Ok seriously bored of games that are just decided by the picks that the team makes… it is incredibly unbalanced and needs to be sorted.
Tanks are literally the carry class in this game, they make or break your team and it is completely broken. If you have bad tanks and your enemies have good ones… you are going to lose.
Supports, if they have Bap…you don’t… you are instantly at a disadvantage. Lamp is possibly the most broken cooldown in the game. It can and does negate ults. If the enemy team runs bap… and you don’t… gl trying to win.
Dps is literally there as an added extra, you don’t make an impact and you can’t carry in the same way a Sigma or Hog can. Infact Dps trying to kill a Support character is not a given, Supports are strong enough to do enough damage to make a Dps worried about how to attack.
I really have no idea how this game can place two lots of tanks against each other with 500-1000SR gap between the teams… it is some of the poorest matchmaking I have ever seen.
And how do you fix it? I agree there are some overtuned tanks and supports, but also dps. And mass buffing dps is never a good thing, same with mass nerfing the support or tank role
Supports and tanks from the design were supposed to be the meta dictating roles
Healing fat dps that have more HP than single shots is very effective.
DPS are not all that useless, the bursty ones are good in skillful hands as well, they just can’t beat refined team coordination in pro play.
But yeah, Brig already proved it. When tanks can protect each other and heal each other, W+M1 becomes easy if you get a Lucio to speed them around. 222 is preventing a Tank-Healer pro meta, but not necessarily was put in there to do so, so… I guess balance will never be achieved as long as hero design doesn’t change much (maybe not even after changing it), hard to let it go, right?
Main tanks do. Off tanks have way more survivability and carry impact right now. But if you dare go Winston rein or even Orisa you go kaboom. Maybe throw zarya on that list too
It’s why the meta is all off tanks like ball dva, hog ball, ball sig, hog sig, sig dva etc
For me, I’d start with giving every hero a more detailed description as to what they are.
Example: McCree is a mid-ranged marksman that excels at one-on-one duels. Players that are an excellant shot and quick on the draw–while also being keen on given situations and timing–should feel right at home.
After this, I’d balance around making sure this hero not only fits this description, but also have definitive strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths: great at 1v1 dueling; marksman; requires timing and situational awareness.
Weaknesses: fighting more than one enemy at a time; long-ranged heroes; crowd control.
Then I would implement ideas to the hero’s kit that would not only fit this idea, but also have the players feeling as if they are playing as the legendary marksman.
Peacekeeper: now reloads one bullet at a time (like Ashe’s Viper).
Fan the Hammer: slightly reduce the damage OR make it where its damage scales with distance traveled (only ending at a short range).
Combat Roll: stays the same, but with the change to Peacekeeper, now gives it more purpose (an instant reload and reposition).
Flashbang: now must bounce off a piece of terrain before exploding in a moderate radius.
Deadeye: now a single-target execute (like Nova’s Triple Tap) that can be body-blocked by higher health enemies.
(Passive): eliminating an enemy with a headshot grants McCree a short boost in movement speed.
Of course, this would be for every hero, but the main gist is that of a post I made a while back: “…counter-picking should be the basis, but counter-playing is what is built upon.”
That changes from rank to rank though. Sup are probably the most impactful across the board but tanks vary a lot from just am accessory in the metal ranks to being way more impactful in the higher ranks.
So for 86% of people (metal ranks) DPS are likely just as impactful as tanks.
But that begs the question… Do the roles need equal impact at any rank at all? There’s no justification for that besides “well, we’d like them to be same”.
And then, if one looks at how much tanks struggle with team work, being by far the most team-oriented role, i.e. it takes a village, then it makes no sense for that to have the same impact as an individual performer, i.e. most DPS.
Facts are Blizzard don’t care about this game so this is why we are in this position. We have reached a point where a support cooldown can literally stop ults from having any impact on multiple players.
I don’t understand their design logic behind characters like Bap and Brig, utterly game breaking mechanics which feel awful to play against and really just make Overwatch a bad game.
The double shield meta is still on us, and Blizzard just do nothing to fix anything. Oh we are working on Overwatch 2… but it isnt here and we are literally stuck playing this god awful version of Overwatch for how long?
Never has a computer game been so mismanaged than WoW and its from the same company. They have turned absolute gold into garbage with such poor design and balance decisions.
Support and tank nerfs aren’t bad for the game and are needed if theyre actually overpowered (some tanks and supports still need nerfs or reworks right now). However, tanks and supports are just fundamentally more dictating and controlling of the game in EVERY meta, and I dont think nerfing them until theyre equal to DPS is the solution.
Except win rates on heroes like hog are in the bottom half of tanks in all ranks. They don’t really have more survability because Ana is there in most games to stop him using his breather as often as he needs. A well placed nade or sleep and hog will die most of the time. Soldier can force him back into cover every time he leaves it, so can Hanzo and Mcree and Widow and Ashe. Basically hog might survive but he can easily be shut down so he is not effective. And that is why his win rates are so bad.
He is fun to play, and so is ball who is also easy to shut down, and that’s why they get picked. Not because they are more effective than main tanks.
And if you want to see a tank explode, just watch a hog against Ana+Hanzo where Hanzo sonic’s the corner at choke and Ana nades hog and before hog’s hook has even reached its target he will already be dead. Sonic arrow + nade destroy hogs.
That’s an interesting discussion, but has nothing to do with what you said.
You said:
In my mind, if a role is single-handedly deciding the outcome of 90% of games, it should be mass nerfed. If a role has next to no impact on the outcome of 90% of games, it should be buffed.
My question is why you think Tanks and supports should never be mass nerfed, and why DPS should never be mass buffed? I would also maybe ask what you consider mass nerfs/mass buffs to make sure I’m not getting tangled in semantics…
And that’s low for a tank, a character with comically large hitboxes, generally low range and whose job is to create space.
Tank TTK is simply too low and has been that way for almost 2 years. Tanks simply lack self sustain in the current state of the game, being too reliant on things outside of their control, like getting covered by your second tank, immo field, healing pockets…
If the game is to have better tanks we need them to be less team-oriented defenses and more self-only sustain in a way that they can survive more by themselves but cannot be made immortal by broken non-sense nor can offer much sustain to other heroes like double shield comp can. So a win-win for everyone around.
For one thing we already have the inevitable queue time issue of DPS just being a popular roles. But also, tanks and supports by default determine the flow and tempo of the game, because they are the ones who can take space, keep teammates alive, deny ults, and a million other things. The major thing is DPS do damage, but tanks and supports also do damage. And by mass nerfing, I mean nerfing every single tank and support. My issue with that is they just wouldnt seem fun to play if they have to have pretty much 0 damage in order to have DPS dictate the meta more
The best solution is dealing with the problematic tanks/supports that gatekeep a good number of DPS (and other tanks and supports) from being viable like sigma or brig
There’s not much they can do to fix the issues with OW. With OW2, they may be able to attempt some kind of better balancing act, but Tanks, by their nature, will always be a little too powerful for an FPS.