What we've learned from JQueen and Sojourn

Maybe limiting the shout to movement only for allies would help here. So keep the AoE heal/ overhealth in the support role only. They should start to make some rules like:

  1. Only tank heroes have hard CC (exception Ana because its Ana)
  2. Only supports have wide AoE heal/ over health effects

That should also be an easy solve: Only the strongest effect applies if multiple are in place or are capped like damage reduction is.

We could also use it for heal but this would make things a lot harder because a lot of skills are HoT and not burst. So we should at least stay away from that without changing heals completly.

This essentially just boils down to the issue of “bigger number win conditions”.

Same as why siege players hated the bulletproof meta, or why the tf2 community changed their own competitive ruleset to prevent heavy/medic stacking (and indeed why weapons like the vaccinator are so universally hated).

Games are just less fun when the winner is predetermined through simply having larger numbers. That’s why the most popular metas tend to focus on changeable hero outputs (say, dive, or hitscan-centric metas), whilst hating on resource-driven metas like GOATs. If you could imagine a game where DPS were designed like tanks and supports frequently are, their output not being mechanically driven, but instead a flat AOE damage over time, it’s easy to imagine just how bad things could be.

So why not just have an OWL-specific ruleset?

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Blizzard have been hard at work flushing their own pro scene down the toilets for years now, and you expect them to act rationally?

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They want to make sure that both the live service game and OWL is on the same ruleset to attract more viewers because they want Timmy to believe they can be a super duper OWL pro too.

Would be nice for a change.

✅ Most minimal way to block GOATs
❌ OWL could disallow GOATs if needed

Well clearly the whole “lose gigantic chunks of your playerbase over that mentality” didn’t work that well.

“Better marketing” is kinda irrelevant if it forces your product to suck.

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ok but if she can’t eat damage for her team by giving them overhealth, then she will need a damage eating ability lol. or she will have to get a significant buff to self heal to compensate cause she will need to body block.

i’m disappointed we haven’t gotten ANY damage mitigation numbers for her from the beta. because I seriously doubt she’s eating more damage than shields are. so it really is very doubtful to me that her team overheal is in any way “fundamentally broken and OP” in the sense that it cannot be tweaked and must be deleted.

That would be a great point but they kinda have their heads up their own bottoms so it’s hard to hear or see advice from outside the company.

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One would hope that Microsoft fixes a lot of that.

Since I suspect a lot of the more boneheaded issues are Kotick related

I think all roles should be treated with caution, but the support and tank should get a little bit more attention.

I think they should try to predict as much as possible, but it isn’t realistic to expect them to see into the future.

The whole point of balance is to constantly make changes so that the meta never feels stale.

No, because they need new heroes to be stronger so they know where to pare down and apply nerfs.

Strong heroes are played more, weaker ones will be underused.

It’s not anything to do inherently with tanks and supports.

It’s abilities that buff your team.

These are historically the hardest to balance. They create synergies that are hard to break.

It makes owl boring since it discourages meta diversity. It makes ranked frustrating because your team refuses to (or insists on) running the synergy.

They went out their way to remove team buffing abilities (nerfing/removing CC, reducing shields, etc.). They probably though commanding shout was safe, but I guess not.

BTW there is more to teamwork than buffing your team. But ow players wouldn’t know about that.

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Damage is allowed to be busted, as long as it doesn’t slow down the match.

This just isn’t true. Overhealth wasn’t “broken” until streamers decided “This thing is getting in the way of my killing, and that’s bad”.

No, before you could get clever with health; you could overheal important characters so they’d stay alive longer and that adds a level of depth to the game. And we ALL know Overwatch fans don’t like “depth” or “interesting gameplay mechanics”; they just want to shoot things.

Keep in mind, while I’m aware Armor didn’t do too much to stop burst damage, the fact is that it COULD help against it. We can improve upon the mechanic to make it work better instead of gutting it. And yet, its gone, and everyone constantly complains about dying too fast.

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dps will just always tend to be less meta defining heroes.

This is a game about teamwork, and most dps heroes are selfish.

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Tanks did define metas since day 1 and will always do. It is very well known and obvious, only bunch of forum dps haters refuse to believe to this. Supports do as well have some impact, like early ana and early brig, for example, but to a lesser degree.

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Well, i see tanks and supports being the ones defining metas. Not just Tanks. DPS obviously are the most expendable and change vastly based on the current meta tanks and supports.

Their goal isn’t to have a balanced game when releasing new heroes. Their goal is to have over the top heroes that let people dominate the game. That brings new players in on a hero release.

News heroes should be a bit overtuned for a month or so. It’s fun.

Rather they go the approach of launch ashe and release the hero under tuned then steadily buffing them. JQ and sojourn are just frustrating to go against rn and nerfing makes them feel worse for those that like them.

This is why I usually don’t play a new hero outside of training/customs for a few months since they’ll usually get nerfed and I hate having to constantly readjust.

So its okay for dps to be released broken, and its “fun” but tanks and supports should purposely be made underpowered?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhhttttt.

And then youll complain about queue times because no one is playing either lmao. Flawless logic.