Big problems need big solutions so this idea will be wild but stick with me… since tank has 1 lone player I think it would be fair to give each tank something “special”. What if we implemented tank “gear ups” or essentially a different weapon option for each tank.
I got this idea from the mobile game clash of clans. In clash you have a “gear up” option that changes your canon defense weapon. Long story short, you sacrifice a bit of the canons range to increase its speed/burst potential. What if we do the same for tanks?
The catch would be that you have to select your weapon variation (normal or “gear up”) at the beginning of each round or game (depends on the game mode), and once the game/round has started you can’t change your weapon variation.
The devs will have to make sure that these weapon “variants” do not counter the same heroes as the normal weapon. Here is an example I thought of (rough draft).
Zaryas main weapon has a simple laser and her alt fire is a slow small splash dmg projectile. Zaryas “gear up” could switch these around. Make the projectiles her main fire with a bigger splash radius while shooting them faster maybe even multiple at a time. Make her alt fire a laser on cooldown similar to illari. (Bubbles charge normally and apply damage scale to the projectile normally)
This would make her not as hard of a counter to dva and sigma if someone is using this weapon “gear”.
This is just one small example, but with hard thinking I think we can add different weapon options for each tank that changes the function of the gun but keeps it’s same dps capabilities while alleviating some of the counter swapping complaints.
This would also make tank a popular role since tanks would have something that makes it special. This also doesn’t take away from the identity of the game since the lore consistently shows that heroes have used different weapons in the past.
Again this would ONLY be for tanks and they can only change their weapon before entering a game and before the match or round starts. Let me know what you all think about this idea