The main reason is that each role attracts a different psychotype of gamer and those who are specifically drawn to tanking are in the minority.
Tanks do too much damage and die too fast.
As somebody who we spent about 1,000+ hours on that issue
- Do 6v6 anyways, as a replacement for 5v5 Open Queue
- Let Content creators do most the balancing
- It’s gonna be extremely scuffed on balancing
- They are gonna have a huge Tank scarcity
- The October 2020 patch was just two placebo effects, and a near identical patch in December 2020 had hard metas.
I think it was just Ana who was even more popular than most of the popular dps. This is FPS after all and even if the devs tried many other things, nothing could beat the fun of hitscan shooting in terms of the popularity. For the same reason, cree is one of the most popular dps of all-time whose abilities are rather bland but has the most satisfying leftclick.
Ana was possible because the support role doesn’t directly oppose shooting. But tanks are like the direct opposite.
Aiming tanks are possible imo, but the OG tanks like rien/winton were short-ranged and AoE/little aim requirements, and they determined what OW tanks are.
It seems the current proportion of tanks/supps players are higher than they were. But I think it’s not because tanks/supps becmame more fun. It’s more like excessively many dps players left the game while tanks/supps players remained mostly, because there’s no alternative if you play tanks/supps.
Which is just a further proof that it is all about the power level and tanking is just miserable now.
Do you know what was fixable issue? Nerfing shields instead of this 5v5 nonsense.
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This is objectively not true.
They showed the graph in the last dev blog.
Support is more popular than tank, even in OW1.
I agree with this part.
Doesn’t matter what format we have, everything can be balanced.
The problem is, they failed to balance every format, and they even acknowledged it.
Sometimes, balancing requires full redesigns and reworks of entire roles. Not sure if they’re willing to do so.
For now, we’re getting way more skins than reworks.
Support became more popular because it’s more like DPS. It’s not actually “support” that became more popular, they just changed the support design to be “DPS with utility”. Which I personally don’t like.
So yes, if you design tanks to be more like DPS, the role will become more popular. But it will also not be “tank”. It will be “beefy DPS”.
Is that a good thing to do? Idk, maybe for some people. But I don’t really like that because I play the game exactly because support was what it was. I don’t like playing “DPS with utility”, I like to play “support”. But sure, if you make every role more like DPS, more DPS players will play the other roles, but at the expense of people (me) who don’t like playing DPS.
Edit: But of course it can also be a net positive. Junker Queen, I think, is seen very positively by most tank players despite playing more like a traditional DPS character. So I’m not saying it’s bad to do that, I recognize that it can be positive and maybe I’m just the odd one out or maybe it’s better for tanks than it is for supports.
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Only one tank, nobody wants the pressure.
Play tank and people are gonna mock you if you’re worse than the other tank.
People are gonna throw a “tank diff” if you’re having an off day.
You think people want that? Lmao.
#6v6 was better
Oh lawd have mercy, do not type such lewd things on the forum. I need this in my life.
But seriously, I am quite happy with the current state of tanking. These recent tank buffs were legit and we weathered the storm of the knee jerk crocodile tears.
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My biggest complaint is that it’s still relatively easy to hard counter certain tanks like D.Va. I know that she’s extremely powerful right now (against squishies) but as soon as Zarya shows up she’s not good anymore. Ya know? I’d gladly trade some of the power for beam heroes being deleted from the game and a little more stopping power against other tanks.
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Because people like their tanks to be the size of the screen.
They could shrink tanks
Give them more range
Nerf their close range oppressiveness.
And problem could be solved. Basically just a dps with tank abilities.
Like rein could be the size of reaper with a fire strike on 1-2 second cd. And 400hp and it would literally be fine
Support is a popular concept in general across many genre.
It may shock some but there is a portion of humans who genuinely enjoy helping others.
Tank has always been weird.
Imagine how unpopular the role would be if you had to solo support every match.
There’s your answer.
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Mainly because reworking tank into DPS clashes with FPS survival instincts.
In FPS you want to be very small, so you can hide behind objects better and would be harder to hit in general. In FPS you do not want to be obvious target, while tanks are literally intended to attract enemy fire with their size.
Support was similarly popular as it is now,
it’s hard to explain, but overall player count played big part of this. (regardless of ratio)
Because there’s one tank in 5v5. The pressure and fact that it forces you to swap when countered, with all attention on you since making you fall down wins the fight 100% of the time, makes it a frustrating experience even if dominating.
On the other hand, support is currently filled with DPS players playing the DPS supports because they’ve been destroying that role’s complexity even more than 5v5 did to tank and support in premise. When you can just go afk, drop a healing turret and go pew pew, you’re not really playing support. And I suspect that this direction is the main reason why DPS queues aren’t as long anymore…alongside the changes to matchmaking in order to reduce them that started back in S1 when there were next to no support players. (10+ min queues for both of the other roles lmao)
The problem is that if we remove the ability to counter swap completely because we’re hellbent on 5v5 being the main mode, then we completely remove the final aspect of Overwatch 2 that made it at all resemble Overwatch in the first place. Strategy and tactics are already dead, as are complex interactions.
Main change I’ve seen floated around which I do see a point for is removing ult charge retention on swap (and honestly I felt like it was a weird change for OW in the first place) but at the same time I see a massive downside being that if you pick a tank at the start that happens to be hard countered by the enemy team and you swap not to counter, but to simply not be hard countered, then you end up at even more of an ult economy disadvantage than the enemy tank simply because you got unlucky, and imo, that’s even more problematic.
I just don’t believe there’s a way to help the tank role properly in 5v5 without completely obliterating the two other roles, and even then, it wouldn’t necessarily make tank enjoyable to play.
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It all comes down to responsibility, adding unnecessary stress to ones life especially while learning. A single support can carry the other support. A single DPS can carry the other DPS, however the tank is carrying the water. Tough for a new player wanting to pick that up and have fun with it.
I guess I should have checked if you’d wrote in here already since you always end up making the same points as me. 
Also when it comes to DPS styled tanks, I think for that role it makes sense to have brawlers in the style of JQ and Ramattra which also widens the appeal of the role…but overall the direction has been too mcuh about stat buffing. Ridiculous health (including effective health) pools and <1 s TTK are not two things that should exist on one hero at the same time.
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The longest queues are support queues.
this is an opinion stated as if it were fact, when it isnt a fact
I say this while acknowledging that between the two choices, I prefer a two tank system, even while I dislike 222/122 intensely
quite frankly, some people like solo tanking, or like me, dont mind it. None of these folks find it to “suck”
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