Tanky tanks =/= more fun

General Discussion
1

This is probably pointless, but I just want to get it off my chest.

  • When OW2 released, tanks got 150-200 more HP across the board to make them more popular. It worked for one season (because it was new), but then players got wise and queues slowly bottomed out over several seasons.
  • In season 9, tanks got less tanky and the queue crashed. That’s ok, we just have to make them tankier again and problem solved right? Well in season 10 we give them headshot and boop resist to compensate. Queues don’t budge.
  • Present day, the devs have identified the problem: tanks still aren’t tanky enough and the wrong tanks are meta. Lets talk about that.

Is being tanky fun?

I don’t think it is. A big part of the fun of PvP games is being able to make choices and the biggest feedback about tanks is having a lack of agency. Being tanky doesn’t give you any extra choices or agency, in fact it dilutes the choices you do get to make.

Damage, utility and mobility are interesting because the choices of the player dramatically changes how much value you get out of these facets. To deal damage you have to make a lot of small choices and execute one or more skill checks. That’s why DPS is so consistently cathartic.

Survivability on the other hand, doesn’t create a lot of choices. You can choose when you are open to taking damage, and choose to go places that squishier players can’t go (the point or a choke), but that’s really it. That’s why it often feels like you can’t carry a game as a tank, but you can throw; because you just have less choices compared to other roles since your main tool is survivability.

The game needs to move away from an MMO-conforming “tank” role. Survivability is not interesting enough of a mechanic to create a whole role around. This lesson needs to be learned or OW will never solve its queue bottleneck problem.

6 Likes
2

Tanks are STUPIDLY tanky
Until you pick the counter then they fall over

That’s the problem

Its lose lose

If you don’t pick the counters, they never die, get to walk at your team for free and kill you all and you don’t get to have fun

You then feel essentially forced to counter them to actually enjoy the game

If you pick the counter suddenly the tanks can’t do anything and they don’t get to have fun and you are only experiencing the artificial fun created by making the enemy tank feel useless. In reality you also arent really having fun cus you are being forced to play something you dont want to play because its the only thing that actually works into them

So there is never a reality where everyone has fun. Someone has to lose. And we have to decide whether the game is worth being less fun for 1/5 of the team or for the other 4/5 players

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I thought we realised this in ow1 when we came to the conclusion that not many people want to actually play tank? And so the simple solution we came to was remove a tank to better fit the player ratio per role and make queue times reasonable.

That’s where we are at right now. We don’t need to keep adhering to tank players cries because they only need to make up 15-20% of the community to make the game stable.

Tank can afford to be half as fun as the other 2 roles because it only needs half the players vs the other 2 roles to make a match.

I say Stick to making the game fun for dps and supports. Tanks should be low priority. Why should we prioritise the fun for 15-20% of the playerbase at the cost of the other 80%? Make dps and support fun first, every tank change makes those roles less enjoyable

4 Likes
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The fun tanks sucked, and everyone was basically supposed to play Orisa or lose.

The global health increase affected tanks the least percentage wise. Before they added critical damage resistance, they made armor feel worse for all tanks that have it.

Its a basic formula of “how many deaths does it take to do your job?” So far, tanks are dying too much to do what Blizzard wants tanks to do.

Well, tanks have become less tanky over time, and fewer people play tanks now then ever before, so what do you think?

How many choices do you get to make when you eat Sleep Dart and die before you can stand up as Doomfist. You stand on the objective and Mei walls you off from your team and you explode. Where were you supposed to be, off the objective with your supports?

It allows you to continue to make choices instead of choosing how to run back from spawn. Or in the case of having a counter swap war with the opposing tank, which tank you will swap to for the fifth time to counter their tank choice.

Point at enemy, click button. So cathartic.

Yes and no. They either need to move away from it, or conform to it completely. Tanks in MMO’s basically have a monopoly on crowd control. Giving this to DPS and Supports, like Sleep Dart, is bad design.

Blizzard could just make it so tanks gain ultimate charge when they receive damage. Players WILL play the characters that have ultimate every 30 seconds.

From a tank player by the way;
https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/career/dc5fb885a1789aa3a4a12ea0d3%7C0741055fe2109a524cba926f8c5b873d/

3 Likes
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Dps and support player’s fun should be the focus not tank players

Look at the last 3 heroes and the very next one for evidence of why we should not care about tank so much

Illari, everyone wants her to be stronger because she is currently very underwhelming. Considered an honest hero. Doesnt have any BS. Considered a high skill hero

Venture, everyone is ok with venture. They dont seem unfair to play against. They dont have any cheesy nonsense. The devs specifically designed them that way so they have windows of opportunity to punish them.

Space ranger, everyone seems super hyped for the next support. Already a lot of buzz when venture released of wanting to get space ranger even sooner.

Then we come to the recent tank. Mauga. Ruined the entire season. No one enjoys playing against him. Literally caused many people to quit.

Funny how the recent support and dps heroes have added additional fun and skill to the game. Its the tank that has added more misery and frustration. If tanks were balanced around dps and supports having fun, we wouldnt have gotten mauga. We got mauga because they designed a tank so only they have fun

5

8 years hasn’t been enough?

I don’t really care if the enemy goes Mauga or not. Like any other tank in the game, just select counter pick, make it so the Mauga can’t do anything, profit.

This is why we have the tank issue in the first place. Tanks have always been last priority for Blizzard. To the point where a META formed because damage was too high due to damage buffs of DPS and Support.

Tank players got the most boring tank to play so they can have fun?
Okay…

In fact, next time you play Mauga, tell your healers not to heal you, and tell everyone to spread out, then get back to me on how much “fun” you are having.

4 Likes
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They tried this mindset, and it didn’t seem to work. They tried multiple times in OW1, and are only just now realizing that you can’t just decide a whole role just isn’t important enough to be fun.

I mean, you’re on the overwatch forum, so I can only assume you don’t understand what I mean. For some reason, you guys have witnessed the failure of your own opinions, but refuse to change them. At this point, I do think we have to admit that there’s something wrong with Tanks. EVERYONE’S saying it, even the developers, but you guys just act like you know better.

With a million and one ways to counter tanks, your antis your discords and what not, I think the game would survive if tanks are tankier. We also tried the never ending nerf cycle, and that was just stupid. Enough nerfs, buff tanks, fix overwatch.

5 Likes
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If you make the Tanks even tankier, you just make counter swapping even more mandatory.

So good luck everyone, I hope you enjoy more Counterwatch :+1:

9

dude I just had a game when i was with dva against sojourn, soldier and lw… you think with matrix i got everything? no , matrix expired in less than 1,5 sec and I was melted due their ridicolous dmg, SO TANKY WHERE? DO YOU GUYS EVEN THINK BEFORE WRITING?

2 Likes
10

It’s called OW1.

Misinformation. Tank had a very healthy community before Brig came into the game. Tanking only fell off post Brig because tanks could get stun locked for 10 seconds straight, but even then I’d argue we still had more tank players than now.

That’s not a solution, it’s a cop out and it’s very common with this team cause they’re terrible at coming up with actual solutions and refuse to listen to the community who provides real solutions.

Yeah this has been the devs thought process as well. It is straight up bad game design to ignore any part of your community that’s not having fun, but that’s been their mentality for most of OW2… until now. Things have changed.

Why?

Because there’s a LOT of hero shooters just around the corner. OW2 got away with ignoring tanks because tanks had nowhere else to go. There’s no other game like overwatch. But that won’t be true in the near future. There will be marvel rivals, deadlock, concord, frag punk. If tanking is more fun in ANY of these game which would not at all be hard to accomplish, the OW2 tank community will take a hit it cannot afford, and suddenly you’re getting 20 minute dps queues in diamond and your tank team mate is silver because there’s 100 tank mains playing the game and they’re all low rank lol.

The tank solution is actually quite simple.

  • Tanks want to be able to play the heroes they want without getting bullied off by counter picks
  • Tanks want to be able to move. Some cc is healthy, chain stunning for several seconds is not.

If the devs could meet those requests, tanking would become way more populated.

2 Likes
11

Because if an entire role is unfun to play, then nobody will play it. Tanks didn’t have participation issues until the end of OW1, where CC was so heavy that tanks literally couldn’t play the game. We can’t return to 30+ minute queue times, just because you think tank shouldn’t be fun.

2 Likes
12

I think the biggest problem right now is the Orisa, Hog, Mauga cycle. Few players enjoy playing as them or playing against them. Break the cycle, improve the game.

I will say the Orisa changes on the CC mode helped though. She’s far more killable than live, while also being more fun to play.

1 Like
13

The devs mention that some tanks are more ok to be meta than others, but thats only true to an extent. Rein and winston are “honest” tanks because they have counterplay, and their actions have consequences. When you remove that counterplay, are they still “honest” tanks?

The armor change was a buff to tankiness. Most tanks struggled with spread weapons and damage over time weapons (i.e shotguns, miniguns, beams). The armor change made them weaker to single shot weapons like Cass, but there’s more counterplay to Cass then bastion/reaper. Bastion/reaper are designed to play in most tank’s niche of close-quarters, Cass needs to keep distance or he dies.

But why isn’t this an issue for any other role. When genji eats a sleep dart or hack and explodes, thats just gameplay. But when it happens to doomfist, tanks are unplayable.

This is what I was getting at. Being tanky dilutes the choices that tanks get to make. So much of their value comes from surviving, that taking a risk and dying for it is so much worse than if it happens to a squishy. Because you have so much health, you have to get value out of it by forcing the point, which leaves you open to getting walled and focused. But thats not a choice, you have to do it because thats the only way you can get value out of being tanky.

It’s not interesting gameplay.

I think we all agree the tank role has a problem. We disagree on the solution. The devs have spent the last 6 years trying to fix tanks. We’ve tried making them tankier, and we’ve tried changing the number of them on the field. I think its you who wont acknowledge the failure of these approaches.

I have never seen what OW plays like without a role that is dedicated to getting value out of “tankiness”. Thats unexplored territory in OW and its high time we try something new.

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What are you talking about? Cassidy was a top 3 dps before and after the armor changes, and he destroys tanks from close range with even greater ease thanks to the armor nerf.

Cassidy in season 11 still does more damage to armored tanks now than he did in season 9.

He’s incredibly dangerous to tanks at close range, and he absolutely does not need to keep his distance.

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Range is their counter. Last I checked, Reinhardt doesn’t have a gun, and Winston has mobility instead of range. Both of these things “keep them honest”.

Pharah right now eats tanks alive. As you saw with the last update, Reaper was buffed to be more advantageous against tanks outside brawl range. Additionally Mei and Symetra were buffed. So lets tally, high damage made armor non existent, and the change to Reaper, Mei and Symetra hurt tanks in their kill zone. Yet, tanks received less Critical Strike Damage from…Ashe, Soldier and…ranged damage, which wasn’t their wheelhouse to begin with. The only functional change to DPS that helped tanks recently was the change to McCree.

Genji has Deflect, Dash, and faster default movement speed. Genji has to do many things wrong to hit by Sleep Dart. A tank simply exists and when they are playing correctly will eat Crowd Control. Also dying instantly because of it is a slap in the face.

Right now, its a larger number, but as MMO aficionados will tell you, effective health is what matters, not the number above your head. When you Sleep Dart a Genji, Ashe, Widowmaker or Ana, they retain the small hit box and can survive if no one can hit them. Tanks are still large and require less aim proficiency to target effectively. They just die.

The only fix to tanking Blizzard has ever done was role queue. It required you to have a tank partner, and now requires you to have a tank period. Outside of that, each change to tanking has either attempted to make tanking more appealing to DPS players, or is a compromise like the reduced armor effectiveness and critical strike damage exchange. A simple reminder for me is that using Earthshatter will kill a target if they get hit at the impact point which was a buff that was not needed. Instead, we could have used the original formula for who gets hit with Earthshatter, or a return to the original stun duration. But no, instead Venture gets the correct pathing of their ultimate and Reinhardt can have Earthshatter blocked by a doorframe, small pebble, defensive cool downs used behind him that he can’t see. Not to mention Mercy can fly over it next to the ground, Genji can double jump over it, and McCree can roll and not get hit, Ashe can shotgun, and two heroes can fly. Gravaton Surge was corrected when too many heroes could just leave the pull, but Earthshatter has been left out of the ultimates that need fixing. What’s the point in bringing it up when its been broken for years.

Charge is the same way. Blizzard made Charge more consistent by increasing the server checks it did to determine if a player was hit or not. This made it too consistent and they reverted it back to a dice roll every time you hit a player. See how long something like that lasts for Dragon Blade. Watch as the community cries out about how Blade whiffs every other strike, and see how fast Blizzard corrects that.

Tanks are not well thought of in Overwatch. They weren’t before, and they aren’t now.

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I dont play tank all that often, but I do enjoy playing one occasionally

so, FWIW:

while I do expect to have more HP than the other roles, I vastly prefer having better defenses/resistances, particularly passive defenses, as thats what a classic tank is all about, as I see it

so give me resistance of some sort not only to taking damage, but also to CC - knockback, stun, sleep, etc etc.

Yeah, I want to resist good old incoming damage as well - think of bullets in real life bouncing off the armored hull of a real life tank

Even more specifically, I want defenses that are less about protecting others around me (like Rein’s shield) and more about protecting me personally. Someone who wants me to in effect “shield” them can position themselves behind me relative to where the enemies are, same as modern soldiers often walk behind moving tanks for the moving cover they provide

The numbers involved are 100% negotiable, and to be clear, I am not looking for invulnerability. It makes sense in real life that someone with (for example) a 44 revolver has no chance of damaging a real life tank, but it cant work that way in a PVP game

so TLDR: I’d be more drawn to playing tank if they were as a class (or role, if you prefer) provided more resistances

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tanky tanks = more fun, but for tanks

depending on how much tankier they get, it’s gonna be = less fun for DPS and Supports

and how it works out,

tanks are double edged sword, not dying means “boring nothing is dying”

and dying too fast means “boring, the team’s tank that dies first means we all die sooner or later”

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You quite literally do in a role based environment. I will admit that tank players are clearly exaggerating their grievances to leverage buffs because if they ACTUALLY had a problem with the role, they would do what all the beta do and go play DPS to pretend as if they do not have an impact and absolve themselves of all personal responsibility. But they keep queueing tank. Liars!

I digress, the developers are not catering to tank players because of the crocodile tears they have long since ignored. They are freaking out BECAUSE they understand the severity of the issue. If we leave, you do not have a game. At least not in role queue.

19

imo, the exact opposite

the “tanks” do too much damage and some of them focus on mechanics like one shots, trolling, and getting group elims

if the tanks were solely focused on zone control and defending allies from damage by either mitigating or tanking it themselves, it would fit the tank role much better. even things like body blocking is a huge part of the core of tanking and they should move away from high damage dps cannons and toward making tanks that can control aggression and disrupt enemy positioning without necessarily focusing on getting elims

yes it would kinda make tanks like roadhog maybe less fun to play, but it would definitely make them more useful if he did a better job of tanking in exchange for less damage

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No offense intended, but that is just insane. Nobody in their right mind wants to protect their degenerate teammates blaming them for everything.

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thats an overwatch problem. i played WoW for a long time and its definitely more tolerable to play solo tank on there.

part of the complication is how complex overwatch is. to most people it is funny shooty shooty game but it requires a great deal of game sense, awareness, positioning, cooldown management, cooldown forcing/watching, not as strategic as maybe counter strike, but definitely more than call of duty

cuz of that you end up with players that just shoot at things in front of them and ignore pretty much the rest of the mechanics. with only one tank you cant protect them all