Reaper arguments are not happening in a vacuum. The fact that there’s 2 players in that lobby with little counterplay alternatives should be enough for this non-sense hard counter to cease existing. And guess what, those two masochists can’t switch to counter.
And let’s assume you got into a lobby with a great team, everyone on voice chat and willing to work together and sing kumbaya as if it were Woodstock after hours, everyone magically agrees they need to deal with Reaper. You need to switch your tank line, so right off the bat Reaper might have forced up to 2 swaps. Those swaps are limited in number, map dependent and work very poorly without their paired up synergies, so you wanna play a MT with an off tank, and then you want that MT to have synergy with your off tank, like Rein/Zarya, Orisa/Hog, Winston/Dva, Rein/Hog ain’t gonna work out too well, but then there’s also map consideration, probably not he best idea to play Rein in Well, for instance. But okay, Overwatch is a amazingly mature and not-toxic community at all, your team isn’t comprised of random internet pricks who could bicker about the colour of the sky and they all agreed to follow a plan, whichever plan that happened to be.
Nice, your tank line switched to work around or flat out counter Reaper… Great! Though, it’s hard to work Rein/Zarya without a Lucio, and hopefully you have a Moira for Orisa/Sigma, or maybe you thought spread out mobile tanks where the best, thus you need Mercy for Ball/Winston, right? So now you’re switching up to two more slots, for a total of up to 4, to counter 1 Reaper.
And remember, that’s a best case scenario, where no one was listening to music instead of joining VC, your support line was open to switch, your tank partner was happy to work together.
But wait, there’s more! Is Reaper map dependent? No. Does he favour any specific support synergy? No. Does he need a strong pocket or any otherwise unusual amount of resources from his team? No. Does he prefer a certain tank line? No. He works day and night, 24/7, literally gives no forks about the composition and knows for sure that there will be 2 tanks in the other team he is countering.
The result of all that mind boggling lack of freedom is partially why DPS have such long queue times. Why would you choose to put yourself in this castrating, extremely disempowering situation while playing a game?? No way, rather just pick DPS and avoid all that.
That’s why Reaper is a problem even if one considers him balanced, which I propose he isn’t thanks to his 3-3 buffs and the 2-2-2 lock. His job, to counter the category, is a design problem as well as a balance one, the same way Brigitte hard countering an entire composition (OG dive) wasn’t healthy, Reaper isn’t either.
He need a nerf to his life steal ASAP and the armor nerf that buffed his damage 14% against armor needs to go. Tanks should not be free kills for Reaper same way Tracer shouldn’t be for Brigitte. This community got all rilled up about hard counters when a support deleted the DPS category, now it’s happening again, it is not okay just because it’s tanks, particularly if you wanna better queue times.
I am not making a tl;dr.