it’s only a dream for hitscan dps lol
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I’m in the minority here, but I think DPS feels the worst role to play. I don’t know how much of it’s due to the matchmaker, but if there is a DPS diff then it’s not like there’s anything left to fall back on. Tanks can play more defensively and supports can focus more on healing, but there’s no fig leaf for DPS.
I had a game recently where I was tanking and our Lifeweaver kept riding our DPS over their inability to deal with the Widow. It got to the point where one guy (who had cycled through a number of heroes) kinda broke down a bit and said he was too crap to handle it - at which point I asked Mr. Lifeweaver to swap to better deal with the Widow. The response? “Uuuuh, that’s not my role. I’m doing my part.” A depressing anecdote, for sure, but hopefully it illustrates my point.
I think the real reason tank is the worst role is because it’s so easy to hard counter the role. Having two players to each role made it so that it was unlikely you’d be able to counter roles. You could counter heroes but not roles. For example in OW1 if the ball was popping off people would switch to bastion but then they weren’t countering the dva. If people ever switched to counter one tank, the other tank could switch to nulify that counter some.
Now that there’s just 1 tank, there’s a clear cut answer in what to pick to counter the entire role. I stopped playing tank because in high rank it ended up I was just constantly switching to avoid 5 players trying to hard counter me. It’s the optimal strategy in OW2 and so stupidly easy to do.
The worst part is it will probably always be the weakest role because blizzard will never go back to 6v6 cause they dont want to look stupid.
Even then, only like burst dps hitscan and Tracer sort of lmao
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The irony is that Blizzard redesigned tanks to be better in 6v6 than in 5v5.
Tanks are now brawlers with stronger dps. Also, dmg is higher for every role so double shield is no longer an issue. Orisa doesn’t even have a shield anymore. Doomfist ignores shields entirely. Junkerqueen exists.
The tank role is fantastically well designed for 6v6 where Doom or Ball can be amazing off-tanks, even ROADHOG would have new life again as a versatile tank if it were 6v6!!
But nooooooooooo Blizz had to literally fix the tank role with its redesign and at the same time break it by removing one.
It’s just comical at this point.
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Tanks are more powerful than ever.
Tanks got some fairly substantial buffs to basically be the easy-mode, sole-carries. It is true that they can’t do it alone, but I usually find plenty of Damage-role heroes being more than gung-ho about doing their job.
In general, though, I find Supports being far less prevalent about doing theirs. Many of them unwilling and choosing not to heal or support their team. This has been a true case since the introduction of Role-Queue back in OW1. And it seems to have gotten worse since then.
Totally.
Ehh… I’ve won on several roles without her. But I do find her new healing a lot more manageable to work with when my Supports aren’t willing to heal their team. Frequently outhealing most of my support teams.
But even then, I still can’t get wins when my Supports are deliberately verging into Gameplay Sabotage.
This only really shows just how much of the game’s dependency is on them and why they tend to be borderline broken. The game balance is overtly tilted towards Tanks. Their lack of stability, however, is also very dependent on their Support-team to actually do their job and heal.
Homogeneity in Supports is well known, but it is rare to pick a wrong support, as again, most Supports pretty much do the same exact thing. Count how many Supports boost damage (Mercy, Zen, Baptiste, Ana, Kiriko), count how many have a defensive ability or ultimate (Zen, Moira, Lucio, Lifeweaver, Baptiste). There’s no real bad pick outside of Lifewaver; and he still provides a lot of healing.
This is mostly false. Most of the Damage-role is also rather homogeneous as many of them fall into the same type of gameplay (mobile, controlled burst-oriented). A handful of them are defensive heroes, with the builder-type being the least represented. Most of the Damage-role, while viable, are also far more mechanically challenging that other roles, and lack the number of “perks” that the other roles receive. Most new Damage-role heroes also lack the kind of utility former legacy or launch-era Damage-role heroes have.
This is also true to some extent. Lack of tutorials furthers this problem.
To be fair, Tanks definitely have a lot more resilience and can more safely engage with risk than other roles do. They are not invincible, however, and player behaviors are arguably true too.
Tank can only do so much; there’s far too much reliance on them to get things done and being pulled in three different directions doesn’t help. Having a co-Tank doesn’t really fix that problem either, just furthers that dependency. Non-Tank heroes, like the Damage-role, need to be more self-reliant and easier to use for a majority of the playerbase, but are too often too mechanically challenging (as compared to other Tanks and Supports) to do this effectively. The lack of utility in the Damage-role is also a serious problem, and it’s wise players tend towards former Defense-role heroes - especially the legacy ones - because they usually have some level of utility available to them (Junkrat’s Trap, Symmetra’s Photon Barrier, Recon, Turrets and abilities like Molten Core).
The game was designed to be played together as a team, yet no considerations about building the game towards that goal happened. Lack of tutorials, and basic instructions explaining each role don’t exist in-game in Overwatch. Only through the game play can you learn about each function of the game, and even that is so heavily obfuscated in the general gameplay to make much sense of it.
It’s actually really the opposite, but there’s still some minor dependency, and when few players understand it, it can make doing anything in the game worse.
Most Tanks did not see any defensive cooldown reductions in the transitions. Many of them lost barrier health.
Healing hasn’t really improved or became more available. Most of the new maps actually have fewer healing points available.
Armor has improved, but it has always been doing its job. And not many Tanks even got improved armor health.
Arguably true. This feels more like it was because of the loss of one Tank that made Tank Ultimates even more impactful; or maybe even just as impact as they were prior to Role-Queue and GOATS.
Had to happen. Most maps didn’t have chokes or hallways large enough to slip past them in OW1.
Still possible; but focus-fire has become something of a necessity now, and Tanks are still capable of some limited defense against it.
Debatable. Zarya/Rein was the metagame composition for the later years of OW1, but there were plenty of synergies available that didn’t always rely on those two. Includign Sigma and Wrecking Ball, and Roadhog and Orisa. Double barrier made have faded from popularity, but it was still available, albeit far less effective after the changes.
Because players eventually learned that Tanks were far more effective at dealing damage more easily than non-Tanks were. GOATS proved this.
This is actually false. Tanks had plenty of defenses to withstand a lot of punishment and crowd control. The problem here was that too many Tank players expected to survive without using their defensive cooldowns, or believed that, should they have been exhausted, that they should still be able to stand up to punishment and focus-fire. Which was never supposed to be the case with Tanks in OW1.
Because Supports don’t heal.
It’s generally very difficult for the Damage-role to do anything with some aid or support. Recall that the original format of the game was to put Damage-role heroes under the Offense-role against those in the Defense-role. Tanks and Supports were supposed to “Generalists” that could effectively avoid all that counterplay between them and assist in dealing with Defense-role heroes like Widowmaker.
This has never been the case.
The reason players switch to a 2/2/2 format was because Blizzard forced that format. It was easier to play a 3 Tank/Support combo and completely ignore the Damage-role heroes, because they could do nothing against the Tank role.
This is false.
Not one Tank saw an increase in damage-output in the transition. Most saw a damage-decrease or stayed exactly the same.
Again false. For many in the Damage-role, they saw decreases in damage output during the transition including; Tracer, Torbjorn, Hanzo, and Echo.
Really the big problem with Overwatch 2’s roles is how much dependency there remains despite Blizzard’s intentions with making OW2 more individually focused so that individual merit would apply more. Instead, what we have is still a very lop-sided impact between the roles and heavy dependency on making things work for the team.
Tanks still have the highest impact overall, Damage-role are still incredibly difficult and incredibly team-dependent, and Supports wax-and-wane on whether they’re truly having an impact on their team, or if its just a skill-issue with the opposing team’s own skill issues (or lack thereof).
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+Bigger Health pools
-Hard counter exist (It is the tank role that gets hard countered and not a specific hero hard counter)
-Tank busters Ana and Zen are not flanked by your dps
-Huge responsibilty on one player instead of 2
-Your supports are having tea party
-You get blamed all the time
-Everyone wants to play dps and hence low queue time for tanks (and more chances of getting stomped)
It is usually DPS diff nowdays in every game . Tank can do random stuff , but if they stay alive dps can carry the game .
The worst role in the game is the one that relies on the other two roles.
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Idk but I want a refund on my zarya golden gun. Zarya feels useless compared to the other tanks (besides hog)
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worst role in the game to play? tank, yeah. lot of pressure and not a lot of margin for error. worst role in the game to enjoy?? dps. your life is hell if you like to play dps. i sure hope you like “play while you wait deathmatch” because you basically live there.
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Regarding responsability, Tank.
Regarding “fun”, DPS for sure. You depend on the other roles doing their job properly to even begin to do yours properly. Sometimes you can be “sneaky” and pull some weight but its not the usual.
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Supports can almost compensate for the dps role now, and have the greatest sustain. All while taking cover behind the team. Their position gives them the best perception of the match, elevating them sometimes to defacto leader
Nah everything but widowmaker is the worst role. Widow is her own role and we all know it.
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Tank, definitely, you need to constantly rely on the team, you need Kiriko to dispel anti-heal, you constantly need healing, you need allies to help you deal with enemy high ground.
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tanking is hard, but if u good u can do the game yourself
But support, if your mates are not doing their jobs, even if you play the best of yourself like the best game of your life, its hard to win, no one notices the job u do the whole game bc you are just the healbot supposed to heal them when they need it where ever they are in the map, and then they trash u bc they died overextending
U support your team but getting some peeling is hard
(its the best game of your life here in gm elo, if u did big mistakes blame yourself ofc)
Game Director - because everyone thinks (knows) you’re a liar and shilling for ABK/Kotik.
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