I like the direction of the season 9 patch. I think the DPS passive, especially, was the answer to a lot of problems, but there is still one massive glaring issue with the game, and that’s that playing tank is still absolutely horrendous. The patch did absolutely nothing to make the tanking experience more enjoyable, and if anything, it has made it worse. It is such a miserable time.
I just don’t see a realistic solution to making the tank role an enjoyable experience in 5 vs. 5, and this goes beyond balancing; in my opinion, the very maps themselves are just not designed for one tank player; there are so many maps with massive spaces and little to no cover, so you’ll find yourself having to hug the wall; otherwise, you’ll just get deleted instantly. So what the hell is the point of a tank that can’t provide cover for their team? It makes no sense.
They tried a lot of changes with balancing in 5 vs. 5, and I’ll give them that, but not a single one has made the solo tanking experience more enjoyable. Are we really going to have to wait another year of experimentation for them to try and make the tank role more enjoyable, or are we going to go back to what we know works?
Listen, 6 vs. 6 is the fundamental design for Overwatch; literally everything Overwatch has been built on the basis of 6 vs. 6, the maps, the balancing iterations, the interactions, everything. Until every single one of those things has been altered in a way to make the 5 vs. 5 function, the tank players will always suffer.
It’s time to throw in the towel and give up with 5 vs. 5; it just ain’t it.
Its time people stop with the 6v6 nonsense. Those post never to anywhere, no one reads those posts (besides the forum users I mean), the devs dont seem like they would ever go back and I dont even need to mention, that 5v5 problems are mostly 6v6 problems that were not seeable, because of bigger problems.
I will not start from the start and discuss this topic in every single stupid 6v6 topic, but 5v5 had more variaty and shorter queues than 6v6 ever had.
6v6 was NOT a balance problem and rather a format problem with 2 tanks being crazy sustainable units that could cover each others weakness, making them frustrating to deal with and DPS cosmetic.
Tank synergy was never balanced and OW1 was always stale. Tanks where nerfed not because they are to strong and rather because synergy was to strong (6v6 problem, not balance).
I will leave it at that, otherwise I start ranting again…
You mean less variety? The balancing philosophy in Overwtch 2 is to have predetermined metas each season to keep everything fresh, and don’t even get me started on the oppressive counterpicking in this game.
The short queue times are due to the matchmaking being 10x looser than it was in Overwatch 1. Everyone knows this: the developers sacrificed the quality of our matches so we could get to playing quicker.
You told on yourself lol. That’s a balancing issue. Tanks like Orisa and Sigma had too much sustain; that wasn’t a formatting issue; that was a balancing issue.
Yeah, that’s how teamwork works. Who would have thought there’d be teamwork in a team-based game?
Also, this is still a very pervasive thing in Overwatch 2.
Balancing issue.
There have been plenty of occasions where tanks were nerfed without synergy being taken into consideration in Overwatch 1, but if tanks weren’t being nerfed because of their own strengths but rather their synergistic strengths, then that is literally a BALANCING ISSUE.
I will never understand people who spew a bunch of baseless nonsense while acting like they took a dump on some other poster. I consistently see you parrot the same misinformation here all the time. Just admit that you never played the original OW, and only played the trash iterations that existed since late 2018+. 5v5 was unanimously a dud, with many more problems and less appeal than early OW1 despite the game going f2p.
All these posts from you and replies from other people correcting you yet you still refuse to accept that the 6v6 format was not responsible for your sorry tank synergy or queue time excuses. Those were entirely a result of terrible balancing, and then role queue. I honestly hope you get silenced from this place one day for spamming the same misinformation over and over. Nobody should be allowed to flood threads with bad takes this frequently.
The goal was never to bring in more tank players. Tank will always be the least popular role in the game, regardless of what blizzard does.
Tank does have issues, counter-swapping being the number 1.there are ways to fix it though, it just takes time. Tanking now is better then it was early ow2 imo
okay, so if that is the truth, Where are we getting tank players to fulfil the off tank role again? You want 6v6 so bad but you just claimed there is no new tank players. So we would be back to 6v6, with nobody wanting to play tank and queue times being horrendous.
It’s been over an entire year; it’s been plenty of time. We’re getting nowhere!
I’d have to disagree. Counter-swapping is more prevalent than ever. You can’t play the game unless your teammates play around you. (If they have Ana or Zen, you better have Kiri or Zen yourself; otherwise, good luck playing the game.) The role doesn’t have any agency anymore. (Good luck doing anything unless your supps are hard-pocketing you with their healing.) You can’t make big plays, at least not until you get your ult, and lastly, you are literally a useless punching bag until you get your ult. ;-;
Switching to 5 vs. 5 did not make for a better tanking experience. A lot of the issues that caused a lack of tank players in 6 vs. 6 have been resolved: way less CC, less sheilds, more tank characters, etc.
A more enjoyable tanking experience means more tankplayers. It’s not hard to put two and two together.
I honestly believe the tank queues would fix themselves if we had another tank on each team. The biggest complaints in Overwatch 1 when it came to tank players were: there was too much CC, not enough variety; too much sustainment; too many shields. We have the answers to every single one of those problems in OW2.
But let’s just say we did go back to 6 vs. 6 right now. The most jarring issue that the game would face would be that there’d be too much CC again. So what I would do to fix that issue is just remove or heavily reduce the impact of a lot of the CC that is not on the tank characters, and then make sure that the tank characters are the only ones who are allowed to have the hard CC in their kits moving forward. (This ensures CC stacking won’t become problematic like it did in OW1.)
Removing and reducing that extra CC is very important, because if we were to add two more tanks back into the mix on each team, then that also means we’re potentially adding two more characters with hard CC back into each match. Having two more characters in each match with CC plus characters like Sombra, Cree, or Mei would be completely overwhelming for everyone involved, and we definitely do not want that.
I mean there’s a lot less CC that can be stacked, people will play for nostalgia reasons and to try out new tank synergies, the game has been rebalanced massively this season idk
I don’t know if it’d magically spawn enough tank players to sustain it forever but I definitely would give tank a go again
