Tanking can be as powerful as the Sun, and it will still not be a popular role.
You can buff and add a bazillion tanks, and a lot of players will still queue for DPS, even if they were underpowered. It’s just how it is.
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That doesn’t mean the role isn’t fun, though. It means the role isn’t appealing those those people. It’s literally impossible to appeal to everyone, and there will always be some type of role that is the most popular. Unless you think they should redesign supports and tanks to just be dps as well, there’s really nothing that’s going to change that. Those roles have purposes.
Rein throwers for passes were not addressed in that article.
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They have purposes, but that doesn’t mean there’s only one way of fullfilling that purpose. I only play support because Ana exist, and maybe Bap, and I’m a support main. Why? Because I like when the supporting part can also be a skill shot. It’s not just Zen that has DPS skill shots, but healing is purely strategical.
Would it be impossible to design a tank with a tanking skill shot? That isn’t just either all strategy, low mechanics, or DPS skill shots, and low mechanic tanking abilities?
I think Ball is a step in an interesting direction for tanks, even tho he doesn’t exactly have “tanking skillshots”, but he’s mechanically challenging in ways other than pure DPSing.
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I think this is addressed by what Jeff mentioned - namely there are not enough tanks. That part I agree with. Tanking is a pretty complex role and there are a lot of ways to do it, and it just so happens that of the tanks that exist, most do fall into this category of “strategy” over skill shots. But there’s also nothing inherently wrong with that, it just means that the role isn’t going to appeal to this who want skill shots. It’s not a whole lot different than comparing different games. Some people like playing roguelike dungeon crawlers, but it’s not really fair to say “well call of duty is more popular than this niche but really fun indie game, so we should tell the developers to make it into an FPS.” In the same regard, roles in overwatch serve certain purposes and those purposes are indeed fulfilled. That’s not to say you can’t make requests for changes, but as long as there are roles in the game, there’s always going to continue to be a most popular role for a multitude of reasons.
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Let’s take a look.
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Right, but, take me for instance.
I play support in other games mostly, I LOVE the support role.
But I don’t play support in overwatch because it sucks hard here.
When the natural support players avoid the support role, then, you have a problem.
I play support in paladins, in tabletop RPGs, in MMOs, Hell, I play support quest.
I play the hell out of supportings. BUT overwatches supports have serious issues, and just trying to sweep that away by saying “it is just there isn’t a lot of support players” isn’t doing anyone any favours.
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So we both know the problem with this system, is that it will do almost nothing to increase Masters/GM Tank players, and mostly just create Gold/Plat Tank players.
So if they were to maximize the effect of this they are basically going to need to move the center of the bell curve for Tank players from like 2500SR, to about say 2700SR.
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Maybe, but that would fix stuff for some ranks, at the expense of others.
You may get the RMS of the queue times down, but the average wouldn’t drop.
RMS dropping is a good thing though - I won’t disagree there.
The basic numerical difference - that damage players have WAY more options in terms of heroes & playstyles - means we need more tanks & supports. They don’t need to be particularly strong. We just need choices & options.
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Not really. DPS is a very self sufficient playstyle below Masters.
Not only do they have firepower, but all DPS have at least one or many strong selfsustain/escape options.
What Tanks need isn’t more options, but a more fun playstyle.
For instance, let’s take Reinhardt, and for an extreme example say we change him to have:
Reinhardt: 1600hp barrier w/ 50% faster regen, 200+200 hp/armor, more frequent firestrike, 85 damage hammer swings, more frequent shatter, faster mobility while barriered. Maybe immunity too stuns in charge.
That would be really fun for the “Get kills and don’t die when neglected by Healers”
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Yep, as I said, I think they need to solve it partially by making more kinds of tanks with different kinds of play. Problem is, they haven’t been making many more tanks. 3 out of 11 new heroes.
And yeah, I’ve never said it’s anything wrong with having tanks that revolve around strategic decisions, nor have I argued that they should be changed. I’m saying that it’s hardly controversial to claim that most people don’t find the current tanks very fun to play. I make this assumption because very few people do play tank, across all ranks pretty much.
An indie dungeon crawler is not dependent on a large amount of players enjoying the gameplay for it to function tho, which is why that comparison doesn’t quite work. It’s not like creative or survival mode in Minecraft, where different people enjoy different playstyles, and play those they want.
In OW, people not enjoying their role isn’t just a “to each their own” kind of situation, since it’s designed around about 1/3 of the population at least being fine with playing each role, otherwise it’ll ruin the enjoyment for everyone else too. It’s like if Call of Duty wouldn’t start it’s lobby unless 1/3 of the players agreed to play Spelunky instead. Then COD either needs to rethink this part of it’s game design, or make additions to Spelunky so that more of it’s player base enjoy it.
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Only skimmed it, and the system does seem to be a potential solution…but I also have to consider the underlying problem, rather than thinking of how good this bandage can be.
Echo was a DPS character I was bitter wasn’t support. There are many more DPS than support or tanks.
The question also often raised by players is: shouldn’t you just make Tanks and Supports more fun or more powerful? And, to be honest, they’re really powerful, and people have a lot of fun. It’s just a matter of preference and taste.
A matter of preference, and DPS has more to choose from.
I’m not even playing OW anymore, but I like to see big changes happen. It’s never really made perfect sense why DPS has so many more heroes; part of it was when it was two roles, but that was before role lock when it didn’t really matter.
Should you guys just make 5 tanks, 5 supports and ignore DPS? That sounds unrealistic, but I do think it would have been smart to release less DPS heroes than the rest by a larger margin starting earlier on.
But that’s just the opinion of someone who hasn’t played in some time, so take it with a grain of salt (not internet salt, imo.)
4 Damage, 4 Supports, and 3 tanks (5 Damage and 3 Supports depending on how you count the Symmetra rework). It feels like progress made by adding more tanks and supports is undone by adding more dps.
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I disagree with this statement. While the teams are split into thirds, there’s no requirement that 1/3 of the players are willing to play the other role. It’s simply a matter of how long you’re willing to wait. A high ratio of damage to tank just means tank players can participate in more games than damage players. I think this is perfectly acceptable, and by design.
Man as a hobbyist game designer this line causes me physical pain when I hear it.
keep in mind that the damage/defence catagory got merged, as at one point their were 4 (Mostly) equally sized sets of heroes.
then the specialist got a soft reworks to be more in line with the other damage dealers.
How about you just stop making tank and heals miserable to play? If you have to hand out cookies to get people to play roles (and they’ll play them at a token level of effort just to get the cookie) maybe your game is just freakin’ broken. I stopped playing around Echo’s release and the patch notes have only gotten deeper into insanity since.
I’m going to be hated to hell for this but I am so sorry. This game is a hecking mess right now. It is starting to feel like a chore to play while it should be fun to play with so many different and interesting characters and mechanics. Starting with how this game made itself to be extremely competitive. To the point where choosing any character that is out of this stupid meta will make you be reported. What the hell? That’s so unbelievably to me on a game. But overwatch is a rare candy isn’t it? Might as well delete the characters if we can’t even use them. I’m playing for crying out loud. Not ‘working’. I don’t care about my ranking. It won’t take me anywhere, it’s the same as being a stupid Instagram influencer. There is no real benefits from it. Unless I’m a streamer which I’m not and many aren’t as well, I probably won’t “benefit” from having a high rank to show off. Because of this, now we have this ridiculous queue that makes no sense to me. I have never seen it in any other fps game before, heck in any other online game, it doesn’t feel like a feature, just a lack of ideas.
Meanwhile I come back to TF2 from time to time because it’s nostalgic to me but MAN I still have so much fun with it. The formula is outdated, it’s not perfect in any way but when I’m playing I’m ACTUALLY having FUN. No wonder this game still one of the most played games on steam after 13 hecking years. It’s at seventh place right now on steam chart with about 80 thousand players. You know why I’m having fun? Because I can choose any hecking class I want with no freaking queue and it’s community is still great to this day. Even the little kids there are wholesome because everyone is having fun together. There’s no hecking weight on my back, I’m free to do as I please and everyone is HAPPY and having FUN. No one is telling me to play a specific class. This behavior in Overwatch should be extremely frowned upon and not helped. An extremely bannable behaviour. It is what is killing the fun and making the game less and less interesting to play.
Yes, it’s called ‘Report’.
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