Why Hog and Ball are so Dominant

General Discussion
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There’s a fair bit at play here, but let me break it down so maybe everyone stops complaining so much about the state of matches.

#1. Team play in general has declined over the past year. Various power creeps plus folks quitting (I’ve seen some longstanding vets and friends quit for good) has pushed the game away from team play both with it’s players and with the heroes.

AND

#2. Power creep and failed “balances”.

Tracer and Soldier are the obvious suspects here. These two heroes can find so much value against so many team comps and tank comps in particular. Tracer can easily play past barrier tanks and farm their supports and DPS, leaving tanks stranded from team resources. This means if you’re playing Rein or Monke and all of a sudden Tracer is on your Ana, you either shield bot/AFK or explode. It’s very boring and frustrating. Why be restrained by your own team when Hog and Ball exist? In the same breath, D.Va is the best peeler in the game and one of the few tanks who can actually bully Tracer AND protect her DPS/Supports from Tracer. At the same time, D.Va can eat CC and dmg for her own Tracer, thus hyper enabling her.

While D.Va would be strong regardless of what DPS are good, the fact Tracer is strong only makes D.Va stronger.

Soldier has never really been a tank punisher, but in his current state, he can keep pressure on passive frontlines by sitting back and poking out resources, while also being able to punish out of position squishies from range. In fact, if Soldier maintains a +21m distance from enemy tanks, only Orisa is capable of hard pressuring him. This means S76 can just hard exist at midrange and blow up a helpless frontline until enemy DPS do something about it. While I think Orisa is actually a really strong hero to play into a Smurf/Carrying S76, Hog and Ball can also easily punish the hero while he is quite helpless against both, even with a Mercy pocket.

Hog and Ball have favorable matchups against Soldier, while being able to mostly ignore whatever Tracer is doing. They survive without team resources and don’t need team input to secure picks. The latter is definitely their driving force, but the fact Tracer and S76 are good is going to drive more independent play from tanks.

Let us next discuss the three supports who have helped lead us to Hog+Ball.

Brig is incredibly strong at the upper ranks right now. She has more favorable matchups vs these tanks than most other supports, but her survival is still cooldown dependent when facing them. On the flip side, Brig can really enable her own Ball, while also making Hog virtually unkillable by playing around him. It’s a twofold measure, but basically Brig doesn’t get instantly deleted vs Hog+Ball, and she can hyper enable both.

Bap has little chemistry within this comp and is quite weak against it. This is one of the primary reasons we are seeing Ball and Hog, who can mostly ignore Bap’s cooldowns and damage and just delete him. Immortality Field is still broken, but Hog and Ball are two of the only tanks capable of hard disabling it’s effects. Whether it is Hooking, Whole Hogging, Booping, or Piledriving enemies up out of I.F. these tanks can just ignore the stupidity of the ability. As a Rein main, there’s nothing worse than MTDing the other Rein, only for Bap to Lamp him and then he kills you. Playing Hog and Ball against Bap is quite satisfying knowing that you can still drop an enemy despite I.F.

Last up is Zen, who has mixed purpose within this meta and how we got here. Zen can hyper enable Ball with Orb and Discord, while on the flip side also being able to put heavy pressure into defenseless Hog+Ball comps. Discord is still wildly broken, and as such it is one of the reasons tank players are opting for the hyper survivable Ball and Hog. Getting Discorded as Rein or Orisa in high ranks is basically a death sentence. Hog and Ball have increased popularity thanks to their survivability against Discord.

A decline in team play is still the primary factor for these tanks taking over, but understand that the state of DPS and Supports has only further bolstered these tanks in the meta. Strong solo play DPS will encourage strong solo play tanks and strong solo play supports. As long as solo carry heroes are at their strongest, we’ll remain in this meta. We need team oriented tanks (ie Winston and Rein) to get significant buffs in order to shift this. It’s far easier for 6 players to just hunt for and secure 1v1s than an entire team stack on a Rein or Dive with a Monke.

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Very based I’d also like the mention Ball is also very strong with D.va’s presence

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I’d argue ball was enabling Dva more. With Balls pickrate going down slightly we saw Dvas go down as well, and ball can function without Dva.

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Well D.va can also function with every main tank lol

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I have no problem dealing with Ball as S76, and I’m not very good. You state ball is a good counter but if soldier sees him coming he can inflict plenty of damage which ball is on his way to force him to go find a health-pack and then put down his heal pad while scaring him off. Hog is limited to 20m range. I don’t see how either is a good counter.

I use S76 to make sure hog can get nothing done by focusing him every time he comes out of cover. And when I play hog, S76 is a PITA.

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As a ball main, I agree 10000%

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Finally someone that understands the current meta situation and why Ball+Hog is increasing in pickrate, it’s not because these tanks are OP it’s because the meta is shifting

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People wanted a more deathmatchy meta and they got it.

You guys prefer double shields maybe?

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This is all totally accurate. As Flats said; any time Hog is a strong pick (and here we have him practically a must pick in high SR), the games balance is out of wack.

I feel like, you are certainly spot on with the teamwork and growing frustrations with the game sort of forcing Ball/Hog…which is frustrating, because on the support side of things, it forces really stinky gameplay. Zen isn’t bad to play as normally, but in this comp he is not fun to play as. You have almost no protection beyond possibly Brig babysitting you, and you’re hyper focused. The point is you’re going to die; you just need to get stuff done before you do. It feels like trash…but playing as the Brig still somehow feels worse, where your job is to either sit around your Zen and babysit him, throwing out CDs once in a while if someone is even in your range, or to TDM and ignore your team and hope you get value that way (when you’re a hero that, technically, relies on your team being closer to you to get optimal value.). It blows chunks.

So with everyone getting frustrated and saying ‘well, f it, I’m going to play something solo-survivable and just muck around’, people are already that close to tilting, so if you don’t play what they want you to play to enable their selfish picks, you’re flamed. It’s nuts.

But make no mistake; Hog and Ball are not balanced right now. Certainly Ball is the worse offender here; he is still far too strong. Hog is closer to maybe a small number slide and then he’s just favored by shields (and still shockingly enough, double shields is still an oppressive comp to run!) not being run ATM.

I can’t believe the balance changes that went through were all Blizz thought the game needed. Brig and Zen are running wild in high SR and both need something done, but Bap is still outrageously too strong also. Ball has been the top pick hero in the game in high SR for ~6 months (which I think is a shocking indicator of how bad balance is right now), and we had just the one balance change this week? Which did almost nothing to anyone?

One baby balance change in six months is not enough to bring anything to this game. It’s amazing to me that Blizz clearly noticed how much people enjoyed the ExC changes and proceeded to rub them in our face saying ‘they’re for lulz!’. People didn’t like them because they were so memey and wacky. People liked playing the game again because it was refreshing to have something new to do. And, frankly, a lot of those changes could have been slightly tweaked and put to live…and they pick a half-boned version of Rein’s changes, the Cass roll for some inane reason, and baby-scatter? That was their takeaway?

I understand the team is hard at work with OW2. I understand the team don’t directly made decisions on what they’re working on. I get that they want to get their nose to the grindstone to push OW2 out as soon as possible, because then all the issues we’re getting increasingly and increasingly frustrated over just go away to them (at least for a while) and it frees up time and space for them to focus again…but the game now, OW1, is starting to feel awful…and it feels all the worse because it feels like we’re being flat out ignored. We’re not even asking for new content like maps or heros anymore. Just basic balance changes on some kind of a reliable schedule. When we got one baby patch a month I remember thinking ‘This is awful, the game cant survive like this’…and then it slowly trickled to two baby balance changes a year? I play single player strategy or simulation games that are years old that get more balance changes than that!

The people playing OW1 are the diehard fans of the series. Comically, we’re the ones they likely don’t have to sell OW2 to. We’re more than likely going to get it, because we are still here…yet we’re the ones being most ignored in lieu of the OW2 workload. We’re the bread and butter still playing and talking about the game, and we get sand kicked in our face for continuing to do so. It’s getting wild.

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I find Ball balance pretty good with every tank. Ball/Winston is a nice dive combo, Ball/Dva as well, Ball/Hog has Ball setup a lot of opportunity for Hog, Ball/Orisa has Ball use Orisa as a quick safezone to have the healers top him off, Ball/Rein has a good Ult combo, same with Ball/Sigma. Ball/Zarya has Ball be protected when harassing the enemy.

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I’ll make the why even more simple: as the playerbase has declined and teamwork is seen as too much trouble, Hog and Ball reflect the greater preponderance of “me-first” minded players. They don’t care to coordinate with their team, and those kits make it easy not to. That’s literally all it is. All the rest is just rationalizations around this point.

Ball has been seeing enough nerfs to start to tuck him in, I suspect that a serious nerf or two is coming Hog’s way. The notable top 10 players right now that are streamers are pointing to a shorter hook and a nerf to breather in some form as necessary steps to balance him out.

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i agree with your core points but I feel you need to add another big one:

3: Fun.

They are really self-reliant, enjoyable and versatile heroes. That is not something you can say about tanks often right now.

Guys like Dva and Zarya are quite fragile these days and cannot really operate solo for more than a few beats. Yeah they have the dmg but who cares if you cannot use it because your too slow, far away or dead. Sitting around and waiting till you can do something, or reacting to what other people do is not as fun as just doing things yourself.
Rein, Monkey and Orisa need their team all the time to work, and even with your team it’s a lot of absorbing hits, blunt pushing and counter-attacks. It’s a lot of waiting for moments and reacting and when you push its to create moments for your teammates. It’s a very punishing playstyle that isn’t too enjoyable.
And Sigma is caught between the two and hampered by all his nerfs. Now they were needed, dude was broke at first but he just feels like a shadow hero, you can tell this version of him is not what the devs wanted but were lumped with due to how hard to balance that insane kit is. It’s hard to find a moment for him to shine by yourself.

As a result only Ball and Hog provide clear opportunities to have a fun game without relying on your team making it that way for you. That’s huge. Like we all talk about balance and meta but your not a pro, I’m not a pro and no one reading this is a pro. We play because we want to have fun and enjoy the game. That’s super hard to do on tank right now and those 2 give you your best shot, so no wonder they see use even though tbh they aren’t even the best.

Edit: I’d also add, as long as you can earn priority passes in tank Q and DPS Q is as long as it is we will see a lot of Hog. If your a DPS just playing tank so you can then play DPS without loo long a long Q he is a decent pick for your skill set that is closer to what you actually want to be playing.

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Too self-reliant, and that is the problem. But I agree, they are fun.

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I would argue the other tanks aren’t self-reliant enough. Two sides of the same coin though I guess

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Overwatch is a team game. To ask for less reliance on your teammates is just encouraging lack of team play. In other words, real Overwatch is not for you by the sound of it. As I started off with: the players who play those tanks the most are by their nature not team players overall, this post pretty much backs that up.

This is why OW 2 is being dumbed down, to allow people to just pew-pew randomly away trying to get solo POGs and the whole thing is a random mess and not a team effort. Convenient for the mobile audience they are now catering to.

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I’m in plat, I don’t get to play real overwatch.

I don’t have teammates I can consistently rely on. Too many either aren’t good enough, don’t care about team play or think team work is everyone else doing what they want without giving anything back.

Not to mention there is a limit. Only doing things at the behest of your team isn’t good enough. You need some solo moments and you also needs moments where your team is working to you. Not all the time obviously but nor can they be totally absent. The devs have actually done a good job getting out of the trap with support, you can often feel very central and apricated and a key part of your team. That’s super hard to do on tank unless you do have that rare 6 operating as a 6.

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Indeed - OTOH, if you care to improve then learning to work with what you have is how you do it, not solo play.

Again, Ball’s getting appropriate nerfing to tie him a bit more to his team, Hog is next on the block. I believe either the next XP card or the one after we will see the first Hog nerfs come in.

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This is a very concise description of the game’s current state, nicely done.

Remains to be seen if Blizz thinks any of that is a problem or a feature. They seem quite happy to push Rein and Winston out.

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Sorry but I have to disagree with the premise that ball presence means nobody wants to play as a team……especially right after a season of OWL (the most team oriented space in OW) that saw a TON of ball being played….

Maybe just maybe ball is a good pick?

Not to mention who is playing ball? If it’s everybody than that’s also a lot of people who have been quite team oriented in the past……or is ball only played by ball one tricks?

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I felt that way more in the past tbh. I used to do that way more and pick to the team and really work to enable them as my number one priority, and too often I watched them proceeded to fail massively. Then I had a period playing with a really good group that were more give and take. I also took on more of a It’s a game I play for fun, so why can’t I have any fun mentality and my thing more. I got to play what I wanted more and I won more, both in and outside those groups.

It’s a balance, you cannot be the immovable object playing your way or the highway. But you also cannot be totally subservient to your team.

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