Save the shields, but not the double shield

General Discussion
1

since changing the numbers has led to the disgrace of tank shields (cooldown, HP and gap), perhaps the time has really come to analyze in which situations the shields become useless despite there being 2-3 in a team.

  • if the beams are a way to overcome the matrix of sigma and D.va, we start to select some bullets of the game that “cross” the barriers?
  • or that the barriers applied in the vicinity add up in one but begin to have a faster expiration in summoning? (inspiration at zero hour)
  • maybe apply a small internal device that if destroyed by flankers first deactivates the barriers (as happens for the immortality field of Bap)?
  • make the damage splash (and not the bullets) passable by the barriers?
  • apply useful bonuses when destroying the enemy barrier by shooting at it? (ultra loading? ) would this discourage invoking shields too often without acting against the enemy in trench battles?

in short, we need a weak point. or find a precise weak point to the barriers that can be positioned and easily replaced (orisa and Sigma) without always going to act in the cooldown or in the shield hp.

Finding a sweet spot should help justify the return of decent shields who simply need to be careful, and not feel “useless” from the start.

2

Ladder during doubleshield “meta” last year.

Solution is to just buff the shields and ban the use of two shields at GM without applying the restriction anywhere else.

6 Likes
3

Huh, interesting.

You wouldn’t even need a “device”, it would just be shooting the backside of the barrier.

1 Like
4

I don’t really agree with this choice. I’m not a pro gamer, but I know that 2-2-2 games are hard to find at high levels. if shield / no shield restrictions are imposed, only those few tank players who start matches are discouraged. furthermore the double shield was also a problem of the middle ranks. :grimacing:

2 Likes
5

You used the wrong tab. If you want to see stats reflective of a meta you need to use GM only, or look at OWL/contenders. Low-mid ranks don’t care what the meta is.

During dive meta, low-mid ranks played Rein Zar. During Goats, they played Rein Zar. During double shield, they played Rein Zar. No matter what meta you look at, if you use the “all” tab, it will always show Rein/Zar at the top.

Low-mid ranks just play what they want/what they’re good at, not what’s meta. As we can see by them playing Rein Zar currently while Sig/Ball are meta

2 Likes
6

Tank shields aren’t a disgrace, they just aren’t absurdly overwhelming anymore. Were you not around before the great barrier nerf patch? It was quite possibly the longest team fights ever, with 80% of the match shooting at shields instead of enemies. It was awful.

The answer to shields is either breaking them, or going past them altogether with dive/rush/brawl. The issue is how much double shield has been fortified by Brig & Bap, as well as Sigma/Orisa being too good at recycling their shields & defensive abilities.

Blizz has taken a crack at every one of these heroes, and we’re pretty much out of double shield meta already. With Sigma being nerfed (and I still think he’ll be good) it’s not unlikely that Orisa may see some slight buffs in the near future once we see how this patch plays out

2 Likes
7

I thought it reminding the original flaw of playing Orisa: the flankers that go around the anchor tank. the real weakness of shields is precisely to destroy them from the inside.

another variant could be that the shields are much more fragile if you shoot into their inner surface.

8

They do. It affects what’s viable. Reinhard and Zarya had win rates far above everyone else. They get picked because they win. While the supposedly “META” Orisa is garbage at Masters and below.

By nerfing Orisa, who only really worked in GM. They essentially nerfed a hero for something the playerbase doesn’t actually do.

You do realize we’re in this mess right now because of that kind of elitist mentality right? Tanks have left and the tank population has been so low it’s made MMR pointless. And rather than trying to get the tank mains back, they’re continuing to nerf the tanks and trying to entice player into the tank role with lootboxes and passes.

2 Likes
9

They win because those players refuse to play & practice other tanks to get the same value they get on Rein/Zar who they’ve been playing since launch & are extremely straightforward. Not because they are better heroes. If they were better heroes then top level players would be playing them too.

Orisa isn’t meta. She hasn’t been for a few months. She’s kinda just not great in general rn

The real issue was that Orisa was nerfed without also nerfing Brig/Bap/Sig at the same time. So Orisa was immediately brought low, while the other 3 issues of double shield were still strong for quite awhile. Now that those other 3 heroes have been toned down it’s likely we’ll see some slight Orisa buffs soon imo

There is no elitist mentality.

The game should be balanced around playing the game properly, there’s no other way to do it. If you think that’s elitist then idk what to tell you. That’s how pretty much every game ever is and has been balanced, around optimal play.

Because it took over 3 years for role queue to come out

The only way for “tank mains” to come back is with the release of OW2.

Justifiably so. Before role queue came out forcing teams to have 2 DPS, we had a non-DPS meta called Goats. Tanks were busted, and Sigma was released busted too and needed several nerfs just to let other tanks finally start to compete without being made busted themselves (Gigahog, I’m looking at you)

Much better way to do it in the short term vs. breaking balance by dumping stats into tanks and making their existence matter more than player skill

You could buff every single tank and the tank playerbase would barely change. People like shooting/killing enemies & don’t like being shot at. That is why tank is the least popular. Nothing to do with balance & everything to do with the nature of the role itself. Tank is the least popular role in every game in existence that I can think of, just look at World of Warcraft.

All buffing tanks would do is push away DPS & support players annoyed by how absurdly overtuned they are

1 Like
10

Tbh, the easiest approach I can figure is to just remove or greatly weaken almost all the strong Anti-Dive capabilities on heroes that aren’t on offtanks, and with the exception of melee based knockbacks, revert all the knockbacks to how they functioned in 2018.

11

That said, an odd idea I was working on. What if D.va and Winston Ults cost half as much.

12

You’re justifying tanks being bad for 99% of the playerbase.

That screenshot was taken last year DURING doubleshield meta.

Every other game has been balanced for the playerbase before going into esports. What you see in high level Counterstrike and COD is also seen in normal play. The way pro players outfit themselves in battle royals is no different from what you’d normally do.

In overwatch. Goats was pretty much exclusively an OWL thing and nerfing them might have been good for pro play, but on ladder where those abused abilities were what made 2-2-2 already the norm, ended up crashing the tank roster. Orisa didn’t go from bottom tier tank to top meta after goats because she was strong, it was because she was the only one left standing.

2-2-2 meant tanks getting nerfed to make two tanks equal to two DPS, causing the already small tank pool to shrink even further.

During the height of goats, people were actually complaining about DPS comps.

The devs also admitted that goats barely existed on ladder, the goats nerfs weren’t needed because it wasn’t a problem and actually encouraged more variety in tank play.

To say that Goats was a problem, you’re basically claiming that there are more tanks than DPS players.

2-2-2 was a mistake, there aren’t enough tank players to actually populate it. And balancing for it meant making tanks so bad the people that actually liked tanking are dropping the role.

You’re taking a pro mindset and trying to apply it to the playerbase. What actually happens is that the more powerful the tank, the less likely you were to get a second tank. When Sigma went live, 2-2-2 wasn’t implemented in QP and what happened was that the number of solo tank games (which was already common) rocketed. Considering what happened in goats, the same would have likely happened in Competitive as well.

2 Likes
13

Except the two problems are: 1. they finally realized that shooting shields is not fun for anyone and 2. Below GM you have a balanced game. You had a balanced game last week you have a balanced game this week, and you had a balanced game for almost the entirety of the past 4 years with only a few exceptions.

14

Not at all. I don’t know why I keep hearing this, it’s totally false.

A Gold player not being good enough to play Sigma as well as they can play Reinhardt does not mean balance is bad, or that I’m justifying any hero “being bad” for any player.

That player needs to practice Sigma, or whatever tank they want to play so they can play them with success, the same way they can play Reinhardt and have success.

It’s just like how Widowmaker shouldn’t be buffed just because a Gold player can get more value out of Junkrat. Just think about it

You used the all tab.

I already explained that Bronze->Diamond do not play what’s meta. Taking a screenshot of ranks that don’t play the meta is irrelevant.

If you want to see relevant data during a meta, take a screenshot of the GM tab. I already said this. Throughout every single meta in Overwatch, the all tab has not reflected what has been meta. The all tab is next to useless.

You are comparing Overwatch, a game with 32 entirely unique heroes… to games that give every player access to the same weapons/equipment and play exactly the same. They’re not comparable. I made the World of Warcraft comparison for a reason. It is another class based game, where tanks are the least popular. You can also look at Heroes of the Storm. Tanks are least popular there as well.

Every role based game in existence, tanks are the least popular. As far as I can think of anyways

This wasn’t my experience. I was playing in Masters & high Diamond at the time and was playing Goats very frequently. But 2-2-2 was also played.

This is a massive exaggeration.

??? Not at all. Goats was a problem if you liked playing DPS heroes. Because it was only after several nerfs to all of the heroes in Goats that we started to see 4 DPS/Ball/Mercy comps emerge in high ranks. Otherwise it was goats galore, and you either matched it or lost. There was kinda a huge deal about it. Players famous for playing DPS were playing tank/support or not even playing at all. It was sad.

1 Like
15

When a hero is unplayable for the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, that’s a problem. During doubleshield meta, Orisa was garbage from Bronze to Diamond, and barely usable in Masters.

I’ve shown you what tanks were viable from Bronze to Diamond. By continuously balancing for the top 1%, you’re only enforcing what the lower tiers can play. Reinhard and Zarya were already dominating ladder while Orisa was at the bottom. So the solution was the buff Reinhardt and Nerf Orisa?

Yes, tanks aren’t that popular, but they don’t actively drive their tank playerbase away like Overwatch does. We had a tank population and going by how the queue times have been going up despite them loosening the MMR, it’s shrinking even more.

That’s what the devs said. Goats barely existed on ladder. Despite your anecdotal experience, that’s what the stats and the devs say.

And for the sake of a tiny minority, the playerbase got crapped on.

Things would have been better if they just applied the 2-2-2 lock to Masters and GM and let the playerbase have the ‘goats meta’.

16

Sounds like those players need to get better at the game then considering Orisa was busted during double shield. I really can’t believe Blizz kept her Halt the way it was for as long as they did.

Not a balance issue, a player issue.

I don’t ask for Widowmaker to be buffed because I’m not good with her :man_shrugging:

No you didn’t. You showed me what tanks were most played in Bronze->Diamond. In that one week of stats (which varies from week to week) all tanks winrates were within a few percentage points of eachother. They just weren’t played nearly as equally.

The whole idea is that players should be required to get better at the game and be able to utilize more advanced heroes & playstyles. Not dumb down the game & heroes by dumping stats into them until they’re absolutely busted just so that a player with no practice can hop onto them & dominate.

There’s a big difference between dominating & populating. I can only repeat myself so many times. If players do not want to play Rein/Zar on ladder they don’t have to. They just have to be willing to put in the time/effort/practice on other tanks. It’s really that simple.

If Rein/Zar were the best tanks, they would be in GM too, but they’re not. That means ladder needs to get better on other tanks & stop playing Rein/Zar

:nauseated_face: I don’t think you know what you’re saying

17

You ruin a hero for something 99% can’t even do.

52 vs 50 is massive. If it was insignificant Orisa wouldn’t have both bad pick and win rates if she was supposed to be powerful.

You’re claiming that everyone is as good as a GM.

They have both top pick and win rates. They’re picked because they work and that’s not going to change if they keep nerfing every other tank.

During Orisa’s meta she actually had one of the worst win rates on ladder.

We have people tracking the stats and the devs during that time. Goats was when tanks were the most balanced on ladder.

Look where we are now. Tank population is so low they’ve loosened up the MMR making QP a total chaos. We didn’t have SR, but there was consistency. There was a clear difference between low mid and high MMR games, that’s gone now. And they’ve put up lootboxes and queue passes trying to get people to play tank.

18

Just give 10% ult charge normally shooting at someone would give. Hog shooting a right click for 150 shield break? Give him 15 points worth of ult charge (.5%) That way barriers should be used to block a lot of damage but not excessive junk rat spam or hog spam or anything like that

19

Nerfing a hero that is overperforming (albeit only at the highest ranks) is not ruining a hero. It’s as simple as this, players need to improve if they want to play more difficult tanks. Reinhardt & Zarya are the easiest tanks to pick up & play, thus they have the highest pickrates in low-mid ranks regardless of the meta.

Again, that was one week of data. The next week was likely different, and 52 v 50 isn’t that bad considering like we’ve been over, ladder does not have nearly as much practice on tanks besides Rein/Zar, so it’s totally understandable why their winrate would be lower.

I barely ever play Widow, I’m not good with her. It’s totally understandable if I have a sub 50% winrate with her because I don’t play her and because I don’t have nearly as much practice as I do with Torbjorn or Symmetra for example. Understandably, my more practiced heroes have a higher winrate, and my less practiced heroes have a lower winrate. That’s just…how it works.

You have to keep in mind…if players don’t play a hero, they’re unlikely to be successful with them. As I’ve said probably 5 times now, players need to stop playing Rein/Zar if they want to get better on other tanks. It’s really not a hard concept. Put in practice, profit.

No… I’m saying you should not be expecting ladder to be as good as they are with Rein/Zar if they never play any other tanks. They’ve been playing Rein/Zar since launch…for over 4 years now. If they’ve put in 5 hours of playtime into Sig/Ball/Dva/Winston, why do you expect them to have the same winrate?

It’s really simple…play other tanks…get better… winrate will go up.

Read comment above.

More practice = Good hero for that player = high winrate.
Less practice = bad hero for that player = low winrate.

Want to increase winrate? Increase the pickrate.

They’re picked for the reasons I’ve stated several times. Even when Sigma/Orisa were at the height of their power…Rein/Zar were still more popular on ladder. You literally just sent a screenshot proving that. You can’t use the excuse of “Rein/Zar are only popular because other tanks have been nerfed” because before they were nerfed Rein/Zar will still more popular…for the reasons I’ve stated.

Players need to branch out, not beg for balance changes to dump stats into other tanks that don’t need them.

:laughing: “Most balanced on ladder”

Whatever that means

20

You know, it’s not that some players who want top down balance are elitists, it s that some average players feel entitled: I’m bad and average, so please hold my hands and don’t let better players bully me.

I don’t see Widow orTracer mains complain that their mains are difficult to get values out of, they know they need to get better themselves.

1 Like