GetQuakedOn had me pretty excited, but now that I’ve been in the driver’s seat for a few games… no, just no.
I have over 400 hours on Doomfist on my PS4 profile, I’m hoping to really get into the flow of PC gameplay now and have done well with DPS Doom on my PC version so far. Side note, cross progression… please.
I played quite a few games as tank Doom, and comparing him to DPS Doom, live DPS Doom is a better tank than Tank Doom.
DPS Doom may not have the Tank health to start, but he gets it via shields. More importantly, as DPS Doom I play the role of tank BETTER because I can draw aggro better. A Doomfist dive DEMANDS an answer, which means I am drawing fire away from my team. I can punch to knock a brawler character away or interrupt a CC effect, saving an ally. I can Slam-Uppercut to pluck a problematic enemy out of the herd and force them to deal with the sudden burst of damage. I can perform complex rollouts (which need Uppercut) to surprise enemies mid-push, creating space. I’ve always considered DPS Doom to be a DPS-Tank hybrid because he has always made space, demanded attention, and had survivability. That’s why I wasn’t too worried about the swap at first.
However. Tank Doom is a sitting duck. Uppercut is vital to getting above the horizontal plane where the enemy team is. If you can’t get a clear exit with Punch, you are D-E-A-D. With Tank Doom, you never have that exit. Because of the size, new Seismic Slam is clearly the best engagement tool. It draws aggro and displaces enemies, all good. However once you’ve used it, you’ve got Punch to escape, and that’s it. Worse yet, new Slam almost always places you BEHIND the enemy team, which is even harder to escape from without vertical movement.
If you Power Block, you become slow and remain vulnerable to CC effects. So you just end up pinned, or hooked, or hacked, or slept, or naded, or discorded, or any combination of all of these. The damage reduction doesn’t matter if you come out of it vulnerable, and 450 HP is nothing against 2 DPS. You can’t even rely on new Slam to escape, because you have to FACE the enemy team to absorb damage, then you often have to turn around and find your escape route from a totally new perspective if you want to Slam out. This isn’t even bringing up how unreliable and hard to control new Slam is. Punch rarely works to escape as well, because a) you still have to turn around, b) you have no verticality, and/or c) you were surrounded while you were slowly holding Power Block and end up punching an enemy behind you and stalling in the middle of the enemy team. Basically everything Tank Doom does that’s supposed to protect him or his team just makes him a sitting duck and even more vulnerable.
I’m not one to complain without giving suggestions.
Lower Doom’s damage as much as you want. I don’t care. Just give us the DPS kit, keep the Slam huge, and put Power Block on a separate button. Console controllers have buttons you aren’t using, namely the D-Pad. Or for that matter, you can even get rid of Power Block. Just please let me protect my team by drawing aggro, plucking out enemies, and being an actual threat instead of CC fodder. I was already regularly saving allies and making space as a DPS, Tank Doom just makes me less capable of it. The cycles of Doomfist let me be a constant threat that continuously draws enemy and attention. The cycles don’t really exist on new Doom. It’s just forward and backward, over and over, hoping you don’t get stalled out in the middle by a CC effect, or even just a classic Doom bug stalling your Punch or Slam (has happened to me multiple times already).
I have so many hours on Doom for a reason. He is fun. He is why I play Overwatch. There is no other character like him in competitive FPS games. Please do not take that away to give him a half-baked shielding ability.
I also want to bring up an important controls side note, the controls menu needs a per-binding force-override option. Every single one of my characters has customized controls, and none of them have the Ping button bound because of it. So to assign Ping, I have to do it to every character individually. Please just let me hold the button to prompt a query, “Are you sure you want to override all custom bindings and re-assign this key for all characters?”
