Armor is a good mechanic against chip damage, which is most of the damage tanks will take over time. I’ve been asking for a while now that Blizzard should experiment with making Shields (aka, blue HP) be the defense against burst damage. Because of how Overwatch works, it would require some adjustments here and there, but this is my most recent proposal on the thing:
I would love to see at least one interaction where Shield HP act like a burst counter. Ie, as long as you have any blue HP on your bar, you can’t take damage on your white HP bar.
This, however, would require some conditionals to prevent people from just pocketing Zarya and walk with an immortal russian monster in the front of your team.
After being protected by your shields in this way, you will get a subtle “shield breaking” animation over your character model, and this benefit will no longer apply to you until your shield HP naturally regenerate (Ie, you need to not take any damage for 3s).
Temporary shields, like Lúcio’s Sound Barrier, also benefit from this effect, and have their own, separated, “break” threshold. So, if, eg, Sigma uses Kinect Grasp while below 200 HP, he immediately recover his shield protection once the new shields are granted.
Doomfist’s The Best Defense no longer provides temporary shields. It will instead provide temporary health . Ie, grey HP instead of dark blue HP. This will prevent him from becoming an immortal beast by himself.
Any single damage source that deal 300 damage or higher will ignore this feature of the shields. Ie, you can’t facetank a D.va Self Destruct and live just because you have shields.
Widowmaker base damage will be reduced to 100 at full charge. While Infravision is active, her crit multiplier will raise to x3 instead of her normal x2.5.
(This way, Widow’s scoped shot alone will not bypass the shield protection, but she will be more lethal during Infrasight, and if wait for a full charge between shots, she will ignore the shield defense)
This way you have two defensive measures in the game. One that counter sustained damage (armor), and one that counter burst damage (shields).
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