Here's why the armor change is so bad (Deep Dive)

General Discussion
1

Anyone that takes the time to look will find pretty immediately that the armor change results in armor tanks taking a LOT more damage from almost every source in the game, except, funnily enough, other tanks. See this resource for a breakdown: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ZpWx7n0Zr7ga67A8BX14mBlSybYl8h3Cw4ObUzGqrkA/htmlview#

But let’s dive into why this is so problematic.

Let’s compare armor to HP for a moment. Say you have a 600 HP tank, and a tank with 420 armor. At 30% reduction, these two tanks both will die after you’ve dealt 600 damage to them. So what’s the difference between 420 armor and 600 HP? There are two primary advantages that the 420 armor hero has over the 600 hp hero

  1. Armor generates less ultimate charge
    In this instance, if you kill the 600 HP hero, you are getting ult charge for 600 points of damage. But with armor, you’re only getting ult charge for 420 points of damage, meaning you’re generating ult charge 30% slower.

  2. Armor is easier to heal.
    As a support, if you’re trying to heal the 600 HP tank, you need to heal all 600 points. But for the 420 armor, even though they have to deal 600 points of damage, you only have to heal 420 points of damage. Meaning you’re healing about 40% faster than you would be for straight HP.

This is the primary reason that the old armor mattered. It meant tanks with a lot of armor were easier to heal back to full and were less ult-farmy than non-armor tanks.

Under the new system, you lose both of these benefits against the vast majority of non-tanks. This becomes particularly problematic when we start factoring in the DPS passive which was (for reasons I frankly can’t even begin to understand) buffed back to 20%.

Let me put it in context this way. Say there’s an ashe shooting an armored tank.
Against old armor, ashe would do 30% less damage, but against new armor, it’s just 5 less damage a bullet. Let me show you the calcs of how this plays out:

Old armor: Ashe does 80 DPS to the tank.
New armor: Ashe does 108 dps to the tank.

So in the old system, healers would only need to pump 80 healing per second to negate the damge, but now it’s bumped up to 108.

But wait, there’s more. Because of the 20% healing debuff, you’re only healing 80% on the tank the whole time. So let’s look at a seasonal breakdown. This is how much healing a support would need to do to keep up with Ashe’s damage against an armored target:

Season 8: 80 healing per second
Season 9: 100 healing per second
Season 9 Midseason: 135 healing per second

And that’s just to deal with the concentrated fire of one hero whose DPS is frankly on the low side. Let’s run these calcs with a Junkrat instead:

Season 8: 87.5
Season 9: 109
Season 9 Midseason: 150

This is why the armor changes are so problematic. They stack very heavily with the DPS passive, making it almost impossible to sustain tanks in combat. Armor tanks are balanced around the presence of this damage reduction that no longer exists, and now they are less able to play the game because their HP bars can’t be sustained nearly as effectively.

As a tank player, I think it’s a problem that tanks are so dang reliant on healing. But they are. And without a MUCH bigger rebalance to the game, nerfing incoming healing this hardcore is just making the role even more miserable.

This is why the armor changes are so bad.

24 Likes
2

This is definitely an interesting read. I am not entirely sure how this plays into practice because I have not noticed a huge difference myself. Probably because I have a barrier to compensate for my poor decision making. Either that, or the fact that support players are usually just stellar to begin with and I ain’t need to worry about none of that because they are doing the heavy lifting. :joy:

4 Likes
3

The new armor mechanics removes 5 damage per hit, up to a max 50% damage reduction. This means that rapid fire hits that deal 10 or less damage per instance have their damage dealt values cut in half. Bigger hits from larger caliber weapons like Widow’s sniper rifle, Cass’s Peace Maker, Phara’s rockets, etc. will only have 5 damage taken away, so a single 100dmg hit from the latter deals 95dmg after armor is applied. This does not include tank critical head shot damage being reduced 25% after the critical multiplier.

This is a direct nerf vs. small caliber rapid fire or shotgun type characters like Sombra, Tracer, Reaper, JQ, Soldier, Sojourn’s primary fire, etc. when shooting tanks. Widow, Hanzo, Ashe, Cass, Phara, Junkrat, and other slower firing, harder hitting characters will deal more damage per shot vs. tanks, but their slower ROF will also be another factor.

4

I’ll tell you why it’s good: to even out each health type’s contribution to survivability while keeping their advantages intact. Armor reducing all damage by 30% basically meant armor heroes had a passive tank cd active as long as they had armor health. This is why Orisa was so far ahead of the other tanks for survivability, she basically had three tank cd’s. With that gone, the survivability between the tanks can more easily be balanced without having to resort to monstrous numbers for non-armor tanks to keep up with armor tanks. Now, the dynamic is armor being good against small bits of damage, shields having useful regen in combat, and health allowing for more in-combat sustain to be put in kits. It allows each type to stand out without being too far ahead by default.

2 Likes
5

Worst part is thinking you’re ok to take some damage at full health with armor just to turn the corner and get dropped below half health in an instant.

Shotguns are way worse against armor now while everything else is way better and frankly I don’t think any of the tanks were complaining about shotguns. It’s the long range hitscan that have always been strong and now it’s just that much stronger.

5 Likes
6

We woupdn’t need all this burst damage if they actually bapanced supports right. Tabks woupdn’t have needed to be buffed to raid boss status. Then dps didn’t need more burst in order to be vonsistently effective in matches.

And here we go round a bout in the same ugly cycle every time.

The devs need to stick to basic game balancing and need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel here.

7

The answer is easy, but they don’t want to put the work in creating an additional passive. Armor should do a 30% flat reduction, otherwise against anything that does more than 30 damage per impact, it becomes paper.

Tank passive for those Tanks should be something like:

  • Armored: You gain a 30% reduction when you are damaged on your armor HP.
  • Brawler: You gain 15% damage reduction for 1 sec after dealing damage.

Then reduce the headshot damage reduction to 15% for all Tanks

1 Like
8

Who thought this was a good idea?

1 Like
9

For sups is, for tanks? Generally no.

Due, most of obscene damage dealers are tied to fast firing heroes.

While hanzo, ashe, junk increased their damage. Thanks got more resistance for crits which would offset on huge amounts of damage.

While hanzo would deal more damage overall. Tracer, roadhog, sombra and reaper had their damage severely reduced on armored targets by significant margin.

But those changes weren’t done in a vaccum. Was to shift damage balance.

First ult charge reduction on tanks, secondly hp/armor increase, third dps passive, fourth armor change

1 - reduces ult, which on both cases makes healing and damage less effective on tanks. As design makes tank less desireable targets to heal but at same time shifts supports from only be healers.
2 - reduces one shots and buffs fast firing heroes, due slow firing heroes would generally take more time to kill relativelly comparing against fast firing heroes, reflecing on how fast firing heroes become dominant even more.
3 - demotes supports focusing too much healing and becomes even less efficient to heal tanks due the ratio of ult charge be pretty low, almost as half of what were in OW1.
4 - armor change shifts the balance again towards slow firing heroes while reducing fast firing heroes damage.

Which is a good thing. That way they can reach some parity between fast firing, burst damage and hp pools being tweaked accordingly as necessary.

Hanzo
120 → 240
84 → 168
115 → 175

Tracer
6(120) → 12 (240)
4.2(84) → 8.4(168)
3(60) → 6(120)

If you account projectile speed and the recent hp pools change:
Roadhog 800 hp

5 headshots from hanzo (180)
2 clips and a half/third from tracer (180)

Previously

4 headshots from hanzo or 3 hs and one bodyshot
1 clip headshots and half of clip being headshot and less the other half being fired as bodyshot.

That increased his survivability.

Going to heroes like rein
400 hp and 300 armor

Having

Hanzo
68 to 115 bodyshots from hanzo means hanzo killing him faster on bodyshots. Leaving from 5 sec + 3 sec = 8 sec on average to 3 sec + 3 sec = 6 sec on average.

While on HS left from
4 sec to 4 sec

Tracer
4.2 to 3 on bodyshots which reflects on 72 shots + 66 shots on old metric. Meaning about 138 shots or about 11 seconds. Against 100 shots + 67 shots, meaning about 167 shots or about 13 sec on average.

While on hs
36+34 shots meaning about 4sec
Now
50+44 shots meaning about 5sec

Those 2 without the increase of hp/armor and without the passive on HS would be way more lethal. Not account also range, projectile speed too.

Most of the change was to breakpoints on specific cases. Due HS being reduced overall. They made burst damage be more effective to armor while fast firing not, at same time the overall times on HS decreased or stayed the same while bodyshots become more lethal overall on burst but fast firing still has the impact on hp as would prior to it.

Is a shift towards normatization of both forms of damage. But making one excel on armor while the other on hp with the hp pool change.

10

I suspect these changes were done to rein in the power of rapid fire, low damage dps like Tracer and Sojurn. They’re trying shift the meta without directly nerfing Tracer. Again.

Things would be much easier for everyone if they just nerfed Tracer properly instead of beating around the bush, ultimately damaging numerous other characters in pursuit of better balance. Sigh.

5 Likes
11

Role passives in general are a stupid idea. Becoming par for the course for Aaron Keller (fire this dude). Without going into depth, ofc a role arching passive is going to effect a range of heroes in different ways. All it does it make balancing harder because it’s more numbers added to the equation. Beyond stupid. All this just to avoid lowering healing numbers which they could of done on a Sunday afternoon

12

Is more akin to compensate the hp pool increase change tbh.

Fast firing heroes loves changes on breakpoints while slow firing heroes don’t.

The hp change shifted the tip towards fast firing, while armor change shift towards slow firing ones.

13

I mean, design wise makes sense to create mechannics like this. Makes the game have systems for each profile of hero. Makes easier to balance and easier to introduce better balanced heroes.

Although some heroes actually need some changes, these systems can serve as template for those changes.

If the hero fires faster, armor is stronger on them. If fires slowly breakpoints is what balances them. Is an elegant methodology which took them some time to do.

14

I like this.

A lot. And I’m a Pharah main, who has benefited greatly from this change—I chunk tanks for a fair amount more now. It’s kind of mean.

2 Likes
15

They lengths they go to to avoid nerfing Tracer is insane.

But tbh, the fact that these changes disproportionately mean tanks do less damage to each other kind of shows their hand. They obviously just don’t want to buff tanks. For whatever reason, they are averse to it, so they instead include a massive nerf.

2 Likes
16

We all have Tracer to thank. Repeat after me, ‘Thank you Tracer’.

17

As far as variety goes, these armor changes do make weapons more specialized. Small caliber rapid fire weapons are more suited for anti-personnel, while higher caliber rounds are better at defeating heavier armor.

18

Why do I have a feeling that the OP did more “work” on this post than the entire OW staff did in consideration of any of the balance changes mentioned in the post?

And that’s not a knock on the OP, in fact, I have nothing but appreciation for this awesome post.

It’s just hard to imagine that if the “balance team” had actually taken a careful look at this data, that they would have made the armor changes in the first place… I guess it’s possible they were sort of just hoping Tanks would be happier by being less drained of HP by the fewer high fire-rate heroes… but it seems pretty inevitable that while that scenario may be improved, it’s going to be (and is) just being replaced by a different, yet worse scenario… which is that every other type of damage is now draining them faster than before.

It just seems to me that either the balance team is sort of wingin’ it, or is understaffed and needs another person to help research more than what’s occurring.

19

I think we should make it that when armor takes damage, every previous version of the game boots up at once and simulates how much damage the armor takes, and the average of that is how much damage you take in the current game

20

Judging by your icon, I’d say that’s some pretty heavy lifting.

1 Like