After more thought, I think solo heal would make more sense than solo tank. Why?
Supports would require fewer reworks than tanks: There are four main supports and 3 off supports. Of the off supports, it would be fairly easy to rework Lucio and Brigitte to be main supports. Zenyatta could realistically have his healing toned down slightly and go into DPS. This is much less significant than the major changes needed to tanks to allow solo tanking or making Roadhog, Dva, and Zarya DPS. Zenyatta is already a hybrid.
Synergy is a huge deal to tanks but less important to supports: Synergy and tank-tank interactions are hugely important to the fun of tanking. Support synergy is much less important and isn’t really related to the fun of the problem.
You need two tanks more than two supports: This may just be subjective, but I feel like the team suffers much more by lacking a second tank. Solo tanking also is much more unpleasant than solo healing (again, subjective).
Adding support utility to DPS is easy: it’s very simple to add support healing to DPS heroes. Adding support tanking is much much harder.
No…Jeff literally already adressed this in his post, and I agree wholeheartedly as a support player with everything he says about it:
Obviously solo tank played, performed, and felt much better to the majority of the team. The only support I can see solo healing is Mercy. She’d probably be a must pick in a solo healer, 3 DPS system.
They could just lock the tank role into Main(Shield) and off tanks and have one main and one off tank per team and keep 2-2-2 without having to worry about double shield or double main tank ever again.
Especially when the only supports with effective self peel are Mercy and Moira. Almost every other healer relies on a second support to peel for eachother. Characters like Zen, Ana, Bap, etc. would be absolutely annihilated in solo healer, triple DPS comps.
He addressed it in his post, but he’s wrong. Mitrovarr speaks the truth. Having one support would be much better than having one tank. Reworking the off tanks will ruin them. Off tank mains do not want to be DPS mains nor do we want to be main tanks. We want to be what we are which would cease to exist.
Every person that thinks 2/3/1 is a good Idea, I hope I have to heal for you, because I’m not swapping off Mercy. So they better buff her, or reap what you sow.
Yeah I’d want some buffs even for the existing mains, and more for the off supports (to make them main supports).
Probably as a minimum promote Moira and Mercy back to their full healing values and maybe throw Ana a bit extra as well. In fact I’d probably consider giving Mercy and Ana some kind of multiple-target heal, like give Mercy a chain beam that heals her previous target for 30 hp/s if there’s LOS between her current target and previous.
I don’t trust their internal testing on this. Even in his post he admitted that some of his tank players did not like it. And he admitted that it solved some problems but introduced more. And he admitted that it would require fairly significant changes to the tanks. I’m not wrong when I say it would require fewer changes to go solo support.
Plus a lot of the more mediocre DPS could have healing abilities added and become kind of off-off-healers. A bit like Soldier 76 is now except more necessary and with more robust healing (including S76 who would have his healing can buffed).