With 2-2-2, you can no longer switch roles mid-game, which if I remember was a core selling point of OW. I just played a QP where I was tanking, and we were losing, and I thought “Man, if I jumped over to someone like Rat right now we could turn this thing around! It would take them a minute or so to react properly and we might win in that time.” But all I could do is switch to another tank, which isn’t really tactic in any realistic sense. “Oh, I’ll surprise them by becoming another tank!”
So if we can’t switch roles, our switching options largely become redundant or pointless. And if those options are pointless, what are they doing in the game?
As of right now if any player is good at flanking can be a game changer. Enemy players kept relying on Symmetra to be this OP hero only to realize they had to swap. Flank meta needs to commence, but overall this just goes to so a lot of heroes aren’t truly build for role queue setting. They need to start tweaking around heroes now that role queue is a norm.
I guess my point is, OW had this thing where you could switch in response to the shifting nature of the gameplay. In practice that usually meant switching roles, not switching within a role.
I have trouble seeing the point of switching out mid-game now.
You switch rat and lose a main tank which opens your team up to another problem.
The issue with the last system is it only works if multiple people on your team are flexible. There’s virtually no situation in which Reinhardt should be switching to rat and leaving your team exposed. You may be better at rat but the DPS can’t play main tank.
If Junkrat is the win condition then one of the DPS should be switching to rat. People being at an appropriate MMR for their current role is one of the big problems that 2-2-2 is attempting to solve.
I see this as the potential of the development crew. It totally does kill the concept from what it was suppose to be, but they it’s not the first time they did that. “hint hint” Symmetra.
The all too common situation where your teammates fail to grasp the concept of your barrier and ignore it and move past it. At which point you playing Junkrat isn’t going to be noticably different.
I have never as a support, dps or off tank player wanted to lose a barrier to gain a Junkrat.
I may have wanted a Junkrat, or I may have thought my DPS wasn’t doing a good job, but I’ve never thought this whole situation would be improved if we lose a tank and get Junkrat.
That’s my experience. I think the idea of 2-2-2 being inherently better than any other number combo is voodoo game tactics at best anyway. Maybe in certain conditions. But in rubber-meets-road gameplay, there’s no one size that fits all.
Role-switching added a tactical and possibly strategic layer, where you could play a certain comp at one part of a match and change to another comp at another. Or lure the enemy into a pattern and then exploit it. Or even just revel in the bizarre alchemy produced by your team making a weird intuitive comp reaction to the game.
If I could map my fun in OW, the high spikes would almost always correlate to “odd” team comps, like 5 dps and 1 healer. Sure, they’re risky, but that’s what makes them satisfying when they work. Now I just feel like, I dunno, I’m being a good boy and playing by the rules so no one gets consfusilated. I’m not sure I’d tag that with much of a fun label.
In a situation where Junkrat is the win condition its the refusal of one of the DPS to switch to him that’s the problem.
Losing a tank because someone refused to go rat is part of the problem of the the old system. Now I won’t lie and say that I’ve never myself switched off of tank and support to get done what the DPS weren’t doing.
However I’m more open to the times that this will happen and I can’t switch than to see 4+ DPS, nobody wanting to play support, nobody wanting to play tank, players not being at the appropriate MMR because they’re a good Mercy but they want to play Widow and don’t have a seperate account…
Each system has its flaws, but the past system had way too many.
