OWC and why Less is More

General Discussion
1

Here’s your TL;DR:

– The modern designs were dictated by the series of mistakes, a huge one of which was Ana
– Skill and strategy were superseded by individual hero powers
– 6v6 is probably better for the game overall - provided the platform for it is there
– Balancing around OWL/GM was a mistake
– An OG-like game mode should exist

(I intentionally don’t go to monetization as that is a whole different battle with no chances of winning)

Anyways, longer thoughts on the OWC as I see it from my PoV. Pondering about it for sometime, here’s what I observed:

– Burst-healing broke supports. OWC has no burst-healing, so every support has its use. Okay, Sym’s still bad, but we knew that already.

– Healing was scarce and promoted intelligent plays and proper positioning. You couldn’t top up 0% → 100% in less than a second. If the target is out of position and about to die - it will die, you can’t throw that lamp or suzu to fix that mistake

– There was a skill in prioritizing whom to heal as a support and whom to target as the DPS. Conventional “wisdom” as “kill their supports first” no longer holds water because - say, that Pharah you decided isn’t a priority destroys your x2 heroes while you only killed their x1 support.

– Map control and health packs were actually a thing. Space meant way more, it wasn’t something surreal only “pros” talk about, it was something you could experience yourself and understand it.

– The DPS were actually deadly. You had to respect that McCree (using the OG name here). Sure, there are broken things like FTH, but we’ll get to it.

– Tanks weren’t actually busted and they were possible to easily deal with as DPS, especially if that tank was out of position.

– Tanks actually had their defined roles, they weren’t forced all to be jack of all trades. Yes, some tanks were terrible at OG, but we’ll get to that too.

– Pocketing was much easier to deal with because TTK and healing were in a balance where you couldn’t out-do the opponents on that pocket only, unless you also out-do them in skill.

– CC was not so obnoxious and was not readily available, even if it was considered “hard-CC”. I’m not talking about some whack multiple McCree or stuff like that. Sure - Mei was a menace, but raise your eyes up from here where I mentioned positioning. You had to respect certain things. You had to play by the rules.

– The game was not balanced, but it was fun. Well - for the most parts anyways. But what’s important is that there was no OWL and no “let’s balance the game around GM that is 0.something% of the player-base!”. History has proven this doesn’t work because - well, where’s OWL now.

– Potential for individual carry was much higher. But at the same time, it being 6v6 meant individual mistakes are punished less.

Am I saying OG is the savior and there were no problems? Of course not. But the contrast is so vast, it allows to get a spotlight on a lot of root issues of the later game iterations. What do I think OWC highlights? Well:

– Ana. Take it as my opinion only, but I believe Ana was that pivotal point in the game history which forced the system to get out of balance and sent it on the run-away spiral of power creep in different directions. Without her, the supports don’t require to compete with her insanely broken kit and therefore you don’t need an abomination like Kiriko to get a spot in the roaster.

– Speaking of the roaster, with 6 spots in the team, you get much more viable combinations and therefore much more heroes have a chance to find their play-time. And that’s already on top of +1 spot in general, so higher chances of getting into the roster.

– Power creep that happened over different iterations: healing creep, CC creep, mobility creep. We get heroes like Sigma who has mobile shields, mitigation, CC, good range damage and a solid burst. Back in OG you had … Rein for that shield and that was it. He couldn’t burst you or CC you from range. He was extremely visible and telegraphed. He couldn’t reposition his shield at the snap of his fingers. This is just one example of designs that had to happen after Ana set the run-away power creep reaction.

– Fun trumps balance. Sweaty games is not what I want to do after working hours. Sure, there are some who take pride in their skill and want to compete - let them have current structures for that. But I bet most of players are here just to have fun.

– A lot of things that were considered “broken” and then nerfed to the ground were just fine for their time and it’s the modern iterations of balance + fixation on the top-tiers balance that required the nerfs or complete removal of those things. Genji’s ledge-dash or wall double-jump was just fine. Not everyone was shadder2k or nercos.

– Balancing around high tiers is wrong. Sure, their experience matters too - but hey, now you know you simply cannot make it balanced for everyone anyways due to skill gaps, but balancing around 0.something% of the player-base sucks the fun out of everybody else. I think it’s safe to say that experience of 80% matters more than experience of 20%. Because this is how you keep the game relevant.

So, where does it leave us in my opinion?

Probably - the developers should rethink their approach to designs. Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag right now. There’s no way mainstream game will outright remove heroes and reworking them has a bad track record. So I don’t hold my breath here.

What I do think could be realistic is just to have some permanent OG-like game mode. Because yes, it does feel refreshing to not have to deal with that Ana or Sombra (saying this as someone who likes Sombra). Many modern designs feel too much over the top and lack simplicity, defined roles and just do too much. Many of them feel as they’re not done with fun in mind. So, if there’s any hope to have an OG-like mode, I’d try this:

– Make it 1 hero limit (but not 2-2-2 or whatever else)
– Do not have Ana or anything past that. At least, in its current form. I firmly believe the balance is polluted after that point.
– Fix clearly broken things like hook 1.0 or FTH (but btw, keep the OG Hog as he - god forbid - can combo his picks)
– Fix the weirdly fast ult charge rate
– Keep the best working parts from OG like Genji’s tech and retcon back the new fluid mech like Hog’s movement during heal or D.Va’s resource DM
– Do not balance around GM or “high tiers”. As mentioned above.
– Do not go for an easy and toothless “let’s grind all the sharp edges off” approach. It’s much more fun to have OP things countered by OP things rather than have two impotent things and everybody is the same.
– Reintroduce back the OG elements like post-match cards while keeping the best modern UI like the scoreboard

I don’t even think it’s a lot of work because all the code is there. Iterating on it should be easy since it’s all past tense and existing mechs. I honestly hope something like this could be a thing.

P.S. Yes I know OWC is not true OG. I am qualified to distinguish. I played in 2015. Yes, not 2016. Not even beta. I played since alpha - when Hog/Junk weren’t a thing and Genji had a poison blade.

22 Likes
2

I wish Classic would stay longer for people understand Anti Heal was actually needed.

Few weeks after release, people understood ultimates combos were an efficient way to play. So I’m not sure about what you mean there.

6v6 is more chaotic and fun. But its less competitive.

OW as any Post-LoL game suffers a community that mimics what they see on esport scene.
People are more about imitating than trying and learning by themselves.

No Limit in Arcade.

3

Let’s agree to disagree. Healing was already scarce. I see no need for anti at all. I think Ana was a wrong design because of how it was implemented, too.

You couldn’t walk into the enemy team, do your thing and walk out, solo. Many modern heroes can do that. OG? Maybe Tracer, Genji - by design and even then it was a gamble. This is just one example.

I don’t want to argue about competitiveness because that’s just what you say. But I want to argue on the platform of fun. And yes, I want fun in my games.

Well, assumption and inference. You can’t expect people not to do it. And seeing how esports miserably failed, I think it shouldn’t be a barometer for devs.

Okay, you didn’t read it carefully. Eh, what gives.

4

I love Ana and anti, but if sustain wasn’t so high would it be needed?

That’s why I like it. I’ll take fun over balanced any day of the week.
What’s the point of competing in something I don’t enjoy?

There should be some level of balance, but not to the point of destroying what made the game fun.

5

I’m curious why you think that. Never really played Classic, not now, not then (not seriously, at least), but from what I remember healing was barely a thing outside of Hog’s Breather.

There is no burst heal in the game at all. You’ve got Zen, who is a joke in terms of healing, Lucio, same, and Mercy probably has the highest hps but compared to Ana and newer supports it’s still super low. What is it, like 50 hps? Support’s outsized impact on survivability came from abilities outside of healing like rez and overhealth, which anti heal doesn’t affect anyway. I guess trans does heal a lot.

But, again, not playing it now so maybe I’m forgetting something.

6

With larger AoE from Lucio, self regen Mercy, Hog and Zen ult, you can easily build an immortal composition.

Yes.
So how can you say Classic is more about individuality ?
I’m not sure I’m understanding… On one hand you praise the individuality in Classic, on the other hand you’re saying you had to play along your team to win in Classic…

Unfortunately, OW is designed to be competitive. I understand your point cause I want to have fun too. But its like asking to play Diablo 4 in League of Legends…

I agree but its what happened and still happening. People go watch some “pro” players and mimic them leading to unreasonable rants and unreasonable balance…

7

That doesn’t speak to the original intentions, plus there’s levels of competitiveness.
Take smash bros or example. It wasn’t made with the intention of being super competitive and perfectly balanced, yet it had a super healthy and competitive scene before having… issues within the community.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that ranked and OWL came well after the initial launch. Iirc, they only had plans for adding a few new characters, but decided to add more (characters, modes, ranked, league. etc) after the game became goated.

…also League periodically adds modes that play very differently from the base game. We hada a vampire survivors-like earlier this year.

8

Can you? Zen ult is, well, an ult, that shouldn’t really count because the trade-off for this insane amount of healing is that you heal basically nothing the entire time. Lucio heals 12.5 hps or something weird like that, with a 3s boost to 40 hps every 12s. And Hog is its own problem, not sure adding an entire mechanic to hardcounter his broken design is better than changing his design.

Just looking at the numbers it doesn’t really make anti heal seem necessary, you know? You’re getting like 120 hps for a brief period on one target (50 Mercy, 40 Lucio for 3s, 30(?) from Zen), 92.5 hps without Amp It Up using three supports. Again, on one target.

That’s what a single Ana can (and probably could, idk her initial hps, if you know please share) almost do. Like, Ana seems to be making the problem worse. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ana’s design and been maining her for like 5 years now, but looking back it doesn’t make much sense to me that anti heal was necessary before she herself got added to the game (again, outside of Hog’s freakishly unfun design).

Edit: Oh, and I don’t even think anti heal is an issue in the first place. I’m probably with you on that one, I’m just trying to understand the part of it being necessary :+1:

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Ana wasn’t a problem, and was one of the best designed supports in the game. I would say that if anything on her kit was problematic, it was the damage mitigation granted by Nano. She is a healthy design.

She is only considered a problem by some in 5v5. This is not the fault of Ana, but the fault of the format.

I agree that the game should not be balanced around professional play. However, it absolutely should be balanced around higher ranks if there is a competitive mode.

10

Yes.
The devs should have nerfed burst healing instead of introducing a half baked heal debuff.

These two are very similar in use to trancendence. The difference is just that they’re abilities instead of ults.

If you want your tank to kill anything in 5v5, you have to kill enemy supps first, and that’s the issue.
The dps passive is that. It’s tied to dps damage.
Several tanks can’t kill anything fast enough if a support is alive.

Meanwhile the dps burst damage is high enough to wipe anyone but the tank before you manage to kill their sup.

Burst heals have needed nerfs for a long time.

Without passive regen, healthpacks actually matter.
You can feel the difference in owc. People who never played ow1 are relatively easy to tell apart, as they hide in corners waiting to self regen instead of knowing where the healthpacks are.

Map knowledge was more important than it is now.

A format issue. With a rigid role queue and buffed burst damage, the 1 tank needs to be stronger than the 2 were separately.

Same as supports. Each had different utility and a niche. These days it feels like most supports can do most things.
Multitarget/aoe heals. Immortality/high heals outside of ults, on top of high damage.

If a supp has low heals, they’re allowed to have high damage (lucio, zen)
For high heals, less damage (moira)
Ana, bap, kiri, illari have both high heals and high damage, that’s a design issue.

Yes.

Supports can get a lot done with just number adjustments. As long as the anti heal passive is removed, a lot of problematic burst heal can just get nerfed or rebalanced.
The devs just need to not be cowards about it. (Nerf all of it by 15% accross the board, and then nerf burst more if needed)

I’m on board with the heal nerfs because it’s
a) simpler for new players to understand when the numbers don’t fluctuate based on if you’ve taken 1 point of damage or not.
B) if support heal less, we’re not hunted as relentlessly, which means we get harassed less during matches. As we’re not quite so mandatory as a winning condition.

11

its so sad how the first DLC hero is still, to this day, one of the most damaging additions to the game :smiling_face_with_tear:

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With OG Hog’s hook combo, two-tapping McCree from downtown uganda, original Pharah rockets, etc, etc? Yeah I can see that “working”. You also told it as if Mercy, Lucio and Zen will all be in = that’s not going to happen, not if you want to win anyways (but hey, that’s plenty okay for having fun - at which point, who cares). OG Lucio had wider range but healing was still super low. OG Hog needed to stand still to heal. OG Zen had 150 HP and would explode the moment he’s pressured.

Idk, did you play OWC? Healing is super low compared to modern times. It enforces positioning. It enforces sense of priority. You can’t throw some gimmick like suzu and bail someone out. If someone messed up, chances are they’re done.

Not really. OG trans was super slow, needed positioning. And it did nothing to save from hard CC or OHK.

13

“Run your faces at them, Mercy has rez” very intelligent.

You pick whoever has more health left, since heals are cheeks. You just all in the healthy guy and hope they delete them fast enough. (if not, rely on rez)

Never hasn’t been a thing.

And they still are. You just need your ult to 1v1 things reliably (which makes sense)

Mitigation? The thing that lead to double shields being the “fun” that it was.
Delicious. Healthy.

There is no pocketing. There’s a corner you can’t reach. They don’t need Mercy to do that strat in that mode, they just need to control a sight line.

Right, Mei didn’t need changed. Bring back non ult freeze.

Is it carrying when you just 2 shot everything? Because of poor balance? And the enemy team didn’t want a shield?

The mode just isn’t good for people who have played longer than 2 seasons. Less is noticeably less. And you can feel it. Let them come out with the other previous version of OW, with Ana and etc.
That’s a hill worth defending, this is not.

2 Likes
14

I intentionally avoided the whole “mass rez” because I know it’s going to be fireworks. For what it’s worth, I am fine with Mercy not having any rez in the proposed OG mode, if that will allow for that mode to happen. In current OWC the ult charge rate is just too fast - as I mentioned in the OP. Fixing that and making it impossible to spam rez could be a solution.

But more than that, OG doesn’t suffer as much from the “we did the wombo-combo quadruple ult, Mercy used her rez and we wasted all those ults” - because TTK is low and DPS are such a huge threat, you don’t really need ults to power through the objective or a choke. You can pretty much two-tap that out of position target or OHK with Hog or some such. Most of the times I didn’t really feel “Mercy reverted my ult”.

There can be no double shields in OG, for once. Also, in the proposed format there is no 2-2-2 or whatever enforcement (barring 1 hero limit to avoid completely whacked stuff). Tanks were possible to counter - and it didn’t require another tank to do it. And - yes, the shield requirement was a thing, but it wasn’t a guarantee of success. Not unless you’re playing in that super-optimized top-1%, but I also included into OP the thoughts on why I think what happens in top tiers should not dictate the balance.

1 Like
15

Very well written and I agree with your insight. The No limits factor of this mode just makes its awful to play, its great to go back to our roots and see what the game was, makes you appreciate what the game is now. However, this mode is nothing more than that.

Now if blizzard did this on purpose, to show the players how much better the current version of the game is, well, hats off blizzard…you proved your point, but I doubt that was the case.

16

I just don’t see this classic mode as realistic. Like it’s fun now. But within a week or two you’ll be discussing how genji and tracer have zero counter play and supports are just there to make them feel good. Or how widow can just go uncontested with no hope for counter play. Or how most the tanks aren’t very viable as a whole. Classic is fun because it isn’t taken seriously. But if it becomes a focus and balance changes occur that fun will die out very quickly. And you’ll just see history repeat. So I agree it can stay as a more ina evade type vibe. But it shouldn’t gain focus or it’ll lose itself quickly.

17

Fair, but it only becomes true the moment that Widow is good enough to consistently counter her direct counters, like Winston. So you’re looking at top-1% or better Widow. As I mentioned - let’s not try to balance the proposed mode around top tiers of play; it does not represent the experience of the majority of players.

For that - and many related issues - I propose to retcon the existing improvements, where applicable - like D.Va’s DM change or Hog’s heals. In general, since there are much fewer variables, there are much fewer weak spots and for most of them the solutions are known and/or even developed. Not saying “retcon everything” as that’d defeat the purpose of it.

All the “busted stuff” is very visible in OWC and is therefore easy to fix. More - there are way lower chances of introducing some unintended consequences like the double-shields were or goats, because OWC does not have the capacity and the critical mass of interactions to be vulnerable to that.

18

But that’s the thing. Fixing it would be the same thing As balancing it. So it’s still is going down basically the same path. Classic should t get hyper focus for balance it should just remain as it is as a mode to see what it was like. Otherwise that fun goes away pretty quickly.

19

Yes and… not completely. As I mentioned:

– Most of the “OP stuff” is so visible and imbalanced that an “easy fix” of a low magnitude can be applied.
– The benefit of most of the retcon-like fixes is that their outcomes are already explored in history and lessons can be learned
– OG has much less interactions and heroes at all, so much less chance for unintended consequences to occur. Impossibility of double-shields no matter what is one such example.
– Proposal goes to not try and balance around the extremities of the highest tiers of play, meaning the threshold for error is much more forgiving.

20

Yes balance after good players