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.
That’s not how that works.
Humans are naturally very competitive. If any activity is popular enough, people will make it as competitive as they possibly can. Doesn’t matter what it is or how well or not well it is balanced… people will compete in it as much as possible IF it is popular.
If it isn’t popular but is balanced very well for the upper levels… those people won’t stick around either because they can’t aquire fame and fortune for their abilities… so they’ll go somewhere else.
In a hero shooter however, that is not the case…at all, nor should it be the goal of tanks.
Thats besides the point, we are talking about at wich lvl of skill balance matters more and is more healthy, what really makes a game popular for the vast majority of the populus is how fun it is, not really balanced.
We are talking about balance here when we mention power-creep and character nerfs.
The game is popular though because its fun to play, not balanced well for the high ends though.
Please for the love of God, buff Ball. Underperforming hero af.
It is potentially power creep, this happened to OW1 over time.
I do not trust blizzard to rein that in, so no buffs, only nerfs.
Start with nerfing all the hitscans, that will take pressure off needing tanks to be raid bosses and supports needing to be completely self-reliant, which will then allow blizzard to tone down the tanks and take pressure off the support role.
“Buffing”
You know, where her heal over time is now 19 instead of 15 and her CD on shout is 19 instead of 20 seconds.
And now her head is a lot bigger and easier to hit.
If this is Blizzard’s definition of “buffing,” I think they can keep their buffs.
Then what should be the goal of tanks? Creating space for their team is a tank’s primary job in any game with a tank/DPS/support class division. There are 3 ways a tank can create space - which, naturally, involve forcing the opponents to respect tank’s space - but none of them are satisfying for your average forum DPS main:
-A tank can threaten high amounts of CC, locking down opponents for his team to eliminate. But getting stunned is not fun.
-A tank can defend teammates behind them by laying down shields or using other methods of damage absorption (Matrix or Grasp). But shooting at barriers isn’t fun.
-A tank can simply threaten enough damage to kill a squishy that doesn’t respect their space. This does not necessarily mean that a tank outdamages a DPS hero, just that
their ratio of damage and survivability is higher: a theoretical 300 DPS, 200 HP hero and a 100 DPS, 600 HP hero will take the same amount of time to kill each other. But this approach just makes tanks fat DPS and therefore is not fun to face.
What a tank can not be is a meat shield with no agency acting as a battery for other players to fill their ultimates on. And I swear to God, this is exactly what majority of people here want.
A tank’s primary job is to create lanes of safe approach for their DPS heroes, not to supplant them.
To do so, many diffetent mechanisms may be used, and appropriately rewarded. For instance, a tank who has significant debuffs and CC accomplishes the EXACT SAME THING, by making being in the nearby vicinity a miserable experience, and by enhancing the DPS players who should be the undisputed kings of their role while not being the “kids who need a lot of survival be damage kings” route.
The legitimate tank roles of guardian, protector, defense, pacesetter, first engager can be accomplished through many means with reasonably limited damage and just adding a bunch of voicelines to reward the tank for the dopamine hit that they currently only get from kills would change the play dynamic in a huge way.
This uncreative and toxic notion that being OP, especially at this level, is the sole way to facilitate tanking is ridiculous…
JQ will go nowhere and the devs decided S2 is DF season. Unfortunate.
Both CC and shielding have been cut down drastically from OW1 because people didn’t find it fun to be stunned/snared regularly and found shooting barriers to be too boring.
The Devs have made it abundantly clear that Tanks will largely be tanking through damage threats for the foreseeable future because that’s the one the least people have historically complained about.
I disagree with the direction, and feel like moving Mei to tank and packing her full of CC could lead us towards a better game, but I am a mere gold player on the forums and not on Blizzard’s balance team. (Though the new patch has given Doom a lot of CC which could mean they intend to slowly add more CC to the role, which would be nice.)
That is not entirely accurate. Cc was not complained about relative to tank use. It was complained about BY tanks who were subject to…and THIS is the part that was the actual issue…Character control loss was the thing that people hated…viciously. chain CC’d tanks couldn’t do anything.
DPS and supports hated stuns and hack, because it kept them from playing their character. If you have debuffs and tank CC (Which some tanks already do) it can range from runspeed debuffs, reload debuffs, timer lengtheners, smoke effects, etc etc etc, enhanced protection, and reasonable damage, and rewards for encoutaged behavior.
The one thing I do agree with you on is that Blizzard chose DPS. It was a foolish choice that is driving supports from the game, but it is definitely their choice.
Actually it was the tank players who whined about CC.
I have more hours on Rein in OW1 than anyone else so I completely understand how frustrating tank play was, and do not want us to go back, but I agree with the OP. However this is like saying ‘buff everything else instead of nerfing,’ realistically raid-boss tanks are the new normal.
They’ve been asleep for the past few years