If there’s one thing I ask from 5v5ers can we please stop doing the whole “ouuu tank sucked because if the other tank played a tank that didn’t match with mine we just lose!”
Please. I beg you. Not only does that still happen in 5v5 regardless, it straight up applies to supports as well.
If you play a support comp that doesn’t fit together or doesn’t make sense… you lose.
Right now in 5v5, if you’re playing tank and your team doesn’t pick heroes to fit with you… you lose. That whole “my off tank picked something bad” shtick, has now just been shifted on to the rest of your team. Now the rest of your team needs to play around you, instead of basically the one tank. Greatly increasing the chances of people just not playing around you, since there’s more people to screw it up.
Please try playing a dive tank, with no dive DPS or supports. You lose. Does that mean it’s a guaranteed loss? No. Same way that playing mismatch tanks wasn’t. Both just greatly decrease your chances of winning, but we gotta stop acting like that problem was only a 6v6 thing and is now completely gone from the game with the move to 5v5.
There is a world difference in between playing Mercy with Pharah or Hog with Kiriko and then old tank synergies, like Rein and Zarya or Dva and Winston.
What is it? Its very simple: the elimination or strong reduction of a tank weakness. Tanks have high amounts of HP and strong defensive cooldowns. Synergy tanks will help the other tanks counter the weak sports and eliminate or strong reduce the time a tank is really vulnerable. This leads to stale a slow matches where it takes ultimate combinations to kill anything.
Because tank synergy is so easy to do, it was the reason that back in OW1 in bronze, silver and sometimes gold a teamfight would last THE COMPLETE ROUND. This is no joke. Nothing died and everyone farmed stats, but in the end nothing happend. You could not see it, because we had no scoreboard, but thats one of the main factors, why it was bad.
There is still no solution to this kind of problem. It was different in higher ranks, but most people had to deal with this. And the “But I dont!” does not matter. The devs even said that this was the case and we have enough youtube videos of “spectating bronze/silver/gold” where you could see this.
Stale slow matches and hyper broken tank synergies only happened when double shield came around. No one cared about tank synergies nor was it this massive uproar before double shield.
Tell me, how do you think brig bap helped that situation at all? How do you think introducing broken amounts of healing sustain to the game and an immortality ability… helped with stale slow matches?
It didn’t. It’s what caused it! The broken supports and ridiculous sustain is what caused this. People died more often before double shield and brig bap came around. Like… a LOT more often. At all ranks.
And like I’ve told multiple other people. Tank synergies are a balance issue. You can nerf tanks.
You listed dva monkey as one of said synergies. Let me ask you. Do you know how many nerfs dive got before they just said “ah screw it, introduce brig”?
I’ll tell you:
Monkey didn’t get his first nerf as a hero… until overwatch 2.
Dva arguably got buffed during dive meta.
Tracer didn’t receive her first nerf until 2018 and it was only a pulse bomb damage nerf.
Stop with the “double shield was the issue!” strawman. No, it was just the worst outcome of that. Tank synergies where to strong before and lead to global tank nerfs in 2018 I think. You know what this lead to? Double shield. Why? Because Orisa was not a main tank anymore and NEEDED Sigma to perform. What did they do? Nerfed Orisa. Why? Synergy.
Its very simple to understand. It is a balance problem, but the balance you would need to perform to fix those problems would lead to the heroes being balance WITH their synergistic partner and trash without them. Old Orisa was the perfect example for that. I remember that very vividly, because I played Orisa a ton in OW1.
Healing is not as bad a defensive cooldowns, because you get to shoot at things and HIT them. Also the healing is never as high as the DPS that is thrown around, so with burst damage or focus fire, you can people through healing.
Character choice is irrelevant with engagement based matchmaking. You could win with a composition that has no synergy full of f tier heroes against a meta composition if the algorithm decides you are favored…
Played hundreds of matches right at Overwatch’s launch year as Zarya with a co-Tank Reinhardt static. That synergy won so many games and one of the reasons why they had to reduce Zarya’s full charge up time back then.
Zarya + D.va was always equally viable.
And then there’s GOATS where Zarya was a constant mainstay on the team.
1.9.0.2 - 3/21/2017
Barrier Projector
Ability cooldown now starts when the barrier is placed, instead of when it ends.
2/18/2021
Base Armor/Health has been redistributed from 100/400 to 150/350.
D.va was getting buffs well before then.
Wasn’t really that popular comparatively until that time, and the stats were showing that she wasn’t really dominating across the playerbase.
Pulse Bomb was definitely an issue, for Tanks like Reinhardt.
Idk. I’ve won games on too many stupid comps to sit here and judge a choice at this point. I’ve beat pharahs with junk and I’ve healed them with Moira’s. So I don’t really care. Sometimes I do miss the days of players picking what they love instead of picking what will win. But whatever. Some players just think meta is everything. Most really don’t care though and shouldn’t.
Maybe I missed the year, but there was a time when they nerfed ALL shields besides winston by quite the amount. This created Orisas dependency on Sigma and also the fall of the tank role, mainly, because how much power the lost. All main tanks were hit and they all said that they would stop tanking. Since then we had a big problem getting tanks. Could also be 2017 or 2019. I have no idea.
The reason for double shield being the first argument is that it was the perfect example of why tank synergys are problematic. It highlights not only that some heroes can be trash without and OP with the synergy, but also how limited design space had become under 6v6. Its brought up again and again, because it was the latest and also most boring synergy that everyone still can remember.
But I personally hated Rein+Zarya synergy in the medal ranks. It was so stupidly OP and so easy to replicate.
Was this before or after double shield? Because this would just prove my point of double shield being the problem.
They didn’t even need to limit the design THAT much.
The problem with double shield is that they introduced a literal 5v5 solo tank master of all trades tank, into the 6v6 double tank game…
Sigma was so broken that if we take launch sigma, and put him into the game right now. He would by far be the most broken tank and it wouldn’t even be close. And that hero got put into a DOUBLE TANK game. It was AWFUL hero design from the jump.
His design was so bad, that he transferred into solo tank 5v5 so flawlessly, and has been a consistent top 3 tank pick for the entirety of ow2, with no design changes into the crossover. That is NOT something that just happens.
Should we go 1-2-1 because the Mercy one-trick didn’t pick Brigitte to cover my Ana?
Just because someone picks a bad synergy is not good enough reason to delete an entire player slot. The same could be said for every role for that matter, and solo Tanks can still pick bad characters, without ANY synergistic potential.
Logically, before double shield… before that you could use Orisa as a main tank. They cut her shield from 900 to 600 even increased the cooldown later down the line by 1 or two seconds. This was the point, where I stopped playing tanks and mainly played support.
I think they nerfed Orisa AGAIN to end double shield, but at that point I was gone already.
It mainly showed that you have to take every single existing tank into account when making a new one, because how crazy strong synergy is. They could never have made Ram in 6v6 or even JQ, ebcause how crazy rush would be.
I agree with this to 100%. Sigma was the tank that shook the game so much, that it imploded with the following changes.
The point is that tanks NEEDED the synergy to perform to 100%. Brig and Ana work good together, but you can still play Ana without Brig if you want. Its not NESSESARY. Back in OW1, you could not play Orisa without Sigma or another main tank or just pray to god that the enemy DPS sucks and they cant break through.
Depends on the powerlevel of the synergy. I already said:
I really like this discussion, but I have to go. Its kind of late here
I just checked where this 900 to 600 hp change happened…
This happened in December of 2019. Sigma came out August 2019.
So I’ll even give the leeway of a month for people to figure the meta out, but double shield was already happening for 3 months prior to the change.
They could, they would just design them to fit in the role better. They would be weaker.
I would say the design is limited even more in 5v5, because now you HAVE to try and make a tank that properly supports the team and doesn’t have over the top weaknesses to be able to handle solo tanking.
Hell, in 5v5 alone we’ve gotten 3 different “shout” abilities.
Ball’s shield change, JQ shout, and mauga shout are literally the same thing just slightly different effects.
