Original post on reddit by u/INeedPeeling
Warning: this post is long, because the issue and its solutions are pretty nuanced.
Overwatch is a great game. It’s really well-designed. I love playing it, and so do most of us. I think it’s going to stand the test of time, and even if it doesn’t, I’m going to keep playing it until a better game comes along. Blizzard has done a great job reducing player toxicity as well. (Who cares about endorsements, right? Apparently all of us do!)
However, there is still one major problem in the OW community: right now, the “Damage” heroes are heavily overrepresented in the player base, both overall and in nearly every individual game. DPS heroes are not only more intuitive to pick up and play, they are generally thought of as more fun.
There are several reasons for this. The DPS-heroes-are-more-intuitive part is something that Overwatch was going to deal with regardless of anything, as a FPS/MOBA hybrid. We’ll address that issue as an inherent “Condition Zero” below.
Let’s continue, though. Blizzard has also made three decisions that have helped make Damage heroes the most “fun” heroes to play for most people, and main tanks (followed by main healers) generally the least “fun” and least represented class. I have a main tank alt and you yourself might enjoy playing main tanks too, but regardless, it is true that the majority of people would rather play DPS, or possibly off-tank/utility support which is right next door to DPS. Main tanks (and then probably main healers other than Ana) are generally the least-desired role, across the entire player base.
(If you’re surprised by the statements above, watch which positions get slam-picked in your games most often. In 90% of games, it’s DPS and off-tank. Or hang out here for a day and count the number of posts that ask how to play a DPS hero, versus posts asking about main tank or support. And when people ask about support, it’s usually Ana or Zen or occasionally Lucio or Brig, the “fun” healers, the ones that can pump out high damage or take down an over-aggressive Genji. Alt accounts are usually tanks and supports who have tank/support fatigue or just want to learn the really fun jobs. I’ve never heard of DPS fatigue.)
Let’s examine the built-in “Condition Zero” and the three Blizzard decisions that have led to the DPS overpopulation. We’ll examine how Blizzard’s decision-making is evolving going forward, and consider some suggestions to address the issues. (The most important issue is probably the one addressed at the end.)
Why are we bothering to talk about this? Simple: we can do something about it by discussing it. Blizzard has a history of listening to the community. It doesn’t always happen fast, but it almost always happens eventually. Last year, we spent a lot of time here discussing the problems with Junkrat’s extra concussion mine. Blizz ended up doing exactly what the community recommended: fall-off damage for the mine and a slight slowdown on Tire movement. And it worked. Junkrat is strong, but no longer overtuned.
Praise be to Papa Jeff; he’s given us a great game, and he listens. Let’s dive into Overwatch history.
Condition Zero: The first problem that leads to extra DPS is simple. Damage heroes are the ones that fit most neatly into previous FPS experience. Tanks and supports are from other genres of gaming: MMORPGs and MOBAs. Even TF2, from my limited experience, seems to be pretty different from OW in this way. So, if a player has played CS, Halo, CoD, or even Quake, but has never played WoW, LoL, HotS, or Dota, they may not really know what a Tank or Support is supposed to do, but they know what fragging is. DPS heroes have the simplest concept: point your gun at the enemy and click on their dome.
There’s not much to do about the inherent intuitiveness of Damage heroes (relative to other heroes). Below, then, are the decisions that Blizzard made that added to the problem. Some of these were not necessarily bad decisions at the time they were made.
The first decision Blizzard made, which unintentionally made this problem worse, was to start the game with both a full Offense and full Defense roster, not understanding that these heroes would all be played interchangeably as “DPS” or “Damage” heroes. (They have effectively admitted this, since now Offense and Defense dispositions are no more.)
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It wasn’t really Blizzard’s fault that tanks and supports turned out to be more powerful than they expected. 2/2/2 turned out to be the dominant early macro-comp. The Overwatch team couldn’t have known that would happen in beta. However, the issue was obvious well before Sombra was released; in fact, the dominant meta during Season 3 was Triple Tank and sometimes even Quad Tank. With that information in hand, Sombra and Doomfist both should have been tanks, or possibly supports. (To be fair, Sombra was played as a support for a while. But Doomfist as an offense hero was a significant misstep.)
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The real problem the roster imbalance created was a lack of counterplay options for tanks, especially main tanks. (This is also a big part of why people pick main tank or main healer and then swap to DPS; there’s no great answer in their class to the hero who’s killing them. At least if they switch DPS they can avoid getting shat on every 30 seconds by that red Mei or Pharah.)
If the opposing team is running you into the ground with Pharah, Doomfist, Widow and Brig, which main tank are you supposed to switch to? Orisa, I guess. The point is that you don’t have a good solo switch option. Tanks depend on each other and on synergy with supports far more than DPS heroes do. If anything, tanks should be the most diverse class, because they have both synergy and counterplay to worry about, in a way that DPS heroes generally do not.
- DPS heroes are generally much more interchangeable and free to engage in counterplay with the enemy. On the ladder, DPS concerns are all about counterplay: who’s dealing with Pharah, who’s dealing with Doomfist, who’s dealing with Widow, who’s dealing with Tracer, do we have a team wipe ult, etc. For almost all of those questions, there are many answers in the Damage category and exactly one good answer (and maybe one other “meh” answer) among Tanks.
We need diversity, specificity, and real counterplay in our tank roster. Especially our main tank roster. Winston is a reasonable counter to Genji and Widow. Orisa is a reasonable counter to Doomfist… but does any tank counter Brig? Does anyone at all counter Brig, other than Pharah, who is of course a Damage hero?
Thankfully, it looks like Blizz is listening, at least in terms of more support and tank heroes. JEFF PLS KEEP IT UP. We need more tanks, especially main tanks. My hope: Blizz does not release another DPS hero until we have at least six main tanks and six off-tanks. (Honestly I would say seven main tanks.)
Moving along…
The second decision Blizzard has made is to incorporate more CC (crowd control, i.e. boops and stuns) into the game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. (Stay with me.) CC is an interesting element of MOBA play; it makes the game more complex, and more fun when it isn’t oppressive. However, right now there is also no real counterplay to CC, other than your own CC, snipers, or Orisa. Of course, Orisa also has CC of her own to throw in the Well, as it were. So this also makes the game much less fun for main tanks, who have more or less exactly one hero they can play if the red team has more Doomfists and Brigs (both of whom are notorious for knocking Reins around like bowling pins).
- What’s the Overwatch team doing about this one? Well, honestly, I’m not loving how this one is being “addressed”. Instead of releasing more heroes who can counter CC, we’re reworking yet another Damage hero to be a solution to Brig (and only by solving the armor problem, not the CC problem). We’re talking about Torb, of course. New Torb does not save our poor main tank players from Stun Lock Hell. But worse, we are turning to our already-overloaded DPS roster to save our tanks (again) from the thing that is crapping on them. Of course people swap DPS when this is what they have to work with.
Right now, we’re dealing with a weird form of CC creep that makes the game much more chaotic and (in my opinion) less skillful and fun.
I believe we need mechanics that will make the game more orderly, not more chaotic. The obvious answer is anti-CC abilities, either like Fortify or Zarya projected barrier, or even abilities that could be applied AoE. I’m sure there are also many more ways to do it.
We’ll see how this one gets addressed over the course of time. Let’s move on to item #3.
This is the sneaky one that everybody underestimates. The final (and secretly the biggest) decision contributing to this too-many-DPS-not-enough-main-tanks issue was, the Overwatch team designed nearly all of the game’s stats and almost all meaningful UI feedback around kills, just like the majority of (if not all) FPS games before Overwatch. Participating in as many frags as possible is what the UI rewards and the game recognizes, even at the expense of dying a lot yourself (and possibly giving up the win to do so). For a theoretically objective-based shooter, Overwatch feels a lot like a game of Team Slayer. And it shouldn’t.
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**Sensory feedback.**Hearing that little ring and seeing the red skull, “Eliminated HiddenPants” drives us to keep playing DPS (or aggro D.Va or aggro Moira or whatever). This is especially true when it’s accompanied by the “ting” that accompanies a headshot. We all like those little dopamine shots; it’s the reason we check our phones so often. Overwatch is no different.
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The Kill Feed. It’s called a Kill Feed. And it tracks Final Blows against heroes, destructible items like turrets and mechs… and Resurrects. (I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about the kill feed.)
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POTG. The purvey of DPS, sometimes Reinhardt, and occasionally D.Va. Ask yourself this: With Graviton Surge being the most powerful ultimate in the game… how often do I see a Zarya POTG? We could go on. Grav, Nano, Supercharger. All solid tank and support ults, perfect setups for someone else’s fat 5K, which leads to them getting POTG. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Cards. Yes, there’s a healing card, and a damage blocked card, but most cards are for different riffs on kills… Shatter Kills, kill streaks, kill participation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a card for Sleeps landed, or Ultimates interrupted. Yet there’s a card for the ridiculous Objective Time (time spent hanging out on the payload smdh). That’s what tanks get.
In B4 someone says no one over 14 cares about POTG or cards. You may not “care”, but POTG and cards absolutely influence your perception of what happened in the game. They’re used as a trump card in arguments about who was doing their job. Experienced players know to temper what we see, but we still pay attention, especially if POTG offers particularly impressive positioning, timing, or mechanical work. Watching the POTG and looking at cards alter our perception of what mattered in the game. “Holy hell, nice flicks by McCree, 60% kill participation, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.”)
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We here at r/OWU know medals don’t matter, but not everyone knows. We still have Moiras or even D.Vas making sarcastic comments about their gold elims, even at higher tiers.
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There are still no meaningful stats for main tanks other than damage blocked and stuff like Shatter kills, and off-tanks are being measured exactly like DPS, which incentivizes them to play D.Va like Fat Genji, Roadhog like Fat Reaper, and Zarya like… whatever Zarya is. The incentive is for all the DPS and off-tanks to ignore the healers and hope they can stay alive, while trying to frag out.
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Ult charge, built up by only 2 things we can control. Damage and healing. Tanks, deal damage in addition to making space, or forget it.
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Edit from a comment: Being on fire mostly comes from doing damage and healing. (And in the case of healing, it’s really only multiple-target healing that does it. How many times have you seen Mercy on fire?)
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What about making space? Ye gods, we talk about it all the time here, but there hasn’t even been an attempt to base a meaningful statistic on controlling space in the map. Starting a team fight on the far side of the cart to save time, that’s something you should get rewarded for and would make people PRESS F*CKING W.
THIS STUFF MATTERS. When you’re spending the whole game getting tossed around by Doomfist and Brig, having MEANINGFUL metrics that say you did your job well are really MFing important!!
Additional Note, because I see it mentioned in the sub from time to time: I am not in favor of a full match stat sheet. We’re moving toward better overall positivity as a community, no need to give everyone a flamethrower. But what we do need are more stats, meaningful stats, and UI feedback.
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Healing a teammate back from Crit should be a stat. You should get a Save for that, and a chime and a little heart (or something) like the skull you get for a Final Blow.
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If you Bio Nade 4 teammates back from Crit and save your Rein with a Nano back from 10 health and he kills their whole team, GODDAMMIT THAT SHOULD BE PLAY OF THE GAME. We talked about Zarya POTG’s earlier. How many ANA POTG’s have you seen? Five? Three? None?
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Peeling an enemy who damaged one of your healers from up close should be a stat. Support Save.
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Drive the enemy tank line back 60 meters when nobody died on either team? That takes skill!!! But you’ll never see any reference to it in stats, cards, POTG, or medals. (Not even objective time, because that shiz won’t happen on top of the payload, I promise you.)
Once we get to be vets at this stuff, we start to realize how much it matters, and we do it anyway. But the UI (and the tutorials) do not teach or provide any game feedback for things like peeling. And don’t we all need peeling!!! These things may be harder to track, especially the tank stats. But they will go a long way toward solving the DPS problem.
tl;dr Right now, everybody (or at least a disproportionate section of players) wants to play the heroes that get kills, because that is what the game itself pays the most attention to: popping off. It is also the class where you will spend the least amount of time dead if no one will help you. It is the class that offers the most counterplay to enemy carries, and the class most capable itself of carrying, AT LEAST THE WAY THE UI EVALUATES CARRYING.
Blizzard can most easily solve the DPS rationality trap if it starts to move the game’s emphasis away from damage and kills, and more toward setting up favorable conditions to win team fights and take objectives. So, the four things that lead to DPS-heavy, tank-light lineups are:
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Condition Zero: a basic FPS community familiarity with Damage heroes and how they work
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Blizzard’s decision to overfill the Offense and Defense roster has created a lack of tank diversity, especially main tank diversity. This then leads to a lack of effective switching options, in a game theoretically built around switching. (This seems like it’s possibly being addressed)
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Too much CC, not enough counter-CC (not being addressed at all)
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Almost all UI feedback and game recognition being built around kills (this is not being addressed or even really discussed)
We can’t change the first factor (Condition Zero). But if we go to work on the last three things, we can start to balance out hero choices.
We can only bring 4 DPS to an end by making other heroes more fun to play. If you have ideas that have not been suggested here, I’d love to hear them!
Best, Peeling
Editor’s note: I have permission from u/INeedPeeling to crosspost this topic. I formatted this post, but made no changes to the text.