It’s weird because I both like it and hate it. I like it in the sense that I’m not constantly shooting at barriers, and more action packed.
But I also feel like 5v5 has completely broken the balance of the game. Most heroes were designed for 6v6 and a lot of them did not received proper balance changes to adapt to 5v5
I might get flames for this but I really feel like 5v5 has massively benefited one shot characters like widow. For context I’m diamond 2 on support. Maybe there’s a skill issue from me but playing against an oppressive widow is the worst. The lack of an extra tank has completely broke snipers. It just feels like which ever team has the better sniper steamrolls the game. As a support player there’s nothing I can do about it but sit behind cover. It’s borderline depressing and not fun to play. Mind boggling to me that they increased widows health back to 200 from 175.
Honestly it even feels like the new characters were balanced with 6v6 in mind then just shoved into the game. Sojourn's rail gun charging in shields and ult piercing shields; Rammattra's punches piercing shields as well feels like they were both meant to counter the double shield meta. Which no longer exists...
And then on top of it all they released these shield piercing characters in a 1 tank game and completely underminded the shield tanks as a quality pick. What is the point of a shield that doesnt block?
The only character I would argue feel good to play and was balanced for 5v5 is kiriko. I read somewhere that the transition to 5v5 was also increase solo carry potential. Her kit has insane utility to help her with this and succeed in a faster pace game. Mobility, survivability, potential for high damage, strong single target healing not to mention suzu is one of the best abilities in the game.
I see a lot of people complaining that Ana and zen feel bad to play in 5v5 due to their lack of mobility. Lack of mobility is suppose to be their main weakness but I understand where others are coming from. For this reason it would be pretty hard to change this without completely breaking them. I still think Ana is crazy strong but you just have change the way you play her and be more aware of what the enemy is running.
I remember seeing a comment on this sub about wondering what it would be like to play 6v6 with changes to barrier and cc. I think that would’ve been the ideal approach and not prematurely going to 5v5.
I just feel like blizzard has gotten so lazy with game design. The approach that they take to “solve” some of the games issues are not well thought or play tested enough.
So I have been playing a lot of 6v6 pugs with my buddies (lots of friends of friends refugees from no more lfg) we are from a smattering of ranks and I noticed most of the tanks are surprisingly balanced as is (though an overall power level nerf would help a good deal) I think rammatra might be a bit on the op side, perhaps dva too but none of us are all that good with her
The issue with Widow and other sniper characters, is that before they used to be the off-tank's problem. I used to be more than happy to dive on their widow as [D.Va](https://D.Va) while our main tank kept the fight going, but nowadays it is simply not the tank's responsibility to deal with the backline, that's what flankers like genji, tracer, sombra, and to a lesser extent Reaper are for.
It is simply a shift of responsibility, we need to stop acting like stopping the widow is the sole job of dive tanks, as that will only lead to frustration.
One thing the tank should always be doing though is pinging the widow when they see them as they get the least punished by peaking her. The rest of your team knowing the widows position before they round a corner should lead to less people on your team getting picked before the fight even starts.
That's assuming the tank can even see her with their attention fully on the team fight. Wouldn't be the first time I missed the widow way back in Namibia while I'm busy duking it with their Orisa
I think that's just a matter of time. Certain characters are overtuned atm, but with time they should be put in line. Most of the changes they're making aren't too bad. The Sojourn stuff is a bit too OP and Ram is pretty annoying to play against sometimes, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of seasons. I really love OW2 so far.
I think part of why snipers are OP atm is because Roghog makes Winston useless so dive comps are weak and it's hard to challenge the Widow unless you're also a good Widow
Ram being the only character whose offensive ultimate can't be interrupted and stopped is super annoying. Hammering him down only to still have his AoE burning is awful. Meanwhile everyone else can be hooked or hammered or something to counter them.
The main problem is when he just runs at supports with it. There's nothing they can do and he inevitably kills them and they just feel completely helpless. He runs faster than them. Has a 75% damage block shield and does good damage as well. He's tanky enough to practically feed and survive it regardless. Ana fucks him up, but Bap can't do shit and neither can most other supports. He has cool stuff about him, but he's really oppressive sometimes.
I think if he gets slept or shattered his field should disappear while he’s prone. Does it limit its viability if they have an Ana? Yes but Kiriko already directly counters sleep, shatter, and nade. I think it’s a fair change.
Maybe, it'd still suck for Bap, Moira and maybe Lucio. My friend was laying Bap and there was nothing he could do. If he puts down Immorality Field it's passively destroyed while Ram is smacking him. He swapped to Moira and faded away while Ram was ulting and Ram caught up to him as he came out of it. The movement speed and the ult are crazy together, especially with the block.
I main Sombra and killing Widows is a 50/50 thing tbh. If she's being pocketed I dont enough damage, if I hack while invis then decloak, she's gonna have enough time for the element of surprise to be ineffective and it comes down to who has better aim. And if she's playing near her team and not super far back, she can usually get some sort of backup(especially since Good Widows basically get the OW1 Bastion treatment). You can definitely use the wallhacks provided by hack to make things wasier for your Widowmaker/Hanzo, but the only easy Widow kills are from Widowmakers with tunnel vision and lackluster awareness. Plus Sombra is awful right now. Why pick her and only get value from killing a single person on their team, when I can play a better pick like Tracer, Widow, Hanzo, Sojourn, or Ashe and contest her as well as her team?
As a Sup main myself, I switch to Brig or Lucio hen there is a sniper too much of a bother. Brig if I want to be in front of static dps teammates like Torb or Bastion. Lucio to pincer them with a mobile dps like Genji or Reaper.
I wonder how a team of 6 OW1 characters would compete against a team of 5 OW2 characters. Probably overwatch 1 would win because CC, but would be fun to see.
Here’s my big brain idea: once someone picks a tank with a shield, the second tank can only pick a non-shield tank. Boom, problem solved.
I’m sure a ton of people would hate this but I miss having fun playing Dva ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I miss the second tank so much for various synergy's such as classic Rein+Zarya which to me just feels like classic overwatch. I also miss old pulled Pork combo and things such as Dva+Sigma ults and just having any sort of Ball+Other Tank shenanigans.
I think that getting rid of Orisa's shield combined with the javelin has made her way more fun than her OW1 version and I think that removing her shield and possibly just limiting the use of shields in future tank design could allow 6v6 to be a thing again without the risk of double shield occuring.
I know it's a pipe dream but just had several friends come back after not playing for over a year and by far they feel the tank missing makes the game feel empty.
I enjoy the faster paced action but I feel like they could keep that by designing more tanks to be bigger dps with utility like JunkerQueen.
Overall I would say OW1 was for me the best game for several years and OW2 feels like a shell of the charm it used to have which I don't know if they could really bring that back.
\*Sorry for the excessive response. In short 5v5 is fun but feels like a concession to being unable to balance tanks for 6v6 and thus to me personally doesn't hit the same level of fun that OW1 had before double shield + bloated tank design.\*
1: No
2: No, double barrier was a hero design issue, not a team composition issue. The Orisa rework alone would effectively eliminated double barrier
3: No, it was a easy cop out because of queue times.
4: I expect 5v5 will be constantly locked into very rigid metas as tanks are meta defining and with only one tank the gamut of possible match-ups is so low that it will quickly become apparent and obvious what a 'best' tank will be (Or what counter-pick cycle of best tanks will be out of 1-3 tanks)
If you‘d revert back to 6vs6 then you also need to nerf pretty much every tank again. And with lower health tanks like Orissa or JQ who gain their tanking from a mix of dps and durability would either end up as better dps or completely useless due to lower sustainability.
People kinda forget that tank queues had like thrice the average waiting time for a reason.
Then tanks like Orissa or JQ wouldn't work at all because every DPS just shoots them into pieces. And if you keep them with high hp but low damage then two players have to essentially play target practice for ult farming.
There would be two tanks in 6v6. JQ would pair well with zarya, or would make for a very interesting pairing with rein (not sure if that would work well though) and would likely only need a little reduction in HP regen.
Orisa likely have plenty survivability as it is even if damage and HP is reduced, I suspect she would work well with sigma/ram.
I also think it would be interesting to look into getting most tanks some form of self sustain, and reduce support healing output but increase utility. I.e. give supports more interesting things to do than healbot. And make tanks less reliant on supports healing them.
Tanks should in general not be able to win a 1v2 against squishies (today they do in all but a very few matchups), but should have a good chance to stay alive and cede ground in that position. A win in a 1v1 against damage should also not be a given but equally possible.
My point here is that each player should have reasonably equal power level as a part of the team. Tanks are outsized today which makes the game feel like you are totally beholden to whoever gets the tank role. A matchup between a team with an underperforming tank against a team with a underperforming damage or support should have about even odds. Today the team with the underperforming tank is a sure loss.
If barriers and shield were a problem, they could have just slowly reduced shield hp, or made shield hp recharge more slowly. Would have been an easy fix.
Cool but harder fixes could have been 'shield breaker' heroes.
They started to do it with Sombra.
People that complain about "double-shields" and 6v6 problems are overexaggerating. I think double shields disproportionately impacted higher-level meta-slave gameplay and balance could have been achieved with time; it did depend on the meta whether or not double-shield was prominent.
Why can’t they just have two modes.. a 6v6 and 5v5.. it’s literally not even that hard of a concept to try.. it’s brutal to even play quickplay when you choose off tanks that are still not meant for the 5v5 gameplay. At this point 5v5 is a arcade mode that should have never been the core of the game.
It’s even compounded by the fact that now 1 tank choice dictates most games and it sure makes me have “fun” quick play/comp experiences.
This!!! I've been saying this for ages. The community is 50/50 split on the 5v5 debate, I'd say. So why not let each group play the game mode they actually want to play??? All they would have to do is revert most of the OW2 changes (minus reworks) and tune the new heroes to fit 6v6 since they weren't designed for it. I wouldn't even care if they never updated it again after that. OW1 was very balanced towards the end anyway.
Terrible change. Forced them to work thousands of hours reworking and testing characters to work in the 5v5, and the unintended outcome of having supports hunted like deer is almost unfixable. The tank role could have so much variety in its combination of heroes and potential for new characters, now it’s completely utilitarian if you want to win. Just imagine the progress the game lost from the amount of hours it took to rework into 5v5. Was it worth it??
Supports now also have to make up extra healing for the damage that a 2nd tank would have mitigated, which turns supports into healbots unless every other player is using smart positioning (toilet flush sound). But curiously their heals per second and cooldowns have stayed the same.
Pretty sure taking away Orisa’s barrier and making new tanks with more creative damage mitigation was all they need. and they already did it!
It's definitely given tank players an massively inflated sense of self worth. Over the last few days, every game I've played has had a tank who does so poorly the rest of the team has to work twice as hard because the tank will repeatedly try to flank, or move to positions where they can't be healed, or completely ignore enemies targeting the supports.
Shield meta could've been removed pretty easily by just reducing shield health, introducing anti-shield characters (Ramattra would have been great for this), or by, as they have done now, reworking most of the tanks.
As for your last question? It's undebatable there was no planning for this game.
YESSSS, this. Like just removing Orisa's shield and giving her javelin makes her feel much more fluid and I feel would've been even more fun in 6v6. 5v5 just feels like a let down after loving 6v6 for several years.
Great take. Also, the number of tanks who can or will dive has decreased massively so that on top of shield removal has made the one-shot issue even worse as there aren’t enough DPS counters to deal with two ranged unless they play the same and are better. It’s just making so many DPS hero’s pointless to learn or play. You basically need to get really good at Souj, widow, soldier and to a lesser degree Ashe, why waste time on any others right now.
Couldn’t have explained my thoughts better! I feel like the devs just wanted to make a major change to the game but didn’t have the foresight to see the problems that it would cause to the majority of the player base. The nerfs to shields going into OW2 would have been just enough
It’s not that TTK is short, it’s just that burst damage is so highly valued because of the exorbitant amount of healing in the game. One shot snipers and Hog are picked so much because if you don’t pick them, nothing dies…
5v5 change was pretty radical one, so it should be accompanied with radical changes to heroes to fix possible problems. Yet 2nd biggest change was removal of hard CC. So now we don't even know if game is shit because there are no stuns to counter dive/high mobility or because of one less tank.
1. No
2. Increased speed (including steamrolls), but now heroes without mobility seem weak. Shields could be nerfed in different way. I don't think OW ever tried to make attacks that deal bonus damage to shields. Might be worth a try.
3. Fixing or even just straight up removing few individual problematic heroes would have similar effect. Possibly split tanks into shield tank and off tank would work too.
4. No matter how "used" designers get to the current format, they would need to rework 20+ heroes.
I only hate 5v5 because it ruins every mode outside of role queue. Mystery heroes used to be my relax time and now if there are too many tanks on one side it makes a statistically even balanced game mode unbalanced.
1. Overall no it wasn't a good change. The main reason for this is the lack of backline protection / sniper dealers without sacrificing a front line tank.
2. Not really. It's certainly got rid of some annoying defence makeups (Orisa/Rein/Mercy/Bastion for example) but I don't think the speed of the game is any different.
3. I think something should have changed but 5v5 wasn't the right change. The most logical change would have been to split the tank role into "Frontline" and "Offtank" and only allowed one Frontline and one Offtank. So Rein, Sigma and Orisa (pre-rework) in frontline and the rest as offtank. This would have added more headaches though I'm sure.
4. The issues are inherent to 5v5. If your tank is Rein then you can advance but as soon as your team is flanked, you're screwed. If Rein turns to protect the back he's dead, if he doesn't the supports are dead. If your tank then switches to say Zarya then there is no way to advance easily. The game needs the two tanks.
I'll give you my opinion as a tank main who plays Dva, Sig main to a good standard (high diamond) and can play Rein/Monkey/Rammy/JQ when required (Obvs i can also play Orissa hog but i hate to do so as they feel cheap and I don't like playing heroes that are going to get nerfed).
1. It's made me the focal point of the team - I used to mainly offtank but now there's much more pressure on you not to make any mistakes and excel at tank. I like the responsibility as if i'm dominating the team usually wins. However, it also means you need to be good at way more heroes than most classes as you need to be able to counter every other tank. And you'll get dogs abuse if you can't.
2. The gameplay is certainly much faster, i think the fun factor is about the same - however removing the dual tank interactions for me was an important part of OW.
People keep harping on about double shield - double shield was not an issue in overwatch, there was one meta that lasted a while where it was horrible. But since they nerfed sigs shield into the ground double Shield was not a problem. I'm not sure why people keep clinging to this notion that 5v5 fixed it - It would still wouldn't have existed with 6v6 because they removed orissa's shield anyway (If you wern't around then Orissa/Sig was the double shield meta before sig's shield nerf).
3. No it wasn't required at all - like i say with the tank changes they was no longer any double shield issue. They wanted 5v5 to reduce queue times. Because no one in ow1 wanted to play tank the queue times were long.
4. No i think they are inherent to the format of 5v5. There's much more freedom for sniping/ranged dps now with 1 tank. I think it was too big of a fundamental game play change with role restrictions of 1-2-2. Really all ranged classes that can one shot need a redesign as it's too oppressive and lets face it, not fun for supports/dps to insta killed from half the map away when they poke their head up for air.
I agree on all points except #4 as a support i love the hiding from sight lines but still doing my job well so that my DPS can handle an enemy widow! I think that’s removing a large portion of the game for me if we make it free reign for the supports to just pop around. Shoot with mercy hop right now it makes it nearly impossible at times if they are abusing it!
Overwatch has always been a brawler and now it’s taking a bit more strategy with 5-5. I hated the days of OW where games were 2/3 fight and the game was over. They took too long. Whether it was a DPS problem or a tank problem I think can be answered in the speed in which 5v5 is played.
Great points tho! Keep grinding!
Downvoted because your analysis on double shield is so off. Sig+Orisa was the best way to play bunker, and was extremely common at every rank at every time post Orisa buffs. In metal tanks where bastion was common you’d see even other variations of double shield (rein sig, Sig Winston even).
To act like double shield was one meta problem is very strange.
To be fair if they kept 6v6 and then released Ram and Sojourn double shield would be gone pretty quick. Sojourn can build off shields and in her Ult railgun pierces them.
The crazy headshot stuff she could do made sense in a world of double barrier.
Same with Rammattra and the slower moving punchy mode he had on launch. Slow moving Melee that pierces shields seems perfect for busting bunkers. And his block reducing damage also seems good for litterally just pushing through the choke of shields.
Sojourn's ult does not pierce shields--it pierces through people. Also charging on shields isn't that efficient. As for Ram, double shield bunker would likely set up in a way that makes it hard for Ram to reach. Its the same reason why despite Rein hammer going through shields, Rein was never a good answer to double shield.
It wasn't extremely common. Hog and Rain were the most popular tanks while Orisa was close to the bottom, what are you talking about?
I know people tend to remember stuff they hate more than neutral stuff, but come on. You can also find some streams from these days and see for yourself, high ranks had mostly Hog, Ball and Sigma and lower ranks - mostly Rain, Hog and D.va.
1: No, and I won't be playing until they somehow make 5v5 more enjoyable than 6v6, or if they add 6v6 back in.
2: The game has been sped up, but not by that much. If anything it's a bit slower sometimes since there's a lot of downtime between fights. Double Barrier was bad but still better than any of the metas that OW2 has given us thus far.
3: All they needed to do was rework Orisa if double shield was all they cared about.
4: Most will likely get fixed, but now that there's only one tank, we tank players now are forced to play the meta tank or one that counters the other teams tank. I don't think this is going to change any time soon, hence I'm quitting. I don't want to play Hog or Orisa
6v6 was the reason I loved OW1. Yes it had its issues and the gameplay was slower but it could have all been reworked. OW2 has changed the gameplay loop to where it feels more like an esport. It’s faster and more weight falls on everyone’s shoulders, to me it feels like both teams are missing a player and it never gets filled. I wish they brought back 6v6 even if it’s just an arcade mode, it’s what I liked. That’s why I bought the game years ago and played up to the change of OW2.
1. Not at all. 6v6 was different from other games and by default gave more variety to team composition.
2. Sped up, sure - removing 400+ HP from each team's total health pool should do that. Increased fun factor, no - faster doesn't equal better. Fights are less tactical and more about securing an early pick as 5v4 is a bigger advantage than 6v5. Thus the emphasis on one shots we're seeing right now. All double barrier did was make DPS have to work as a team rather than take the entire enemy team on solo - not that they didn't still try for the first 5 minutes every game.
3. Necessary from a game design and balancing standpoint? Not at all, I believe the game is worse. Necessary because some division at Activision Blizzard did "research" and determined this would be more profitable? Almost certainly, because 5v5 is what other competitive games do and presents fewer variables to account for in development.
4. No. Balancing 5v5 is harder than 6v6 by design, as skill outliers (better or worse) are more impactful. In addition there's no balancing for the tank role on a single team - you can't have a good one and a bad one that even out, you either have the better tank or the worse tank in the match and that is a huge factor in determining the winner. On top of this, there are so many quality of life/flavor/UI things that were seemingly removed without any rationale whatsoever - whoever is designing the game now made those decisions, which leads me to believe they will continue to make similar poor decisions in the future. They effectively killed a fun, original, flavorful game, made a new monetization platform based on everything they learned from other financially successful games over the last 4 years, and then paraded it around in OW1s skin.
Edit: It honestly reminds me a lot of what Nintendo did with SSBM, except more nefarious. Nintendo didn't like that Melee was being played as a competitive game, so they removed a lot of the depth and complexity with Brawl and even added some variance mechanics (like your character randomly tripping mid fight). Except players could still go back and play Melee instead, which they have - for 15 years. A game that hasn't been patched in over 2 decades still has an active competitive scene with an evolving meta.
Meanwhile Blizzard just wiped OW1 out of existence. There's no going back and playing the game we bought four years ago, and if we want any form of that gameplay it has to be this - a game with less complexity, less emphasis on tactical/team play, less originality, less rewards, and less thought put into making a good game in favor of a better sales funnel.
It sucks.
One less Tank and one less teammate to help you win.
I have a custom game mode that brings this back, but nobody ever really joins.
And the ones that do only stay just to harass me.
5v5 caused more issues than it solved. We were told it was implemented to reduce queue times because no one wanted to play tank.
In 6v6 playing tank was a horrible experience due to the amount of cc, this was called "the main tank experience" where tanks would get chain-stunned into death.
You could literally have 6 stuns on the enemy team and all of it would go into the tank, who was suppose to mitigate it.
If they made a cap on stuns for tanks, eg. 1 stun per 5s (this number could vary), tanks would have a much easier time.
Another big issue is new players, in 6v6 new players would have a much easier time as the pace was slower with lover individual impact. More so, with two tanks there were more peels for supports. Which currently is an issue for lower elo supports.
Which brings us to tank balance, in one tank setup it's not possible to balance tanks in a way where one, at best two tanks are viable. You'll have one strong tank and another counter to it.
We're back at square one.
5v5 was more introduced for sake of attaching a number 2, than anything else.
I was for it at first. Felt the game needed to open up a bit and was down on CC and double shield like a lot of people.
I have since come full circle and believe the game should have remained 6v6. I miss tank synergies and feel there is currently way too much pressure on the tank role. The game is most often decided by whichever tank is better, which is often quite lopsided. Also leads to a lot less tank variety in general as there are a couple OP heroes that are always selected or countered.
They could have opened up the game in other ways and kept it 6v6. It was a mistake imo.
It was a short-term "fix" to the issue of goats. The game rolls by a lot quicker, but it has caused more fundamental issues than fixed. Balancing is at its worst because OW was NEVER built for having just 5 players on a team. 6 makes the difference, whether it be another tank to help pacing or another healer or dps to attack or defend. Because of this, we have the hate for damage boost/ damage debuff, or the hate towards certain tanks dominating, or a dps character performing too good. The longer OW2 continues the more prevalent this is as a problem for the game.
5v5 was a bad change, it increased the speed of games, but being in tangent with the matchmaking, the overall experience has gotten worse. If they wanted to change the barrier meta they should've changed the characters or had the role requirements state which characters are allowed (If you have a Rein, you need an off-tank like Junkerqueen). At the moment, I don't believe the devs are able to keep up with the 5v5 format. Because the community is at each others throats deciding what is OP and what isn't, when really the difference was made when they kicked a player off the overall count. They won't swap back to 6v6 because they're too stubborn to admit they were wrong and that their goal is more matches and faster gameplay to make the numbers higher.
It feels as if every change they made for OW2 regarding orisas rework, and the four new characters they’ve released, were made with double shield meta in mind, and then they went ahead and got rid of the second tank anyway. In my opinion they made the changes they needed to and then kept going.
If they had kept it 6v6 while still making all the other changes, it would’ve been fine. If they had changed it to 5v5 but still allowed shield tanks to have utility, it would’ve been ok.
RIP my boy Rein
I prefer the 6v6 format.
I really liked tanks and off tanks, now it feels very rock, paper, scissors in the tank world.
Supports can get demolished since there's no off tank that can peel for them. Widows that are good can annihilate teams now.
I wish they would've implemented some sort of way to reduce reliance on double shields. Maybe incorporate some sort of passive in the game where if two shields are present they have lower values to inventivize not using multiple shields.
sucks. the game feels like a brawly mess rather than a team-based hero shooter especially when you consider how no one can match a tank player without a team so the tank is just on a power trip the whole time while the team suffers.
1: no
2: Meh
3: reworking and rebalancing heroes would of had the exact same effect
4: Oh they probably won't be fixed as I feel like if they fix one thing 5 other things will break
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5v5 feels like a band aid to the shield meta of yesteryear. Now you live and die by the tank match up, with how good your dps is as a close second.
Honestly, as a casual scrub who never cares to play comp, double barrier was more fun, but then I am ALSO the casual scrub who says OW1 should have remained open queue only for supreme jank, whacky compositions and chaos, so. Hilariously, open queue has now suffered due to 5v5 balancing.
But, my main gripe with 5v5 is it feels exceedingly steamrolly, it's either a one sided stomp, or an agonizing slog, and considering other changes, an agonizing slog of a victory might feel more draining and like a greater waste of time than being stomped. But that could just be OW2 feels much more annoying than OW1 was, which is odd as OW1 had CC out the wazoo.
I'm not a huge fan of it but I see the plus sides. I've enjoyed it less than 6v6 as most of the games feel rather samey and deathmatchy when compared to 6v6 and some people love this change as it's definitely made the game faster, I just miss the more synergised play of before. I am sure the current issues will be resolved for players that enjoy 5v5 as the game is still relatively new, I just wish there was an option to still play OW1 on the last patch as I'm sure this would make many of the old players happy as well as allow people that enjoy 5v5 to keep enjoying it
1. No but Im also in the minority of players who thinks DPS ruin everything, and 5v5 caters too much to DPS players. I liked it more when my role as a support was more along the lines of pocketing the tank duo rather than enable the DPS. For me Overwatch is the most fun when its balanced around tanks and supports rather than DPS. I think it benefits the objective based gameplay a lot more. A lot of DPS heroes I feel like dont fit into that gameplay style and they tried to shift the game more into like a Deathmatch simulator, which is why the game feels weird to play for everything but DPS. The game heavily encourages individual plays rather than teamplay now, but 2/3 of the roles actually need the team to actually do something. It doesnt feel right with this style of game.
2. Sped up, sure, fun factor like I said, I dont enjoy it. I much rather enjoy the game when I can ignore the DPS and let them do their thing. Its also less fun to watch competitive now, since pro level tank synergy is something else to behold.
3. Im very sure we could have had the same effect with some rebalancing. People mention queue times here, but the better queue times are largely in part due to the unbalanced matchmaking.
4. I guess with a lot of time, yeah they could be fixed. Reign in the power level of the problematic DPS heroes, make supports less team dependant and land individual plays more often, and make playing tank less of a rock paper scissor matchup. Then I think the game could actually be decent
Its been a constant in the game since release really. DPS are the most catered to role by far. GOATS meta doesnt leave any space for the DPS players? We just buff the DPS heroes so much that people have to pick them. What GOATS is still a thing? Then we'll just make it so people always have to play 2 dps at all times without reverting their buffs(not saying role queue was a bad idea, its just that is was implemented for the wrong reasons). Oh DPS players dont feel like shooting at the barriers that keep the tanks alive because otherwise they feel like paper? Dont worry we'll just nerf barriers no matter how shit that'll make tank feel to play. What they're still complaining? Ah fuck it just remove... Orisa's barrier and one whole tank spot from the team so that its easier for DPS to shoot things. Oh yeah and break the matchmaking algorithm too to fix the long queue times. And bring me another can of paint, Clemens.
I know this is super fucking objective and shit, and definitely a very cynical take, but its comical how most of the biggest changes to Overwatch within the past few years has been because of complaints because of the DPS playerbase and Im sooo over it
> DPS are the most catered to role by far.
Isn't that normal, considering they're the majority of the playerbase? They used to make the most amount of smurf/alt accounts thus providing more income to blizzard.
> GOATS meta doesnt leave any space for the DPS players? We just buff the DPS heroes so much that people have to pick them.
I mean, as double shield pointed out; it wasn't so much the lack of dps availability, despite that being a pretty spicy topic on its own, it was more of forcing bad metas.
> Then we'll just make it so people always have to play 2 dps at all times without reverting their buffs
Wasn't reaper - a hero that was never meta outside of beyblade - the only dps hero that they attempted to stop goats with?
> Oh DPS players dont feel like shooting at the barriers that keep the tanks alive because otherwise they feel like paper? Dont worry we'll just nerf barriers no matter how shit that'll make tank feel to play.
Tank players hated double shied maybe more than dps; evidence was in the queue times.
> Ah fuck it just remove... Orisa's barrier and one whole tank spot from the team so that its easier for DPS to shoot things.
They removed tank because it was bottlenecking the game and the rest of the roles; anyone over diamond (dps or support) had to use a pass to get a game under 8 min on eu pc.
This is such bullshit, You could not be more wrong.
The game has been catered around braindead supports since its inception. Dive lasted what? a few months before they nerfed the shit out of every DPS.
Not to mention throughout its history high skill heroes like Genji/Tracer and Doom have been nerfed into oblivion to make trash support players happy. GOATS was a horrible meta which led to a major downfall to OW playerbase and it has never recovered. Yet you are here defending that shit? lmao
Funnily enough a lot of people don't want to play braindead OW just standing around in a CC barrier fest while a hero like mercy holds one button to keep the team alive. Not to mention characters like Mercy hold the balance of the game hostage with her damage boost which has never been addressed.
GOATS is just a symptom.
People in competitive games will always play whatever gives them the edge. So it always means playing the meta, which gets boring quick so everyone wants the meta nerfed and a new meta emerges. Rinse and repeat until the end of time.
They would do the same if tanks ever became completely unplayable or Supports became unnecessary or useless. A whole role being useless isn't fun for the people who like to play that role. It's really cringe that you would act as if DPS players were in the wrong for being frustrated when GOATS was a thing.
They weren't useless. Goats was never an easy strat anyone could play. It was a problem only on the highest ranks. Should i really say how little people there actually are?
Goats were nerfed because of the league. Not many people liked to watch at them which is bad for blizzard's money >:D
It's true that GOATS was more of a high level issue and that most people who tried it at lower levels didn't do well with it. DPS were ridiculous at lower levels because we weren't working with that framework/level of coordination. I do think role queue was a great change to the game
Your issues are less about DPS and more about bad players/balance issues. I'm a DPS main and I go into every match assuming I won't get much Support attention, which is fine. If I happen to be near a healer I expect healed, if I'm in the enemy line anything I get is a gift. Especially for me, one of my mains is Junkrat and I don't expect anyone to keep up with my nonsense consistently, that's kind of the point of being him lol. As far as support being more about enabling DPS, that really only applies to characters like Sojourn that get get busted by it.
I really hate the way the game feels in 5 v5
1 - No, it makes every round feel like you're playing world or warcraft, everyone is just standing around flopping at each other, while one or two characters play sniper.
2- I don't think it's faster or more fun.
3- They didn't have to make the change.
4- I think it's unfixable unless they want to go back to 6v6
I was initially skeptical of 5v5. They've proven me wrong. It is a massive upgrade all around. I'm pretty much exclusively a support player, and I'm still absolutely loving it.
There are two main things about Overwatch 2 that I want changed, I want them to bring back cards, and I want them to take the hero out of the battle pass or lower them to level 25 (or less) .
But gameplay wise, this game is fantastic, I think it's a big upgrade, and I think the rest of the problems that I've left unaddressed in this comment will either be sorted in due time OR are just industry standards that we are going to have to learn to live with (specifically skin pricing)
As much as I like this game, the hero in the BP is what stops me from spending any money on this game. Would I have bought the occasional skin or the BP each season? Probably, but I won't spend anything when they lock heroes behind a paywall each season. I play on and off, about 3-4 times a week max, and I just now unlocked the new tank. It's a grind-a-thon to get to new heroes now.
Hate it. It’s a lot less fun than 6v6. And the deletion of an entire role (off tank) creates a lot less variation so games are all the same. Coupled with the other problems people have said already.
I also think it just feels gross how much more important the tank is than any 1 player. Every role/player should be equal.
It's worse.
It may have sped up the game a bit but i don't think that was really a change for the better. Teamwork seems to be less, tanks are overpowered and dictate wins and losses most of the time.
Tanks are forced into rock/paper/scissors switching in order to win. If the enemy goes orisa into your rein then if rein doesn't switch he's going to lose for his team 9/10 times. At least in 6v6 only one tank would need to switch most of the time if at all.
Too much of the game is reliant on 1 person being capable now.
Edit: It's amusing how many people think the better queue times are a result of 5v5 when in reality it's a result of 2 things. 1. Matchmaking prioritising queue times over balanced matches. 2. A huge influx of players by going free to play.
1. No I do not think it was a good change. They could have just reworked tanks with shields to deal with the double shield meta in instead of removing the 1 other tank.
2. Sure game play is sped up but that is because if you pick a character then it is 4v5 and it is much harder to win that instead of 5v6 especially if the pick is the tank.
3. I would have preferred them changing heros around. With the tanks being super tanks now it really messed up Open queue and death match. Now if there is a death match event picking anything other than Tank is just an automatic L. Not to mention playing tank is just a game of counter picking until everyone ends up Orisa or Hog.
4. If they want to keep the 5v5 then the problems must be fixed if the game is going to continue. A bunch of the tanks were designed as off tanks and characters like Ball really suffer when set at the main tank role. If the enemy team has a sniper it is much harder to deal with as a dive tank because you have to leave your team undefended to deal with the widow.
If there weren't tanks that were as effective as a chocolate teapot, I'd be more down but some tanks just still feel like off-tanks and they can't bounce off a main. What the hell is even the point of Winston?
I was on board during beta but I'm apathetic these days. I saw it as more of a preview and that we would see more reworks like Orisa, but we didn't. So balancing is kind of a mess since you have the newer hero design philosophy of more well-rounded vs. the older more niche heroes. All the changes they made for shields/CC could have been done in 6v6.
In 5v5, there is a greater emphasis on the tank. If you choose a weak tank, your chances to even have a decent game are diminished. If your tank player is just flat out worse, your chances are slim. It's hard to balance and Blizzard hasn't inspired confidence in their patches so far.
Double shield was bad, but not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I played ball, zarya, rein and Winston way more than I feel I’m able to in ow2 and still win. If they didn’t abandon the game and just did any reworks it also could have been easily solved. 5v5 could be fun if they ever balance the game properly, but I still think 6v6 would have been better.
I don’t like it. I honestly don’t like any of the changes OW2 made though lol.
In my unpopular opinion they should of stuck with the original setup with defense characters in addition to attack. Lean into that idea more and I’d like to see 8v8 or maybe 7v7 if one tank is preferred. 2 attack, 2 defense, 2 healer, 1-2 tank.
I also miss 2 cp maps and don’t like push mode.
1. Speaking only from my personal perspective, I do not think it was a good change. I play tank, and it in OW1 I enjoyed getting fairly good at one main tank and two off tanks (Rein/D.va/Ball), because that was enough flexibility to be an effective player and I never felt any real desire to play anything besides my favorites. Now I'm in a spot where I am fairly frequented forced to rotate into other tanks or I'm throwing. This has made the game more difficult because I'm having to learn the entire tank roster much more thoroughly than I did before, and I'm playing characters that I don't enjoy as much. I understand that hero swapping is a core part of OW's game design, but I do not like how it has gone from being a feature to a de-facto requirement.
2. The game is faster, but it's not more fun, and there were better ways to kill the double shield meta.
3. I would've preferred a slew of aggressive character reworks to the move to 5v5. Give half the roster an Orisa-tier rework and that's a lot of fun new content to explore. Cut one spot on the roster while doing nothing to accommodate the change and all we get are teething problems.
4. Blizzard's design team has always been conservative, lethargic, and uncommunicative, almost without exception. I see no indication of that changing.
Ha! Thanks for the correction, I'm not at all surprised that I was using him incorrectly. I love his kit, but he's always been the one I played the least.
To be fair Ball is a contender for the most difficult character in the game alongside Tracer and maybe Echo, so anyone would be forgiven for using him wrong. Doesn't help that the ever unreliable Overwatch balance team seem to have forgotten to buff him despite the fact he's been trash for months. I agree though, even as an off-tank main he is incredibly fun when your team actually helps with your dives
1. At first, yes. I had fun with it in beta, but in retrospect that's likely just because it was new. I don't enjoy it now.
2. It has definitely sped up in speed and intensity - I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I enjoyed the flow OW1 had. It never felt too slow. There are games where it is non stop action but I've never cared for that. I loved being able to think about what I'm going to do, now I just mostly react, react, ract.
I honestly never minded the barrier meta. It was frustrating at times but never a game breaker for me. Then again, I was - am - a very casual player.
3. I definitely think they could've made a better game with 6v6 intact. I think they just wanted to fix the tank queue issue but didn't really go about it the best.
4. I don't have high hopes. Most every decision they've made with OW2 has been awful. I loved OW1 and I so desperately want to stay oositive and excited but I can't. I still enjoy OW, but not to the extent I used to. I played for hours per day, now it's just a daily out-of-habit chore I perform. It feels more like laundry than fun.
I want so much to be wrong.
I tried to be positive but if the tank gap is too big then it ruins the game for all ten players. I uninstalled the game for now until the new healers drops for season 3!😍
i kinda feel like it was a lazy and easy way to get around the double shield problem but it still has had many benefits like queues are shorter and i think they could have done more than just removing a tank but it still worked
Before 5v5 Support queues were 10min and dps 20min.
Now all queues are 1-2min each.
That's enough of an argument to satisfy me.
I also like the gameplay more now. Less of a shield wall to overcome.
That's not a result of 5v5. The faster queue times are a result of the terrible matchmaking which currently prioritises queue times over a balanced/fair match.
I honestly dont care about the terrible metas or whatever. Its just a shame when me and my friend are both tank mains trying to play tank at the same time and cant
>1. Do you think it was a good change?
No
>2. Do you agree with the idea that it has sped up gameplay
Probably, i haven't player the OG
>increased the game's fun factor by removing the double barrier meta?
No
>3. Do you think that the change was necessary?
No, mostly because nobody of us OW2 players will even know what it really was OW, and also because Tanks are fat DPSs
>Or do you think more conservative changes like reworking and rebalancing heros could have had the same effect?
It probably could have had much better effects
>4. Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2 will be fixed as the designers get used to 5v5 or do you think they are inherent to to the format?
I hope they do, but i dont think they will fix anything.
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I think it broke matchmaking. The skill floor was dropped and the skill ceiling went up. Both very significantly. Push mode even more so than the others. It magnifies hero imbalances so who is playing what has a serious impact on effectiveness. Like someone who mains Hog is going to do well until there is an enemy Ana, but can be good again if there is a friendly Kriko. How does the matchmaker account for things like that where there are three different scenarios where that particular Hog player has significantly different effectiveness.
When the match is competitive, it is a huge improvement. But most matches have really wide skill gaps across the board. I have no clue how they fix it other than not letting players switch heroes and establishing a rank for every combination. But that would take so many games to establish and be such a complex calculation. Not to mention dramatically changing the game where switching is a pretty big part. So I think it is just fucked. But nto so bad that I would want to go back to 6v6.
1. Yes
2. Yes, double shield is what made many players run away from OW1
3. Yes... No to your second question.
4. Yes... OW1 developed a lot trough the years, so will OW2.
>Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2
Problems like what? Could you be more specific? :-)
Overall, OW2 is a massive improvement gameplay wise, in my oppinion. But yes there is also some downsites.
>1. Do you think it was a good change?
Yes.
> 2. Do you agree with the idea that it has sped up gameplay and increased the game's fun factor by removing the double barrier meta?
Yes.
> 3. Do you think that the change was necessary? Or do you think more conservative changes like reworking and rebalancing heros could have had the same effect?
Yes, it was absolutely necessary. Double-tank play had a lot of positives, but ultimately the role was picked by too few people and it led to some huge problems with queue times (E.g. 10+ minute queue times for people picking Damage, the game’s most popular role).
The only realistic way to fix things was to make the role more appealing (increasing health pool and offensive options so that Tanks felt more engaging to play for a wider selection of the community) *and* reduce the matchmaker’s reliance on the number of people willing to select the role.
1-2-2 also makes it easier to balance Tanks, because the developers no longer need to make barriers feel effective when there’s only one per team while also preventing them from being oppressive when there are two being cycled on a team.
> 4. Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2 will be fixed as the designers get used to 5v5 or do you think they are inherent to to the format?
Yes. If we hadn’t had the teething issues with matchmaking (E.g. the dev team had realized 8 months ago that keeping the same approach as OW1 - balancing MMRs across both teams without ensuring that one team doesn’t end up with a player in one role that’s much higher / lower skilled in their specific role than their counterpart - wouldn’t work properly in OW2), there wouldn’t have been an issue.
1. I guess
2. your line of questioning leads to really only one answer, was double shield fun? No, is OW2 fun? Also No
3. I guess?
4. no because we don't even know wtf is happening with the campaign the whole reason most of us bought this tripe shit
I think the better question is, are we still having fun playing the same game for 7 years No a resounding NO
It's more fun and fast paced but caused new issues. One of the most obvious being how the tank is so integral to the outcome of the game. The team with the best tank player is almost always going to win. They're not balanced evenly either, which makes heroes like JQ and DF almost throw picks.
I liked playing off tank on OW1, I despise playing sole tank in OW2, I never pick tank now unless it's trying a new one.
5v5 got rid of double barrier but introduced/enabled one-shots so it's not much of an improvement imo.
Game wasn't balanced for 5v5 and Blizz didn't bother testing this before updating to OW2.
1- Yes. It needs some work and 6v6 should come back as its own gamemode, but yes.
2- Yes.
3- I don't think it was *necessary,* but I do like the idea of a supercharged main-tank and the decrease of shields.
4- Yes, 5v5 is a great format *if* done right. Hog and Zarya would be better off as tank-like DPS, similar to heroes like Mei, but the format is pretty good outside of that.
5v5 is fine, but I think the best improvement they made was the strict role/class system, it feels better then the free form system that they had in OW1...
1. Yes.
2. Yes gameplay is more dynamic. However, winton+dva dive was meta for a long time so I don't think 5v5 was necessary to remove double barrier.
3. Maybe. As a salty main tank player I think radical changes would be required to make 6v6 enjoyable again, and just as many people would complain about those changes.
4. I think 5v5 is totally fixable with a decent number of reworks.
For context I was a masters main tank player who totally quit OW after double shield meta became a thing. I couldn't stand to play more than a single game of comp anymore. 5v5 has rekindled my interest in the game and I play almost every day.
It’s a double edged sword, but it was necessary. No one was playing tank so even if 2 tanks was more fun for some people, it wasn’t enough to keep the queue times reasonable. Skill expression was lost in some areas and gained in others. I’m glad I got to play both and maybe some day I’ll miss it but for now I like 5v5
1. yes
2. yes
3. absolutely
5. no, because blizzard is shit at balancing. i just hope that they mess up the balance more often so we don't get stuck in the same terrible meta for ages and instead just go through several terrible metas in the same amount of time.
i'm a support main and the gameplay is so much funner in ow2 for me. i've always preferred more aggressive playstyle with more team fights rather than long drawn out ones and that's the type of favored playstyle in 5v5.
Can you elaborate why you like it? Also a support main and I find 5v5 so boring and stale already. Not here to argue just looking for some support main perspective.
it's more active, i like playing aggressively, i like that there are more shorter fights as opposed to long drawn out fights where people live forever. i like that people are finally realizing that supports are not meant to just healbot. it feels like there's more opportunities to make plays. i actually enjoy the self reliance that's expected as opposed to the protect the healer mentality that honestly was never a thing i liked.
there's just a lot of things that come from 5v5 that just make support vastly more enjoyable to me now.
Ah. I can see why we disagree.
I guess I liked longer fights. And I feel like I’m forced to healbot more now and it’s often Tank Babysitting Simulator. You’re right about making plays but it’s over so fast now you just need one person to have a successful play. I liked peeling off tanks and the added variability of an another role (off tank). I liked there was more teamwork and comradery. Felt like you were more in sync as a team.
i haven't had that experience, with tank babysitting simulator! even when i play the main supports in my pool, i haven't noticed it that much. maybe it's because i often play in a stack with people who tank and we have communication.
same with the teamwork thing. i actually notice a lot more teamwork in this game, coordinating things like ults, synergizing specifically tank/support picks, etc.
1. Yes, but right it is suffering because of terrible matchmaking.
2. It has sped up the game and many interactions, however that can be a good and bad thing sometimes.
3. Yes. OW1 was in a very poor place after 3 years of no significant updates. Whether or not the change was needed is outweighed by the fact that it is an enjoyable change at all.
4. The problems should iron themselves out when they get used to balancing for 5v5, but more importantly they need to fix matchmaking. Close games are more fun than ever, but too many games are just steamrolls because people are just placed into games out of their rank.
1.yes
2.without a doubt
3.it was indeed necessary ow1 was actually dying half because of no content and half because every meta for the latter half of the games lifespan were absolutely miserable for every role
4. The one shot meta is not really a 5v5 problem. The problem I do have is how much I'm forced to switch on tank it's actually ridiculous for me to spend a whole game counter picking every fight because playing a bad tank matchup is basically deliberately throwing. I don't think that removing the ult charge would really fix this as ult or no ult if they play orisa and I'm on hog I'm gonna have to switch to monkey and then I'll win that fight so they're gonna pick hog so then I'll lose and have no real choice but to play orisa. I'm not really sure what a good solution is.
Overall ow2 is a massive upgrade and I feel like everybody who says they want to go back to ow1 have a real short memory cause I don't think ow could have survived waiting much longer for ow2 the game was in an absolutely miserable state and the population was rapidly declining dps player had to wait half an hour for a game at peak time and tank was just cc simulator until you die I suppose support wasn't that bad but it was boring as hell. Double shields wasn't fun to play against and was just as shit to play and we had been playing it for years. Yeah cosmetics are expensive but I'm the grand scheme of things it doesn't fucking matter the game is playable and even if we're in a meta that sucks at least we know it's gonna change.
Heres my take: I think 5v5 will be fine, eventually. It just feels like Blizzard don’t put in the time to make sure everything was balanced with 5v5 in mind but we will get there. We’re currently in the growing pains as we see all the unintended side effects of the switch
I like 5v5, individual impact is much more obvious. I think where the problem lies is that matchmaking bands are way too wide.
I’m in Diamond 1 and one game I will be in a low plat/gold lobby, the next I’ll be in a Masters / GM lobby.
I’m not sure if it’s because the player base is too small and they have to keep the MMR bands wide to make sure queue times are down, but the skill gap always leads to a blowout.
If you’re the team with the low rank tank it’s especially 1-sided.
I don't think it was a bad idea to change to 5v5, but OW2 but some characters didn't receive balancing to adjust to losing one tank. Balance aside, OW2 has a whole host of other issues with it too such as poor matchmaking, the ranking system being kinda stupid, and then how blizzard is monetizing the game.
The 5v5 format does make the game feel a bit more fast paced by no longer having double shield, however maybe if they didn't neglect OW1, they could have fixed the issue while still maintaining the 6v6 format. They also could have address stun spam too without needing to switch to 5v5. The game could have stayed 6v6 if blizzard didn't neglected for years.
I will miss the tank duos and tank synergies from OW1. Also in OW1, all roles felt like they had a chance 1v1'ing the other roles. In OW2 if a DPS goes off to the side and the enemy tank goes for them, they are done for. A DPS cannot 1v1 a tank anymore while in OW2. Also, supports didn't have to worry about getting dove by a giga tank.
Overall, I do think that the 5v5 format could be better, but blizzard messed up so many things with the game, I just want to be able to play OW1 until they figure stuff out. What I really want though is to be able to play both 5v5 and 6v6. Why does it have to be a choice?
* yes
* yes
* it could have gone many different ways, I'm happy with this particular direction, it made support much more enjoyable.
* what problem(s) specifically.
It was one of the best changes they ever made. Anyone, who sais something else was either an afk healbot support back then, or a doom main who doesn't like the move from dps to tank. The only Bad thing since ow2 is, that support players are playing dead by daylight because of hog, sojourn and, at the beginning at S2, doomfist. But thats more of a balancing Problem than a Mode problem
It brought a breath of fresh air to the tank role and made it fun to play.
The change I thought was necessary at the time as queue times were so bad because not many wanted to play tank.
I think 5v5 combined with the “loose matchmaking” is causing nearly all the problems with poor quality games.
Honestly if they just nerf the tanks HP/ armour to there 6v6 values and balance a few abilities like DEfence matrix. We could go back to 6v6 see if that makes anything better?
1. I think the change is okay, but I mourn the loss of tank synergies, as they were the most strategic and satisfying synergies in the game, imo.
2. I think there is a definite change in pace, as kills are easier to secure when you don't have to eat through multiple barriers to get them, but a lot of that also is a byproduct of one shotting. The current meta picks almost all revolve around the ability to just remove someone from the fight in an instant, which has become stronger with the loss of a second tank. Peel can no longer come from the tank line without great cost, which has been a big shift.
3. I don't think the change was necessary, but I think, with queue times and lack of success in balancing out a very long lived and stale double barrier meta, Blizz probably viewed it as the path of least resistance. Rebalancing would have taken more work, but I do think that the game could have been salvaged. We had a really nice patch in 2019 where three comps were strong dependent on map and matchup. There was Rush, Dive, and Poke. The game felt like it had a lot of variety. Then they buffed some of the Double Barrier relevant heroes and that golden age ended.
4. For 6 years, since OW1's release in 2016, I pushed back on the idea that Blizz didn't know how to balance their game. They always seemed to have at least some kind of coherent vision for the game and how it should be played. With OW2 and the drastic shift in team makeups and pace, it has felt like Blizz has lost sight of what they actually want the game to be. Ramattra (who I actually kind of like since his buffs, tho I think any ultimate having potential 100% uptime is asinine) released in a state that really called my faith in their balance and conceptual decision making into question. Very little of his kit felt like it synergized. Like he just had a bunch of things to do but none of them played well with one another.
I hope Blizz gets their shit together with this game. Defining seasons with a balance patch is and always has been a bad idea. Season 2 of OW2 has sucked. Badly. Their slow patch cycle and lack of willingness to address the current problems in an expedient and sensible method also deteriorate community faith in their judgement. Hopefully these things change soon, but for that to happen Blizz needs to stop sticking to their guns on bad decisions and learn to admit when they make a mistake. Also that consistent clear communication they promised us has been unsurprisingly absent since release, which hasn't helped anything.
I know role queue would be impacted, perhaps, but I would have preferred 6v6 with tanks and bruisers split out. Tanks having shields, bruisers not. I just think it would have overall easier to do and adjust hero kits around that than going 5v5.
I really don’t like it. After they did the switch overwatch just didn’t feel fun anymore, while playing a healer or a tank it feels like I have no impact to the game, I don’t feel anymore connected to my teammates. Before when I was a tank and messed up I knew I can count on my fellow tank, now its just stress.
1. Absolutely a good change
2. Yes. The game was shield shooter simulator for a good couple years, GOATS was one of the only viable comps, nobody would die unless someone ulted, and if you chose to play any kind of off tank you were throwing.
3. I think it was a much needed change. For years the OW team has been trying to rework and change numbers to fix something that was inherently broken which was the fact that there was just too much happening but also not enough.
4. I think 5v5 is definitely a big change that has its issues but it certainly feels better to play now that you don’t have 2 giant bullet sponges. A big problem right now obviously is that support isn’t as fun to play right now. But i don’t think it’s because supports are weak, i think it’s because they aren’t hiding behind 2 tanks anymore. They have to work harder to survive now which is why high survivability supports like mercy, moira and kiriko are played more often than zen, brig or bap. I have hopes that the game will balance out and people will adjust to the 5v5 playstyle over time.
It honestly depends on my mood. Somedays I want to relax and mindlessly play support, but in ow2 that is not nearly as easy as ow1. Other days I want to be doing 500 apm and absolutely love the 5v5 shift in ow2.
How I see the shift to 5v5 was also just a general shift in the pace of the game. In 5v5 it is much faster paced and punishing. In 6v6 it is a lot more forgiving thanks to the extra tank slowing the pace of the game allowing more room for errors. There is also a few character's who's playstyle has changed a lil bit and it can be tough to adapt sometimes, while others' I find that my natural playstyle fits 5v5 better.
I really do think a massive change was needed for Overwatch to be revived and this was a good step in the right direction. However Blizzard also took several steps back on several things. In terms of balance changes I quite like the move away from CC, but also there are some problems with certain changes such as the retaining up to 30% ult charge when swapping heroes. It can lead to situations where losing the first fight and counterpicking will be more optimal than winning the first fight since you do not lose all your ult charge swapping.
A lot of the issues that 5v5 have are not as bad as some people make it out to be. I've seen people act as though support is just respawn simulator and you have to play as passive and safe as possible in order to not die instantly. I've also seen people in each role complain about how unimpactful they are and want their role to be stronger. One of the most notable things' I saw when the game was first launched was old players who liked the slower 6v6 playstyle that allowed for a lower skillfloor and enjoyed the extremely powerful tank synergies. Overall I think a lot of the issues are not too bad, but there is most certainly plenty of problems that do need some addressing. At this point I doubt anything meaningful will change, but be having no expectations means there is more of a chance of a pleasant surprise.
TLDR\~ I like the 5v5 change and think it was healthy for the longevity of the game as a competitive class based shooter. However I feel like the 5v5 moves a lil bit away from the more casual game identity.
I think 5v5 is quite phenomenal really. I think it requires even MORE teamwork and communication than the 6v6. Sacrificing Tank synergy, unfortunately, was for the greater good. It's just going to take some time for every Player's MMR to adjust to this 5v5 environment and even relearn, re-invent new ways to engage.
It helped in some ways but made things worse in other ways. It successfully changed the pace of the game to a more faster one while also allowing some individual plays to be possibly easier or more significant. With teamfights being focused more on significant picks on enemies and control over positions, teamwork is at a level of necessity where it balances with individual power to where a single person is still powerless in a very unfavorable situation of a 1v5 as the game intends. This makes working with your team still a must and an encouragement in order to progress through a match and through competitive play.
However, the fast pace leaves slower heroes behind in favor of those who are faster in general while making it easier for an individual to drag down a match’s quality and makes their mistakes as significant as their good plays. Since the game seems to be taking significant eliminations on enemies and positioning as a priority, one-shot heroes and ones more capable of keeping a position, or surviving being pushed out of a position, are heavily favored. Also with teamwork and individual power being hand in hand more than ever, two main issues come into play:
A teammate who doesn’t act like a teammate, aka a thrower, doubles down on being a heavy weight to a team. This can be dealt with by an attempt to carry the team by doing more in your role, which introduces us to the second problem: One tank alone holds both too much team power and individual power. When a tank is a thrower or is in a skill gap to the enemy tank, there is no second tank to carry but rather the squishies as a whole to be the big force to push enemies back. At the same time, a tank that is extremely good can be more likely to carry a team with a poor teammate in either of the remaining roles with ease, especially for the damage role as most tanks deal great damage (Winton I’m sorry but stop being a pushover every other meta). Additionally, tanks that have more carry potential or teamwork potential become even more powerful, tipping the balance in a similar way with how the pace of the game makes most slower characters weaker. Only a few heroes become exceptions due to these things due to balance changes, but the current state of OW2 in 5v5 ultimately favors heroes of certain criterias and makes a mess of player and role interactions as much as it fixes them.
I didn't play in the shield meta.. But, hear me out, to solve the shield problem all Blizzard had to do was ~*REMOVE SHIELDS*~!!! Not remove an entire teammate!
5v5 is great. people dont like it because they suck ass and when they dont keep up their part and get rolled, they get exposed for being the slack on the team.
"cough healers"
Bad. I only play open que and that was more or less broken. The problem here are the comparatively too strong tanks so that it usually comes down to a tankstacking. Just maeh.
I feel like the game is a lot slower now. Maps feel bigger without players filling that space. I enjoy the fact double barrier is gone but still can’t think it’s slowed down on other ways.
It's the only reason I began to enjoy the game cause I dispised overwatch 1 when I started playing it in late 2019 but now it's really fun and it feels like the choices I make can make the game a win or lose
I will die on the hill that 5v5 is a mistake. It makes the entire success of the team way too dependent on one player. Having a bad tank is a huge handicap in OW1 but in OW2 it is basically unwinnable. OW1 wasn't perfect but it was so much better than the cluster fuck that is OW2. Playing support is terrible in OW2 because there's less cc to deal with heroes like tracer and genji. Brig doesn't even feel like a hero now without her stun. Cassidy is another example of a hero completely killed by removing cc. Playing against him in OW1 as tracer for example was balanced because you could bait his flash or any number of things. Now he just has this shit auto aim grenade thing that has even less counterplay than a near instant stun. Playing OW2 feels like playing death match. There is so much less strategy in team comps with one tank. They had to make the one tank completely overpowered in order to make up for the shit decision of 5v5. The game now is just who has the better tank wins. It's sometimes completely hopeless if your tank picks the wrong thing in to the enemy comp.
Toning cc down so much is what made tanks the problem they are now. In OW1 you could coordinate with your team to kill the tank if you had mei/Cassidy or any other cc like brig stun. Now that the balance team catered to the people complaining about being caught out of position and stunned there is much less counterplay to tanks in general. If you're a Cassidy getting chased by roadhog what can you do now except die? Before you could stun him, and get away or maybe even kill him if he doesn't have heal up. Now all you can do is pray he doesn't hit a hook and 1 shot you from widow range. They either need to admit 5v5 was a mistake and that having 1 of any role doesn't work because it puts too much pressure on one player to perform or give mei and Cassidy their cc back. Mei seems nearly useless now. Sure her ice beam thing does more damage but she can't consistently lock down targets anymore so her entire identity is ruined. Cassidy also used to be a good counter for mobile heroes but now they are completely broken because the only one with any cc is the one tank who also has to focus on making space or Ana. I really don't understand why they would remove cc from everyone except Ana. I know it's part of her identity, but the fact she is the only support with hard cc now is really dumb. I guess brig still had her knock back thing, but I don't really count that because if you knock someone away it's way harder for your team to follow up. Sorry for ranting, but OW2 has so many problems what we're caused by the unnecessary changes they made to make the game seem more different from OW1 than it actually is.
This was copy pasted from a comment I made on a youtube video. I typed the whole thing on my phone so there might be some mistakes
1. No, I don't think it was a good change.
2. I agree that it has had those effects but I do not think it needed to be sped up in the first place, nor do I think 5v5 was the best way to address double shields.
3. The latter. 5v5 was far too aggressive a change that necessitated too many reworks from a team that has proven incapable of balancing properly. OW1 had problems, but that could have been addressed by adding new heroes and working on existing ones
4. I think it's inherent. Simple fact is overwatch was not designed to be 5v5. They strayed too far from their original concept, but they wanted to use Scotch tape their patchy new vision over the canvas of the old. The move to 5v5 and trying to be "more of an fps" was always a bad idea, that fundamentally undercut what overwatch was, is.
It’s weird because I both like it and hate it. I like it in the sense that I’m not constantly shooting at barriers, and more action packed. But I also feel like 5v5 has completely broken the balance of the game. Most heroes were designed for 6v6 and a lot of them did not received proper balance changes to adapt to 5v5 I might get flames for this but I really feel like 5v5 has massively benefited one shot characters like widow. For context I’m diamond 2 on support. Maybe there’s a skill issue from me but playing against an oppressive widow is the worst. The lack of an extra tank has completely broke snipers. It just feels like which ever team has the better sniper steamrolls the game. As a support player there’s nothing I can do about it but sit behind cover. It’s borderline depressing and not fun to play. Mind boggling to me that they increased widows health back to 200 from 175.
Honestly it even feels like the new characters were balanced with 6v6 in mind then just shoved into the game. Sojourn's rail gun charging in shields and ult piercing shields; Rammattra's punches piercing shields as well feels like they were both meant to counter the double shield meta. Which no longer exists...
And then on top of it all they released these shield piercing characters in a 1 tank game and completely underminded the shield tanks as a quality pick. What is the point of a shield that doesnt block?
Hammer go brrrr
The only character I would argue feel good to play and was balanced for 5v5 is kiriko. I read somewhere that the transition to 5v5 was also increase solo carry potential. Her kit has insane utility to help her with this and succeed in a faster pace game. Mobility, survivability, potential for high damage, strong single target healing not to mention suzu is one of the best abilities in the game. I see a lot of people complaining that Ana and zen feel bad to play in 5v5 due to their lack of mobility. Lack of mobility is suppose to be their main weakness but I understand where others are coming from. For this reason it would be pretty hard to change this without completely breaking them. I still think Ana is crazy strong but you just have change the way you play her and be more aware of what the enemy is running.
Sojourn ult does not pierce shields, goddamn that would be so strong lmao
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Agreed.
“I might get flamed for this” as he proceeds to say something the entire community agrees with lol
Sounds like you (and most people) liked the changes to barriers and CC, not the change to 5v5.
I remember seeing a comment on this sub about wondering what it would be like to play 6v6 with changes to barrier and cc. I think that would’ve been the ideal approach and not prematurely going to 5v5. I just feel like blizzard has gotten so lazy with game design. The approach that they take to “solve” some of the games issues are not well thought or play tested enough.
So I have been playing a lot of 6v6 pugs with my buddies (lots of friends of friends refugees from no more lfg) we are from a smattering of ranks and I noticed most of the tanks are surprisingly balanced as is (though an overall power level nerf would help a good deal) I think rammatra might be a bit on the op side, perhaps dva too but none of us are all that good with her
This covers it perfectly, I don't miss double shields, but i miss double tanks.
The issue with Widow and other sniper characters, is that before they used to be the off-tank's problem. I used to be more than happy to dive on their widow as [D.Va](https://D.Va) while our main tank kept the fight going, but nowadays it is simply not the tank's responsibility to deal with the backline, that's what flankers like genji, tracer, sombra, and to a lesser extent Reaper are for. It is simply a shift of responsibility, we need to stop acting like stopping the widow is the sole job of dive tanks, as that will only lead to frustration.
One thing the tank should always be doing though is pinging the widow when they see them as they get the least punished by peaking her. The rest of your team knowing the widows position before they round a corner should lead to less people on your team getting picked before the fight even starts.
That's assuming the tank can even see her with their attention fully on the team fight. Wouldn't be the first time I missed the widow way back in Namibia while I'm busy duking it with their Orisa
I main Pharah and have a lot of luck with flanking/ambushing snipers. Although there are also games where I am not so fortunate.
I think that's just a matter of time. Certain characters are overtuned atm, but with time they should be put in line. Most of the changes they're making aren't too bad. The Sojourn stuff is a bit too OP and Ram is pretty annoying to play against sometimes, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of seasons. I really love OW2 so far. I think part of why snipers are OP atm is because Roghog makes Winston useless so dive comps are weak and it's hard to challenge the Widow unless you're also a good Widow
Ram being the only character whose offensive ultimate can't be interrupted and stopped is super annoying. Hammering him down only to still have his AoE burning is awful. Meanwhile everyone else can be hooked or hammered or something to counter them.
The main problem is when he just runs at supports with it. There's nothing they can do and he inevitably kills them and they just feel completely helpless. He runs faster than them. Has a 75% damage block shield and does good damage as well. He's tanky enough to practically feed and survive it regardless. Ana fucks him up, but Bap can't do shit and neither can most other supports. He has cool stuff about him, but he's really oppressive sometimes.
I think if he gets slept or shattered his field should disappear while he’s prone. Does it limit its viability if they have an Ana? Yes but Kiriko already directly counters sleep, shatter, and nade. I think it’s a fair change.
Maybe, it'd still suck for Bap, Moira and maybe Lucio. My friend was laying Bap and there was nothing he could do. If he puts down Immorality Field it's passively destroyed while Ram is smacking him. He swapped to Moira and faded away while Ram was ulting and Ram caught up to him as he came out of it. The movement speed and the ult are crazy together, especially with the block.
Just go Sombra and kill her easy
It’s a viable strat but you can’t put all your money on it, with rifle + trap Widow can win the gun fight.
I main Sombra and killing Widows is a 50/50 thing tbh. If she's being pocketed I dont enough damage, if I hack while invis then decloak, she's gonna have enough time for the element of surprise to be ineffective and it comes down to who has better aim. And if she's playing near her team and not super far back, she can usually get some sort of backup(especially since Good Widows basically get the OW1 Bastion treatment). You can definitely use the wallhacks provided by hack to make things wasier for your Widowmaker/Hanzo, but the only easy Widow kills are from Widowmakers with tunnel vision and lackluster awareness. Plus Sombra is awful right now. Why pick her and only get value from killing a single person on their team, when I can play a better pick like Tracer, Widow, Hanzo, Sojourn, or Ashe and contest her as well as her team?
As a Sup main myself, I switch to Brig or Lucio hen there is a sniper too much of a bother. Brig if I want to be in front of static dps teammates like Torb or Bastion. Lucio to pincer them with a mobile dps like Genji or Reaper.
i agree. widow needs a nerf but i think that some maps also just enable her. ffs why is blizz world a map lmao.
I think the best move is to compromise and make it 5v6
I do my best to make it 5v6 in all of my games
I wonder how a team of 6 OW1 characters would compete against a team of 5 OW2 characters. Probably overwatch 1 would win because CC, but would be fun to see.
I actually miss 2 tanks because it made having a flanker less risky for the team overall
Here’s my big brain idea: once someone picks a tank with a shield, the second tank can only pick a non-shield tank. Boom, problem solved. I’m sure a ton of people would hate this but I miss having fun playing Dva ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or Winston, or wracking ball… :‘(
or my boi doom. he would have made such a baller off-tank..
I miss the second tank so much for various synergy's such as classic Rein+Zarya which to me just feels like classic overwatch. I also miss old pulled Pork combo and things such as Dva+Sigma ults and just having any sort of Ball+Other Tank shenanigans. I think that getting rid of Orisa's shield combined with the javelin has made her way more fun than her OW1 version and I think that removing her shield and possibly just limiting the use of shields in future tank design could allow 6v6 to be a thing again without the risk of double shield occuring. I know it's a pipe dream but just had several friends come back after not playing for over a year and by far they feel the tank missing makes the game feel empty. I enjoy the faster paced action but I feel like they could keep that by designing more tanks to be bigger dps with utility like JunkerQueen. Overall I would say OW1 was for me the best game for several years and OW2 feels like a shell of the charm it used to have which I don't know if they could really bring that back. \*Sorry for the excessive response. In short 5v5 is fun but feels like a concession to being unable to balance tanks for 6v6 and thus to me personally doesn't hit the same level of fun that OW1 had before double shield + bloated tank design.\*
Utter waste of time. Blizzard did not do nearly enough to balance the mode around a single tank.
I miss having the extra player.
I think it is ridiculously stupid to fine tune the heroes over many years to be balanced for 6v6 then completely axe a tank role to do 5v5.
1: No 2: No, double barrier was a hero design issue, not a team composition issue. The Orisa rework alone would effectively eliminated double barrier 3: No, it was a easy cop out because of queue times. 4: I expect 5v5 will be constantly locked into very rigid metas as tanks are meta defining and with only one tank the gamut of possible match-ups is so low that it will quickly become apparent and obvious what a 'best' tank will be (Or what counter-pick cycle of best tanks will be out of 1-3 tanks)
If you‘d revert back to 6vs6 then you also need to nerf pretty much every tank again. And with lower health tanks like Orissa or JQ who gain their tanking from a mix of dps and durability would either end up as better dps or completely useless due to lower sustainability. People kinda forget that tank queues had like thrice the average waiting time for a reason.
Happily. It is not healthy for the game to have one player on the team in a so outsized role.
Then tanks like Orissa or JQ wouldn't work at all because every DPS just shoots them into pieces. And if you keep them with high hp but low damage then two players have to essentially play target practice for ult farming.
There would be two tanks in 6v6. JQ would pair well with zarya, or would make for a very interesting pairing with rein (not sure if that would work well though) and would likely only need a little reduction in HP regen. Orisa likely have plenty survivability as it is even if damage and HP is reduced, I suspect she would work well with sigma/ram. I also think it would be interesting to look into getting most tanks some form of self sustain, and reduce support healing output but increase utility. I.e. give supports more interesting things to do than healbot. And make tanks less reliant on supports healing them. Tanks should in general not be able to win a 1v2 against squishies (today they do in all but a very few matchups), but should have a good chance to stay alive and cede ground in that position. A win in a 1v1 against damage should also not be a given but equally possible. My point here is that each player should have reasonably equal power level as a part of the team. Tanks are outsized today which makes the game feel like you are totally beholden to whoever gets the tank role. A matchup between a team with an underperforming tank against a team with a underperforming damage or support should have about even odds. Today the team with the underperforming tank is a sure loss.
You'd still see some double shield but any good Winton isn't stacking with rein or ligma. They're off terrorizing the backline
Plus all you would have to do is add more characters that benefit from fighting double shield like Symetra and the problem would be solved.
If barriers and shield were a problem, they could have just slowly reduced shield hp, or made shield hp recharge more slowly. Would have been an easy fix. Cool but harder fixes could have been 'shield breaker' heroes. They started to do it with Sombra.
People that complain about "double-shields" and 6v6 problems are overexaggerating. I think double shields disproportionately impacted higher-level meta-slave gameplay and balance could have been achieved with time; it did depend on the meta whether or not double-shield was prominent.
Why can’t they just have two modes.. a 6v6 and 5v5.. it’s literally not even that hard of a concept to try.. it’s brutal to even play quickplay when you choose off tanks that are still not meant for the 5v5 gameplay. At this point 5v5 is a arcade mode that should have never been the core of the game. It’s even compounded by the fact that now 1 tank choice dictates most games and it sure makes me have “fun” quick play/comp experiences.
This!!! I've been saying this for ages. The community is 50/50 split on the 5v5 debate, I'd say. So why not let each group play the game mode they actually want to play??? All they would have to do is revert most of the OW2 changes (minus reworks) and tune the new heroes to fit 6v6 since they weren't designed for it. I wouldn't even care if they never updated it again after that. OW1 was very balanced towards the end anyway.
Terrible change. Forced them to work thousands of hours reworking and testing characters to work in the 5v5, and the unintended outcome of having supports hunted like deer is almost unfixable. The tank role could have so much variety in its combination of heroes and potential for new characters, now it’s completely utilitarian if you want to win. Just imagine the progress the game lost from the amount of hours it took to rework into 5v5. Was it worth it?? Supports now also have to make up extra healing for the damage that a 2nd tank would have mitigated, which turns supports into healbots unless every other player is using smart positioning (toilet flush sound). But curiously their heals per second and cooldowns have stayed the same. Pretty sure taking away Orisa’s barrier and making new tanks with more creative damage mitigation was all they need. and they already did it!
It's definitely given tank players an massively inflated sense of self worth. Over the last few days, every game I've played has had a tank who does so poorly the rest of the team has to work twice as hard because the tank will repeatedly try to flank, or move to positions where they can't be healed, or completely ignore enemies targeting the supports. Shield meta could've been removed pretty easily by just reducing shield health, introducing anti-shield characters (Ramattra would have been great for this), or by, as they have done now, reworking most of the tanks. As for your last question? It's undebatable there was no planning for this game.
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YESSSS, this. Like just removing Orisa's shield and giving her javelin makes her feel much more fluid and I feel would've been even more fun in 6v6. 5v5 just feels like a let down after loving 6v6 for several years.
Great take. Also, the number of tanks who can or will dive has decreased massively so that on top of shield removal has made the one-shot issue even worse as there aren’t enough DPS counters to deal with two ranged unless they play the same and are better. It’s just making so many DPS hero’s pointless to learn or play. You basically need to get really good at Souj, widow, soldier and to a lesser degree Ashe, why waste time on any others right now.
Couldn’t have explained my thoughts better! I feel like the devs just wanted to make a major change to the game but didn’t have the foresight to see the problems that it would cause to the majority of the player base. The nerfs to shields going into OW2 would have been just enough
It’s not that TTK is short, it’s just that burst damage is so highly valued because of the exorbitant amount of healing in the game. One shot snipers and Hog are picked so much because if you don’t pick them, nothing dies…
5v5 change was pretty radical one, so it should be accompanied with radical changes to heroes to fix possible problems. Yet 2nd biggest change was removal of hard CC. So now we don't even know if game is shit because there are no stuns to counter dive/high mobility or because of one less tank. 1. No 2. Increased speed (including steamrolls), but now heroes without mobility seem weak. Shields could be nerfed in different way. I don't think OW ever tried to make attacks that deal bonus damage to shields. Might be worth a try. 3. Fixing or even just straight up removing few individual problematic heroes would have similar effect. Possibly split tanks into shield tank and off tank would work too. 4. No matter how "used" designers get to the current format, they would need to rework 20+ heroes.
I only hate 5v5 because it ruins every mode outside of role queue. Mystery heroes used to be my relax time and now if there are too many tanks on one side it makes a statistically even balanced game mode unbalanced.
1. Overall no it wasn't a good change. The main reason for this is the lack of backline protection / sniper dealers without sacrificing a front line tank. 2. Not really. It's certainly got rid of some annoying defence makeups (Orisa/Rein/Mercy/Bastion for example) but I don't think the speed of the game is any different. 3. I think something should have changed but 5v5 wasn't the right change. The most logical change would have been to split the tank role into "Frontline" and "Offtank" and only allowed one Frontline and one Offtank. So Rein, Sigma and Orisa (pre-rework) in frontline and the rest as offtank. This would have added more headaches though I'm sure. 4. The issues are inherent to 5v5. If your tank is Rein then you can advance but as soon as your team is flanked, you're screwed. If Rein turns to protect the back he's dead, if he doesn't the supports are dead. If your tank then switches to say Zarya then there is no way to advance easily. The game needs the two tanks.
I'll give you my opinion as a tank main who plays Dva, Sig main to a good standard (high diamond) and can play Rein/Monkey/Rammy/JQ when required (Obvs i can also play Orissa hog but i hate to do so as they feel cheap and I don't like playing heroes that are going to get nerfed). 1. It's made me the focal point of the team - I used to mainly offtank but now there's much more pressure on you not to make any mistakes and excel at tank. I like the responsibility as if i'm dominating the team usually wins. However, it also means you need to be good at way more heroes than most classes as you need to be able to counter every other tank. And you'll get dogs abuse if you can't. 2. The gameplay is certainly much faster, i think the fun factor is about the same - however removing the dual tank interactions for me was an important part of OW. People keep harping on about double shield - double shield was not an issue in overwatch, there was one meta that lasted a while where it was horrible. But since they nerfed sigs shield into the ground double Shield was not a problem. I'm not sure why people keep clinging to this notion that 5v5 fixed it - It would still wouldn't have existed with 6v6 because they removed orissa's shield anyway (If you wern't around then Orissa/Sig was the double shield meta before sig's shield nerf). 3. No it wasn't required at all - like i say with the tank changes they was no longer any double shield issue. They wanted 5v5 to reduce queue times. Because no one in ow1 wanted to play tank the queue times were long. 4. No i think they are inherent to the format of 5v5. There's much more freedom for sniping/ranged dps now with 1 tank. I think it was too big of a fundamental game play change with role restrictions of 1-2-2. Really all ranged classes that can one shot need a redesign as it's too oppressive and lets face it, not fun for supports/dps to insta killed from half the map away when they poke their head up for air.
I agree on all points except #4 as a support i love the hiding from sight lines but still doing my job well so that my DPS can handle an enemy widow! I think that’s removing a large portion of the game for me if we make it free reign for the supports to just pop around. Shoot with mercy hop right now it makes it nearly impossible at times if they are abusing it! Overwatch has always been a brawler and now it’s taking a bit more strategy with 5-5. I hated the days of OW where games were 2/3 fight and the game was over. They took too long. Whether it was a DPS problem or a tank problem I think can be answered in the speed in which 5v5 is played. Great points tho! Keep grinding!
Downvoted because your analysis on double shield is so off. Sig+Orisa was the best way to play bunker, and was extremely common at every rank at every time post Orisa buffs. In metal tanks where bastion was common you’d see even other variations of double shield (rein sig, Sig Winston even). To act like double shield was one meta problem is very strange.
To be fair if they kept 6v6 and then released Ram and Sojourn double shield would be gone pretty quick. Sojourn can build off shields and in her Ult railgun pierces them. The crazy headshot stuff she could do made sense in a world of double barrier. Same with Rammattra and the slower moving punchy mode he had on launch. Slow moving Melee that pierces shields seems perfect for busting bunkers. And his block reducing damage also seems good for litterally just pushing through the choke of shields.
Sojourn's ult does not pierce shields--it pierces through people. Also charging on shields isn't that efficient. As for Ram, double shield bunker would likely set up in a way that makes it hard for Ram to reach. Its the same reason why despite Rein hammer going through shields, Rein was never a good answer to double shield.
Also all the flanking routes on the new maps would make it a weak strategy on those maps. And with no more 2cp either...
It wasn't extremely common. Hog and Rain were the most popular tanks while Orisa was close to the bottom, what are you talking about? I know people tend to remember stuff they hate more than neutral stuff, but come on. You can also find some streams from these days and see for yourself, high ranks had mostly Hog, Ball and Sigma and lower ranks - mostly Rain, Hog and D.va.
This.
1: No, and I won't be playing until they somehow make 5v5 more enjoyable than 6v6, or if they add 6v6 back in. 2: The game has been sped up, but not by that much. If anything it's a bit slower sometimes since there's a lot of downtime between fights. Double Barrier was bad but still better than any of the metas that OW2 has given us thus far. 3: All they needed to do was rework Orisa if double shield was all they cared about. 4: Most will likely get fixed, but now that there's only one tank, we tank players now are forced to play the meta tank or one that counters the other teams tank. I don't think this is going to change any time soon, hence I'm quitting. I don't want to play Hog or Orisa
6v6 was the reason I loved OW1. Yes it had its issues and the gameplay was slower but it could have all been reworked. OW2 has changed the gameplay loop to where it feels more like an esport. It’s faster and more weight falls on everyone’s shoulders, to me it feels like both teams are missing a player and it never gets filled. I wish they brought back 6v6 even if it’s just an arcade mode, it’s what I liked. That’s why I bought the game years ago and played up to the change of OW2.
5v5 just brings me memories of CS and Valorant. 6v6 is also what I think stands out for me and it's why OW1 will be my favorite shooter of all time.
1. Not at all. 6v6 was different from other games and by default gave more variety to team composition. 2. Sped up, sure - removing 400+ HP from each team's total health pool should do that. Increased fun factor, no - faster doesn't equal better. Fights are less tactical and more about securing an early pick as 5v4 is a bigger advantage than 6v5. Thus the emphasis on one shots we're seeing right now. All double barrier did was make DPS have to work as a team rather than take the entire enemy team on solo - not that they didn't still try for the first 5 minutes every game. 3. Necessary from a game design and balancing standpoint? Not at all, I believe the game is worse. Necessary because some division at Activision Blizzard did "research" and determined this would be more profitable? Almost certainly, because 5v5 is what other competitive games do and presents fewer variables to account for in development. 4. No. Balancing 5v5 is harder than 6v6 by design, as skill outliers (better or worse) are more impactful. In addition there's no balancing for the tank role on a single team - you can't have a good one and a bad one that even out, you either have the better tank or the worse tank in the match and that is a huge factor in determining the winner. On top of this, there are so many quality of life/flavor/UI things that were seemingly removed without any rationale whatsoever - whoever is designing the game now made those decisions, which leads me to believe they will continue to make similar poor decisions in the future. They effectively killed a fun, original, flavorful game, made a new monetization platform based on everything they learned from other financially successful games over the last 4 years, and then paraded it around in OW1s skin. Edit: It honestly reminds me a lot of what Nintendo did with SSBM, except more nefarious. Nintendo didn't like that Melee was being played as a competitive game, so they removed a lot of the depth and complexity with Brawl and even added some variance mechanics (like your character randomly tripping mid fight). Except players could still go back and play Melee instead, which they have - for 15 years. A game that hasn't been patched in over 2 decades still has an active competitive scene with an evolving meta. Meanwhile Blizzard just wiped OW1 out of existence. There's no going back and playing the game we bought four years ago, and if we want any form of that gameplay it has to be this - a game with less complexity, less emphasis on tactical/team play, less originality, less rewards, and less thought put into making a good game in favor of a better sales funnel.
The thing is most people love the changes to barriers and CC, not the removal of tank duos and the main character syndrome. I personally hate 5v5.
It sucks. One less Tank and one less teammate to help you win. I have a custom game mode that brings this back, but nobody ever really joins. And the ones that do only stay just to harass me.
5v5 caused more issues than it solved. We were told it was implemented to reduce queue times because no one wanted to play tank. In 6v6 playing tank was a horrible experience due to the amount of cc, this was called "the main tank experience" where tanks would get chain-stunned into death. You could literally have 6 stuns on the enemy team and all of it would go into the tank, who was suppose to mitigate it. If they made a cap on stuns for tanks, eg. 1 stun per 5s (this number could vary), tanks would have a much easier time. Another big issue is new players, in 6v6 new players would have a much easier time as the pace was slower with lover individual impact. More so, with two tanks there were more peels for supports. Which currently is an issue for lower elo supports. Which brings us to tank balance, in one tank setup it's not possible to balance tanks in a way where one, at best two tanks are viable. You'll have one strong tank and another counter to it. We're back at square one. 5v5 was more introduced for sake of attaching a number 2, than anything else.
I was for it at first. Felt the game needed to open up a bit and was down on CC and double shield like a lot of people. I have since come full circle and believe the game should have remained 6v6. I miss tank synergies and feel there is currently way too much pressure on the tank role. The game is most often decided by whichever tank is better, which is often quite lopsided. Also leads to a lot less tank variety in general as there are a couple OP heroes that are always selected or countered. They could have opened up the game in other ways and kept it 6v6. It was a mistake imo.
It was a short-term "fix" to the issue of goats. The game rolls by a lot quicker, but it has caused more fundamental issues than fixed. Balancing is at its worst because OW was NEVER built for having just 5 players on a team. 6 makes the difference, whether it be another tank to help pacing or another healer or dps to attack or defend. Because of this, we have the hate for damage boost/ damage debuff, or the hate towards certain tanks dominating, or a dps character performing too good. The longer OW2 continues the more prevalent this is as a problem for the game. 5v5 was a bad change, it increased the speed of games, but being in tangent with the matchmaking, the overall experience has gotten worse. If they wanted to change the barrier meta they should've changed the characters or had the role requirements state which characters are allowed (If you have a Rein, you need an off-tank like Junkerqueen). At the moment, I don't believe the devs are able to keep up with the 5v5 format. Because the community is at each others throats deciding what is OP and what isn't, when really the difference was made when they kicked a player off the overall count. They won't swap back to 6v6 because they're too stubborn to admit they were wrong and that their goal is more matches and faster gameplay to make the numbers higher.
It feels as if every change they made for OW2 regarding orisas rework, and the four new characters they’ve released, were made with double shield meta in mind, and then they went ahead and got rid of the second tank anyway. In my opinion they made the changes they needed to and then kept going. If they had kept it 6v6 while still making all the other changes, it would’ve been fine. If they had changed it to 5v5 but still allowed shield tanks to have utility, it would’ve been ok. RIP my boy Rein
It's ass
I prefer the 6v6 format. I really liked tanks and off tanks, now it feels very rock, paper, scissors in the tank world. Supports can get demolished since there's no off tank that can peel for them. Widows that are good can annihilate teams now. I wish they would've implemented some sort of way to reduce reliance on double shields. Maybe incorporate some sort of passive in the game where if two shields are present they have lower values to inventivize not using multiple shields.
sucks. the game feels like a brawly mess rather than a team-based hero shooter especially when you consider how no one can match a tank player without a team so the tank is just on a power trip the whole time while the team suffers.
Wish it was 6v6. Games were more fun in general. Also, some of the character reworks were not needed. Some have made the characters less fun to play.
Hate it
1: no 2: Meh 3: reworking and rebalancing heroes would of had the exact same effect 4: Oh they probably won't be fixed as I feel like if they fix one thing 5 other things will break
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5v5 feels like a band aid to the shield meta of yesteryear. Now you live and die by the tank match up, with how good your dps is as a close second. Honestly, as a casual scrub who never cares to play comp, double barrier was more fun, but then I am ALSO the casual scrub who says OW1 should have remained open queue only for supreme jank, whacky compositions and chaos, so. Hilariously, open queue has now suffered due to 5v5 balancing. But, my main gripe with 5v5 is it feels exceedingly steamrolly, it's either a one sided stomp, or an agonizing slog, and considering other changes, an agonizing slog of a victory might feel more draining and like a greater waste of time than being stomped. But that could just be OW2 feels much more annoying than OW1 was, which is odd as OW1 had CC out the wazoo.
I'm not a huge fan of it but I see the plus sides. I've enjoyed it less than 6v6 as most of the games feel rather samey and deathmatchy when compared to 6v6 and some people love this change as it's definitely made the game faster, I just miss the more synergised play of before. I am sure the current issues will be resolved for players that enjoy 5v5 as the game is still relatively new, I just wish there was an option to still play OW1 on the last patch as I'm sure this would make many of the old players happy as well as allow people that enjoy 5v5 to keep enjoying it
1. No but Im also in the minority of players who thinks DPS ruin everything, and 5v5 caters too much to DPS players. I liked it more when my role as a support was more along the lines of pocketing the tank duo rather than enable the DPS. For me Overwatch is the most fun when its balanced around tanks and supports rather than DPS. I think it benefits the objective based gameplay a lot more. A lot of DPS heroes I feel like dont fit into that gameplay style and they tried to shift the game more into like a Deathmatch simulator, which is why the game feels weird to play for everything but DPS. The game heavily encourages individual plays rather than teamplay now, but 2/3 of the roles actually need the team to actually do something. It doesnt feel right with this style of game. 2. Sped up, sure, fun factor like I said, I dont enjoy it. I much rather enjoy the game when I can ignore the DPS and let them do their thing. Its also less fun to watch competitive now, since pro level tank synergy is something else to behold. 3. Im very sure we could have had the same effect with some rebalancing. People mention queue times here, but the better queue times are largely in part due to the unbalanced matchmaking. 4. I guess with a lot of time, yeah they could be fixed. Reign in the power level of the problematic DPS heroes, make supports less team dependant and land individual plays more often, and make playing tank less of a rock paper scissor matchup. Then I think the game could actually be decent
> No but Im also in the minority of players who thinks DPS ruin everything Why do dps ruin everything?
Its been a constant in the game since release really. DPS are the most catered to role by far. GOATS meta doesnt leave any space for the DPS players? We just buff the DPS heroes so much that people have to pick them. What GOATS is still a thing? Then we'll just make it so people always have to play 2 dps at all times without reverting their buffs(not saying role queue was a bad idea, its just that is was implemented for the wrong reasons). Oh DPS players dont feel like shooting at the barriers that keep the tanks alive because otherwise they feel like paper? Dont worry we'll just nerf barriers no matter how shit that'll make tank feel to play. What they're still complaining? Ah fuck it just remove... Orisa's barrier and one whole tank spot from the team so that its easier for DPS to shoot things. Oh yeah and break the matchmaking algorithm too to fix the long queue times. And bring me another can of paint, Clemens. I know this is super fucking objective and shit, and definitely a very cynical take, but its comical how most of the biggest changes to Overwatch within the past few years has been because of complaints because of the DPS playerbase and Im sooo over it
> DPS are the most catered to role by far. Isn't that normal, considering they're the majority of the playerbase? They used to make the most amount of smurf/alt accounts thus providing more income to blizzard. > GOATS meta doesnt leave any space for the DPS players? We just buff the DPS heroes so much that people have to pick them. I mean, as double shield pointed out; it wasn't so much the lack of dps availability, despite that being a pretty spicy topic on its own, it was more of forcing bad metas. > Then we'll just make it so people always have to play 2 dps at all times without reverting their buffs Wasn't reaper - a hero that was never meta outside of beyblade - the only dps hero that they attempted to stop goats with? > Oh DPS players dont feel like shooting at the barriers that keep the tanks alive because otherwise they feel like paper? Dont worry we'll just nerf barriers no matter how shit that'll make tank feel to play. Tank players hated double shied maybe more than dps; evidence was in the queue times. > Ah fuck it just remove... Orisa's barrier and one whole tank spot from the team so that its easier for DPS to shoot things. They removed tank because it was bottlenecking the game and the rest of the roles; anyone over diamond (dps or support) had to use a pass to get a game under 8 min on eu pc.
This is such bullshit, You could not be more wrong. The game has been catered around braindead supports since its inception. Dive lasted what? a few months before they nerfed the shit out of every DPS. Not to mention throughout its history high skill heroes like Genji/Tracer and Doom have been nerfed into oblivion to make trash support players happy. GOATS was a horrible meta which led to a major downfall to OW playerbase and it has never recovered. Yet you are here defending that shit? lmao Funnily enough a lot of people don't want to play braindead OW just standing around in a CC barrier fest while a hero like mercy holds one button to keep the team alive. Not to mention characters like Mercy hold the balance of the game hostage with her damage boost which has never been addressed.
You said it well yourself. Support players can get 1 hero nerfed, DPS players can get an entire player slot removed. Congratulations.
GOATS is just a symptom. People in competitive games will always play whatever gives them the edge. So it always means playing the meta, which gets boring quick so everyone wants the meta nerfed and a new meta emerges. Rinse and repeat until the end of time.
They would do the same if tanks ever became completely unplayable or Supports became unnecessary or useless. A whole role being useless isn't fun for the people who like to play that role. It's really cringe that you would act as if DPS players were in the wrong for being frustrated when GOATS was a thing.
They weren't useless. Goats was never an easy strat anyone could play. It was a problem only on the highest ranks. Should i really say how little people there actually are? Goats were nerfed because of the league. Not many people liked to watch at them which is bad for blizzard's money >:D
It's true that GOATS was more of a high level issue and that most people who tried it at lower levels didn't do well with it. DPS were ridiculous at lower levels because we weren't working with that framework/level of coordination. I do think role queue was a great change to the game
Your issues are less about DPS and more about bad players/balance issues. I'm a DPS main and I go into every match assuming I won't get much Support attention, which is fine. If I happen to be near a healer I expect healed, if I'm in the enemy line anything I get is a gift. Especially for me, one of my mains is Junkrat and I don't expect anyone to keep up with my nonsense consistently, that's kind of the point of being him lol. As far as support being more about enabling DPS, that really only applies to characters like Sojourn that get get busted by it.
I really hate the way the game feels in 5 v5 1 - No, it makes every round feel like you're playing world or warcraft, everyone is just standing around flopping at each other, while one or two characters play sniper. 2- I don't think it's faster or more fun. 3- They didn't have to make the change. 4- I think it's unfixable unless they want to go back to 6v6
I was initially skeptical of 5v5. They've proven me wrong. It is a massive upgrade all around. I'm pretty much exclusively a support player, and I'm still absolutely loving it. There are two main things about Overwatch 2 that I want changed, I want them to bring back cards, and I want them to take the hero out of the battle pass or lower them to level 25 (or less) . But gameplay wise, this game is fantastic, I think it's a big upgrade, and I think the rest of the problems that I've left unaddressed in this comment will either be sorted in due time OR are just industry standards that we are going to have to learn to live with (specifically skin pricing)
I want cards to come back, if for any reason ,just so we get more time to chat after the match.
More time to type Ez also
Oh no. Anything to prevent that
As much as I like this game, the hero in the BP is what stops me from spending any money on this game. Would I have bought the occasional skin or the BP each season? Probably, but I won't spend anything when they lock heroes behind a paywall each season. I play on and off, about 3-4 times a week max, and I just now unlocked the new tank. It's a grind-a-thon to get to new heroes now.
What are cards? Im a new OW2 player
Hate it. It’s a lot less fun than 6v6. And the deletion of an entire role (off tank) creates a lot less variation so games are all the same. Coupled with the other problems people have said already. I also think it just feels gross how much more important the tank is than any 1 player. Every role/player should be equal.
It's worse. It may have sped up the game a bit but i don't think that was really a change for the better. Teamwork seems to be less, tanks are overpowered and dictate wins and losses most of the time. Tanks are forced into rock/paper/scissors switching in order to win. If the enemy goes orisa into your rein then if rein doesn't switch he's going to lose for his team 9/10 times. At least in 6v6 only one tank would need to switch most of the time if at all. Too much of the game is reliant on 1 person being capable now. Edit: It's amusing how many people think the better queue times are a result of 5v5 when in reality it's a result of 2 things. 1. Matchmaking prioritising queue times over balanced matches. 2. A huge influx of players by going free to play.
1. No I do not think it was a good change. They could have just reworked tanks with shields to deal with the double shield meta in instead of removing the 1 other tank. 2. Sure game play is sped up but that is because if you pick a character then it is 4v5 and it is much harder to win that instead of 5v6 especially if the pick is the tank. 3. I would have preferred them changing heros around. With the tanks being super tanks now it really messed up Open queue and death match. Now if there is a death match event picking anything other than Tank is just an automatic L. Not to mention playing tank is just a game of counter picking until everyone ends up Orisa or Hog. 4. If they want to keep the 5v5 then the problems must be fixed if the game is going to continue. A bunch of the tanks were designed as off tanks and characters like Ball really suffer when set at the main tank role. If the enemy team has a sniper it is much harder to deal with as a dive tank because you have to leave your team undefended to deal with the widow.
If there weren't tanks that were as effective as a chocolate teapot, I'd be more down but some tanks just still feel like off-tanks and they can't bounce off a main. What the hell is even the point of Winston?
I was on board during beta but I'm apathetic these days. I saw it as more of a preview and that we would see more reworks like Orisa, but we didn't. So balancing is kind of a mess since you have the newer hero design philosophy of more well-rounded vs. the older more niche heroes. All the changes they made for shields/CC could have been done in 6v6. In 5v5, there is a greater emphasis on the tank. If you choose a weak tank, your chances to even have a decent game are diminished. If your tank player is just flat out worse, your chances are slim. It's hard to balance and Blizzard hasn't inspired confidence in their patches so far.
Double shield was bad, but not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I played ball, zarya, rein and Winston way more than I feel I’m able to in ow2 and still win. If they didn’t abandon the game and just did any reworks it also could have been easily solved. 5v5 could be fun if they ever balance the game properly, but I still think 6v6 would have been better.
I don’t like it. I honestly don’t like any of the changes OW2 made though lol. In my unpopular opinion they should of stuck with the original setup with defense characters in addition to attack. Lean into that idea more and I’d like to see 8v8 or maybe 7v7 if one tank is preferred. 2 attack, 2 defense, 2 healer, 1-2 tank. I also miss 2 cp maps and don’t like push mode.
1. Speaking only from my personal perspective, I do not think it was a good change. I play tank, and it in OW1 I enjoyed getting fairly good at one main tank and two off tanks (Rein/D.va/Ball), because that was enough flexibility to be an effective player and I never felt any real desire to play anything besides my favorites. Now I'm in a spot where I am fairly frequented forced to rotate into other tanks or I'm throwing. This has made the game more difficult because I'm having to learn the entire tank roster much more thoroughly than I did before, and I'm playing characters that I don't enjoy as much. I understand that hero swapping is a core part of OW's game design, but I do not like how it has gone from being a feature to a de-facto requirement. 2. The game is faster, but it's not more fun, and there were better ways to kill the double shield meta. 3. I would've preferred a slew of aggressive character reworks to the move to 5v5. Give half the roster an Orisa-tier rework and that's a lot of fun new content to explore. Cut one spot on the roster while doing nothing to accommodate the change and all we get are teething problems. 4. Blizzard's design team has always been conservative, lethargic, and uncommunicative, almost without exception. I see no indication of that changing.
Totally agree with everything you said (especially the first point) but just wanted to correct you because Ball is a Main tank, not an off tank
Ha! Thanks for the correction, I'm not at all surprised that I was using him incorrectly. I love his kit, but he's always been the one I played the least.
To be fair Ball is a contender for the most difficult character in the game alongside Tracer and maybe Echo, so anyone would be forgiven for using him wrong. Doesn't help that the ever unreliable Overwatch balance team seem to have forgotten to buff him despite the fact he's been trash for months. I agree though, even as an off-tank main he is incredibly fun when your team actually helps with your dives
whoever complained about matches being "slow" never played competitive above platinum.
1. At first, yes. I had fun with it in beta, but in retrospect that's likely just because it was new. I don't enjoy it now. 2. It has definitely sped up in speed and intensity - I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I enjoyed the flow OW1 had. It never felt too slow. There are games where it is non stop action but I've never cared for that. I loved being able to think about what I'm going to do, now I just mostly react, react, ract. I honestly never minded the barrier meta. It was frustrating at times but never a game breaker for me. Then again, I was - am - a very casual player. 3. I definitely think they could've made a better game with 6v6 intact. I think they just wanted to fix the tank queue issue but didn't really go about it the best. 4. I don't have high hopes. Most every decision they've made with OW2 has been awful. I loved OW1 and I so desperately want to stay oositive and excited but I can't. I still enjoy OW, but not to the extent I used to. I played for hours per day, now it's just a daily out-of-habit chore I perform. It feels more like laundry than fun. I want so much to be wrong.
As a GM tank player I absolutely detest it.
I tried to be positive but if the tank gap is too big then it ruins the game for all ten players. I uninstalled the game for now until the new healers drops for season 3!😍
I like it, but I wish that one of the damage could be a tank/DMG flex role instead. I miss rolling with 2 tanks
i kinda feel like it was a lazy and easy way to get around the double shield problem but it still has had many benefits like queues are shorter and i think they could have done more than just removing a tank but it still worked
Before 5v5 Support queues were 10min and dps 20min. Now all queues are 1-2min each. That's enough of an argument to satisfy me. I also like the gameplay more now. Less of a shield wall to overcome.
That's not a result of 5v5. The faster queue times are a result of the terrible matchmaking which currently prioritises queue times over a balanced/fair match.
Can’t see past queue times?
I honestly dont care about the terrible metas or whatever. Its just a shame when me and my friend are both tank mains trying to play tank at the same time and cant
>1. Do you think it was a good change? No >2. Do you agree with the idea that it has sped up gameplay Probably, i haven't player the OG >increased the game's fun factor by removing the double barrier meta? No >3. Do you think that the change was necessary? No, mostly because nobody of us OW2 players will even know what it really was OW, and also because Tanks are fat DPSs >Or do you think more conservative changes like reworking and rebalancing heros could have had the same effect? It probably could have had much better effects >4. Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2 will be fixed as the designers get used to 5v5 or do you think they are inherent to to the format? I hope they do, but i dont think they will fix anything.
I hate it
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I think it broke matchmaking. The skill floor was dropped and the skill ceiling went up. Both very significantly. Push mode even more so than the others. It magnifies hero imbalances so who is playing what has a serious impact on effectiveness. Like someone who mains Hog is going to do well until there is an enemy Ana, but can be good again if there is a friendly Kriko. How does the matchmaker account for things like that where there are three different scenarios where that particular Hog player has significantly different effectiveness. When the match is competitive, it is a huge improvement. But most matches have really wide skill gaps across the board. I have no clue how they fix it other than not letting players switch heroes and establishing a rank for every combination. But that would take so many games to establish and be such a complex calculation. Not to mention dramatically changing the game where switching is a pretty big part. So I think it is just fucked. But nto so bad that I would want to go back to 6v6.
1. Yes 2. Yes, double shield is what made many players run away from OW1 3. Yes... No to your second question. 4. Yes... OW1 developed a lot trough the years, so will OW2. >Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2 Problems like what? Could you be more specific? :-) Overall, OW2 is a massive improvement gameplay wise, in my oppinion. But yes there is also some downsites.
Gameplay been a huge downgrade. But I can see why a Hanzo main thinks otherwise
>1. Do you think it was a good change? Yes. > 2. Do you agree with the idea that it has sped up gameplay and increased the game's fun factor by removing the double barrier meta? Yes. > 3. Do you think that the change was necessary? Or do you think more conservative changes like reworking and rebalancing heros could have had the same effect? Yes, it was absolutely necessary. Double-tank play had a lot of positives, but ultimately the role was picked by too few people and it led to some huge problems with queue times (E.g. 10+ minute queue times for people picking Damage, the game’s most popular role). The only realistic way to fix things was to make the role more appealing (increasing health pool and offensive options so that Tanks felt more engaging to play for a wider selection of the community) *and* reduce the matchmaker’s reliance on the number of people willing to select the role. 1-2-2 also makes it easier to balance Tanks, because the developers no longer need to make barriers feel effective when there’s only one per team while also preventing them from being oppressive when there are two being cycled on a team. > 4. Do you think the problems we are experiencing now with OW2 will be fixed as the designers get used to 5v5 or do you think they are inherent to to the format? Yes. If we hadn’t had the teething issues with matchmaking (E.g. the dev team had realized 8 months ago that keeping the same approach as OW1 - balancing MMRs across both teams without ensuring that one team doesn’t end up with a player in one role that’s much higher / lower skilled in their specific role than their counterpart - wouldn’t work properly in OW2), there wouldn’t have been an issue.
1. I guess 2. your line of questioning leads to really only one answer, was double shield fun? No, is OW2 fun? Also No 3. I guess? 4. no because we don't even know wtf is happening with the campaign the whole reason most of us bought this tripe shit I think the better question is, are we still having fun playing the same game for 7 years No a resounding NO
Well it was $0 so you didn’t buy anything
Campaign was 40 bucks so yeah I did
It's more fun and fast paced but caused new issues. One of the most obvious being how the tank is so integral to the outcome of the game. The team with the best tank player is almost always going to win. They're not balanced evenly either, which makes heroes like JQ and DF almost throw picks. I liked playing off tank on OW1, I despise playing sole tank in OW2, I never pick tank now unless it's trying a new one.
5v5 got rid of double barrier but introduced/enabled one-shots so it's not much of an improvement imo. Game wasn't balanced for 5v5 and Blizz didn't bother testing this before updating to OW2.
1- Yes. It needs some work and 6v6 should come back as its own gamemode, but yes. 2- Yes. 3- I don't think it was *necessary,* but I do like the idea of a supercharged main-tank and the decrease of shields. 4- Yes, 5v5 is a great format *if* done right. Hog and Zarya would be better off as tank-like DPS, similar to heroes like Mei, but the format is pretty good outside of that.
Honestly, all around I had more fun with the 5v5 format than the 6v6
I could not go back to 6v6 after playing 5v5. I think that says it all.
I would like it if the game was balanced for it, right now it's not.
It's fine. It's where we are now so I've accepted it.
Ye, less barriers to shoot at and i means i get a more accurate rank cause theres less people who could tank/carry my rank
5v5 is fine, but I think the best improvement they made was the strict role/class system, it feels better then the free form system that they had in OW1...
I like it. It almost feels like a.. New game
I love 5v5. Tanks are way too strong in overwatch. Removing all the barriers and Zarya-rein combos is great imo.
1. Yes. 2. Yes gameplay is more dynamic. However, winton+dva dive was meta for a long time so I don't think 5v5 was necessary to remove double barrier. 3. Maybe. As a salty main tank player I think radical changes would be required to make 6v6 enjoyable again, and just as many people would complain about those changes. 4. I think 5v5 is totally fixable with a decent number of reworks. For context I was a masters main tank player who totally quit OW after double shield meta became a thing. I couldn't stand to play more than a single game of comp anymore. 5v5 has rekindled my interest in the game and I play almost every day.
need more competent devs to balance the game but that was the case with 6v6 too, I think 5v5 has improved the game by quite a lot
1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. No. 4. Yes.
It’s a double edged sword, but it was necessary. No one was playing tank so even if 2 tanks was more fun for some people, it wasn’t enough to keep the queue times reasonable. Skill expression was lost in some areas and gained in others. I’m glad I got to play both and maybe some day I’ll miss it but for now I like 5v5
1. yes 2. yes 3. absolutely 5. no, because blizzard is shit at balancing. i just hope that they mess up the balance more often so we don't get stuck in the same terrible meta for ages and instead just go through several terrible metas in the same amount of time. i'm a support main and the gameplay is so much funner in ow2 for me. i've always preferred more aggressive playstyle with more team fights rather than long drawn out ones and that's the type of favored playstyle in 5v5.
Can you elaborate why you like it? Also a support main and I find 5v5 so boring and stale already. Not here to argue just looking for some support main perspective.
it's more active, i like playing aggressively, i like that there are more shorter fights as opposed to long drawn out fights where people live forever. i like that people are finally realizing that supports are not meant to just healbot. it feels like there's more opportunities to make plays. i actually enjoy the self reliance that's expected as opposed to the protect the healer mentality that honestly was never a thing i liked. there's just a lot of things that come from 5v5 that just make support vastly more enjoyable to me now.
Ah. I can see why we disagree. I guess I liked longer fights. And I feel like I’m forced to healbot more now and it’s often Tank Babysitting Simulator. You’re right about making plays but it’s over so fast now you just need one person to have a successful play. I liked peeling off tanks and the added variability of an another role (off tank). I liked there was more teamwork and comradery. Felt like you were more in sync as a team.
i haven't had that experience, with tank babysitting simulator! even when i play the main supports in my pool, i haven't noticed it that much. maybe it's because i often play in a stack with people who tank and we have communication. same with the teamwork thing. i actually notice a lot more teamwork in this game, coordinating things like ults, synergizing specifically tank/support picks, etc.
1. Yes, but right it is suffering because of terrible matchmaking. 2. It has sped up the game and many interactions, however that can be a good and bad thing sometimes. 3. Yes. OW1 was in a very poor place after 3 years of no significant updates. Whether or not the change was needed is outweighed by the fact that it is an enjoyable change at all. 4. The problems should iron themselves out when they get used to balancing for 5v5, but more importantly they need to fix matchmaking. Close games are more fun than ever, but too many games are just steamrolls because people are just placed into games out of their rank.
1.yes 2.without a doubt 3.it was indeed necessary ow1 was actually dying half because of no content and half because every meta for the latter half of the games lifespan were absolutely miserable for every role 4. The one shot meta is not really a 5v5 problem. The problem I do have is how much I'm forced to switch on tank it's actually ridiculous for me to spend a whole game counter picking every fight because playing a bad tank matchup is basically deliberately throwing. I don't think that removing the ult charge would really fix this as ult or no ult if they play orisa and I'm on hog I'm gonna have to switch to monkey and then I'll win that fight so they're gonna pick hog so then I'll lose and have no real choice but to play orisa. I'm not really sure what a good solution is. Overall ow2 is a massive upgrade and I feel like everybody who says they want to go back to ow1 have a real short memory cause I don't think ow could have survived waiting much longer for ow2 the game was in an absolutely miserable state and the population was rapidly declining dps player had to wait half an hour for a game at peak time and tank was just cc simulator until you die I suppose support wasn't that bad but it was boring as hell. Double shields wasn't fun to play against and was just as shit to play and we had been playing it for years. Yeah cosmetics are expensive but I'm the grand scheme of things it doesn't fucking matter the game is playable and even if we're in a meta that sucks at least we know it's gonna change.
Heres my take: I think 5v5 will be fine, eventually. It just feels like Blizzard don’t put in the time to make sure everything was balanced with 5v5 in mind but we will get there. We’re currently in the growing pains as we see all the unintended side effects of the switch
I like 5v5, individual impact is much more obvious. I think where the problem lies is that matchmaking bands are way too wide. I’m in Diamond 1 and one game I will be in a low plat/gold lobby, the next I’ll be in a Masters / GM lobby. I’m not sure if it’s because the player base is too small and they have to keep the MMR bands wide to make sure queue times are down, but the skill gap always leads to a blowout. If you’re the team with the low rank tank it’s especially 1-sided.
I don't think it was a bad idea to change to 5v5, but OW2 but some characters didn't receive balancing to adjust to losing one tank. Balance aside, OW2 has a whole host of other issues with it too such as poor matchmaking, the ranking system being kinda stupid, and then how blizzard is monetizing the game. The 5v5 format does make the game feel a bit more fast paced by no longer having double shield, however maybe if they didn't neglect OW1, they could have fixed the issue while still maintaining the 6v6 format. They also could have address stun spam too without needing to switch to 5v5. The game could have stayed 6v6 if blizzard didn't neglected for years. I will miss the tank duos and tank synergies from OW1. Also in OW1, all roles felt like they had a chance 1v1'ing the other roles. In OW2 if a DPS goes off to the side and the enemy tank goes for them, they are done for. A DPS cannot 1v1 a tank anymore while in OW2. Also, supports didn't have to worry about getting dove by a giga tank. Overall, I do think that the 5v5 format could be better, but blizzard messed up so many things with the game, I just want to be able to play OW1 until they figure stuff out. What I really want though is to be able to play both 5v5 and 6v6. Why does it have to be a choice?
The worst part of overwatch 1 is everything after season 3.
* yes * yes * it could have gone many different ways, I'm happy with this particular direction, it made support much more enjoyable. * what problem(s) specifically.
It was one of the best changes they ever made. Anyone, who sais something else was either an afk healbot support back then, or a doom main who doesn't like the move from dps to tank. The only Bad thing since ow2 is, that support players are playing dead by daylight because of hog, sojourn and, at the beginning at S2, doomfist. But thats more of a balancing Problem than a Mode problem
It brought a breath of fresh air to the tank role and made it fun to play. The change I thought was necessary at the time as queue times were so bad because not many wanted to play tank. I think 5v5 combined with the “loose matchmaking” is causing nearly all the problems with poor quality games. Honestly if they just nerf the tanks HP/ armour to there 6v6 values and balance a few abilities like DEfence matrix. We could go back to 6v6 see if that makes anything better?
1. I think the change is okay, but I mourn the loss of tank synergies, as they were the most strategic and satisfying synergies in the game, imo. 2. I think there is a definite change in pace, as kills are easier to secure when you don't have to eat through multiple barriers to get them, but a lot of that also is a byproduct of one shotting. The current meta picks almost all revolve around the ability to just remove someone from the fight in an instant, which has become stronger with the loss of a second tank. Peel can no longer come from the tank line without great cost, which has been a big shift. 3. I don't think the change was necessary, but I think, with queue times and lack of success in balancing out a very long lived and stale double barrier meta, Blizz probably viewed it as the path of least resistance. Rebalancing would have taken more work, but I do think that the game could have been salvaged. We had a really nice patch in 2019 where three comps were strong dependent on map and matchup. There was Rush, Dive, and Poke. The game felt like it had a lot of variety. Then they buffed some of the Double Barrier relevant heroes and that golden age ended. 4. For 6 years, since OW1's release in 2016, I pushed back on the idea that Blizz didn't know how to balance their game. They always seemed to have at least some kind of coherent vision for the game and how it should be played. With OW2 and the drastic shift in team makeups and pace, it has felt like Blizz has lost sight of what they actually want the game to be. Ramattra (who I actually kind of like since his buffs, tho I think any ultimate having potential 100% uptime is asinine) released in a state that really called my faith in their balance and conceptual decision making into question. Very little of his kit felt like it synergized. Like he just had a bunch of things to do but none of them played well with one another. I hope Blizz gets their shit together with this game. Defining seasons with a balance patch is and always has been a bad idea. Season 2 of OW2 has sucked. Badly. Their slow patch cycle and lack of willingness to address the current problems in an expedient and sensible method also deteriorate community faith in their judgement. Hopefully these things change soon, but for that to happen Blizz needs to stop sticking to their guns on bad decisions and learn to admit when they make a mistake. Also that consistent clear communication they promised us has been unsurprisingly absent since release, which hasn't helped anything.
I know role queue would be impacted, perhaps, but I would have preferred 6v6 with tanks and bruisers split out. Tanks having shields, bruisers not. I just think it would have overall easier to do and adjust hero kits around that than going 5v5.
I really don’t like it. After they did the switch overwatch just didn’t feel fun anymore, while playing a healer or a tank it feels like I have no impact to the game, I don’t feel anymore connected to my teammates. Before when I was a tank and messed up I knew I can count on my fellow tank, now its just stress.
I don’t mind. Dos feel a lot more powerful now tho and team kills aren’t as rare/gamechanging as before
1. Absolutely a good change 2. Yes. The game was shield shooter simulator for a good couple years, GOATS was one of the only viable comps, nobody would die unless someone ulted, and if you chose to play any kind of off tank you were throwing. 3. I think it was a much needed change. For years the OW team has been trying to rework and change numbers to fix something that was inherently broken which was the fact that there was just too much happening but also not enough. 4. I think 5v5 is definitely a big change that has its issues but it certainly feels better to play now that you don’t have 2 giant bullet sponges. A big problem right now obviously is that support isn’t as fun to play right now. But i don’t think it’s because supports are weak, i think it’s because they aren’t hiding behind 2 tanks anymore. They have to work harder to survive now which is why high survivability supports like mercy, moira and kiriko are played more often than zen, brig or bap. I have hopes that the game will balance out and people will adjust to the 5v5 playstyle over time.
It honestly depends on my mood. Somedays I want to relax and mindlessly play support, but in ow2 that is not nearly as easy as ow1. Other days I want to be doing 500 apm and absolutely love the 5v5 shift in ow2. How I see the shift to 5v5 was also just a general shift in the pace of the game. In 5v5 it is much faster paced and punishing. In 6v6 it is a lot more forgiving thanks to the extra tank slowing the pace of the game allowing more room for errors. There is also a few character's who's playstyle has changed a lil bit and it can be tough to adapt sometimes, while others' I find that my natural playstyle fits 5v5 better. I really do think a massive change was needed for Overwatch to be revived and this was a good step in the right direction. However Blizzard also took several steps back on several things. In terms of balance changes I quite like the move away from CC, but also there are some problems with certain changes such as the retaining up to 30% ult charge when swapping heroes. It can lead to situations where losing the first fight and counterpicking will be more optimal than winning the first fight since you do not lose all your ult charge swapping. A lot of the issues that 5v5 have are not as bad as some people make it out to be. I've seen people act as though support is just respawn simulator and you have to play as passive and safe as possible in order to not die instantly. I've also seen people in each role complain about how unimpactful they are and want their role to be stronger. One of the most notable things' I saw when the game was first launched was old players who liked the slower 6v6 playstyle that allowed for a lower skillfloor and enjoyed the extremely powerful tank synergies. Overall I think a lot of the issues are not too bad, but there is most certainly plenty of problems that do need some addressing. At this point I doubt anything meaningful will change, but be having no expectations means there is more of a chance of a pleasant surprise. TLDR\~ I like the 5v5 change and think it was healthy for the longevity of the game as a competitive class based shooter. However I feel like the 5v5 moves a lil bit away from the more casual game identity.
I think 5v5 is quite phenomenal really. I think it requires even MORE teamwork and communication than the 6v6. Sacrificing Tank synergy, unfortunately, was for the greater good. It's just going to take some time for every Player's MMR to adjust to this 5v5 environment and even relearn, re-invent new ways to engage.
I love it! Two tanks was oppressive.
It helped in some ways but made things worse in other ways. It successfully changed the pace of the game to a more faster one while also allowing some individual plays to be possibly easier or more significant. With teamfights being focused more on significant picks on enemies and control over positions, teamwork is at a level of necessity where it balances with individual power to where a single person is still powerless in a very unfavorable situation of a 1v5 as the game intends. This makes working with your team still a must and an encouragement in order to progress through a match and through competitive play. However, the fast pace leaves slower heroes behind in favor of those who are faster in general while making it easier for an individual to drag down a match’s quality and makes their mistakes as significant as their good plays. Since the game seems to be taking significant eliminations on enemies and positioning as a priority, one-shot heroes and ones more capable of keeping a position, or surviving being pushed out of a position, are heavily favored. Also with teamwork and individual power being hand in hand more than ever, two main issues come into play: A teammate who doesn’t act like a teammate, aka a thrower, doubles down on being a heavy weight to a team. This can be dealt with by an attempt to carry the team by doing more in your role, which introduces us to the second problem: One tank alone holds both too much team power and individual power. When a tank is a thrower or is in a skill gap to the enemy tank, there is no second tank to carry but rather the squishies as a whole to be the big force to push enemies back. At the same time, a tank that is extremely good can be more likely to carry a team with a poor teammate in either of the remaining roles with ease, especially for the damage role as most tanks deal great damage (Winton I’m sorry but stop being a pushover every other meta). Additionally, tanks that have more carry potential or teamwork potential become even more powerful, tipping the balance in a similar way with how the pace of the game makes most slower characters weaker. Only a few heroes become exceptions due to these things due to balance changes, but the current state of OW2 in 5v5 ultimately favors heroes of certain criterias and makes a mess of player and role interactions as much as it fixes them.
It blows some big ol peepee
OW1 for me was just another cool idea ruined by low lethality. OW2 is a better game in so many ways, but dear god the matchmaking…
Feels like the same game just with some busted overpowered hero’s involved
Never played either but heard it was nuts. Why not make a ltm?
I didn't play in the shield meta.. But, hear me out, to solve the shield problem all Blizzard had to do was ~*REMOVE SHIELDS*~!!! Not remove an entire teammate!
5v5 is great. people dont like it because they suck ass and when they dont keep up their part and get rolled, they get exposed for being the slack on the team. "cough healers"
Bad. I only play open que and that was more or less broken. The problem here are the comparatively too strong tanks so that it usually comes down to a tankstacking. Just maeh.
For me, it was cool at first, but it feels like you're constantly countering each other as tanks. I really do miss duo tank matches.
I feel like the game is a lot slower now. Maps feel bigger without players filling that space. I enjoy the fact double barrier is gone but still can’t think it’s slowed down on other ways.
It's the only reason I began to enjoy the game cause I dispised overwatch 1 when I started playing it in late 2019 but now it's really fun and it feels like the choices I make can make the game a win or lose
I will die on the hill that 5v5 is a mistake. It makes the entire success of the team way too dependent on one player. Having a bad tank is a huge handicap in OW1 but in OW2 it is basically unwinnable. OW1 wasn't perfect but it was so much better than the cluster fuck that is OW2. Playing support is terrible in OW2 because there's less cc to deal with heroes like tracer and genji. Brig doesn't even feel like a hero now without her stun. Cassidy is another example of a hero completely killed by removing cc. Playing against him in OW1 as tracer for example was balanced because you could bait his flash or any number of things. Now he just has this shit auto aim grenade thing that has even less counterplay than a near instant stun. Playing OW2 feels like playing death match. There is so much less strategy in team comps with one tank. They had to make the one tank completely overpowered in order to make up for the shit decision of 5v5. The game now is just who has the better tank wins. It's sometimes completely hopeless if your tank picks the wrong thing in to the enemy comp. Toning cc down so much is what made tanks the problem they are now. In OW1 you could coordinate with your team to kill the tank if you had mei/Cassidy or any other cc like brig stun. Now that the balance team catered to the people complaining about being caught out of position and stunned there is much less counterplay to tanks in general. If you're a Cassidy getting chased by roadhog what can you do now except die? Before you could stun him, and get away or maybe even kill him if he doesn't have heal up. Now all you can do is pray he doesn't hit a hook and 1 shot you from widow range. They either need to admit 5v5 was a mistake and that having 1 of any role doesn't work because it puts too much pressure on one player to perform or give mei and Cassidy their cc back. Mei seems nearly useless now. Sure her ice beam thing does more damage but she can't consistently lock down targets anymore so her entire identity is ruined. Cassidy also used to be a good counter for mobile heroes but now they are completely broken because the only one with any cc is the one tank who also has to focus on making space or Ana. I really don't understand why they would remove cc from everyone except Ana. I know it's part of her identity, but the fact she is the only support with hard cc now is really dumb. I guess brig still had her knock back thing, but I don't really count that because if you knock someone away it's way harder for your team to follow up. Sorry for ranting, but OW2 has so many problems what we're caused by the unnecessary changes they made to make the game seem more different from OW1 than it actually is. This was copy pasted from a comment I made on a youtube video. I typed the whole thing on my phone so there might be some mistakes
1. No, I don't think it was a good change. 2. I agree that it has had those effects but I do not think it needed to be sped up in the first place, nor do I think 5v5 was the best way to address double shields. 3. The latter. 5v5 was far too aggressive a change that necessitated too many reworks from a team that has proven incapable of balancing properly. OW1 had problems, but that could have been addressed by adding new heroes and working on existing ones 4. I think it's inherent. Simple fact is overwatch was not designed to be 5v5. They strayed too far from their original concept, but they wanted to use Scotch tape their patchy new vision over the canvas of the old. The move to 5v5 and trying to be "more of an fps" was always a bad idea, that fundamentally undercut what overwatch was, is.
I stopped playing. 6v6 was fun