’t want to pay the $20-40 price tag so they didn’t buy it. That alone will turn away more people. Free? what is there to lose!
Give it a few months and see how well 5v5 does. My IMO it’s gonna turn away more players than 6v6.
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Much better, IF tanks were not buffed so much. Less barriers the better.
I prefer 6v6, but it’s not that big of a deal to me.
Tanks are braindead to play now. DPS is a lot more chaotic, which I find less fun. Support is hell.
I find myself slowly warming up to it…only to be completely dominated by widow and hog players who don’t miss. Then I switch off to another game.
2 Likes
I enjoy it as much as 6v6. I miss having the 6th player, im glad i dont have to fight double shield anymore
Not “overbuffing” them, buffing them in the sense that they dont need the help of a off/main buddy is the necessary evil, not overbuffing their stats that dont mean a thing other than just making them overly strong when its not needed.
Either way, GOATS was an issue because… when you get down to it all, tanks are just the stronger characters and even when put on same player count limit, even then still stood out as the stronger role.
And while, its a necessary evil, for their whole existence in the first place, that they are the strongest role, there is a just right balance, where we are NOT at, where they are just strong enough to be fun and effective while not being too much a burden when not played well.
And so, there should be an argument to be made that they shouldnt be buffing tanks (specially the meta ones) and instead be nerfing them until we hit said right balance line.
Then, 5v5’s big boned role issue at the very least, would be less of an issue and the actual necessary evil its supposed to be.
If you’re a support player, it’s a miserable slugfest with no teamwork, no peels, and no objectives except dive enemy support as fast as possible. Pick Moira/Kiriko/Ana and DPS/nade or you lose.
If you’re not a support player, it’s the dream battle royale you’ve been waiting for.
It’s basically the same to me.
nah I like it, but maybe I’m biased bc I am anxious in general and didn’t use the voicechat at all (+being a woman). So instead of communicating I just know the vibes of what to do you know. I can’t play Junkrat as well due to less shields tho, but even as a tank main, I like it a lot more like this.
I’m a support top 500 main bozo
5v5 is a side grade change with its own problems. Once again the reworks are iffy or plain bland.
Obstacles that are part of strategy went out the window.
Now its more twitchy duels. So far I don’t find it amazingly fun.
I have just gotten to level 60 on the free bp. Basically I play it less than I did OW1. My friends came back to check it out, but never touched it again.