The issues with 6v6 had nothing to do with Balance

General Discussion
81

Correct. It was actually Ana, Sojourn and Sombra.

This is largely false.

New heroes coming into the game - particularly those from the Damage-role - never did reach peak numbers of the original launch roster. And two of them, had some serious issues with being successful. Sombra was marred with a rather poor and heavily restricted kit, and Doomfist’s designed was flawed from the get-go and had numerous bugs and issues with landing successful abilities and attacks. The latter two, Ashe and Echo were much more successful, especially after a recovery tweak to Ashe’s gunplay that necessitated a downward tweak to her damage.

Supports did have problems, but these were largely numbers issues. Every Support post-Ana, was healing more than the last, especially Moira and Brigitte. Moira was blowing so far past all other healing numbers, and there were several tweaks to other Supports (like Lucio and Mercy) whose healing got even strong, if more limited by range and the removal or change of an ultimate. This inevitably led to the double-Sniper and Grav Dragon metagame, and Brigitte just flew further past that and became the catalyst for GOATS. 20 healing per second for 5 seconds from Inspire and 150 healing from Repairpacks that would lead to 75 armor overheal. Not to mention her stun combos could kill Tracer in less than two seconds.

Tanks were the larger issue, though. Starting with Orisa introducing the Fortify mechanic that would later be passed onto Roadhog and later added to Reinhardt in the form of Steadfast and Bastion in the form of Ironclad. Wrecking Ball became the fastest hero in the game (previously reserved for Lucio), and Sigma re-introduced the Double Barrier metagame for 2/2/2.

However, most of the heroes didn’t introduce new mechanics, only Ana, Sombra and Orisa did. TTK skyrocketed as new Support healing was introduced and buffed, and every new Tank had some crowd control to control teams. It was pretty evident that Tanks and Supports were causing issues, but mostly in terms of numbers, rather than in specific mechanics.

Reaper, not Genji.

Only in beta, D.va was added into the game well before the final two beta tests.

Sticky Bombs and Duplicate was a concept introduced before Overwatch launched. Blizzard had always wanted a Railgun hero, too. Sticky Bombs would eventually be part of Echo’s kit, but it also appeared as Tracer’s Pulse Bomb.

Orisa had a smaller kit than Reinhardt.

She did. Several times, in fact.

Genji wasn’t performing after GOATS. He was seen as mildly overpowering in beta, but after they dropped his damage from 32 to 28, he appeared to be performing just fine. They had considered giving him 150 health, instead, but the damage reduction seemed to be enough.

Apparently this had to do with where they wanted her, they didn’t initially consider her a Support hero, but they did Sombra.

Yep, they even hinted at her at the end of beta when they announced that going forward all Supports would be healers. And her map; most people thought she was Sombra.

This was notably around the time they reduced the duration of Dragonblade.

There are some serious rose-colored glasses here about 6v6. First, we didn’t get 2/2/2 compositions until the end of OW1, and it only last a year and a half, shorter than the GOATS meta.

Second, it was demonstrably clear that Tanks and their synergy was a serious problem to the point that much of the Damage-role was rendered largely irrelevant. If anyone did creep out ahead of time (such as Mei) as a counter to their, they were tweaked to become less of an issue. The catering towards Tank metagames and compositions was a serious problem, and the only way they could solve it was to introduce 5v5.

Or they stop using the templates they’ve been using since day one of OW1’s alpha.

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82

5v5 does not have double shield or overly-synergistic tank duos or queue times constantly bottlenecked by a lack of tank players. What you said is just simply not true at all

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83

How can you honestly believe this when Mauga and Hog are the two most popular tanks?? People are so hyperbolic about antinade

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84

Ya you know.

And some of them get really mad when you point out that the tank basically needs to be on their last leg in many cases for it to actually lead into a kill.

As in basically spent all their resources be it barrier/dm/cc, and ontop of that already in a position where their just going to eat a lot of focus fire.

on a ability that can be blocked like any other projectile, while also being on a 12 second cooldown.

85

Oh don’t even get me started about how this forum loses all rationality when discussing nade. People have honestly argued with me that DVA has no way to counter nade. It’s sooooo silly. Like no way this dude genuinely believes Hog and Mauga can’t be played atm because of Ana. If you’ve played more than one game of OW2 this season you know how ridiculous that statement is

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86

They still weren’t sure exactly what to do with her! We all saw Ana’s ptr powelevels. She was significantly tamer than launch Ana and current Ana. So different, not a high healing spammer like we got. As if the devs who were testing her in the ptr actually cared somewhat about balance, before someone told them to just make Ana able to spam high healing for the mercy main playerbase. Why did they turbo buff her from the ptr? Gee, idk. Maybe because players who were used to aim-lock noodle healing were struggling to get value on her against OP barriers and divers? But I’m sure you’ll give me an excuse that they changed her kit values at the last second because she was “highly under performing” despite the reasons I just told you. The devs don’t give the playerbase a chance to try to get good with new heroes, they just want any player able to play them well right off the bat.

You honestly have to separate your belief that a hero who took 1.5 years to create from inception was always planned+destined to exist as their final launch product and coexist with the previous heroes as such. You should know by now that new heroes and reworks are glorified ability showcases by some dev who worked on a fancy new ability and wants to make an impression on mouthbreathers. They did it with storm arrow, mercy rework, immortality field, sigma, both sym reworks, etc. A bunch of stupid designs that got pushed to live in significantly overtuned states just because someone worked on them and were considered new and content.

And anyone who played this game at a competitive level with skilled players knows that a slightly nerfed tracer wouldn’t have been unplayable. Genji didn’t need infinite double jumps and a full ability reset dash. And if I recall correctly Winston got more buffs than nerfs. Nobody would be complaining about genji or tracer not contributing damage if stupid new supports weren’t added to the game powercreeping sustain.

See this is exactly what we are talking about. You genuinely cannot fathom something that you didn’t personally experience. Heroes like tracer getting nerfed right away and game healing not getting turbo buffed or devs not being morons would mean idiotic heroes like brig wouldn’t exist. So many other possible heroes could have been added that could tolerate being dived instead of brig. Get that into your head already, brig was not a must addition to the game. Stop insisting crap like GOATS had to happen, it happened purely because of developer incompetence.

87

sure but 6v6 was still far far better than 5v5 dude

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88

???

M8 you lost it at this point.

PTR ana had more damage that could allow her to two tap tracer, did double healing on nade (Had a 2x healing boost), had shorter cooldowns on both nade and sleep.

And longer up times on both cooldowns effects. And had speed boost on nano.

And post launch was buffed even more in like the first week.

The only major benefit she has now is healing on nano, but that was traded off by her no longer having speed boost. Also you can shoot through allies that have full health.

You don’t have a an argument here.

89

I assure you, that Sojourn was still just reused project titan concept art at that OW1’s launch. She probably wasn’t planned for hero development until like 2018 when the twitter crowd was starting to make a fuss over no black female characters being added to the game yet. Not even joking.

Yes I know. Those two heroes in particular had clown kits that made no sense for the game. That being said they both contributed way too much CC, with Sombra’s case happening after her 2018 mini-rework which let her hack more freely like in the middle of combat. Both heroes disrupted the game quite a bit for the worst imo.

I agree that these two didn’t nearly disrupt the game compared to the tanks or supports but if you look closely their kits still would not have been healthy in launch OW. Ashe didn’t need her coach gun to both knock herself away and hard boop enemies. Her dynamite was clearly a failed attempt to deal with GOATs AoE healing, as it was too easy value compared to existing dps AoE abilities. And Bob probably didn’t need 1200 hp and the ability to chain CC combo enemies to death as much as it did. Just things I noticed that would have absolutely been dialed back if Ashe was a launch hero designed + checked by the beta team.

As for Echo, she mostly disappoints me. A copycat character moved to damage role because the devs gave up entirely on none healing support concepts due to their many previous screw ups. Biases aside, she did out put too much damage for a time. Her focusing beam was basically an ultimate until they nerfed the duration. I’m not a fan of hero bloat of newer dps heroes getting three good abilities for damage, I prefered when hero kits were simpler. And as fun as landing stickies were, I thought they exploded too quickly for a sticky ability (probably because sustain became way too good in the game). Basically, Ashe and Echo weren’t able to ruin anything because too many other heroes and dev changes already did. I still disagree with their kit powerlevels that we got from them. Not like I’m complaining about either of them now in OW2.

Yes, but she could also contribute ranged poke damage through her shield while protecting her teammates and able to use the rest of her kit, including a second defensive ability and a mini zarya grav on cooldown. Being cooldown based, her shield effectively recovered while it was still up unlike a certain armored crusader or launch Winston. Shooting with a shield up was balanced on Winston who had an incredibly simple kit with every cooldown needing to be used with every damaging engagement. He also only did close range tickle damage compared to Orisa. She introduced a new element to the game with her turtle-damage spamming with almost no downsides when she had teammates to make up for her weaknesses.

Reread the sentence you are replying to. I specified “in the beginning” when tracer nerfs actually mattered. Before the devs unleashed brig onto the game. Those impactful tracer damage nerfs you speak of took way too long to get added to the game. Probably because she was the game’s pikachu or something.

I do remember those days when people thought Ana was sombra. Lots of hype and speculation back then. But it’s a real shame that the devs decided to go the healing-only route with support role because we all saw how badly that went for the game instead of tweaking non-healing supporting.

To be fair I only have bad memories of 6v6 role queue. That faulty format should have never happened, but it’s what many people compare OW2 to when comparing both games.

I’m not sure if you are not counting the last year of no content. But 2-2-2 was forced onto the game sometime in the later half of 2019. Basically half of OW1’s lifetime.

There are too many problems with the game so I don’t expect everyone to know all of them. But I firmly believe that barriers were too overtuned, never balanced for the game from the beginning. I doubt players would complain so much about tank synergy if barriers weren’t so universally good, and if Ana didn’t happen to make teams cling to shield tank+off tank in order to deal with everything she unleashed onto the game.

90

People are allowed to have biased opinions over what they find fun and not fun.

This is a pointless battle and no one will listen to you because its about opinions over what they find fun

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91

M8 you already proved that your not a reliable source of information.

On a side note like like nearly every hero was, Overwatch was just a way to reuse the concepts and talent that was working on project titan. Into a cheaper to produce Project. that was mostly worked on by like 20 devs till near release.

We have confirmation that the designs of tracer / widow / Reaper / torb were all concepts part of titan.

Which doesn’t mean much as all of those assets had to be made from scratch for the OW engine. Nothing was just copy and pasted code / animation / or model wise.

Have a great day now.

92

no?? the full game is balanced around hardcounters, they still can start to remove every single hardcounter on the game and rebalance the game again.

the reason why the game is soo bad, is because is really easy to hardcounter the enemy tank.

93

12 second sleep dart, 10 second nade back then. Iirc she had this for so long.
But do you know what else ptr Ana had? Only 6 darts in her ammo. Effectively making her play completely differently than the heal spammer we got. One of her few weaknesses besides no mobility and they get rid of it with no compensation nerfs to her power so that players won’t think that she sucks. And that’s how the game got a support that could contribute and manage more combat healing than Mercy, while still getting access to anti-healing tech. Bravo dev team. But go ahead and tell me that having only six ammo doesn’t fundamentally change how she is now or during the game’s life.

94

If they dont scale back the power creep and ease in which you can hard counter tanks, we will be having the exact same bottleneck on the tank role. I dont mean down the line, I mean we are already seeing it play out right now, and it will only get worse.

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95

???

I don’t know were your getting your information, but everything has been saved on the PTR pates notes and OW wiki.

And I can not find the numbers your pulling up.

Even then those cooldown numbers are still shorter then what she has now.

And even “IF” she had six shots, it wouldn’t matter much because she had 2x healing on nade that lasted 6 seconds.

96

h ttps: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=OunYAH-WjAY
Jump to around 3:30 to see cooldown timers

No way, really! The OP grandma got slap on the wrist nerfs to her cooldowns starting in OW2? Seven years after she had them for all of OW1? WOWIE

Except it would absolutely matter because if you had any consideration for how this game works you’d know that an Ana wouldn’t be able to keep healing a teammate during combat or multitask nearly as easily with only six shots + one nade between reloads. Regardless of whether nade does x2 or x1.5, I shouldn’t have to educate you that a x2 healing nade paired with only 6 shots is effectively much weaker and more limiting for teammate sustain uptime than x1.5 healing nade paired with 10-14 shots. Come on now.

Okay but Sojourn was literally just a page of concept art at OW1’s launch used in the recall animated short for 0.01 second until they started working on that archive event. How am I wrong and why does this matter? She wasn’t planned to be added to OW yet, they had tons of leftover project titan concepts lying around to use. Between the two of us why am I the unreliable one when I am the one who keeps having to do the correcting here?

97

Op ? No.

Has a rather strong utility tool that can be frustrating to play around?

Yes.

Be it that she was always a rather easy hero to dive onto. Her damage and healing output over the course of a match is usually less then what other supports provide.

And much like cassidy is very reliant on landing her cooldowns to maintain value.

And it’s rather common for such to be blocked, or forced out of her via damage pressure.

And you know what? even with more shots, their considerable periods of the game were other supports were more important and capable.

Prior to to the buff to her nano that gave it healing, it was basically only a tool to be used to buff genji. As using it on tank would usually result in the enemy just stalling it out. While other dps ults were also easily manageable.

You played for anti nade, but between stacking tank tools it was usually rather difficult to actually land it on more then a single target.

Theirs also her history with OWL, especailly in the 5v5 format were it’s common to run things like LW Lucio or illari bapt. Were she just didn’t have much a place to be effective.

Not to say we didn’t see ana, but in many cases she just dies alot in high level play and needs a lot more peeling then other supports.

You can watch pro ana players die three times and be force to swap to something that can live longer then 10 seconds into each fight.

Healing over time, is not a major factor for the most par. Like ammo is basically just their to set up 1 second breaks inbetween shots fired.

VS you and your healing partner of mercy being able to refill a hog in like 2~3 seconds without his coldown.

150 + 120 = 370 hps + 100 burst heal from nade.

And you can do that for 6 seconds straight minus the fact that you spend 1 second reloading somewhere inbetween.

Now you have 3.5 seconds up time and that only boost healing by 1.5. And only does like 60 healing on burst.

It’s a none factor for the most part in this discussion, Especailly when ana’s will miss like a third their shots anyway. And can have her healing stopped by d.va or winston getting in her face or by being pressured by a flanker.

Internal development and public release are not the same.

They make multiple heroes at the same time, and release them in the order they see fit to do so.

Mauga had a version of him that was functional enough to be released back when we got sigma. But they changed their minds rather late into that release schedule.

so we got our space man over the gatling guy.

98

It’s the same in 5v5, but worse because your entire “RPG like team build” changes based on what the enemy tank picks, or so we now pick metas or sub-metas during the match based on whatever hard counter is necessary.

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99

Fighting unwinnable pointless battles is the OPs goal in life

100

As I’ve always said, the problem was poke damage. If a rein could get in swinging range, Orisa and Sigma were toast. But the sniper gang barrier busted him before he had a change. If precision hitscan did less damage, Double barrier would have never been a problem.