Orisa & Sigma’s barriers are very often said to be unbreakable; that breaking them isn’t a viable option. Well today I am here to prove the people who say that wrong with some math! And no, you don’t need a Bastion to break the barriers very fast.
With an Orisa + Sigma + Soldier:76 + McCree + Baptiste + Zenyatta composition, for example, you do roughly 817 DPS. 900 + 1500 = 2400. 2400/817 means that it takes about 3 seconds to break the enemy Orisa & Sigma barriers with the ranged composition I mentioned even though there is no Bastion in it; just your typical damage heroes. Now granted, you are using an Orisa + Sigma yourself, but that is because they synergize the best with a ranged composition. Based off this math, I don’t see how burning down the barriers from range is not a viable option. Doomfist, Reaper, Moira, & Lucio seem to be put in with Orisa + Sigma not because they synergize well with the tanks, but because they can get around the enemy barriers. The barriers can break very quickly with a standard ranged composition though.
A lot of the time on ladder people don’t focus shields together. It feels impossible to convince all six players, including your supports to shoot at a shield. When they do they just absolutely melt though.
I tend to prefer shooting at sigma’s shield instead of orisa’s if I have the option. I feel like the damage is more permanent since he has to recharge his damage taken, whereas orisa can immediately redeploy.
There’s a self-defeating attitude when it comes to barriers, IMO.
People don’t like shooting barriers, and I guess I can’t blame them. It’s not terribly engaging, even if I do quite a bit of it as a Zen main. Of course, when you don’t even try to actively break barriers, they’re that much more effective.
I’m sure anyone who’s ever tanked knows how intimidating it feels when your shield is being ripped to shreds. You’re forced into playing much more passively, and your team is much more vulnerable as a result.
Double barrier makes the issue even more pronounced because the tanks can shift the burden from one to the other and it becomes harder to work them both down at the same time.
The problem tends to be that when you hold the defensive position you are at the advantage for laying down the damage first, and have the added advantage that Orisa’s barrier cooldown is already well on it’s way back down to zero. This means the attacking team not only has a delay before they can even start shooting back (it takes time to let the barriers deploy, move forward, etc), but they basically have to burn through a whole extra Orisa shield.
By the time they do that, both of your barriers are already gone and the defending team is already getting picks.
Sigma can take down his barrier and apply it whenever he wants.
Orisa can instantly redeploy depending on when she originally put it down.
Cool downs matter and I didn’t see you really factor that in. Doesn’t matter if you can burst one shield down when it’s back up against before you can do anything meaningful.
By the time you burn the barriers down you don’t have enough firepower without having to force a reload to take down the people hiding behind the barriers, especially with the healers keeping them up.
Yes, double barrier does still break fairly quickly
The problem is that single barriers break down even faster than that, meaning the double barrier still has the advantage in durability. Also, if your Sigma is smart with his Grasp and his Barrier Recall, he can really force an extension in that time to break the barriers
It’s not that simple. Sure, sometimes you might not have enough firepower to get a kill after bursting down a shield, but other times you will. Every situation is different.
What’s universally true is that the shields won’t shoot themselves. If you don’t bother, they’re going to be a lot more oppressive. It’s also true that applying as much pressure to the enemy tank’s shield as possible will force them to play more cautiously.
Sigma recalling and throwing out his barrier over and over does not mean it is indestructible, it will still be running out of health extremely fast and there will be a huge gap of opportunity to decimate the enemy team. Same with Orisa having a shield down on defense in advance, it just will take slightly longer to break through the barriers.
No, but ignoring the fact that they can tactically deploy and redeploy them with dry math isn’t real game either.
For instance, any decent Sigma isn’t just going to deploy his shield and leave it out randomly to see how fast it can break. He’s going to wait until critical moments and throw up a 1500HP barrier.
When i’m in QPC, we have 4 DPSes (The damage kind, Pharah, Hanzo, Junk, etc.), and the enemy Orisa’s shield takes 8 seconds to go down, i start considering if i should drop my tank and go Bastion.
The easiest method so far is to hope there are enough people on comms so that they can hear me say “Break shield, break shield” and have the shield be gone instantly.
How can one take into account the completely random action of deploying and redeploying a barrier in a math problem? I went for straight numbers here. You could say Fan The Hammer + Roll + Fan The Hammer would help break the barriers faster & Soldier:76’s Helix Rocket adds some extra damage as well. There are so many factors, but based off the basic values of damage and health of the barriers, we can see how my point still holds true.
If the Sigma is not putting out his barrier to block the damage coming in and is trying to save it, his team will get blown away.
zenyatta is asking to die tho. see ur theory takes time. doom can easily kill a zen no problem in a sec.
the easy way is doom to get a pick and have the odds in ur favor. sure u can break shield even without the zen. but the window is small and for doom the window is huge. so ur basically asking for a hard time.
u also didn’t put into effect of orisa fortify, she’s not gonna die in it. and sigma defense matrix thing. just a lot of filler time.
reaper is picked so he can counter doom kinda. at least make him hard to hit while also killing there tanks (hard to kill)
moria has good healing for slow games (everygame is slow)
lucio just has a defensive ult for sigma cuz if not ur whole team is dead
If your team is trying to completely ignore the barriers and run past them with Lucio speed boost, why not use Reinhardt + Zarya/Dva/Winston as the tanks?
The average DPS doesn’t even shoot the barriers. Do you expect them to break them? It honestly pisses me off seeing them just stand there if a barrier comes up, trying to run around it instead of just bursting it down.
You’re doing something wrong then, even with 2 dps it doesn’t take 8 seconds. Junkrat alone will almost break it in one magazine, dealing 780 damage to it. Add another dps, then tanks and support too. It shouldn’t last anywhere close to 8 seconds even with 2 dps.
lucio is super slow. reason why they reverted him in this upcoming patch. which means rein sucks. (he needed 5 other players to support him to be capable of being meta in goats. and even then he got switched with winston sometimes.)
worst tank by far. and with more CC in the game he’s even worse. sigma is basically a better rein imo. zarya doesn’t work cuz rein doesn’t work.
dva has been nerfed super hard and with dive (dva winston) fights need to end fast. (also meaning u need a zen but as i said doom kills zen super easy) with moria and lucio, the fights are going to last long and lucio counters blade so u cant really ult to win very good.
like u have to play insane for dive to work compared to double shield meta.
