Honestly earthshatter is problematic in that it encourages mirror comps as the best way to deal with earthshatter is with another reinhardt, who can also earth shatter.
It also heavily penalizes none shield comps as they are now free kills due to the nature of how earthshatter works.
Ideally a reworked earthshatter would penetrate shields, to balance this out the casting duration would be changed from .45 to 1.25 seconds. This allows time for things like roadhog hooks or mei walls, doomfist punches, heck even enemy reinhardts forced to emergency charge.
It would also require more team work to successfully get a earthshatter off, but getting one off would be even more rewarding.
This doesn’t apply to half of the tanking roster, who are the one’s that are forced to mirror reinhardt in order to deal with it.
Its a skillfull match up exclusively for the reinhardt v reinhardt, for the rest its really not that hard for a reinhardt’s team to force out a shield, than you just break it and free earthshatter.
It would be better to balance out the roster instead of further encouraging tanks to play reinhardt in seemly every way possible.
If you have Wrecking ball, roadhog, Dva, Zarya as your tanks. Than your at a significant disadvantage unless one of your tanks goes shield tank, this FORCES people to go shield tanks.
If earthshatter was changed to ignore shields and balanced accordingly than playing into a reinhardt without a shield tank of your own wouldn’t be a death sentence.
Heck even 1-3-2 might be possible. Part of the reason it wasn’t was because you NEEDED a shield tank going into a reinhardt, Dva/Roadhog just wouldn’t cut it.
That’s the problem, reinhardt’s shield is the only reliable way for a tank to deal with reinhardts earthshatter, which only further cements him as required in the meta and further encouraging mirror comps.
Sleep,
Brig Bash,
Flashbang,
Mei Wall, (my Favorite)
Hook,
Hack/EMP
Zarya Bubble (blocks LOS of shatter)
High ground,
Double Flankers,
Double Air (phara + echo)
To be honest I LOVE playing with a decent Rein as a support main.
I just pump heals into him, let him go aggro, nano him and watch him shatter the whole team and mop up.
And if the other team doesn’t use any of the many counters to it, that is on them.
But it doesn’t need to be that way, as it is right now even though I want to play Dva I’m forced to pick reinhardt every damn match that the enemy team choices reinhardt, because unless my 2nd tank choice reinhardt, we can’t do anything about it.
This works too, as it stands right now reinhardt is really strong, and he’s also the best way of dealing with himself, so it just further forces tanks to play rienhardt which further makes people to just not want to tank.