The problem is that this is the natural conclusion of two years of trying to fix every balance problem with “moar DPS”.
- Dva got reworked from a “backup tank” to a “bulky DPS” that can do a DPS’s job but with more sustain, which is a theme we’ve seen repeated with off-tanks in general over the past year.
- Defensive abilities and playstyles have been systematically pruned away, which lowers the game’s TTK (time to kill) even further
- We’ve gotten several more one-shots added to the game, but minimal counterplay to them.
- The mobility creep (dive meta) was “fixed” by adding a bunch of cc instead of fine-tuning mobility heroes as needed, which traded one creep for another.
- The cc creep has enabled a ton of quick kill combos, with no consistent counters to it (Zarya bubble’s uptime is too low to be a consistent cc counter).
It’s gotten so bad that you need to play tanks - heroes with health pools big enough that they have a chance to survive these one-shots and quick-kill combos - just to be able to play the game instead of wasting most of the match staring at the kill cam and playing a “walking back from spawn” simulator.
There’s also the issue that off-tanks have been turned into fat dps that do everything dps heroes can do and more, making any DPS a direct downgrade from a so-called “off tank”.
Healers come as a package deal with tanks.
If we want DPS heroes to be relevant again, off-tanks need to be brought back to their roots: beefy, hard to kill quickly, but not enough damage to justify replacing the DPS in the team comp.
57 Likes
Everything and nothing is the culprit of GOATS
that’s what I’ve learned here anyway
6 Likes
Brig got her “oneshot” removed and Doomfist was nerfed into the ground, now he’s the worst hero in the game.
What oneshots are still causing this meta? Pretty sure it’s just the insane healing and armor
16 Likes
Widow and Hanzo (ignoring the fact that healers die just as fast as DPS to a good old head click lul)
The whole “DPS push themselves out of the meta” is a myopic suggestion that only serves to let people not have to face that tanks and healers are and always have been more important in organized play than damage dealers
12 Likes
I’d have to agree, snipers are essentially the most picked dps, and besides that, there is too much dmg in the game to have a good reason to dps. Tanks can easily do just as much damage as dps or at least kill just as much, so why pick dps?
Would also make sense why mercy is looked at as bad. That’s mostly because she cant heal tanks, but she’s great healing dps. Too bad picking dps is a throw if goats is around.
1 Like
Healing very much is the culprit. The amount of burst healing in the game enables tanks to dive in and out without sacrificing much in the process.
It’s the same reason Ana enabled triple/quad tank after her release
8 Likes
Perhaps Goats is simply the unforeseen end result of the philosophy of the game itself…
In creating a game where all these abilities exists…its hard for balance to truly be fair.
3 Likes
Snipers. Snipers are required because burst damage is the only thing effective with all the free healing around. There is also the fact that both snipers have high and rapid damage output. Hanzo can burst down an Orisa barrier faster than Junkrat can while still maintaining the ability to headshot. Things like that push other heroes out of the meta.
Healing needs to be toned down and all of the snipers need their firerate hit hard.
5 Likes
i actually expected you to point out that the culprit is simply the fact that Overwatch’s primary dps enabler is underpowered
you know, Mercy?
4 Likes
There is no single cause, every thing is to blame. Dmg creep lead to healer creep, Burst dmg creep lead to having to be a tank just to have something to heal. Further inability to heal fast enough to keep people alive has lead to needing 3 support.
So no I really don’t think Support are over powered and it’s causing the meta. If anything it’s a sign they are too weak that you need 3 support on a team to keep them alive.
If anything healing needs a buff, BUT only if they also rework how it over laps a bit. Make it so two separate sources of healing don’t stack in some way.
16hps healing is absolute garbage on it’s own against abilities that do 300-600 dmg in 2 seconds or less.
5 Likes
Make her damage boost be a 500% increase
Everything is fixed yo
To be fair the bulk of the CC stuff was in the game before Brigitte was released. Then we got Brigitte and the wheels came off bus. The only hero or CC added after that was Wball and I guess Ashe’s coach gun but neither of them have pushed any real shifts in game play, not really. A good Wball can be annoying but it’s not -and you’re dead- out of no where in most cases. He also has a lot of decent play/counter option in game so I don’t see too many people having a huge issue with him.
After all, he is a rather fat target to hit.
IMO the issue was launch Brigitte. She was an over kill level of fix for dive/flankers. As she launched so over tuned she also countered pretty much every high rate of fire DPS with her armor and her zero counter play stun had way too much impact on non-dive heroes.
I still think her launch state and bull in a china shop style of play did serious damage to the goodwill of the player base.
I also suspect on some level the balance team was blind sided by goats and the over all power of the 3-3 meta. Keep in mind this is the same balance team that felt launch Brigitte was 100% ok, when clearly she wasn’t as we got something like 7 or 8 balance patches in a row.
Yet even now she still is a key part of the one of the most smothering metas we have ever seen in this game.
I’m not sure how any of this gets fixed as all my ideas would be drastic changes that I can see happening (forced hero limits or maybe hero bans) but not in time for OWL S2.
3 Likes
Nah, it is a healing. A lot of constant and reliable AoE healing.
Exactly the opposite. TTK outside of few one-shot mechanics is incredibly long. That is what makes Goats so strong - it dies much slower than it kills.
14 Likes
December 8th his pick rate was 2.44%, so, slightly below average.
Now it’s plummeted to 0.71% on competitive.
3.2% to 1.3% on QP.
This is a catastrophic fall. Developers took it too far, which is weird because it doesn’t seem like they changed all that much… but Doomfist is one of those heroes who’s on a knife-edge of viability.
4 Likes
Tanks just do more overall damage than DPS more consistently and they have larger health pools. Plain and simple. You need 3 supports to keep those 3 tanks alive because of how much HP they have. Plus u need movement speed from Lucio and a stun from Brig to add in more cc.
11 Likes
If they limited Healers to 2 per team in OWL/Comp, then GOATs and TankyComps like QuadTank wouldn’t be a problem.
Why would such an arbitrary limitation be put on the game?
It doesn’t solve the issue, just ignores it for a 0.000001% of the playerbase.
It’s not healers. It’s tanks lol. They do more damage than DPS. Take Damage away from tanks and DPS become a requirement to have.
2 Likes
exactly. people needing three supports doesnt mean they are op, it means they need the triple healing to even survive.
i still think some tanks in this game do way too much damage, so they can play like fat dps. and like you said, their big health pools require lots of healing, which incidentally overlaps well with AOE healers and ana. its really more a coincidence than anything. if the healers had different healing mechanics (for example if we only had a single AOE healer, or more stationary healers, etc) then goats couldnt exist because they couldnt sustain their fat HP pools.
healing isnt too strong, its more of the synergy being too strong. its not a single hero at fault, its the fact that theyre all in the same game.
5 Likes
It’s both, but fixing the tank issue would be a lot harder than just limiting Healers to 2, and redesigning Brig.