Currently, the game allows swapping to any hero at any time. This basically kills many hero choices and forces you to play heroes who excell at everything at once (like McCree). Now, here is an idea to improve the concept of hero shooter and make every match more unique:
Players can now pick their own pool of 2-4 heroes that they are allowed to swap within a match or a round.
These are the heroes they will be allowed to pick. The rest are locked and can only be swapped to if you change your pool in “prepare” phase. This makes you choose heroes carefully and have backup strategies, thinking of counters and not going Rein instead of Hamster just because “they’ll swap to Sombra anyway”.
Everyone can see each other’s hero choices at the start of the game, and their hero pool is shown below their portrait
This is to reinforce the idea of unique playstyles and to help players counter the enemy choice. Say, one picks Pharah-Echo for their hero pool - you would see that and pick a hitscan hero. But he also picked Ashe, so you’d need a flanker to deal with her or someone who can outrange her or close the gap. Now he has to choose carefully, because if he picks another projectile hero you’d have a field day playing Genji. Suddenly, the game is much more complex and has more depth to it.
At the start of a match both teams vote for 1 or 2 heroes to be banned for the entire match
Not necessary, but helps figuring out which hero needs adjusting. While this may lead to constant Widow or Brig bans, most of the time people will ban a hero who gets picked more than anyone else.
Obviously, the game would need more heroes so this system would function as intended, but it would be solved by OW2, and we can at least test it and see where it goes. This doesn’t need to be a “rework for comp”, it might as well become a new “tournament” mode. At the same time it gives more room for hero buffs since you aren’t restricted to “I can swap to this hero at any time” and you never buff that hero, but rather “I would consider having this hero in my pool against X or Y because my choice is limited” and you can buff anyone to address this specific match-up. After all, if your choice has no consequences, is it really a choice?
Hero bans with this sort of system is genuinely the most counter intuitive idea I have ever seen here on the forums. I do appreciate the idea of hero pools though…
I mean I got something similar.
Although I think my method is a lot simpler.
I.e. Pick Two heroes, your teammate in the same role picks two heroes. Now you share those 4 heroes with your teammate, but don’t have access to the rest of the heroes.
Picks are secret from the enemy team.
With bans, you might not get the hero you want.
With picks you always get the hero you want.
However there’s a shadow game of which team is able to run cheese comps, with the enemy team potentially not having access to easy counterpicks.
I even add in an optional at the end, where picks are secret, and the TAB screen doesn’t instantly update when there’s a hero switch.
I don’t want to be rude and say I like your idea better in his thread, but, well, I would admittedly prefer it.
The core idea sounds really fun to be honest and I feel we would actually see a reduction in one tricking and toxicity under this system. I can only speak for myself, but I would play my two heroes and stop one tricking.
If they pull a Pharmercy and the dps don’t have a hitscan in reserve, the team will finally be forced to learn the match up instead of harassing dps to swap. And whoever picked a reserve hitscan would likely be the one to swap so you don’t have that weird awkwardness of wondering if you need to be the one. It might still happen if someone picked it to cover a base rather than flex to it themselves, but still. I can only see a huge net positive.
no. it would require heroes to now have excessively narrow niches AND for heroes to actually be reasonably close to being equally balanced for that system to work. hyperniche heroes simply just won’t be picked at all and would be easily countered esp if they’re locked into it. and with a very apparent hierarchy in balance, there will defs be some heroes picked far more than others or banned more than others.
