I think maybe a slight breather nerf could assist or maybe the Kiriko nerf will help Hog not be so dominant. Winston’s shield health would probably be the best nerf for him.
Ball’s problem is that he strongly needs teamwork and communication. When the team is capable, he’s a monster.
Her ult that is also easily cleansed by Kiriko. JQ needs help and I hope it’s decent enough to make her more viable.
I absolutely think you’re correct in saying that the Doom and JQ buffs are power-creep, the tank role is OP as it stands and i also believe there should be ONLY nerfs to any of the tank cast, unless they are fundamentally flawed, so reworks are needed, wich i dont see much of that.
Though i wonder if said power-lvl that should be aimed at was somewhere along the lines of our current Doom/Ball… and not below that.
It would only be powercreep if it’s pushing the upper limit of what the tank role is capable of.
If it’s not doing that, then it’s just a buff, and you got people calling every buff powercreep, because they don’t understand what the term they are talking about even means.
I figure Tank nerfs are only warranted if they conflict with getting more Supports, or if compositions become too durable overall.
And that trying to give each player in each role equal impact is basically acting like we gotta balance the game as if Role Limits don’t exist. When Role Limits have been in the game for 4 years.
Both, he needs a small buff because since his launch he has received nothing but nerfs, and then they revert the nerfs and call it buffs
His boop got nerfed in OW1, got reverted in OW2 and they called it a buff
His piledriver got nerfed in OW1 and never was reverted
His ult had a “buff” where it spread more, which was a nerf for him
His shields didn´t give any ult charge in OW1, that has nerfed to 50% ult charge in OW2
His doubleboop got nerfed, it´s doable now but it´s nearly impossible
Wich i believe it is.
Not everything is related to supports (tank strenght kind of is but not as much), as it stands, the tank role has much too power in their hands, nerfs will help deal with that.
Not EQUAL balance, less strength, the tank role needs to be the best role, doesnt mean it has to be by this amount.
Long essay writeup warning.
you people are pathetic i hope junkerqueen and doom’s buffs are MASSIVE
scry some more
This is not a short post.
OW 1 had a long series of Tank nerfs over the course of GOATS and Double Barrier in an attempt to speed up fights.
This is every change to Tanks from the start of GOATS onwardsto the end of OW1 balancing.
DM Cooldown increased 1s → 2s
Knockback fixes (small nerf)
DM range reduced 15m → 10m
Move to 2/2/2 kills GOATS
DM regeneration rate increased 12.5% → 16% and regenration delay lowered 1s → 0.75s
DM cooldown reduced 2s → 1.5s
Booster cooldown decreased 5s → 3s
Booster cooldown increased 3s → 4s
M1 movement penalty reduced 50% → 40% and DM cooldown reduced 1.5s → 1s and Missiles acctivation delay reduced 0.5 → 0.25
Armor/Health changed from 200/400 to 300/300
Call Mech damage up 50 → 250
Dva got some buffs towards the end, but a lot of Dva mains felt that the 5m range reduction on DM made her fundamentally weaker than she was going into GOATS, and she was generally one of the weakest tanks in 2/2/2.
Move to 2/2/2 and Bunker
Orisa was hot garbage on release and still pretty weak until they buffed her repeatedly to try and counter GOATS. They then killed her barrier, shrunk Halt and screwed with the rest of her numbers because they couldn’t balance her with Sigma. Fortify was the only thing to actually get better.
Move to 2/2/2 and Bunker
Rein traditionally came and went with the Meta (particualrly Zarya’s strength), but he simply couldn’t close the distance against Bunker comps with his barrier health reduction. He became almost useless outside of a handful of maps.
Move to 2/2/2
A bit of a grab bag of changes for Hog, most of these made a lot of long time Tank mains pretty mad as Hog was the least Tank like Tank. Hog getting stronger indirectly made Winston a lot weaker and hurt other tanks a fair bit as well.
Wasn’t added until the change to 2/2/2, Some chunky patch notes here, they did some bulk balancing to start his life.
Sigma was too powerful on launch, but they went completely overboard towards the end with some chunky nerfs, overall more than halving his barrier health and giving it a horribly clunky cooldown preventing flexible use.
Move to 2/2/2
Winston suffered hard from the Hog buffs, Reaper buffs and the whole Bunker Meta meant dive was all but impossible. He really couldn’t do anything in the end.
While he was added just before GOATS took over the Meta he only saw 1 change during that time
Move to 2/2/2
Mines now move with platforms they are on
Ult projectile speed up 10 → 12 (Huge nerf) and Ult activation time reduced 0.25s → 0.1s (did nothing, this isn’t a useful compensation buff)
Slam snare reduced 1s → 0.5s
Claw “Fix”
Shield reduced 100 → 75 per target
Claw knockback reduced 25%
Claw max grapple time introduced at 6s
Ball absolutely did not need the nerfs he got, He was decent but not great for a long time, and then they nerfed him repeatedly for seemingly no reason.
Move to 2/2/2
Small nerfs stacked up over the course of 2/2/2, leaving her really quite underwhelming towards the end
Across all of these Hog was the only tank to actually come out stronger over the course of these GOATS and Bunker changes.
There were a large number of Damage role changes over the period, which were overall a buff for the role and an assortment of Support changes that were generally a net negative for the role. This lead to Tank survivability dropping to painfully low levels towards the end of OW1 and remaining there for almost a year unchanged while they worked on OW2.
There was a mass exodus of Tank Mains due to the weak state of the role, which lead to unreasonably long queue times for the Damage role. I don’t want OW 2 to screw up in the same way.
If you nerf every single tank to be weaker than Doom and JQ are now then they simply can’t have enough anything to make anyone care about them.
Given that they don’t have the abundance of stuns that Tanks in other 3 role games have and they can’t “Taunt” their opponents to force people to pay attention to them as they are fighting humans who can make actual decisions rather than Bots with easy to manipulate AI aggro. How do you propose the Tank role in Overwatch would Tank after big enough nerfs that everyone is weaker than Doom and JQ are right now?
LOL tanks are the last ting needing a nerf now.!. and i dont even play tank…
Game balance stopped on OW1 around what, pretty much 1,5 years ago with the last tank change being on Ball’s grapple spawn cooldown on Agust 2021.
It was double shield meta ever since then, meaning they still hadn’t done enough nerfs for the 2/2/2 scenario quite yet when they decided to move to 1/5/5, where they seem to have “forgotten” that tanks were already too strong on 2/2/2 and then overbuffed most of them.
Thats the crux of the issue, tanks were already way too strong, its considerably worse an issue now that though reduced, close of said role power is in the hands of one player instead of two needing to play in tandem.
You have one of the worst opinions in the forums
Zarya, Dva and Hog definetly need nerfs. Maybe Winston. And Junker Queen needs massive buff
No they don’t.
Why the dps have to always cry about everything?
Complaining about shields is what got us here on the first place.
Wait… you actually think tanks were too strong at the end of OW1? Because the meta revolved around them?
No. The meta in OW1 actually revolved around whichever role was the MOST restrictive and unpleasant. When building a team it makes perfect sense to build around the least terrible member of the most terrible role because the other better more flexible roles will probably have stuff that synergizes with whatever that least terrible character is.
The only exception to that have been times where one particular hero was over performing so hard that they broke the game. Examples include Ironclad Bastion, post rework Hanzo, and post rework Mercy.
Wich by the time of 2/2/2 (and right before it with GOATS), was the tank role, its literally by design, they still are, it takes ridiculous lvls of overpoweredness to take some of their spotlight (Kitsune Rush and Sojourn).
So… whats your point? You dont think they were/are too strong?
The big issue they had was that they dependend alot on the off/main tank to do their full job, wich was much too annoying/unfun for the vast majority of the playerbase, so nerfing them without adressing said issue was a big nono, something the OW balance team didnt find the right answer to and decided to change the format again.
the thing is, a big part of the support problem is tanks-tanks, with their strong defensive abilities, are impossible to kill while being healed. therefore, supports must be killed first, making the role less fun. also some supports can do very little when a tank decides that they want to kill said support, making the role even less enjoyable. The doom buffs really wont help with this.
It’s weird that so many people are saying that supports need to have more even 1v1 capabilities against dps, which are atm between 50:50 and 70:30, when there is another role that supports literally cannot 1v1 unless they are more than twice the player. not saying tanks should be made much weaker in 1v1s, but it’s something to think about when considering support popularity, or lack thereof.
In OW1? Absolutely not. Fun fact, during Goats before all the nerfs trying to get rid of it… Tanks were still super unpopular. Then most of them caught nerf after nerf and made it worse. The only reason tanks didn’t completely disappear at most ranks is because somebody is going to have to step around the corner and take the first volley of enemy fire or stand on the super exposed objective for a while… and nobody else can do it.
The answer was literally staring them in the face. In OW1 QP, the two most popular tanks were Ball and Hog. The one tank with a self heal and the one best suited to living off health packs. Every other tank needed to be constantly healed to achieve anything. I mean… I personally ran into this so much that I got to the point where I would actively choose to solo tank as Brigitte 1.0 over any actual tank because I could heal myself.
More tanks needed self healing and to be less team reliant. That’s all they needed to do. They didn’t need to turn them all into raid bosses.
Popoularity does not equate strength, specially for a average plat lvl ladder game.
Now, if you could pick multiple tanks, thats what woulda happen on sweaty matches.
Not “achieve anything” , to get the best results, obviously, they synergized better with supports and their off/main tanks, making them the strongest role when played in tandem with a good team.
The reason Ball and Hog were popular, more Hog than Ball, was because of their independency, of anything, damage, healing and off/main tank synergies, but thats only on average-low ranked ladder, when people actually wanted to win, they picked synergistic tanks that carried the game on their backs.
The same EXACT reason DPS was/is the most popular role and Support the least.
QP is NOT where we look for balance either.
You mean the majority of the playerbase? Cause that’s what low and average ranked players are.
How well do you think the game will do if over half the playerbase despises playing as 33% of the slots on a team?
80% of players won’t consistently have “a good team”. You know what happens when a game balances only around the elite at the expense of everyone else? The game dies.
Yes, thats what i was referring to.
People already despited playing tanks, nerfing the tank slot power lvl but making them more fun for the whole player-base by making these changes aimed at 5v5 would’ve been the right call, hindsight and too late obviously.
Y’know what happens when we balance a game for people not playing the game to win? The game loses all of its competitiveness and becomes absolutely awfully balanced.
Its specially better to top-down trickle down balance since when done correctly, on skill tiers people dont even experience these situations, it doesnt matter to them but only to the important competitive skill-tiers.