This is a disection of the double shield composition which is commonly used a reason to discredit the viability of 6v6. This will serve to inform why the issue is no longer present due to recent balancing and reworks. However, this is NOT entirely factual. All I ask is that you don’t dox me if you disagree.
Double shield was primarily caused by Sigma and Orisa. However, with Orisa’s rework, she no longer has her deployable shield which would almost alleviate the issues with this comp.
The main principle of double shield is that the tank can deploy their shield and still contribute to the team fight with damage and abilities. This means that Rein doesn’t count towards a double shield meta. The only heroes currently viable for a double shield comp are Sigma, Ramattra, and technically Winston, however Winston doesn’t fit well into the poke-brawl comp occupied by Sig and Ram.
Even with the precense of Ram, his shield is on a time duration and cannot be easily cycled with Sigma’s as it’s on a long cooldown. Comparably, Orisa’s OW! shield was on a 12 second cooldown, however due to the duration, it could have constant uptime. Comparing this to Ram cements him as an invalid pick for such a comp.
This only leaves Winston, however he’s a dive tank and wouldn’t synergize well with the comps supported by double shield. Additionally, his shield is also on a cooldown, whilst now very long, he cannot easily cycle and avoid being killed.
Whilst double shield is definitely still possible in 6v6, it would take far more effort to do effectively, majorly hurting its risk-reward state. So there you have it, double shield would be almost impossible to pull off with OW2’s current state.
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i agree, 6v6 should come back along with the original OW that we’ve all paid and cherished for.
cant wait for some guy to come in here and say “But but THE QUEUE TIMES”
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Na I’m just going to detail how the game was made to self balance it’s self via counter picks, and that tank duo’s layered together or with the odd support. Removed any need to do that. And inherently created a rock and a hard place scenario as you couldn’t just nerf the problematic heroes because they were necessary to manage other heroes as part of the counter pick cycle.
Also ya que times are an issue, tanks kind of didn’t like the to do the whole “main tank” thing and left.
You make good points about the shields, but the problem with 6v6 was a lack of tank players, which led to unreasonable queue times and looser matchmaking. It didn’t make sense to require an equal number of players for the least popular role by far, and the tank population is still a problem today with only one tank per team.
I don’t think there’s a realistic way to get four tank players in every match. It’s not a question of balance or hero design. Tank is the least popular role in every game with traditional tank/DPS/support roles. 6v6 really only worked with open queue.
Being tired of hearing the reason doesn’t make the reason any less the reason.
Honestly now that GOATS has been solved, role queue MIGHT not need to exist anymore.
If they were to leave tanks as is 3 tanks and 2 support is horrible to play against in MH.
Double shield wasn’t so strong just because of Orisa and sig shields alone. They both had their own strong defensive cooldown they could use when a shield wasn’t available, kinetic grasp and fortify.
Kinetic grasp and fortify both still exist and are stronger than before. While Orisa lost the shield, she now has an ability almost equivalent to the incredibly strong kinetic grasp, Javelin spin. Javelin spin will straight up destroy projectiles that hit it, nullifying any effects just as well, better even, as a shield that could’ve blocked it, while potentially being able to block infinitely more damage than her old shield could’ve.
Ram might be a decent substitute? I don’t really want to get too much into that though. I imagine they would have very powerful defensive ability rotations as well. In the case of both pairings, you also need to consider the support’s abilities to cover occasional gaps in these defenses.
And they’ll be right. I really do want them to replace 5v5 with 6v6 everywhere in the game for an entire week. The majority of the 6v6 crowd will not complain when the game reverts to 5v5, or ask for 6v6 again until they forget how long the queues were, again.
The main issue is that Orisa no longer has a shield to cycle Javelin with, so her “shield” uptime would still be much lower than before.
Maybe because all i ever see that 5v5 defenders ever bring up is “Queue times” (especially for tank) to keep 5v5, when in fact the queue times are just as bad if not worse than OW1’s iteration despite the switch to 5v5. We’ve been given a degraded product that never solved the queue times issues and sometimes even made it worse, and they expect me to believe them that 5v5 was made to solve it. And the worst part of all of this despite them significantly lowering the barrier of entry to solve this supposed “queue times issue” by:
- Making the game into a F2P model which will allow easy entry into the game to bring players in. All it takes is an account, download the files, and you’re in, no payment required (OW1 never had this)
- Extending matchmaking ranges where you can be matched with players several ranks above or below you in hopes to find matches faster (OW1 never had this)
The queue times are still terrible!
And the best part is that these people who keep bringing the argument that “the switch to 5v5 was created to solve queue times,” the Blizzard developers themselves have recently said that the switch to 5v5 was never for queue times, but it was for a gameplay change. So I’d like to hear anyone try to defend 5v5 now that even Blizzard developers have said this.
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I’m not experiencing that, nor am I seeing it the top 500 streamers or so. give or take im in the east coast US servers.
Like keep in mind the old ques were so bad that gold DPS players were like waiting for 30 to a couple of hours to get a game.
I remember my little sister throwing a fit, because the she couldn’t play bastion for like a year. Because she didn’t have time to wait for the que. And became a salty brig and mercy player.
in high plat and Daimond now I’m seeing like 5 minute ques at the worst. And streamers are not exactly playing entire different games while they wait now.
This may be a BOLD statement but for those of us in groups of (2) queue times should DECREASE not increase in 6v6. Many more combos of groups could fix together making for faster queues. 3x Groups of 2, 2x Groups of 3 1x Group of 4 + 1x Group of 2 and those are simple examples and already more combos of queues than can fit in 5v5 for group queues.
Imagine if 5v5 released with 1 new Tank, making a hero roster of 8 Tanks, 16 DPS, 7 Supports, and the only new hero we get in 3 YEARS is Echo, yet another DPS hero when we already have so many.
Also imagine that 5v5 is left in a state where you can easily put together the “ultimate CC team”, as Geoff put it in the OW2 PVP Dev Livestream, that consists of OW1 version of heroes like Reinhardt/Roadhog/Sigma, Cassidy/Mei/Sombra, Ana/Brigitte that chain-CC the Tank players to oblivion. Ultimate’s also came up way more frequently in OW1, which meant getting hit by Earth Shatter more often, EMP’d by Sombra more often, Frozen by Mei’s Blizzard more often, etc.; but ult charge rate can been reduced in 2-2-2 just like they did for 5v5.
Because those are exactly what happened in OW1 2-2-2. Anyone that thinks 2-2-2 was even remotely given a chance clearly have not studied. So no, the Queue Time argument against 2-2-2 is not reasonably supported, we had a very imbalanced hero roster and awful hero release schedule, as well as too much obnoxious CC that could’ve been toned down to make Tanks enjoy 2-2-2 more, we didn’t have to wait until OW2 5v5 to begin to address the CC issue.
So a lot of those design decisions wouldn’t been made in 5v5 format.
Tank duo’s were so stacked that they removed the normal counter play for the separate heroes they comprised. At least in the specific meta duo’s that were played. And required CC to just to have openings at times.
If they started with 5v5 roleque specifically, there would be no reason to have for brig to exists for example.
Because she was specifically designed to break apart the winston/d.va dive duo, and more wasy to play around the flanker duo of genji/tracer.
Much like the base game now. We would have never needed a hero like her to manage that. Nor would we ever have to deal with goats or double barrier for that matter.
I can see old mei sticking around as she was designed around launch d.va / roadhog and genji. Were it’s a single target slow and eventual freeze. Be it how strong that is would very heavily.
Heck most of defence hero reworks might have never happened either because their is just a lot more open space for torbs turret to shoot something that isn’t the enemy tank stack. Or sym to not immediately get zoned out of the game because their is more room to play around single winston, then their is the actual dive duo that will get in and obliterate a slow character like her.
Maybe. I had fun with GOATS tbh. And I thought pre-RQ was OW at its best. But tanks would have to be super rebalanced now to go back to open queue.
I also don’t think the community would be willing to go back, support-only players especially. People only want to play what they want to play, which is what caused RQ, which is what caused 5v5. I think anything that makes people feel pressured to be team players isn’t going to go over well.
I think the overwhelming majority of the community never wanted or asked for 5v5 to begin with and would much prefer to go back to 6v6, with or without RQ. It’s easy to make statements about what you perceive or believe to be true of the community’s wishes to support your own argument on either side.
5v5 is not working and has created more problems that they intended to solve with it. The gameplay is stale and impossible to balance in its current state with the raid boss single tank role. The game has been dumbed down and the strategic element that made OW1 popular to begin with has been diminished to a point where the only strategy needed is knowledge of which tank counters the enemy’s tank.
Even most of the popular streamers that initially were in support of 5v5 have mostly changed their perspectives.
I don’t think people were asking for 5v5 either, but RQ, which was heavily requested (not by me), more heavily than anything I’ve ever seen around here, made requiring 4 tanks per match untenable. I agree that strategic elements were lost from early days, but I think RQ did that. 5v5 was the only practical option to counter the issues 6v6 was having post-RQ.
I like 5v5 fine. It works for me, but that’s because I’m a flex player adaptable to any patch. I’m not saying it’s the best ever, but I have to recognize that it’s infinitely better than 6v6 RQ. It bothers me how short this community’s memory is. Whether 5v5 is more popular or not, it’s the only way this game is going to work. At least it’s working for some people now, and we’re not all waiting in 10-minute queues for QP like we did before the switch.
I don’t even think that’s true. Counter picks were supposed to be a good option, but not literally the thing that made Overwatch balanced. Mostly because counters to characters are inevitable, and no one would like the game if it was literally just “I swapped, so lose”.
People complain about rock paper scissors now for a reason. And by the way:
Is considered good design. “I’m weak to this guy, but with teamwork, we can overcome our downsides” is something overwatch should really have in the game. The alternative is this counter swap crisis that we have now.
Blizz could add a 2nd tank right now and literally make no other changes, and every complaint about 6v6 from OW1 would be completely meaningless.
Shields already melt fast today because ALL roles do much more damage in OW2. Imagine when the enemy team has TWO tanks busting them down?
Queue times complainers conveniently ignore that tanks are redesigned into brawlers and are much more dps friendly. There is longtime proof this works because you already see tons of dps players queueing support because they too are dps friendly. And you see tanks picked constantly in every game mode possible except 5v5 role lock because solo tanking is horrible.
The game mode of 5v5 is what’s killing queue times.
I still don’t understand the mindset behind defending Overwatch’s removal.
Are you tired of people complaining about 6v6? The solution is simple.
Bring back the game.
but then, no battlepass to extort the players 