Actually we’ve been talking about Tanks, as role, a lot recently. In the past we’ve had trouble trying to figure out how to make tank heroes like Roadhog compete with big protective tanks like Reinhardt. Lately we’ve been thinking, what if we just go the other direction? What if Reinhardt was more like Roadhog? What would that feel like for the entire game? Basically, what if all ‘main tanks’ became ‘off tanks’?
This would mean Tanks would be less about pure protection, and more about brawly offense. Barriers would be less prevalent, damage overall would be higher (tanks doing more dmg, and reducing less dmg), which is kind of scary potentially. We’ve already been experimenting on this front and so far its been pretty fun, though the game does feel significantly different. Players have to play the map angles a lot more aggressively as you can’t just rely oin your Tank/barrier for cover.
I’m not sure where these experiments will go but they’re pretty interesting so far.
Roadhog does not play as a tank. He plays as a DPS hero with a bigger healpool.
The tank player population has already been hemorrhaging for the past few years because tanks feel too squishy and play too much like dps heroes, instead of feeling tanky and playing like actual tanks. If you make every tank more like roadhog, you’ll drive away the few “real” tank players that are left.
It would effectively delete the tank category from the game. 2/2/2 would become “2 fat dps, 2 squishy dps, 2 healers.”
That could also end up hemorrhaging the support player population… I can’t speak for all healer mains, but there’s there’s no way in hell I’m EVER going back to healing “4 dps” comps.
Yeah. Mercy thrived in DPS heavy comps because she is the DPS healer. People complained about having to keep them all alive however I was one of the few who found it fun. Mercy can keep 4-5 DPS alive a lot better than any other healer. Her current kit would end up working significantly better than her trash mass rez kit would. Found it fun in those days, I’m confident it would be even better now.
We’re talking about 3 squishies (when you include the other healer) and 2 giant healthpools. Mercy hasn’t been viable for healing large healthpools since she lost her 60hps - and that’s not even taking into account the burst damage creep that’s pushing to make sustain healing obsolete.
Besides, I believe that just like they said on an interview.
every hero should be able to carry.
by reducing their effectiveness they take what makes tanks-tanks.
supports are able to heal 2-3 team members pretty effectively.
dps are able to get even 3 kills in the right conditions.
By taking away protection from tanks, you decrease their effectiveness against enemies from protecting against up to 3 people to 1…
A lot of people have problem with hog for being effective really only at stopping one target and the rest of his kit is surviving and attacking.
Even if he does has some protection it’s still not enough to rely on it in a team fight…
The direction they have to go for is the strength of Reinhardt shield.
being able to survive a bit until he gets what he wants and then it’s useless but if you use counters it will not stand long enough.
Same with every other tank purpose.
hog should be a stationary tank? so let him get the damage resistance cloud from 3-1-2 to help dove targets.
Zarya should be a close range protection in case of an attack?
let the whole team get the bubble to survive the attack.
All the point of tanks is the protection and space making.
If they decrease their focus on the part what will make tanks spacial?
Game is actually stale in balancing and gameplay, the game is declining, both popularity and playerbase.
Double shield is make the game even more stale.
Buff defense of the tanks is a bad thing in the actually state of the game.
The actual idea of Blizzard, make the “main” tanks more similar to roadhog, give more damage in general will surely will give a shock to the actual state of the game.
Not sure if will be a good change, but is something this game need.
This doesn’t go away by changing tanks to be more aggressive. They just go about it in another way. Tanks are ineffective at long range but super strong in short to mid range and this is what should be focused on. Limit the effective range of tanks but make it so they’re super strong at that range. That way they aren’t just making space by holding up a rectangle. They’re making space by forcing the enemy team to respect their space.
That’s what I got that they wanted to do when they said “make tanks more like Roadhog”. They wanted to make it so approaching a tank alone is a scary thing. Think about how carefully you play around Roadhog when you know he has Hook. They want to make it like that for every tank. In essence if you engage a tank in a 1v1, a single screw up can cost you the matchup.
I think that defines the tank role even better. Tanks go from being punching bags to being something you’re actually scared of
Yeah. I want a proper 6 dps comp back. 2 fat DPS, 2 squishy DPS and 2 healing DPS was absolutely amazing. Felt like every tiny detail, every microsecond mattered.
I’m not saying we should also make it such that every support is an off support, buuuut
On the other hand, Roadhog especially and off-tanks generally are very popular picks for the daily “loot box” game that many non-tank-mains feel a need to play.
There’s no guarantee that more players would start playing tank more regularly, of course, but main tank mains have always been rare.
I can understand that current tank mains who are happy playing main tank this much wouldn’t like these changes, but I think there’s a good reason to expect more people would choose to play tank if they do go this direction. I don’t know that I would actively choose to play tank, personally, but it sounds a lot more appealing than it is currently and I think it would make all the difference for quite a few people.
As a flex tank player I wouldn’t really mind this as long as playing tanks would feel empowering, but currently making changes like this would pretty much make the teams with better Ashe/Widow players win most of the time. Some players mald about CC being oppressive in this game, but I’ve never felt that even Mei with constant freezes was oppressive in any way since chain freezes happened only with her ultimate which is understandable and even if she got a primary fire freeze it required coordination to get Mei there and to get it through your frontline defenses which Mei is bad at handling
The real issue behind double barriers’ popularity is pure damage. Ever since Cree buffs, 76 buffs, Ashe buffs, Genji shuriken buffs, Tracer range buffs and so on we’ve had an increase in pure damage which has caused an issue where a singular barrier gets broken down before there’s enough progress in a teamfight so we need double barriers, but even with high barrier health double barriers would be still be a thing because Sigma is a better D.va with a barrier so he would be paired with Rein and Orisa regardless. Then there are things like Ana’s whole kit which is very great against anything non-barrier as antinade is one of the strongest abilities in the game and sleep dart is one of the most premium CCs in the game. Add in Nanoboost and decent sniper damage and you get the monster that we have. But guess what works against Ana who is deliberately being favored by the devs even though she should definitely not be? Barriers (and Zarya bubbles, but they’re on long cooldown)
In other words if we want a shift in the tank roster we need to do the following:
Get high range pure damage in check
Rebalance Sigma away from his barrier towards the rest of his kit as an off-tank or a main tank that works with something else than a barrier (which is very hard btw)
Give D.va her matrix back so she can consistently eat varying abilities thrown at the teammates. One option would be also to revert her primary fire and boop damage back to what it used to be, remove micro missiles and introduce a defensive ability that works against pure damage, nades, sleep darts, dynamites and stuff like that
Make Roadhog’s Breather cleanse Hog from negative status effects
And the rest of the tanks already see quite healthy pickrates in high tier competitive gameplay at the moment. With these changes we should be able to also tune Orisa and Rein accordingly so that they can function as better main tanks for Orisa/Hog/D.va or Rein/Zarya/D.va + if Sigma revolved less around his barrier and more by tanking with his actual body it would make Sigma/Zarya more viable without heroes like DF/Brig being the energy farm targets
It’s a complex issue, but most of it is caused by the power creep in long-range pure damage and Sigma’s release
The problem before anything is the difference between protections strengths and the weakness of shields counters like Bastion or Junkrat.
but if we look at the protections for a second.
so far we have double shields- now imagine all off tanks get some sort of buff to their protection like in 3-1-2.
suddenly hog might seem as a better option than a second shield with orisa,
But if hog is a better pick than other dps and support options might seem better to attack from range.
and so another composition might work better.
but lets say they keep orisa-sigma.
then you’ve got d.va being better at time based protection.
meaning your team can do better inside enemy lines.
so out of nowhere dive becomes a much better pick.
The reason why I prefer buffs and not nerfs is that every tank got a role to play in a team, a reason to pick it over others, and by nerfing the tanks you take their role away.
Reinhardt’s job for example is pushing forward to the point, his shield blocks income damage while Reinhardt and his team slowly push in.
Once in point he use his hammer and fire strike to put pressure and clean the point.
Charge is an optional tool to either get a surprise pick mid fight or disengage when needed.
The best they can do to is increasing speed while holding shield while also decreasing shield’s hp a bit but that’s about it, any other way will just take away Rein’s capability to do his job.
Because of that there’s no real way to nerf most tanks to focus more on other things…
Another example lets look at divers.
D.va needs her matrix to get into enemy lines without getting harmed before the fight starts- if you take away range,time or size you just force her to get harmed much more for noting…
Each hero should be able to do his job well so forcing them do something else is just a big mistake…
besides- tanks job is not securing kills but rather make space and protect.
dps should be the heroes securing kills.
So letting tanks be a bit closer to dps will not do any good to the role…
Even hog by the way does his job better than he might feel like to most people.
sure he can’t protect your whole team but hooking a diver forcing it to fight you or stunning pharah mid-ult can make a big impact.
The only real problem with the hero is him being able to only deal with 1 target at a time and not having some sort of protection for more than 1 hero.
right now he’s much more fitting to be an anti ult tank rather than a full time job protection.
If that’s the case then I would like to see some testings.
Reinhardt & Hog punish really well but it can be nice seeing other tanks punishing a bit harder. not too much more but still can be internsting to test
The actual role of main tank simple not work, double shield is a problem and can’t be resolved by lowering damage(developers already tried to lower damage and the gameplay result aren’t good they said).
The best thing to try is to remove “main” tank and make tanks like rein more similar to roadhog.
Is the only way to make the tanks gameplay less stale.
I have over 500h on Rein and i would instantly delete OW if they make Rein Hog 2.0 … sorry, but Tanks in the game since launch and some ppl enjoy play mt
Actually the game is stale in gameplay/balance and declining.
Can have a chance to be saved altering the gameplay or leave the game in this way, continue the declining until blizzard choice to stop the support.
The changes coming with the time can be only accepted, specially in fps multiplayer, i will love to continue to play instagib ctf in some way, but i know is not more possibile.
When even someone like Kaplan want to reduce the presence of barriers and cc, something is really wrong with it.
There is the thing… there was never a problem with Reins barrier… because he have to choose to shield or want to deal dmg/regen his shield. Winstons barrier was never reliable as an anchor, more to grab attention, block cd etc.
Orisa csn use everything she has while shielding, but cant move her barrier arround so easily.
SIGMA on the other hand can do everything, shile shielding and his barrier is extremly mobile too. When Bliuzard would finally realize that they should never add a barrier like this to the game, we never had a problem with double shield in the first place. More like with the snipers…
i cant understand how they never even tried to divide 1-1-2-2 shielders and offtanks… I mean, nobody wants offtanks cuz they are simply outmatched by shielders… Separately they don’t sound so different, but when you have characters that not only do as much if not more damage then others with the option to provide shield/barriers to the team, becomes clear why such a GAP exists and why double shield can be so opressive. There is no other choice, really. Either they nerf shielders damage (poor orisa and winston) or they separate roles, cuz this “every tank as a offtank” is just horrendous