Play a game with bad tanks/supports and come back and tell me how easy it is to just shoot stuff.
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The tanks are the ones that should dictate how the team play. A team that has unco-operative tanks, or a team that doesn’t play to their tanks’ strength is a team playing at a massive disadvantage. Supports are vital to helping the tanks & damage players do their jobs by peeling/healing and/or enabling. Trying to engage in a 5v6 without a tank or support is much harder than one without a damage player.
If we want to talk about each role’s impact on historical metas, it’s been very rare that a damage hero has been the one that is meta defining - most metas have come about because of powerful tanks or support heroes, or strong synergies between the two. Damage heroes have often been the ones that are there more to make up the numbers, rather than being meta-defining themselves.
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A simple test is Mystery Heroes.
The team that wins the RNG lottery and gets a shield tank or a healer or 2 always has the advantage vs the team that got all dps heroes or that have mostly all dps heroes and a tank like Roadhog.
Also the fact that Tanks and Supports have better Ultimates across the board than DPS heroes and better abilities/utility than DPS heroes.
All DPS heroes have going for them is a bit more damage and even some support and Tanks do comparable damage and in some cases more.
When a dps is “popping” off its most likely them getting finishing blows after tanks and supports have also contributed to the kill. And people blame the evil dps heroes because they are doing their job , which is to get kills. To do damage. To finish low health targets.
DPS heroes are not allowed to do their job with consistency, because they will get quickly witch hunted and nerfed when they are doing their job.
Not lately. The tanks ability to be a tank, defend their team, and make space has been nerfed severely. Then the buffs they received turned them into brawlers.
You answered the question “is dps the least impactful role” by concluding, DPS is the most fun role because they have the highest kill potential. And 4 people like the post.
This is why nobody takes the fourms seriously.
What do you know about overwatch being casual controller player, please explain yourself.
Hmm, I think every role is high impact & has about the same amount of impact on a match until you get to like super high Top 500 and OWL level of play
What provides the most impact is an enemy dying…should have said this in my conclusion my apologies
Thought people would scroll down a little and read that
DPS can only really deal damage, aside from the obvious exceptions in mei and sombra. Supports and tanks have heaps of extra utility as well as similar kill potential a lot of the time. It’s no coincidence that the worst tank atm is hog who can only really kill things and doesn’t have much utility, and the worst support is moira who has no utility and very little damage. Support especially is a bit of an overloaded role with bap, ana, zen, and to some extent lucio having insane utility and kill potentially on par with a lot of the DPS cast.
No they CAN do much more. It’s just that the game doesn’t incentivise it. DPS can peel, take/hold space, apply pressure, protect their team, distract, force abilities, force ultimates and so on. It’s just the game doesn’t pat you on the back when you do any of that so most dps players don’t do it or consider it ‘someone else’s job’.
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And how do they do all these things? By dealing damage or threatening to deal damage. Supports and tanks can also do this as well!
I don’t know, everytime I lose a game on DPS I definitely feel like it’s my fault. I think it’s the most impactful role. Maybe that’s cause it’s my worst role by far IMO. When we win, I think it’s because of me, and the other DPS. Maybe that’s just low ELOS though.
Pre role que damage.
I can see how you came to this conclusion, but I disagree. For one thing the highest impact is controlling the objective. You can win a game without killing the enemy team, but you could also lose even if you kill the enemy team. Kills are very helpful like you mentioned in order to have full objective control.
However, tanks and supports not only have the tools to kill as well, but they can control much more of the map and how team fights go than DPS can. In addition to have damage, tanks/supports have defensive cooldowns, mitigation, at least double the HP pools (tanks) or the ability to raise your effective HP even for the whole team while using seperate forms of utility or damage (supports). There’s a reason every meta has been dictated by either tanks or supports. There’s a reason why before role queue we had a 6-month meta with no DPS but never had a single meta with no tanks or supports.
You need tanks and objectives to have objective control and to set up the DPS to even get value in the first place. You can’t solo kill as DPS in high elo and you need a proper set up from tanks and resources from the back line to get value.
Even the three core types of comps are all tank-centric with a bit of support
- Rush: Needs lucio and rein/winston and you just run at the enemy and excel in close range fights
- Dive: Needs a dive tank and usually brig in this day and age, you look to overwhelm the enemy from multiple off angles and make them ‘break from pressure’
- And the dominant poke: Long-range tanks like orisa/sig and bap are usually needed and you try to drain all their resources before they engage you in close range
DPS have impact don’t get me wrong. But instead of driving the metas and controlling the flow of the game, they compliment comps through optimized picks. Yes a DPS can definitely have a high impact, especially in lower ranks when they aren’t punished. But in the big picture of the game compared to what tanks and supports do
And this all comes from someone who hard mained tank role for a year and a half
Tanks- can do damage and have protective abilities as core mechanics.
Supports- can do damage and have healing abilities as core mechanics.
Damage- can do damage.
Yeah, it’s the least impactful globally speaking. If you’re missing one dps on a teamfight it’s not in the same league as missing a support or a tank. That’s what people mean when they say least impactful.
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If they really were the “least impactful role,” then 90% if the player base wouldn’t rush to play the pretty much exclusively. Like no one sits down at a video game, let alone in competitive modes and goes, “you know what? I’m going to play the guy that sucks today and does nothing while everyone else gets all the glory.”
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It’s also more than twice the size of tanks or supports, so naturally the most mains will be under DPS. 17 DPS and 7 supports… that’s a bit of a gap. And it’s also the most straightforward, simple, and directly rewarding class in the game. For example, when you get a kill (your main job), you see a giant red skull in the middle of your screen along with a sound queue and your name in the kill feed on the top right. You are most likely to get PotGs alongside certain tanks, and people praise you if you get a 4K or higher. We all love a good dopamine rush right? In the grand picture of the game, tanks/supports have the most impact and dictation of the tempo and win conditions.
Also, the DPS being least impactful mainly applies to grandmaster, which is a small fraction of the playerbase. In most ranks, the role with the most impact is the role that is actually playing the match most properly.
I don’t think you understand what impactful means. That’s essentially why people pick dps. The amount of responsibility of a dps ends on damaging people. That’s what most people see out of it. While as a support you need to have eyes on your whole team, and as a tank you have to make sure to protect your team.
They’re the least impactful role because they’re one dimensional TTK droppers in a game where there’s PROTECT-DAMAGE-HEAL as the triforce
Quoted for emphasis.
Again, quoted for emphasis.
This is false.
What has greater impact? Pulse Bomb on a Tank, or Earthshattering an entire team? (or even half of it)
This is a little flawed.
You can take just the damage and damage blocked numbers to get a better view of some of the problems. Adding together raw numbers is a little specious, because no one has that kind of health or can individually negate that much damage without assistance.
GOATS have more to do with value given to a team than actual impact (but it does help). Put simply; all Damage-role heroes can do is just damage. Supports and Tanks can also do damage, but they can also put out defense and healing support towards their team and gain value from that.
So in all aspects, it’s better to add Winston or Mercy to your team than Genji or Tracer because they can do same things as Genji or Tracer, but also offer more than they could.
Reinhardt vs. Widowmaker on Nepal: Village. Reinhardt wins because Widow can’t get the objective without putting herself at serious risk.
Again, quoted for emphasis.
Not entirely true, but the point the stands.
The comparison isn’t really about impact, but rather the value one brings to the team. It’s not wrong, but not quite hitting where the subject is.
Effectively, the metagame.
Effectively, while this is true, consider that Pulse Bomb on D.va won’t even kill a max health D.va, but D.va’s own Self-Destruct potential will kill Tracer, along with everyone else on the team. Therefore, the simple question, “What has the most impact?” when you compare Tracer’s ultimate with D.va’s ultimate. Don’t think so much about the counterplay that’s involved, just keep it simple.
A more nuanced argument will explain why Tracer is a key or top pick in the current metagame, but it’s irrelevant to the question being asked.
I know people like to bring up tanks damage
But the thing is that DPS have much much higher solo carry potential.
For example, zarya often referred to as a DPS tank actually often only does what is known is “trash damage” which is simply feeding healer ult charge. This is because she actually has one of the lowest solo kill %'s in the game. Tanks in general actually have incredibly low solo kill %, barring roadhog who provides pretty much nothing else for his team.
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