What about 1-3-1 instead of 1-2-2?

General Discussion
1

would that be more or WORSE balanced?

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2

Same problems. Arguably worse.

9 Likes
3

too many variables to format it as a blanket statement tbh. Would require a lot of playtesting and fine tuning, even then nobody knows for sure.

4

I feel as if the solo support experience would almost be worse than being the solo tank, actually. People feel entitled to healing. People do not feel entitled to space as it is a team effort.

13 Likes
5

imagine being the lone support against a genji/tracer/sombra lineup

8 Likes
6

Game doesn’t need to cater to dps enjoyers even more so big nope. Every single game would be decided by a dps diff

7 Likes
7

then was the reason for 5v5 honestly just b/c playing a tank wasn’t as popular?
honestly…the only issue i have with tanking in this game is that it’s not like tanking in every other game. You should be hard to kill as a tank, and you shoudlnt do as much dps …that’s how tanks are supposed to work. RIght now it seems they just have more HP but still take dmg just as badly as a dps…which is why they aren’t fun. Some of them are flat out broken which I GUESS is fun?? (Roadhog and Orisa)…but that’s about it.

8

What we’ve learnt from 5v5 is that minimum players of a role should be 2 at least, otherwise too vulnerable to the counters and too much responsibility/pressure on one person.

2-4-3 would be perfect imo

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9

Do you know want immortal supports on top of raid boss tanks.

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10

9v9 is a new one :thinking:

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11

Why? Introducing 1-2-2 they didn’t made any tests, just forced this change .

5 Likes
12

That would be way worse

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13

Which is probably a factor in why its so bad imo, again lots of factors but it mightve been in a better spot.

That being said ik they tested it with pros for a bit in the league.

14

0-3-2 is the only way.

Games where there are no tanks are the ones that won OW GOTY.

Try hards who swapped to tank destroyed the fun of that. Then an even more try hard team came about, GOATS. Then role lock to bury the game we loved.

Open queue still allows anything, I did not like the 0-4-1 games at all. But the 0-3-2 were like a sweet, sweet spot. Those games were nothing but super fast fun with sustain. Kept supports on their toes and DPS senses sharp. It always got ruined when some loser would swap to Reinhardt to shield. I would just auto-report them.

Tanks ruined OW. End of story.

15

Pros

  • Would modestly help DPS queues
  • Make individual Supports feel more impactful*

Cons

  • Gameplay is now even more punishing for the tank

  • Supports now have more attackers coming for them about while having to output more heals

  • The necessary support buffs to make this even somewhat viable would mean it’s basically impossible to kill anyone being healed without coordination and focus fire. This would make the above worse, since you can’t kill anyone until the support dies

*could also just not buff the supports and have things die even faster than they do now, which would kinda fit with the direction the game has gone in.

16

They giga-buffed the tank so they could survive solo, don’t want them to do that to supports. And if they dropped it to just one support the game becomes hunt the healer, 3 dps out to kill one support because then the other team has no healing.

1 Like
17

Worse balanced and worse queue times.

18

Yeah Sorta like how tanks are alone right now hey?

1 Like
19

Worse.

The devs said years ago on a reddit AMA that they had tried a handful of different formats, and 1-3-1 was one of them. They concluded from their playtests that single-support-comps made the game too snowball-y. It became too easy to swing a fight in your favor by hunting down the enemy team’s only support and killing them.

Nowadays we can also see the other consequence of having a role with only one slot in it – it becomes too dependent on counter-picking. So now instead of just the tanks complaining about how counter-swapping makes the role less fun while also raising the skill floor, the supports would be complaining too.

Lastly, support doesn’t really have population issues. If you look on overbuff you can see that there are almost as many support players as there are DPS players. Actually, as of the time of me typing this, support has a higher pickrate than DPS. So I think that removing one support could cause a bottleneck.

EDIT: Support has a higher pickrate on PC, not on console.

EDIT 2: I forgot to add that one of the things that the devs noticed during their playtests is that support players don’t like being alone in their role. Iirc, out of all the roles, supports were most likely to enjoy having a partner. (That was one of the reasons they decided to cut a tank instead of a dps / support. Out of all the roles, tank players were the most inclined to leadership / shotcalling, so they adjusted better to being alone. Both support and DPS felt overly pressured to “perform well” when there was only 1 of them.)

In a 1-3-1, not only did the support not like being alone, but having an extra dps on the enemy team trying to hunt them down proved to be extremely overwhelming.

So yeah, combine being 3v1 witch-hunted with being overly reliant on counter-swapping, having 0 peel, being the only player responsible for your entire team’s sustain, and you get a very stressed out support.

If you think that the support backlash was crazy at the start of 1-2-2, I guarantee you that 1-3-1 would have made the situation 100xs worse.

1 Like
20

then maybe its time we just get rid of tanks or just make them actual tanks instead of what they are now

  1. they shoudl be hard to kill
  2. they should not do as much dps as their dps counterparts
  3. they should be immune to one-shots.