You should stop making your opinion based on what you hear but on your own experience…That would prevent stupidly wrong infos to be spread…
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Melee just doesn’t work as well in a 1st person shooter as it does in a 3rd person shooter. That said, we have melee tanks like Doomfist. And Venture is close to melee, not pure melee but melee adjacent.
Melee is frustrating to play against in Overwatch because you need mobility and sustain on the hero. Look at Doom. Even when he was a DPS he had lots of health and overhealth. Look at Venture where every ability grants shields. Look even at Rivals where heroes like Magik have tons of ways to increase the health bar as well as mobility.
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So you say my reply is stupidly wrong?
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Considering players aren’t satisfied with what Blizzard’s doing, I wouldn’t put much faith in what heroes Blizzard thinks have a place in Overwatch. Imagine if we said “That mechanic consistently fails and everyone hates the job he does on the car, but if he thinks this car shouldn’t have brakes, then brakes have no place in this car”.
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We had dps doom who had one of the most unique hero designs in any hero shooter.
he was a pub/noob stomper hero so all the lower ranks hated him whilst he was very very mid/niche/weak in high elo.
still the most fun hero design I’ve ever played in ow and rivals.
People who have no clue what they’re on about say dps doom was hard to balance but in reality he was pretty balanced at the end of ow1, top dog of the niche heroes.
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Cause Brigitte created problems.
Doomfist was underpowered and largely broken or irrelevant. Like many other heroes in the Damage-role, he struggled for most of the playerbase and tended to be borderline on the higher end.
Venture is CQC, not really melee.
Truly melee heroes are basically those in the Tank-role and one in the Support-role, all others tend to be more short-ranged, CQC heroes.
That short-ranged poke is actually 20 meters, longer than the effective ranges of Reaper or Tracer.
But otherwise, yeah, they’re more CQC than melee specifically.
No, he wasn’t.
He did have a larger hitbox than the typical Damage-role hero (basically wider than Mei, or Bastion, but still shorter than Bastion)
He had the typical CQC health pool of 250, plus extra bonuses with his passive giving him extra health. But the problem was, and continues to be an over-reliance on Rocket Punch and how narrow it is to land it on a target, much less get them to hit a wall at the correct angle for the bonus damage.
Venture is a better design, but they’re also easier to play and work with overall than Doomfist today.
The problem was the angle they were tackling the heroes at. Remember that all “offense” heroes are intended to be glass-cannons, and being a melee hero in this section just doesn’t work. Moreover, the idea behind Genji started with Hanzo first, as using a bow and then switching to a sword, before they split the character into two separate individuals.
Skyrim and Indiana Jones can make it work pretty well.
Albeit, very simplified.
Because the problem lies in the fact that the game has a specific role that’s supposed to Tank damage, and heroes like Majik, and others need those bonus health totals, because the damage range of everyone else is designed to tackle and kill those high health Vanguards.
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Many details in Rivals allow them to have melee heroes that work without having to shoehorn CC+overhealth+mobility to their kit. The maps specially, since those dont exist exclusively for the sake of hitscans with giant sightlines or hard to reach high grounds.
But also mobile melee DPS heroes are strong yet balanced out by anti-mobility/dive heroes. Spiderman and BP and Magik can exist because Peni, Namor, Storm and Wanda exist to counteract them.
In OW, Blizz spent years nerfing defense heroes and butchering any anti-dive hero that existed other than Dive. DF would have been fine if defense or disruption DPS like Mei, Sym and Sombra were actually allowed to counter flankers, something they have been basically all but nerfed out in favor of being turned into bootleg Hanzo or Soldier.
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Sounds fun!
Brig was a problem because she was a support that could 1v1 anyone, while healing her team, and could make her team immune to one shots. That’s not at all a comparison to what a DPS melee hero would be.
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Even launch Brig was allergic to Pharah and Junkrat, and to a lesser extent Sym, Mei and Torb.
Tracer and Genji are not ‘‘anyone’’.
Letting players have direct agency over the meta is amazing
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It’s 16m with a splash of 2.75m meaning a max range of 18.75m with the last 1.75m of the splash doing 12 DMG… Which is nothing for a weapon that fires so slowly. Everything about their kit encourages you to play in melee range and weave in cannonballs and quick melees between ability uses. This is as close to a melee hero the DPS will ever get in ow.
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Because it’s honestly a dumb concept in A; a game with guns, and B; a competitive fps balanced around a certain amount of offensive output requiring mechanical skill.
To allow a melee dps you’d have to design them to be difficult in a manner other than aim to substitute the skill gap required to make them work WITHOUT designing them in a way that’s impossible for most hero’s to interact with.
Which means how do you make a melee dps close the distance against someone like soldier or ashe? And after they get there how do you make them require enough skill to earn the kill?
Every feasible answer lands them into the tank role by default because blocking and absorbing hits while trying to close distance are definitive tank aspects.
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I mean, that’s still more range than a lot of tanks, and that’s what I would consider melee range. Under like 12 ish meters pretty much. Venture is able to play just outside of those truly close ranges. It’s short range, but not really melee, because it’s outside the range of actual melee characters like rein brig even winston kinda applies. Basically if you can play outside of cassidy flashbang range I don’t really consider it melee anymore
I still do not know how viable such a short range dps would be though. Venture is kinda supposed to be doomfist but actually functional because venture actually can play outside of melee range.
Idk tbh I think magik kinda shows you how. You give them decent mobility and just enough damage so that they can get kills once they get there if they land everything and even then they have to be considerate of positioning because you use a lot of cds to make kills happen. There’s dps doom but the problem with dps doom was that he had essentially no counterplay to cc and he could one shot with only punch.
Funny because I designed an entire melee DPS back before Illari was announced but it never took off on the forums. But a melee dps can totally work in this game.
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Close-quarters gameplay is very complex to manage in an FPS, while for Marvel Rivals the third-person perspective allows for a more immediate perception of the action.
I could trivially point out that Wrecking Ball has a third-person view when in ball mode, exactly the type of gameplay that most closely resembles immediate melee action.It helps a lot in reading the positioning and the intrusion on the battlefield. But then we have examples of heroes who have created enormous balance problems in a roster that is very specialized in shooters: Doomfist had the justification of the oneshot with the rocket punch, but then they moved him to a tank to be able to balance him to a “fighter”. Since then, the only hero who has timidly approached the concept of melee / short range DPS is Venture, but we see that they struggle to manage the immersive action well.
But I digress, I understand what you mean: “why not heroes who punch?”. as i said, i think it’s a matter of how to handle the “reward” from a kill made by a mainly short range hero in a mainly shooter roster. Genji gets that kind of reward with the sword literally because it’s an ultimate. Doomfist gets it for battlefield management (environmental kills) and ramattra is perhaps the only hero to have a fight mode that still shows a basic clumsiness in being able to actually propose it all the time (in fact it’s an ability that alternates). If we had had some good ideas maybe genji would never have been what he is today, and the same goes for doomfist who maybe would never have become a tank. Or… well, brigitte: how difficult was it to understand the measure with which to propose she in the game today?
I think Overwatch can… look at how Rivals does with the melee approach. but I definitely would NOT copy it without a strong focus on balance, OW’s shooter dps are completely different from rivals, especially in what surrounds them in supporting.
But hey: TPS and FPS have differences that are impossible to compare, right?
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Not only is gapclosing a long distance successfully without dying a skill on its own, but also most melee heroes have to land combos to successfully kill someone. Not to mention that to successfully flank/dive without a full comp, you need to track cooldowns far more accurately than safe long range heroes.
So if you mean ‘‘skill = aiming’’ then no, low range heroes should not have aiming requirements anywhere near that of high range heroes. Aiming requirements should be proportional to the range a hero has.
In addition to the third vs first person perspective others have brought up, Rivals gunplay is INCREDIBLY shallow compared to Overwatch’s.
In the few melee characters that Overwatch has, Reinhardt, Brigitte, Winston (yeah, I know hes got a gun, but for all intents and purposes its a melee weapon) and Genji (during Dragonblade), actually swinging the weapon is the least interesting part of their kit.
A pure melee character would be very hard to balance and just not really that interesting to play compared to the DPS we already have.
There is a well-established system of the ranged attack like aim in shooter(balance, skill and fun combined), but melee in shooter lacks such a concept imo.
Many devs design melee just as huge AoE, meaning they skip aim, one of the core system of the shooter, without trying to make a system like that. It makes them too simple to be an interesting mechanic without being op. Melee is either unbalanced as hell or just boring as a result.
In fighting games for example, melee combat is centered around defense mechanism and combo. What’s more important here is the defense. It is their well-established core identity of melee combat which can provide balance, skill and fun.
Melee in shooter in general is like playing a fighting game without defense and thus it should be adjusted for the balance. Boring without being op and no depth as a result.
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I’m rounding, but yeah, this is true.
Depends on what you’re used to play, but Venture fires pretty fast; faster than Genji or Lucio at the least.
Ehh, they encourage the same engagement distance as pretty much every other flanker; whether you’re Tracer, or Reaper or Venture, you’re going to engage within the same range. One element of Venture, though, is that they have to commit to kills with Drill Dash (and follow-up with Clobber, or Clobber whenever you get within that range chance); which is kinda similar to Genji or Echo.
And for the most part, I agree, that this is probably the closest you’ll get to a melee hero in the Damage-role, beyond Genji, at least.
Until we see another Damage-role hero that corners the same niche.
Basically, Venture’s sorta the right way to design a hero like Doomfist. While also having a functional… or more forgiving defensive component. Whereas Doomfist needs to contact, or hit a target with one of his abilities to generate overhealth/shields, Venture can just press the button and get it immediately.
Dig/Burrow is… kind of a separate discussion, but for what Overwatch is, it works, but it needs better… “expression” to show that there’s some level of counterplay to it (basically you can force Venture out of the ground, though it is limited to only a few heroes).
Rocket Punch was his least damaging ability. It only did 100 damage at max, full charge, if the target hit the wall, it could do up to an additional 150 damage, but the ability was so conditional and back-ended that it didn’t really work well for something that difficult to hit, on the other hand, this did let them allow Rocket Punch to kill.
Venture’s design frontloads the damage from Drill Dash, and then back-ends additional damage the longer the contact of the ability. This is a better design as a whole for Overwatch.
You might as well throw in Junker Queen onto that list, as she is a functionally a melee hero too, given how her necessity to landing Carnage as often as possible works for her, and how many combos are built into that ability.
Depending on the fighting game, it’s more of a control of space than actual melee combat. There’s quite a few fighter archetypes that are based more around distance or ranged that just CQC combat.
Dhalsim being the proto-typical archetype for 2D fighters, but even some 3D fighters put a lot of value on spacing and control; Soul Calibur being the most prominent.
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Overwatch should get fart based dps.
A female junkrat that damages with gas.
They can completely rip off harley quin with her latest weird fart fetish comic.
/jks
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