Why do people think tanks are getting buffed? 5v5

Same as now but people in mid ranks don’t care so it won’t change

You could nerf barriers and give tanks more health now, it would be the same

a net positive change for who? at this point i don’t think it will be worth for Damage players either, because queue times are going up anyways since one tank player is going to queue dps or support, and i will be one of them as a tank main.

to me tanking is special in OW because of the synergies and if you ask tank mains 90% will answer the same. The more brawler, faster, deadlier tank is a narrative blizzard pushed to accomodate dps-players-only and justify 5v5, dps players will never play tank role

i will try 5v5 but when thinking about it, it doesn’t sound right in every way imaginable, we’ll see i guess

2 Likes

Caveat: I am not confirming here the extent to which we’re looking at Doomfist. It would be disrespectful to the the hard working members of Team 4 to not give their work our best effort in revealing it.

Speaking more generally, existing hero reworks and/or balance changes are a part of our larger comms plan for OW2. We want for heroes to have the appropriate amount of space and time to shine and we’ll be doing what we can to create some great reveal content that will hopefully surprise and delight you.

22 Likes

Can you comment at all on general levels? Like, in general, are we going to see damage levels or burst damage go down?

In general, are we going to see healing levels go down, or else burst healing go down, or else AOE healing go down?

I probably speak for quite a few tank players when I say I’d feel a lot better about these changes if I knew burst damage was also going to be less than it is in the live environment.

1 Like

they confirmed back in May 24th AMA that they intend to do internal testing with deep changes on Mei as a tank if she were to keep her gimmick that is freeze.
the hero designer said they plan on giving her the most wanted feature, iceskating, and imo it’d be great to have her CC on primary replaced with a CD skillshot like Ana’s sleep dart with less duration and range.
i suppose after all these months they had the time to properly test her so it would be nice to hear what direction they want to go with her in OW2 - make her an actual off-tank / brawler or a dps, but blander

Well you actually don’t need to buy the product.

You need to try the product. If you don’t like it, you can stay “done”.

My statement isn’t on what you are entitled to do. It’s on what is most intelligent to.

That would be to know what you do and don’t know.

Give criticism on what you do for sure - the current game. You are well qualified as a customer to do that.

But saying things like ‘McCree will be completely unbalanced - devs stupid for 5v5” when McCree is confirmed to have changes, we don’t know what they are and we don’t know what 5v5 feels like just doesn’t seem useful.

They are going to rework my main. To which I could say “wELL hE AINT DoOM, I’M dONe” but I don’t know what ideas I do I might as well wait to see.

I never said it was 100% or 0%. Seems you aren’t even reading my comment.

I recommend you look at the feedback from GM or higher tanks before saying this a low ELO issue. Mind you I don’t think it’s as much of an issue at lower ranks given people can’t aim very well down there.

Most people here are commenting on things Blizzard has confirmed / re-iterated in this very thread. For example, the fact that Blizzard is making the tanks more offensive and reducing the number of tanks by 1. You don’t need to have played OW2 to see that Tank synergies will be gone (that’s a given now) or that reliance on tanks will decrease, Blizzard have straight up said as such. They’ve also stated that tanks won’t be drawing most of the damage anymore:

This comment makes it clear why Blizzard is calling tanks brawlers in OW2, they are removing 1 part tank and adding 1 part DPS. Yes tanks will still block damage but we’ve also made them even more DPS like. We don’t need to have OW2 in our hands to read Blizzards own comments on where the role is headed, they’ve pretty clearly indicated the direction on multiple occasions.

2 Likes

Well

Ok, I see where this is going. The last thing I will say is there is a big difference between giving your opinion and acting like you know precisely what the final product is going to be like.

I only commented on one of those groups so I won’t be drawn into this further but feel free to carry on.

Whatever they do to fix queue times, will simultaneously attract players and alienate players.

And this includes doing nothing to fix queue times.

There are no options that don’t alienate players.

Furthermore, the idea that if they are changing what demographic of players the game appeals to “I.e. More FPS, Less MOBA”, that is obviously going to attract a certain type of player, and push away another group of players.

The trick is choosing the option which alienates the fewest amount of players, and attracts the highest amount of players.

Which as a guy who spent roughly 600 hours looking at this queue times issue, I believe this was one of the best ways forward.

Because Jeff Kaplan (RIP) literally said multiple times (and we even had an Experimental (double RIP) in order to go to one tank they’d make significant changes to existing tanks for balance.

I wouldn’t be any stock into a rushed showcase for Blizzcon, I doubt it reflects OW2 at all.

The idea of a brawl tank might make me finnaly look into playin tank. I just wanna get out there and wreck into the enemy lines.

Sounds good on paper, but im not sure this will work out this way. At start for sure, plenty of Tanks will play and que times will be fine.
But there are several factors that outright make it an almost irrelevant change imo.

  1. The new players who come to the game with OW2. The majority of them will be DPS players, thats just how it works. So immediately, there will be a lot more DPS player to handle.

  2. There are a lot of tank players atm, who only plays tank, because the long que times, otherwise they would play DPS. Add those to the DPS que.

  3. I am certain without a shadow of a doubt, that a lot of tank players will just leave the pvp scene overall, solo tanking is not something i can see working out well,especially because of the too much pressure and the lack of synergy.

  4. Supports will have enough of it very fast, where they will get overwhelmed from every direction because of the lack of a tank and either quit or move to DPS.

So in theory its good to remove 1 tank from the bottleneck, but for every tank removed, there will be 6 new DPS, so the que times will still be horrible, if not worse after a month or two. Because the tank role will still be on short supply and the support category will become the new bottleneck.
I wonder what comes after that, remove a support as well? Or make it 3 DPS 1 support 1 tank? I wonder how many years will pass until they realize that the DPS role just feels too good to play compared to the other 2. Or the fact, that with every new DPS hero released, they delay the category balance by a year.

2 Likes

That’s why they’re shifting and making it more rewarding/good to play aggressive tanks as fat DPS. The idea is no longer, tanks need to tank (Even though tanking skillset is important.), but rather, the perception that tanks are aggressive DPS so more DPS players would leapt to it.

Solo tanks like hammond/dva/hog would also further force that change into the players faster. Since if you don’t have a frontline, the only way to win is to dive aggressively. Which is what DPS players want instead of waiting, sitting and pushing up with the shield. Additionally, the lack of synergy is a total sham. Synergy between your DPS and Supports are still a thing. (I also find it bull that tank queues being long will ever be a thing. If anything, tanks will still be the fastest queue since you only need one and with DPS/Supports being the larger pop.)

As for the supports, that’s why they’re giving the role passive, more survivability and punishes flankers who can’t finish the job fast enough. Not to mention that there are still options for supports, going Zen/Moira/Brig/Lucio. If your claims of support having enough of it very fast, they’ve quit a long time ago (And not to mention, DPS players are also moving to support since it’s a tad faster and Bap/Ana/Zen scratches the DPS itch as well.).

I’ll prob agree that support might be the new bottleneck, but as it is, you only need one tank for 2 DPS/2 Support for a game to find a round quickly. Not to mention that it’s also finally possible for Blizz to introduce more shield tanks without the issue of double shield.

Sad to say, but making tanks fat DPS is prob the way to go. Supports are already there with heroes meant for supporting and doing damage part of their toolkit rather than raw healing.

tanks are getting buffed because how does a ball protect his team without a barrier if enemy team is running a reinhardt who does have a barrier? obviously the ball team here is at a disadvantage so they need to adjust ball to be able to protect his team better. or imagine a team with a hog vs a team with a rein… again. the hog cant protect them in anyway, the rein can.

surely anything could happen but in theory the reins team would have an advantage cuz they can shoot all enemies without any danger. they probably wont change rein too much cuz he is ALREADY good thanks to having a Barrier. the main tanks who are getting big buffs and changes are the tanks without shields. tanks who cant help their team as a solo tank. like if enemy has dva… and she is just like she is in OW1… theyre gonna lose. ill just kill her. especially if we have a barrier and they dont. so dva will surely be getting re-worked , just like hog and ball.

no matter how brawly you make a tank. i can still kill u from afar from behind a barrier if you dont have a shield of your own OR some new re-worked abilities to avoid this scenario.

"To be completely candid: I understand that you need to get your hands on the game and experience it for yourself to fully form an opinion. As someone who was an OW fan and player before I ever joined the team, I have a huge amount of empathy for folks who are frustrated waiting for OW2.

Speaking as someone who plays retail comp nightly, and playtests 2 almost daily, it’s difficult to envision what the experience is actually like until you’ve been in the environment and played several matches. I sincerely do not mean this in a gatekeep-y or “we know better than you” tone, but more to create an understanding that we get your sentiment and understand where your feedback is coming from."

That’s the problem - the last demo stream looked to be played by players at a silver/gold level. It is understandable for there to be low confidence in the balancing capabilities of the people currently play testing. If you could at least name some pro players that are contributing to the play testing feedback, I think you would find that there is a higher confidence rate in what you are saying.

With perspective, because Overwatch 1 is essentially "over’, as far as I can say, the development team had never made a lasting change that wasn’t a net loss for tanks as a whole.

Not a damn thing they say will convince anyone who’s still awake that any change they make to tanks will be to the benefit of tank players. The team’s word is worth less than nothing because they have been nothing but duplicitous, deceptive and pathetically biased towards the damage heroes and the pro players that prefer them.

I don’t need to play OW 2 to see what the future holds. That was demonstrated perfectly by the gameplay footage released not long ago: Reinhardt having his shield shredded and then pathetically swinging his hammer at three ranged dps heroes he could not reach, as they pounced on him with impunity while he tries to backpedal into cover. You call that progress or improvement. Garbage. Utter garbage. May your company collapse around all of you.

3 Likes

Hi AndyB! Thanks for communicating with us!

Something I have concerns about are what supports will look like in Overwatch 2. I really enjoy using defensive abilities and healing to protect my teammates (and even rescue them from getting wiped)!

But I worry that Overwatch’s supports are going the opposite direction, and that they may end up becoming “dps characters with a little bit of heals/utility on the side” by the time the sequel rolls around.

Is the design direction of supports something you’re at liberty to speak of at the moment?

3 Likes

any idea when we can expect a new live stream or just more info from the devs? they said during blizzcon that they wanted to show us more stuff more ofthen even said “we dont want to confirm that we do every other month, but we want more”. this has been shown in April with the good live stream event. but havent heard anything since then.

even the release year of OW2 we had to learn from OWL and the teams. so is there anything coming up in the near future that we can look forward too? becouse I feel the community needs it atm.

No she hasn’t. She has no where near the amount of mobility of ball and doomfist. She has never had a positive wr in plat in below, and even Diamond now. It’s crazy coming back here after all this time and people still complain about a hero who has been trash in metal ranks since the beginning of the game.

I just want to know exactly where they are at with her. I’ve heard enough “we are thinking about x and y” then they end up doing something completely different with other things.

It just annoys me the Mei change announcement was aimed at people who are annoyed by Mei with 0 regard at all for those who actually play her in terms of info outside of that one dude saying “it’s fun to try and line up as many people as you can and deal a bunch of damage”.

Firstly, I appreciate what appears to be a fairly candid, pointed, and elaborate reply. That’s something that’s been absent from Blizzard for a while, and it’s refreshing to have some actual, substantive communication from Blizzard.

That said… I have to disagree with a lot of what you’re saying. I understand you’re the messenger here and a lot of this message may be philosophy being pushed down from higher ups, so please understand my frustration isn’t targeted at you. To put it frankly, I really don’t think Blizzard has a clue when it comes to Tanks, and I think the direction they’ve chosen is not going to work out with the shining success that’s being promised.

Tank synergy is a massive part of what people enjoy about tanks. That’s going away with 5v5. I don’t really need to play it to understand that. To me, for Blizzard to utterly do away with that highly characteristic facet of the game is foolishness, because, in seeking to “fix” the issue with the Tank role, it’s taking away one of the few remaining enjoyable aspects of it. That’s a very bad note to start on, and it’s, as I’m sure you’ve realized, one of the biggest reasons that a lot of players hold 5v5 in low regard without even having played it.

Ostensibly, sure, if the upsides of this change are big enough, they’ll offset the loss of tank synergy, but I’m unconvinced. For example, as I’m sure you know, one frustration people have is with tanks being “vaporized” in the current game. In 5v5, with a reduction in defenses, that’s going to become an even larger problem, especially since beefing up tanks’ offensive power is going to mitigate the loss of damage from removing a tank. Now, sure, Supports might be able to focus on healing a single target more (even though that, as a player, sounds more like a downside–spending a good majority of the game shooting healing darts up the tank’s behind doesn’t sound like a good time), but this “upside” neglects that tank rotations currently mean Supports can put a little more emphasis on healing the whole team, which is a good thing. With a tank hogging the healing resources, that means DPS and Support partners are going to be more pressured for healing, which is going to promote more stop-and-go, peek-style gameplay similar to what we had several months ago (and which, despite accolades from a handful of people, was not overly popular). Nevermind, too, that burst damage and weaker healing means it’s extremely easy to overpower non-ult healing and shred through health bars, which would require a huge numbers overhaul to fix, meaning a lot of characters are going to wind up very different if Blizzard intends to actually get a semi-balanced, enjoyable game (and, if Blizzard hasn’t learned this by now–people don’t like their very unique, signature characters being utterly upended. Just ask Symmetra, Brigitte, & Mercy mains).

On top of that, I don’t particularly trust Blizzard playtests. Blizzard has made a lot of claims about what goes on in their playtests; very few of those claims have translated to the actual game. Jeff Kaplan even talked about that at length (I believe in the 1-3-2 or Tank redesign posts from Reddit? Don’t remember exactly), expressing how what Blizzard experienced in their internal gameplay was considerably different from the live game because Blizzard has a specific idea about how to play the game in their minds, and the playerbase has a different idea. Blizzard, too, I think, has overly invested themselves in designing a game that’s fun & functional for extremely high level players (i.e. OWL) without giving adequate consideration to how that impacts ordinary players, or they misconstrue how that will impact ordinary players because of the internal/pro bias. Blizzard needs to think outside the relatively small box of their office to understand the ramifications changes like these may have for the game.

So… again, thank you for the communication, but it does little to reassure–it honestly makes me even more apprehensive of the changes coming in OW2. While I dislike the overuse of the comparisons to CoD, Valorant, Apex, etc., it does legitimately seem like Blizzard is chasing the high of those games with these changes, and… well, sorry, but I’m just going to go play those games. Overwatch had something special. It’s far too late now, but my advice would be not to squander that unique nature.

7 Likes