With every addition of broken support character or overbuffed immortality ability tanks become more and more useless, especially those who do not do much damage, like Winston and Wrecking Ball.
Whether or not you win or lose just narrows down to ‘Did your team have the bionade/suzu/discord orb?’
The support nerfs this season didn’t do much in terms of addressing this problem. They were too weak to have any effect on Ana or Kiriko, who are still top-picks in GM.
Please reduce the severity of healing so tanks can actually do impactful damage, rather than just waiting for support utility to do something, in order to win a fight.
1 Like
I’d say it’s less to do with Agency, and more to do with “the type of gameplay you need to do to win, just isn’t that much fun”.
9 Likes
well ya because its just protects support or lose and that not fun when tanks draw is being the big main guy who makes space and leads their team to victory but thats the supports alur now
Well, I need to do a full writeup of it. But essentially a lot of what people complain about a balance issue, isn’t a balance issue.
If there’s a sufficient quantity of A and B tier hero picks for each Role, then it’s not a Balance issue at that specific ELO.
But they devs keep hearing “Balance, Balance, Power, Impact, Balance” etc. And it’s mostly all wrong.
The issue is unfun Counterplay.
The fix?
Minimize things that are antifun. And improve stuff that is fun.
Which mostly boils down to “there’s not enough mechanical-execution risk-reward for high impact Support abilities that zone the scope of what Tanks are allowed to do, without losing”.
I.e. High easier Support abilities should be easier to screw it up. Beyond just cooldown management.
1 Like
I think those are closely related. Tanks have to bait cool downs and play super defensive right now which makes it feel like you have no agency because you aren’t really making the big plays if you are playing right. And that’s not fun because you are the punching bag.
so ana
insane healing
immortality
and get out of jail-free cards all exclusive to support
Well like I said in the previous comment.
Which mostly boils down to “there’s not enough mechanical-execution risk-reward for high impact Support abilities that zone the scope of what Tanks are allowed to do, without losing”.
I.e. High easier Support abilities should be easier to screw it up. Beyond just cooldown management.
For example,
- Less Impact: Cut the effect of AntiNade in Half, but lower the cooldown in half
- Mechanical Execution Risk: AntiNade requires a near direct hit to proc AntiHeal.
The thing about this is that tanks like Winston and WB which the other person is complaining about don’t take much skill to leap into the backline and deal damage, either. They can stay to try to kill the support alone who is getting help but if these two jump a lone support, they easily win, already, and without much risk or “skill”.
This is not easy because it is often contradictory between different people/roles. Tanks running into the backline and obliterating it may be “fun” for the tank, it isn’t fun for the support. It would be almost impossible to make it so lone tanks can generally “have fun” most of the time without making the game extremely unfun for everyone else.
5v5 is the biggest issue this game has and the biggest thing keeping tanks from having “fun”.
At first, it was easy to kill a lone support, but with swift step and lifegrip, it’s not so easy anymore.
i wast easy in the beginning of ow2 people just played it to much like ow1
1 Like
It’s not rocket science to say that being able to pull a teammate away from a bad situation decreases one’s ability to get a kill.
Tanks (I feel pretty inarguably) have more impact on their team than any other character. I feel the problem lies more in tanks being forced to swap frequently or accept a loss. DPS and support rarely NEED to counterswap or else they’re throwing, whereas tanks experience this rock-paper-scissors in basically every game. Sometimes I just want to play Winston! I don’t want to play Zarya/Orisa every game ya know
1 Like
Looking at just stats, tanks do have a lot of impact, but keep in mind that you can’t really use your valuable cooldowns if Zenyatta slaps a Discord Orb on you and you get obliterated.
That’s one big reason why Zarya and Orisa were played before this patch, because they were the only tanks who can survive the damage, with Zarya even being able to capitalize off of it.
Sure, but any dead character is useless. Zen’s discord just got heavily nerfed,though, and makes it so he can’t just keep discord in the tank all game, as long as the tank breaks LOS for a couple seconds.
Discord Orb was just one example. Anti-Nade is very similar, and it only got a cooldown nerf of 2 seconds.
Another large part of it is counterplay, that is very much true. Usually if you try to run a tank then the enemies will pick the exact characters to make your character useless.
E.G. I go Ball, enemies run Ana, Brig, Bastion, Sombra, etc, and I cannot do anything without getting fried.
Yeah tanks have TONS of characters who are designed to counter them. It sucks, but I think it’s necessary because tanks are so powerful.
Yeah, but at the point it is at tanking just feels miserable. Sure, there can be counters, but don’t make them completely disable a character.
I agree with counters in this game being too severe and tank players are hit the hardest by it. The game currently is too rock-paper-scissors-ey for my taste. But I don’t think the issue is tanks are too weak overall.
It does and that’s what it’s designed to do. It’s also not rocket science to understand 4 and 5 second cooldowns are much lower than a 19 second one.