While I completely and wholeheartedly understand where some people are coming from with this statement, part of me disagrees.
Sure, from the little game-play footage that we have seen, it is understandable to see the game may become seemingly more geared towards DPS players; however, I think it’s more-so that the game is giving each player more urgency in their own roll in order to have the ability to have more individual impact.
This can be seen in the new philosophy behind tanks or “brawlers” as well as what I presume they will be doing with supports. As a support main I am hoping they don’t make every single support a Zenyatta-esque support, I can see that they want to make supports less healing-centric. This can be seen with this new in-combat healing reduction (which they’ve stated probably will not make it to the OW2 Live game).
I for one am excited for this change as I’ve always found healing to be the less enjoyable aspect of support (even as a Mercy main). While I do enjoy healing my teammates in clutch situations, it would be foolish of me to say that I didn’t enjoy landing a massive purple anti-nade as Ana or pulling off a clutch resurrect as Mercy more than simply full healing my entire team.
As a support player, I am really genuinely hoping that utility is going to be the driving factor for the support category alongside damage and healing. I think a hero like Mercy is going to need larger changes if they want to nerf healing in the way they are planning as in OW1, Mercy is a pocketbot for teammates but that’s a whole different topic.
Anyways, I personally think the game is not being targeted towards making DPS players happy, but rather giving each player more urgency and the ability to carry from a solo position which is a problem Overwatch has struggled with since its inception, particularly when Blizzard began to market the game as a more competitive shooter game. By making a sweeping changes like making the game 5v5, they’re going to bring in more players who left simply because they felt they made little to no impact within the team.
Moreover, I think before everyone starts making massive conclusions of how every roll besides DPS is now dead, we need WAAAY more content and context of what the team wants to do with supports in particular (and tanks of course) before we make any sweeping conclusions.
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More like OW2 caters to FPS players.
With MOBA/RPG players taking a backseat.
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I like healing. Sometimes enabling someone else to win the day is what I want to do, and if we’re moving to “everyone is a solo operator” OW is gone and it’s TF3
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They’re changing it to 5v5 in an attempt to fix queue times for DPS players. Additionally, from what we’ve seen they’re giving damage players an outsized impact on every match.
It is what it is. They’re catering to their eSport and the majority of their players. There’s a bottleneck there that they’re trying to address. Do I agree with it? Course not. But trying to deny it is pointless.
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What frustrates me is that they’re catering to people who could just as easily play Apex or COD for the same result, and driving off the people looking for something unique. The Activision rot is really taking hold, it seems.
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I think that’s likely the intention, but so far that seems to boil down mostly to… catering to DPS players, or at least people who favor DPS playstyles.
Tanks can’t be good brawlers if they can’t live long enough to close the distance, or mitigate the amount of damage that comes with being bigger and easier to shoot than a standard DPS. It doesn’t seem to me that they’ve become any less reliant on their team than previously, and Zarya in particular seems quite a bit weaker with how much less often her bubbles are available.
Supports can’t be good combat healers if they are being specifically squelched while in combat, they’re going to have a harder time escaping the DPS who now move faster than them, and we know of two of them who received nerfs to their utility and/or CC. The support play we’ve seen so far is simply flatly nerfed from what it is now.
It seems like “individual impact” is translating to, “not even good teamwork on the enemy’s part can keep me from fragging when I click heads”, and that only feels very good for the head-clicker.
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This. The fact that they are changing something so core to the title which in return will require a change to all the maps and rebalancing of every hero just to fix queue times for DPS players just shows where their priorities are. Blizzards words and the actual gameplay of OW2 are just confirmation of that. Heck they aren’t even rebalancing hero’s around the same philosophy anymore, healers are getting nerfed and tanks are being turned into impotent DPS. It’s hard to imagine catering more to DPS.
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OW 2 going to go down in textbook history as how to ruin a sure-fire franchise by literally throwing away everything good about it and homogenizing it for the most fickle playerbase that exists.
A simple fact is this: DPS players (and Blizzard) assume there will be people so into the lore, etc., they will play Support/Brawler roles regardless of how it feels and what level of fun it is.
They won’t. And you cannot have a game when it’s hard to locate players for the 60% of the slots they represent in a team. DPS players better not expect queue times to drop, it may in fact be quite the opposite within three months or so.
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I think these two things are FUNDAMENTALLY at odds.
Supports / tanks primary function is to enable other roles. If a single player can carry the entire match now, enabling others is now a relic of the past and the game turns into an extreme contest of individual performance.
People that like enabling/protecting are getting shafted if those functions no longer exist/are irrelevant.
If everyone just exists to solo-carry in every role, than every role starts to just feel like a different flavor of DPS, and the people who actually liked teamplay end up losing the thing they liked about the game.
Maybe not catering towards every kind of DPS players, but definitely catering towards a specific type of player. And people who aren’t that player (myself included) are understandably disappointed.
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I think you mean “agency” rather than “urgency.”
Queue times will drop at the start; just like they dropped when cross-play was first added. I suspect supports will probably become a big bottleneck though. I already get support 25% of the time going flex, and I can’t see healing nerfs attracting people to the role. They will literally just feel like gimped DPS (Which is roughly the same reason I suspect tank population won’t significantly grow long-term either)
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They will also lose a lot of their current players who are not happy with their role being turned into pseudo-dps and most likely will not be able to keep the new players as they will just see another generic shooter game that has half the roster almost unusable but required to be used on over half the team.
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I’m not sure where you picked up the idea that supports are going to change. They’ve outright said that supports are likely to recieve the least changes, and they’re only looking into healing because they felt it was too high in 5v5.
I’m not saying they won’t change anything, but everything we’ve been presented tells us the opposite. If so, they should probably be more clear about it.
I don’t mind massive overhauls as bad as some, but I finally figured out what’s been bothering me, and I don’t mean this to be snide or rude, but what we’ve been shown so far. It’s as if they’re copying the homework of more popular shooters, but the homework is for a different class. Does that make sense?
So I like some changes but they’re going all-in on the deeps.
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Isn’t this literally what OW1 is right now? Many heroes are currently balanced towards more dps-y playstyles or to be more self dependent
The point is while it may be this way today, they are going to make it far worse tomorrow.
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You seem to be talking behalf of all tank or support players, when literally tanks like:
- Zarya
- Roadhog
- Wrecking Ball
Or supports like:
- Baptiste
- Zenyatta
- High ranked Lucios
Exists. When you play heroes like this, they are literally there to do as much damage as possible not necessarily to mitigate damage or heal at all. Shooting and getting kills is fun
The problem is the game should not require playing just “shooty” characters to have fun. If that is really the goal, then let’s make a list of characters to frankly remove from the game.
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Well TF2 is what OW took a lot of inspiration from
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DPSWatch… Tanks and Healers are trash in OW2, DPS super sayans god blue.
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