Mobility cascade

General Discussion
1

Does anyone remember the issues with mobility when OW2 started?

5v5 had dropped the off tank, and the CC drop required so the one remaining tanks didn’t get utterly monstered also made DPS mobility stronger.

Flankers were really strong, and the support players were struggling.

A lot of people were, unsympathetic, and those of us who had been around a while, said “well, they will end up buffing the supports ability to survive and/or fight back and DPS players shouldn’t get to comfortable with the balance of power.”

They solved the problem by nerfing the flankers a bunch, and giving the supports more abilities to deal with them, in particular Mercy’s enhanced GA is a direct result of this.

This is just the ongoing balance of OW2, shaking out the issues which moving to 5v5 gave us.

The enhanced GA didn’t come out of nowhere. This was utterly predictable, along with the reaction to it.

People will get used to it, and Mercy will fall out of the meta soon enough the moment Sojourn also falls out.

Snipers are likely to be hit, with the drop of an off tank, and the flankers being nerfed, they become strong.

Tank may find they will be soon after, with the supports having more survival, and less flanking and sniping dropping them the game is likely to slow down…

Support healing will likely be nerfed after that… Which will speed the game back up again.

Then? I’m not sure what comes after that…

The 5v5 Rock landed in the pool, and these are just ripples. Eventually we will hit an equilibrium point.

Just not yet.

Anyone who has been around long enough will get a feel for the ripples, and where they will go.

2 Likes
2

I don’t want to think too much about how we can make Overwatch 2 enjoyable.

At the end of the day, I just miss Overwatch. Why can’t we just have that?

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3

Ripples my friend ripples.

Mobility was crazy strong in OW1, so they put in a bunch of CC, which dropped the tank numbers, and eventually it became unsustainable.

The move to 5v5 is because of that…

We can’t go back to Overwatch 1, we don’t have the tank players to do so.

4

Awww ya go me! I’m in another Mercy thread! Dag nabbit!

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5

It is more of a “chill everyone, we have all been here before, and this too will pass” thread.

2 Likes
6

Gutting heroes isn’t solving the problem.

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7

Except I never really liked role queue but…I was still enjoying tank.

Nowadays if I ever drink too much and come back to Overwatch 2, I queue role because open queue is just a mess. And even if I get brawler, it’s just not enjoyable.

5v5 and the whole balancing around it is the actual problem here.
And it will never be addressed.

8

Blizzard doesn’t want to take on the mobility problem directly.

So we get what we get.

9

I think they should have a rotating arcade mode that’s just OW1 as accurately as they can recreate it. That would actually be better than keeping the old game alive, because it would have an active playerbase when it shows up and has some novelty.

10

Well, amongst other options to speed teamfight durations back up.

  • Lower Tank health
  • Lower Tank Healing Received
  • Convert their Armor into HP
  • Lower the effectivenes of Tank/DPS defensive/escape/sustain abilities
  • Raise the cooldown of Tank/DPS defensive/escape/sustain abilities
  • Buff Support Firepower
  • If the above doesn’t work, Lower some of the heals on Ana/Bap/Moira
  • Reduced amounts of OverTime
11

Yeah but you can nerf flankers without making them useless.

12

This was the step before the support healing nerf.

Things like this as well.

I don’t think that is going to happen. I know the reasoning, but I think they will be trying to make the roles distinct again.

Which is where we are now.

13

Oh, and of course they are probably going to give everybody a regen/coherency passive to offset the grumbles about Tanks/DPS having less survival.

Maybe with a longer activation timer though, so it conflicts less with “in-combat” heals.

14

They could, as I said, after that stage, I don’t know where it will go.

15

Still, kinda silly how predictable all this stuff is.

We were talking about most of that 3 years ago.
[OW2] Balance Design Blueprint

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16

This merry go round is pointless. The game was almost perfect in season 1. They just needed small flanker nerfs, real Sojourn nerfs and widow 175 hp.

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17

But unstoppable :), we will ride the ripples out, until we land somewhere new, and hopefully better.

18

:beer: :beer: :beer:
Another one! Another one!

19

The only curveball is I expected them to nerf Sojourn/Widow/Hanzo quicker, and to have bad Matchmaker Speeds instead if bad Matchmaker Quality.

And the reason I was suggesting “Do almost no changes to the Support role except Brig without a Stun” was just get it out the door faster for OWL.

But they’ve done next to nothing to attract more Support players besides add Kiriko, for the last, 8, months…

20

You have moved to three drinks and doing it for non Mercy threads as well I’ve seen :slight_smile:

Though given the state of the game, I can’t blame anyone for picking up a beer.

I think they have been doing frantic work on the game engine in the background.