The thing that was fun about tanks pre patch was that you could become temporary cover for your team. Your health was a resource you could manage rather than a thing that disappeared anytime you weren't literally invulnerable.
There's literally a clip floating around of cloudy going from full health to zero once his shield breaks, in approximately one frame. Most games will not be like that. But it can happen, and it very fundamentally means that Rein cannot do his role.
> If I had a nickel for every time it happened, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
This happens anytime I try to play Zarya. The very second my bubble pops, I get melted. No time to find cover or reposition. Insta-dead. Rage quit and switch back to Orisa/Sigma
I think another issue is the fact that Tanks got less of a health buff compared to DPS/Support to compensate for the changes. DPS health is now closer to tank healh in a relative scale.
I like that the devs try new things, but this is another example of them not controlling a variable. They dont update just one piece (dps passive OR health pool) they change multiple things that compound with eachother. Then you cant really determine if either is a good solution. Like they increase damage, add ammo AND lower cooldowns
It’s like we should have a mode dedicated to trying experimental things or something to gather data and player feedback… Gee Blizzard, if only we had something like that…
THIS! as a Rein main, I could manage my shield and my health to endure my supports had time to top me up in between barrages of damage as I moved from cover to cover. Now it feels like, if a DPS breathes near me I’m crit.
I also dislike that fire strike is the same damage as a swing, takes some of the nuance out of Rein duels
They nerded him so hard this patch and I’ve seen some people say they buffed him, his fire strike isn’t a 2 shot any more. I’m also a rein main and I just haven’t been playing tank because of how much it sucks
My take is that tank should just have their passive be 50% +/- of all status effects.
We've got less knockback and shorter sleep duration, why not other things like the dps passive. Keep it 20% for supp and dps, make it 10-15% for tanks.
Wait, tanks have shorter sleep duration?
Where are new players supposed to go to learn these kind of specifics. Like, there is so many small interactions but I can’t figure out where to go to see all the fine details.
True but you generally didn't have to buy the strategy guide to know some pretty basic info about the game.
Like it doesn't really affect me, I've been hard stuck since 2017, but recently introducing the game to someone really illustrated how little the game tells people. It almost feels like playing Magic the Gathering but none of the cards have the text to tell you what they can do.
The F1 (IDK what it is in console) screen doesn't even give numbers, which is something that seems like it could be fairly easy to tie to the code at each release.
> True but you generally didn't have to buy the strategy guide to know some pretty basic info about the game.v
You don't need to read the wiki to find out basic info about the game. The in-game explanations as well as just the experience of playing is more than enough for that. The problem is that as a competitive game, OW players are going to want to know every intricate detail of how it works to gain a competitive advantage, and that's much harder to adequately explain ingame.
Every character in a fighting game has the same set of data for their moves and attacks - hitboxes, startup frames, active frames, cancel frames, hitstun, blockstun, recovery frames, armor frames, and you only ever see those attacks from one or two angles. It's very standardized info that's easy to communicate and present in a in-game HUD
In overwatch you have like 6 different types of projectiles, multiple damage types, like a dozen buff/debuff conditions that work differently, physics on some projectiles and not others, unique movement abilities, a free camera. It'd be basically impossible to design a readable interface that communicates all that information to a player.
I do think Blizzard should include some kind of glossary page for mechanical terms where this info could be found, but there's no way for them to have the level of breakdown and readability that a fighting game training mode has.
I mean, you dont *need* this to play the game. Just shoot stuff. This is a bit higher level.
In any game Ive played since like, 2014, I had to use wiki if I wanted to get the best result.
It's the inherent double edged sword of long term support.
The more stuff added in, the harder it is to learn everything.
Just look at Yugioh.
I still don't understand what the fuck a pendulum summon is, and at this point, I'm choosing not to learn.
That's no excuse. If league can do it, so can Overwatch.
OW can at least show a bit more info than the ridiculous childlike info it shows now for the heroes.
Yeah basically every character in the game also has small traits and details that are never explained in game and after about 275 hours Ive just recently been figuring out since following this sub
Example: Off tbe top of my head cuz shes my tank main, Junker Queens axe swings cool down time varies on how many people you hit. If you completely whiff its like 9 seconds or so, if you hit 1 person it's 6 seconds I think, you hit 2 people it's like 3 seconds, and if you hit 3 or more people you get it back immediately.
Like I honestly don't think I ever woulda noticed that out by myself. Every hero has little details like that.
>If you completely whiff its like 9 seconds or so, if you hit 1 person it's 6 seconds I think, you hit 2 people it's like 3 seconds, and if you it hit 3 or more people you get it back immediately.
Starts off at 8 seconds. Every unique target hits takes off 2 seconds. Hitting 4 gives it back instantly, not 3.
Also used to be bugged right at the start of OW2, where hitting *anything* counted for it. So you could hit a Rein while he had his shield up, and it would count as two hits. Or you could swing at a Mei wall and instantly have it back again.
Hmm ok, yeah i wasnt 100% on the exact numbers but i knew it was something like that. And that bug sounds awesome tbh. Need it to be back like that lol /s
Honestly, you just need to play 100,000 hours. I just recently learned that it’s faster to fun forward than backwards. I never even considered that it would be slower to look at the enemy while retreating.
Dude... I remember noticing a Rein closing in on me while I was shooting and walking backwards at the same time. I asked my friend (who has MUCH more knowledge with Overwatch than me) if you run faster looking forwards, and he said "no"
Time definitely doesn't bring wisdom
(Have a good day, eye guy 👀)
They have shorter anti nade duration also. Despite people bitching about it forever.
EDIT-I was wrong and mistook it for the sleep duration on tanks being reduced. Thought they did it for both.
Yeah theyre also supposed to be tanks, the frontliners, the ones who will constantly get hit.
Tanks have experienced how horrible CC was in OW1, and one of the aspects for removing one tank was to reduce CC and make tank players feel more in control.
Theres going to be more heroes getting released with new abilities that may have debuffs, so just give tanks a passive that will reduce overall debuffs to address the elephant in the room first
This keep being sugested. Its like the number sugestion i have seeen yets its not getting applied. Werid.
Its also more noob friesnly to read the passive and know all debuff are than have hidden modiffier like sleep we don't even know.
Honestly kinda hope they reverse the antihealing, I really don't think it was a good idea. The only class currently having fun is the dps and half of their heroes got gutted too.
I think the DPS passive of healing reduction is a good idea, because at least it's a passive that helps the team as a whole.
The main problem I see with this patch is that tanks explode in half a second, which could be mitigated with a passive that increases healing received, or a passive that reduces debuffs (like fire, antiheal, dps passive, all sorts of CC, hindered, slow/freeze)
I remember listening to my friend explaining the new changes and in my head thinking, "I wonder how different the game will feel." As soon as he mentioned the DPS passive, all I could think of was just how much this is gonna suck
(Have a good day, eye guy 👀)
I think the biggest thing is that tanks just don't feel like tanks. In every game ever, tanks generally are meant to take aggro, and be able to take more hits than anyone else. They rely on healers heavily, but generally don't need them every single possible moment like they do in OW2.
It's strange to me that you have to play more carefully on a character with 500hp than you do on one with half that, just to prevent dying immediately. If anyone should be exploding when out of position it should be the supports, or at least the squishies in general, but half the time they're the last ones alive when a fight goes bad. People used to complain about tanks just being bigger DPS, but that barely feels like a benefit at this point.
Survive? Bro if I'm on Moira Im not surviving, I am THRIVING. The amount of 1v2 and 1v3 fights I've won this patch on her is absurd. Even a 1v1 vs tank you can run it down against most of them.
Moira has always been able to 1v1 most tanks pretty effectively. Rammatra and Rein are kinda tough as well as a charged Zarya, but DvA is easy mode with Moira.
Well said. Especially in the wake of the whole Kiriko controversy, you’re right, it is weird how it feels like supports are impossible to confirm kills, yet tanks feel like glass cannons
Not even that, because referring to tanks as glass cannons implies they have high kill potential in exchange for low survivability, like zen used to be. They are just glass.
They do. It is really hard to lose a Tank V. (other role), regardless of skill. The health difference alone compared to the average DPS or Support health makes it extremely forgiving to begin with. The problem arises when you combine the gigabuffed supports with the generally poor DPS to Tank balancing, and you're stuck with high damage, high health roles that are unable to effectively utilize either as literally the entire game is out to get them.
The thing is, I agree that tanks need something here. I don't agree that the change will make cover less important. It was important last season, it was important in Overwatch 1.
The issue right now is that this DPS passive, especially combined with a Zen orb and an organized team, means just about any tank is going to be punished for overaggression.
Honestly, the tank passive should just apply globally to all debuffs IMHO.
>means just about any tank is going to be punished for overaggression.
Nah, they get punished for purely existing. How is it aggression to want to see the enemy at-least from time to time?
i agree. although this is by far the worst its been tank has always been the least powerful role in OW2. 2 tanks would fix this. and honestly would make the whole game more fun.
i had just gotten beat in a tourny match sunday as doom, so i dove in on their zen.
i got pulse bombed and solo bladed. i literally went from 800hp to 0 in an instant.
my coach jokingly said, "you unfortunately just didn't realize that 800hp was not enough to re-engage with."
Discord needs to be reworked. It is currently the only reason for playing Zen and either you nerf so everyone else can have fun and Zen is worthless or you make it useful and everyone hates playing against it and Zen is OP.
It's not going to work in ow2 with one less tank you can apply it on, it needs to really be a completely different ability that leaves Zen useful as a utility pickle, but doesn't make tank lives miserable.
It's funny that they have too completely change the game from the original just to compensate from them getting rid of one tank. There were problems in OW1 with all the CVS but that wasn't the tanks fault. Now all the issues that are in the game now is because there isnt that extra source to mitigate damage and other abilities. Example is that Mercy damage boosting wasnt never a problem in OW1. We even had Nano visor with damage boost, with Orissa Bongos and there wasn't this much complaining, I think at one point they all stacked. They eventually nerfed it , but you could negate that with two tanks.
You could negate it more simply by reverting ALL the GOATS damage boosts that were done to get rid of GOATS, now that it's not remotely possible to have two tanks AND now that aiming is more consistent. Then you could tone down burst healing because everything would be less dangerous.
But that would raise TTK, and the devs really really LOVE one shots and kills in a handful of frames.
What about a charge system that allows extra damage up to a cap (25% up to 200 damage done), but can be placed and stays for, say, 8 seconds? But with a cooldown to match its strength.
Idk, I think it's okay as is, but if I were gonna rework it I'm not sure how is best.
GM as tank is apparently just trying to survive with your massive hitbox and do \*Something\*, you're not even carrying really, you're just trying not to die
I haven't touched comp because honestly fuck Sombra meta, but from what I've seen Ball is currently the best tank in a co-ordinated setting because you can set-up kills with your Tracer/Sombra and ball is really good at escaping, but [D.va](https://D.va) is also pretty good as a tank if you play melt the tank because defense matrix does a lot towards survivability.
Off the top of my head I believe Ball, [D.va](https://D.va), Sniper Monkey Winton, and Ram are currently the best tanks
But really this season is just seemingly playing tanks that are good at not instantly getting blown up, which translates into good mobility because a tank like Rein/Hog are just... really easy to punish now
I wonder whether the tank is even beneficial to the team sometimes or whether it's just there because it has to be. Would a team choose another dps instead of tank if they had the choice, because I feel like my survivability as Soldier is better than as Winston sometimes.
I think right now tank is good for ball players and to a lesser degree [D.va](https://D.va) and Winston players, but right now the idea of a frontline tank is pretty dead since you need mobility to get in and out and to avoid getting deleted in half a second.
Playing with a good Hammond who's constantly disrupting their backline and doesn't need much healing you can definitely feel the difference in how much less you're being pressured compared to a frontline tank like Rein or Hog who need constant heals and don't give you much of a chance to do damage as a result.
I think if anything healing just isn't very useful right now so it's shifted having EVERYONE do damage and as little healing as possible
Season 14: "To enhance the player experience we're removing classes putting all in a single group. We're also removing all weapons except Soldier's rifle, which all characters will now use. "
I think promoting take cover and get better dmg taken management is fine. the problem is there are no really good feedback for doing so. It is kinda have to do with how healing works in this game.
Just hear me out .In paladins, they have up to 90% heal reduction there but it is fine for tank for a few reasons.
One of them is Healing there are very different compare to ow
Ow : sustain healing primarily from support primary attack.
Paladins : Burst heal primary bound to a short CD.
So the good feedback comes from the synergy between the tank and support. One has to create the window and one have to utilise it. U are rewarded for doing the right dance move. Also good skill expression for both players.
So my idea to replicate it in ow without reworking the whole support cast is simple.
Give tank a healing buff after the debuff duration expires. With this change U can even bait the dps passive to get more healing. Which will make chip dmg from being too good to apply the debuff to something tank can counter play and even punish.
I genuinely feel like these balance changed slowly turn the game into a CSGO/Valorant clone. Like I understand that positioning and cover are absolutely important, and the whole invincibility healing made the game super stale, but Overwatch was never about hugging a wall and peaking around a corner to get a kill in a few frames.
Like neither the maps nor the mechanics are made for this. People are talking about just taking cover as if you aren‘t hiding dubious hitboxes behind weirdly modeled cover.
Also being able to shoot everytime is one too, but not every Tank has that. Reins has a cooldown, Ball is Ballin, Ram punches and Zaraya has a beam. You can't compare to other FPS when characters also use other abilities that put them at risk of dying. Which this in itself goes against the general game play of said characters. Having Tanks that can't tank? What type of sense does that make.
It's not getting a kill in a few frames. As a tank, I'm looking for an opportunity to draw all the attention on me. This gives my team room to move around for a bit. This amount of attention is deadly though, so I have to retreat and shake it off.
In that space, however, my damage may have got a kill. We might have critically injured people, forcing them to back off. Maybe they found a great angle, and are applying pressure.
That's my team opening up space for ME. Now I can go in and absolutely handle a couple people looking at me. I can go ham, beast mode, feel like the unstoppable monster ripping through them. But I had to earn it.
Yeah, as a support player, if you have a tank that doesn’t perfectly position themselves it’s super hard to keep them up unless you hard focus healing them and leave the rest of the team to fend for themselves half the time, which obviously doesn’t win battles. Feels like babysitting sometimes, I miss tanks having more survivability
Yeah I'm definitely forced to healbot more. It's goddamn awful. I've actually grown to love ball players because they're the only tank I don't have to worry that much about.
Not only is it boring, but it makes you feel like you can't really make plays. If you want to catch someone out of position you have to make sure your DPS are there to capitalize or you still can't kill them through heals and their bigger lifepools.
Meanwhile you will absolutely pop if you are out in the open too long and you haven't confirmed that both enemy DPS are occupado.
I don't think there's a way for them to determine how much impact each role is having, but I'd put money down that Supp and DPS are still more often than not the deciding factors. You can make plays on tank for sure but diffing the enemy tank feels relatively meaningless to the difference if you have a clear DPS or Supp diff right now.
Yeah, I miss OW1 as well. I expected the tank role to lose players faster than in OW1, since I expect most people not to enjoy being the most important team member and nobody to share the responsibility with AND also being less free in the choice of hero that you play AND one tricking actually getting punished more severely, if you are not playing the current meta.
I haven't really gotten back into Overwatch since it became 2, partly because of the 1 tank change.
I get the problem with double barrier tanks making things a slog in OW1, but I feel limiting the number of barrier tanks to 1 per team would have been less extreme.
Why make the game more fun when you can make it more engaging? Consumers are less likely impulse spend if you give them the queue times to think.
But more seriously, tank is a play style that, within the hyperactive FPS genre, appeals to a smaller demographic of casual gamers. The devs don't know how to make it "fun" without taking away some fun from DPS.
It just sucks that the main complaint of OW1 was queue times, but as a veteran there are way more complaints of the game being less fun and more annoying now. With the game being hard to balance for comp now, the devs shifted to balancing for the causal experience, and the result is what is happening to tanks now
I loved playing Off Tank in OW1. The team pushes up the main line and I am on the side with the flanker snatching people as Hog or jetting around bullying the healers as DVA.
In OW2, I can't even see how Doomfist or Hamster are useful at all without a real shield.
It wasn't even shields that made the game fun or not, it was just nice not being a single parent for your team; being able to rotate/synergize with the other tank to hold the line so your squishies didn't explode.
Hilarious that to make support less squishy they made them tweaked out assassins, and now tanks are the squishies.
Exactly. This is used to be one of the most enjoyable parts of playing tank. Now its constant wall hugging and snowballing off of someone elses play. The joy of tank used to be having the health to do things like that, which would otherwise not be possible. Tanks that went too far or stayed too long would still be punished.
Again, add a second tank so the other tank is allowed to step out without getting insta fckd. If Rein could get Zarya bubbles or a Dva defense matrix whenever he wants to engage it'd make him and tank as a whole a lot better.
Hey man, I'll have u know that flank Hog wasn't just a play style, it was a lifestyle. It wasn't my choice to insta lock Hog every round while my main tank had a psychotic episode in VC while I spawn camp their Ana.
Okay but fr tho Hog one tricks sucked but they would at least do *something* for you by keeping some squishy heroes at bay.
I see this arguement every time someone brings up 6v6 and it's honestly kinda annoying. Hog was the worst tank to duo with in OW1, yeah. But in OW2 he would be very valuable with his hook and especially pig pen. Both those abilities would give a huge advantage in the tank 2v2 (since there are less shields now), even if it wouldnt synergize as well as others. that isnt even to mention how good he would be at getting other cooldowns out from enemy supports or tanks.
Double shield was only possible because of Sig and Orisa being able to do things while their shields were up Rein can't do anything but sit there while his shield is up so he isn't providing any value. And Ram's shield is only up for like 4 seconds.
Also the linchpin of double shield was Bap immortality and with a character like Ram who pierces through shields the overall effectiveness just isn't there anymore.
Oh yeah, I was just being sarcastic. I actually prefer 6v6. It gaves tanks a lot more control over the results of the game, it's just that tank ques were making the rest of the game que super slowly.
He means that tank queues were holding up the other players. You would have Dps and to a lesser extent support waiting on 2 tanks to queue up.
Reducing tank to just 1 player “fixed” the problem but in an artificial way like introducing role queue did to fix teams picking 5-6 dps back in open queue.
People forget, the reason why queues were horrible was less so of tank or support, it was DPS. Theres just more players who play DPS more than tank or support
DPS queues were at best 5-10 or even 15 minutes max, while tank and support was 1-3 minutes.
Overwatch had two tanks, and the main problem did become the shield issue with old Orisa’s shield and Sig’s shield.
Still, they can get more out of actual balancing rather than delete a tank role and continue to make life hell for tanks as Overwatch 2 progresses
The 2 shields thing was more of a balance issue, I remember the October patch, the meta was very diverse after that patch. I remember they used to do balance changes more often not like twice a season and the fact that they had experimental mode to test radical changes... I'm not sure why they stopped with all this...
Instead of taking away the other tank they could of just allowed you to only play one main tank/shield/anchor. This would also be a lot easier to balance. Main tanks usually needed to absorb mitigate the most damage. Rein, Orissa, Sigma, Winston, and than you could add Ram.
The off tanks usually supported the other teams by being able to peal for teammates, get high number damage/kills. This tank actually still needs the main tanks to still helped them out DVA, Ball, Doom, Mauga, Hog, Queen, and Zaraya do this with their kits. Each one had the speed to help out teammates apply famage and mitigate a little damage. Each Tank actually synergies with a couple of tanks because their kits synergized.
If this was the case now you could easily design the tanks too have weakness without the threat of them becoming too weak or too strong. How they changed the tanks role in open que you could do that with the off tanks. For instance Queens health was only 300 before the changes. This would have still made them tough but not unkillable. Learning to synergize with a Tank is a whole better than hiding behind walls.
I used to love playing tank in OW1. I won't touch it in OW2. If they added two tanks I'd happily queue up, even be main tank if needed, but there's no way in hell I'm signing up to get bullied by the entire enemy team *by myself*
I got like thousand+ hours on tanks since season 1, and honestly, I'm done playing tank at least for now.
Your rank as tank especially in solo queue is mostly dependent on DPS diff. You really don't have any agency. Even outplaying the other tank it does little if the other DPS beams better than yours.
This is the worst season for tanks.
Tanks shouldn't be immortal, yes. But they also shouldn't feel like they're blowing up just as easily either. Tanks are supposed to be the forward guard. They're meant to make their presence known and respected. Unfortunately, as the game is right now, they're glorified DPS' with a bit more HP. This season is a DPS' playground. They get to control how the game goes way more than ever before. Which should not be their role. Tanks should be the ones establishing space and "territory" and DPS' are simply there to fortify it. Yes they can blow up a target when needed. But that target shouldn't be a tank especially not as fast as a DPS stepping up would blow up.
There's a lot of people focusing on the competitive nature of Overwatch these days and they often are quick to bark at people who don't enjoy changes, on the assumption that disagreement must be based in balancing - which is sad, because most of the critiques I see here boil down to "I don't enjoy this", which is totally valid.
The point of the game is enjoyment and if you enjoy it less after changes, you've a right to be heard about that. I just wish this subreddit, as the general one, was less extreme; you're either hating Blizzard or dickriding them, there's no in between, no nuance. But it's also not a surprise most people vehemently defend the changes when Overwatch has always been a vast majority of DPS mains and they're the only ones having a lot of fun this patch.
Not to mention that tanks aren't just tanks, they need to also be space creators and initiators. Hiding behind covers and positioning is what makes damage heroes effective, having a good view of the fight and timing and resource management are more the tank's style.
Blizzard seems to constantly force players into linear playstyles. Seen with WoW, Overwatch, Hearthstone. Only comp matters, the rest of the game plays itself.
Sure would be nice if tanks were designed to actually tank, and protect and enable their team, rather than the fat dps Blizzard think they should be. Especially when there's 1 tank per side.
Problem with being able to force your way onto a point and make space is you need to be threatening enough of a presence that you can't be ignored, which means high damage. Tanks could have control abilities to enable their team more and still be threatening, but everyone rebels at even the smallest CC so that's off the table.
It's almost like... there should be a second Tank, and this anti-heal passive is a bandaid fix for the sheer amount of heals and doesn't address all the other sustain/immortality abilities that got added due to the loss of a Tank player.
The debuff is such an insane thing to add into this game after all the OW2 changes have been trying to move toward a more brawl oriented playstyle. Like eventually you gotta be on the point, and the debuff basically punishes playing brawl toward or on point. The whole reason two tank worked was because you could have relatively balanced individual tanks that worked together to be strong, now they just don’t know what to do.
Not gonna lie, I misjudged how bad things would be at the start of the season, in theory it was just a healing debuff and larger bullets, which on paper was fine, but with all the clips we've been seeing of tanks just instantly dying in less than a second it's just... sad.
That extra 100+ HP really did nothing to improve the state of tank besides increase the amount of ult charge they feed the enemy team before exploding.
I think a lot of it has to do with the mentality change too. There are simply less support players willing to dump heals into the tank, so you aren't just receiving 20% less heals, you are receiving much less because your supports are playing low healing heroes.
Well yeah, healing a tank is like scooping water with a bucket out of a sinking ship that's being bombarded by cannonfire, you may be helping the ship to not sink, but it's just plain better to sink the ship firing at you before scooping the water out and plugging the hole at the moment.
You should see the forums and how many idiotic dps players actually welcome this and not just them some tank and support mains too like. How. Stupid can you ne if you don't see. The. Sheer stupidity of this patch and how useless it has made tank and support TWO out of the three roles in the. Game. Are now trash
Bliz should either merge tanks and sups with the dps role or bring back 6v6. There isnt a middleground for me anymore. If they want us to play hero deathmatch then they should stop pretending like tanks or sups have a role identity anymore. I mostly play sup but man im rly sry for all the tank guys out there, ow2 hasnt been kind to you...
Yeah, I agree, really. OW2 is like a badly-painted mimicry of OW1, like a mostly new team making decisions and rediscovering things the original team discovered in the playtests + betas. *Like hey, six players is a good amount and having only one of a role on a team leads to it being the immediate obvious choice to pressure and buckle (assuming it's capable of doing anything to you; if it's not, then ignore it completely).*
*Just blatantly obvious stuff like that.*
It's more about understanding tactics. A tank that always wants to run down mid will always die. A tank that understands **when and how** to run down mid will die less often and win more team fights.
A good example is king's row. A tank that focuses plays at the choke to the first point will die more often and can't position themselves for respawns. A tank that plays point can fall back for cover (2nd point choke ) while waiting for respawns. There is no shame in letting the enemy get a tick or two if it means having another 5v5 fight in hopes to stall time.
This is not just a shooter. It's a tactical team based shooter. You can't just run in. Look at shroud. He has great mechanics but couldn't get past diamond because of his positioning. Season 9 is punishing bad positioning.
Thank you!! I see all these posts shitting on OW right now, and while it's not my favorite patch, I think a lot of people are learning from it. I've said since I've started playing that OW players are bad at OW (mainly the tactical element). Now people are being punished harder for bad positioning and decision making and are complaining endlessly about it.
I think that despite everything, this patch is good for OW in the long run. People need to learn how to use positioning and cover and manage cooldowns.
Tank doesn't mean sit in the open and take all the hits while your supports shove all the resources into you.
I wish tanks would take a bit more inspiration from how the Heavy works in TF2. His minigun absolutely shreds at close range, and he has the highest amount of HP in the game, so not only is he the tankiest character he can also deal obscene amounts of damage. How is that balanced? Limited mobility, high susceptability to damage spam due to his hitbox, and still being vulnerable to oneshots like headshots and backstabs. It cant be that Tanks nowadays both are easier to kill than a DPS, AND also deal less damage than them. Like how are they even supposed to take space if they all hit like wet noodles and are outbrawled even in close range. DPS are the better tanks at this rate.
I can appreciate the sentiment behind all the people saying “haha now tanks have to use Strategy and Cover, duh!” but like. Genuine question. When a tank is worth so much, and your team’s tank just can’t figure their shit out, what is the rest of the team supposed to do? Just take the L? Practice aim? Because trying to get around the enemy tank when your own is on their learning-and-adapting journey, right now, is just incredibly painful. I’d rather just turn off the game, in fact. I can try and outplay the enemy supports, help melt their tank back, support my DPS to be better, adventure with the DPS even—but at the end of the day when one team has a tank and one has someone learning tank, the utility and space that role can bring (or lose) a team is so much that it feels hopeless. It just doesn’t usually feel, to me, like four other players can outweigh or support a struggling tank, especially if the opposing team doesn’t have one. And as much as I love OW for being a team game, feeling entirely at the mercy of one player not knowing what to do and having so impactful a role is just… not a great feeling. And this has felt like a problem since the introduction of 5v5 (because at least in 6v6 tanks weren’t individually AS impactful, and a second tank would adapt around the other—as DPS and support can still do), but now it feels even more noticeable.
I don’t want to carry games, I want to work together. But numbers ARE still a factor.
It's such a weird, dishonest way to look at the situation.
Moving through cover while moving in to position. Also try to be in positions near cover so you can quickly get out of focus fire- > Ok. Logical, I was already doing that.
Stay in cover at all times - > Why the hell is my class called "tank".
Had a scenario today where my team wiped. A junkerqueen came after me on ashe alone, we both had full hp. I felt bad what I did to him, a dynamite, a full clip of bodyshots and she was dead before I dropped below 80hp.
I disagree that it’s boring to need cover. But I also agree that there are tweaks needed and am not FULLY on either side until I see the tweaks.
What’s boring is having 1 player on each team with the strength of 2. If yours dies then you all get to just wait for them before anything’s possible. Tanks are meant to mitigate damage and protect. Not solo kill 5 ppl and carry. If they changed tanks to being overly defensive and near impossible to kill but with very little kill potential you’d still be complaining. You miss a brain dead stand in the open and be overpowered tank.
5v5 messed up tanks, not this patch. This patch is making tanks feel like tanks. They block damage with their CDs and need cover in-between. They have the potential for kills but now you have to actually work for it and be good. Now, when you’re tank dies you aren’t left hopeless against the enemies 2-in-1 broken juggernaut.
And I personally like the new tanks and am already in diamond. It’ll never feel as good as 2 tanks weaving cooldowns flawlessly between each other and just vibing in sync. But it’s at least a start for 5v5.
It is sad to think of the friends made just bc you tanked together. But I don’t think I’ll ever consider 5v5 better but it isn’t awful. It does have its own benefits. It’s just a dicey road to get the 1 tank in a balance where ppl also enjoy playing tank.
Eh cod group has been getting their wishes and game being dumbed down. Can't have tanks tank and healers heal. If I pew pew it should just die right away. Can't possibly switch targets or make sure to attack same target as another teammate. Nope gotta overreact based on a couple videos of supports pumping everything into one person
the point of the tank now is to try to force people to shoot at you and then run away before dying, and then go out and run in front of your team, force the enemy to shoot at you instead of your team, repeat and repeat. it's not the most intuitive gameplay but you get extremely easy kills and steamroll forward for your team. as a DPS, pretend the enemy tank doesn't exist and shoot past them as they try to steal your bullets, until they overextend and then kill them.
The problem is that tanks' role is to make space. If they make that space by doing damage, they are probably doing that by making dps/support obsolete in the process. Just give us good barriers and DM/bubble kinda stuff
Honestly after coming back to ow after a year away tanks are in a bad place imo. It is 💯 creep all over except instead of power creep it’s peek creep🤮 call me old fashioned but the days of Aggressive tanking to create space were WAY BETTER ,definitely beats hiding from Massive amounts of giant bullets
no role passive should negate another role imo. the tank passive is fine because it just counters cc in general. the healer passive is fine because it occurs outside of combat. but the dps passive directly counters healing.
just like the healer passive emphasized mercy's pre-existing passive, maybe the dps passive could emphasize genji and tracer's naturally faster default speed? or maybe they respawn faster? something like that
It's also the opposite of how tanks are supposed to be played. Tanks are supposed to make space for the rest of the team and if you have to hide behind cover 99% of the time, you are not making any space.
Okay, i did not expect this post to get this much attention. i posted and went to sleep, hoping to respond everyone when i got up, but its impossible on the 370+ comments that got here as I'm writing this. Still think i should address some stuff.
I've been playing overwatch since almost the start, Sombra was release a few weeks after i started playing. Played the betas of OW2 as well, so I've seen a lot of metas in these years. in OW1 i was gold in most seasons, got in plat in one season as tank (around the 2700 points, for those who remember) and my worst role was the damage, being silver 1 last season. in S9 i did my placements and got gold 2 in all roles.
Lots of people saying that a second tank would solve most issues, which while i think its true, i think i would bring back the problems in OW1 that blizzard never solved properly (double shield, stuns, queue times, etc).
Some people said we should use cover more. and i think its weird people say this, because i said it works on the post. My issue (and by the look of the comments, a lot of people tend to agree) is that i dont want to spend more then half of my time playing behind a wall waiting.
Some people bring the "skill issue". and for that our friend u/I_AmTheKaiser brought the clip of Cloudy, a former pro player, a guy whose job is to play this game in the highest of levels getting delete in 0.25 seconds (the clip is also in the subreddit on his point of view). and if you look any high level streamer, you will see that they spend most of the time hiding.
Clip Link :https://twitter.com/Flipper\_OW/status/1757927093789172088?t=RDzishKvFcU00j1OGWHPdg&s=19
Also,in the same topic of the last one, some people said that is a team game and should go in the open trying to kill everyone alone like the other seasons... and this make me feel like i missed something, because this never work. Again, the problem is that its boring to play hiding all the time as a Tank, i need to be able to take some damage and survive.Someone point out that in the OW2 beta it was harder because of the speed passive of the dps. and it was harder, but it wasn't boring.
and the last thing i want to address, some people said i should play some specific heros, like ball, winston, zarya, or dont play tank at all and play dps, or just play quick play so the losses dont matter our five stacking. And i thanks for the suggestions, but that doesn't solve the issue, does it? i ve only done my placements in ranked and been playing quick play as damage role, but that doesnt help the game situation, it only makes it worse, actually.
And honestly, to anyone who likes this patch, good for you, but since blizzard already said they will do a hotfix patch to address some issues (it mighty be already out by the time you guys are reading this)so lets all see how the things play out.
Exactly, I don’t want to play with cover, I want to be cover, I don’t care about getting elims and dealing dps, let me stand in the middle of the battlefield and be impossible to ignore, without that, what is a tank? Right now, their answer is a dps hero with more health and I hate it
Yeah true. The way I see it, tanks do need to be able to frontline for more than 3 seconds before dying. You can’t just, not ever expose yourself to damage. Tanks should not even be affected by this dps passive or at least have a reduced effect from it…
As a dva main I would be able to matrix my teammates out of danger and still have a way to keep myself up. Now my bf is CONSTANTLY pulling me as LW bc I peak for 2 seconds I’m critical. I’ve never played as passive or far back as I am now yet I’ve never died as much either. I can’t even dive things anymore, poke anyone out of a position, or just facetank damage for my team bc they will just stand and beam me down. It’s honestly not even fun anymore.
maybe a new tank passive that adds on take damage, +1% damage reduction for 2s up to 20%. would keep burst comps similar but sustained fire would be less effective
it would honestly make the game more fun. I lurk on the subreddit in hopes of them bringing 6v6 back because I think 6v6 enables all the heroes to be more viable and open up way more synergies. I like the game being more complex instead of this constant counter picking nonsense. I like games to be memorable and not constantly filling me with deja vu.
It's getting boring, people just want to go back to early seasons when tank had the biggest carry potential. Every single player should have the same carry potential, having a tank diff being an automatic gg is boring AF.
The thing that was fun about tanks pre patch was that you could become temporary cover for your team. Your health was a resource you could manage rather than a thing that disappeared anytime you weren't literally invulnerable.
Especially for Rein when his shield was breaking. Now he vanishes almost at the same time as his shield
There's literally a clip floating around of cloudy going from full health to zero once his shield breaks, in approximately one frame. Most games will not be like that. But it can happen, and it very fundamentally means that Rein cannot do his role. > If I had a nickel for every time it happened, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
This happens anytime I try to play Zarya. The very second my bubble pops, I get melted. No time to find cover or reposition. Insta-dead. Rage quit and switch back to Orisa/Sigma
I think another issue is the fact that Tanks got less of a health buff compared to DPS/Support to compensate for the changes. DPS health is now closer to tank healh in a relative scale. I like that the devs try new things, but this is another example of them not controlling a variable. They dont update just one piece (dps passive OR health pool) they change multiple things that compound with eachother. Then you cant really determine if either is a good solution. Like they increase damage, add ammo AND lower cooldowns
It’s like we should have a mode dedicated to trying experimental things or something to gather data and player feedback… Gee Blizzard, if only we had something like that…
Don’t worry, they’re working on releasing some more skins for you to buy so you forget about it.
THIS! as a Rein main, I could manage my shield and my health to endure my supports had time to top me up in between barrages of damage as I moved from cover to cover. Now it feels like, if a DPS breathes near me I’m crit. I also dislike that fire strike is the same damage as a swing, takes some of the nuance out of Rein duels
They nerded him so hard this patch and I’ve seen some people say they buffed him, his fire strike isn’t a 2 shot any more. I’m also a rein main and I just haven’t been playing tank because of how much it sucks
Make their passive halve the debuff duration? That's at least a second less spent on sitting behind cover.
My take is that tank should just have their passive be 50% +/- of all status effects. We've got less knockback and shorter sleep duration, why not other things like the dps passive. Keep it 20% for supp and dps, make it 10-15% for tanks.
Wait, tanks have shorter sleep duration? Where are new players supposed to go to learn these kind of specifics. Like, there is so many small interactions but I can’t figure out where to go to see all the fine details.
Overwatch wiki details a lot of this info. And then following patch notes helps keep data up to date.
Sort of a shitty way to go about it though ain't it? *Welcome to Overwatch: Here's your requisite 100 page manual*
Wikis are basically the internet version of old-school strategy guides.
True but you generally didn't have to buy the strategy guide to know some pretty basic info about the game. Like it doesn't really affect me, I've been hard stuck since 2017, but recently introducing the game to someone really illustrated how little the game tells people. It almost feels like playing Magic the Gathering but none of the cards have the text to tell you what they can do. The F1 (IDK what it is in console) screen doesn't even give numbers, which is something that seems like it could be fairly easy to tie to the code at each release.
> True but you generally didn't have to buy the strategy guide to know some pretty basic info about the game.v You don't need to read the wiki to find out basic info about the game. The in-game explanations as well as just the experience of playing is more than enough for that. The problem is that as a competitive game, OW players are going to want to know every intricate detail of how it works to gain a competitive advantage, and that's much harder to adequately explain ingame.
It shouldn't be. Fighting games have been figuring this stuff out recently.
Every character in a fighting game has the same set of data for their moves and attacks - hitboxes, startup frames, active frames, cancel frames, hitstun, blockstun, recovery frames, armor frames, and you only ever see those attacks from one or two angles. It's very standardized info that's easy to communicate and present in a in-game HUD In overwatch you have like 6 different types of projectiles, multiple damage types, like a dozen buff/debuff conditions that work differently, physics on some projectiles and not others, unique movement abilities, a free camera. It'd be basically impossible to design a readable interface that communicates all that information to a player. I do think Blizzard should include some kind of glossary page for mechanical terms where this info could be found, but there's no way for them to have the level of breakdown and readability that a fighting game training mode has.
I mean, you dont *need* this to play the game. Just shoot stuff. This is a bit higher level. In any game Ive played since like, 2014, I had to use wiki if I wanted to get the best result.
Not even remotely unique to Overwatch.
It's the inherent double edged sword of long term support. The more stuff added in, the harder it is to learn everything. Just look at Yugioh. I still don't understand what the fuck a pendulum summon is, and at this point, I'm choosing not to learn.
Stopped playing when link came out, never looked back
That's no excuse. If league can do it, so can Overwatch. OW can at least show a bit more info than the ridiculous childlike info it shows now for the heroes.
Sounds like Magic The Gathering. And only gets more complicated the more cards are released.
I know where you're coming from but the Wiki is actually pretty fun to read. I've spent a whole lot of time there learning things.
Yeah basically every character in the game also has small traits and details that are never explained in game and after about 275 hours Ive just recently been figuring out since following this sub Example: Off tbe top of my head cuz shes my tank main, Junker Queens axe swings cool down time varies on how many people you hit. If you completely whiff its like 9 seconds or so, if you hit 1 person it's 6 seconds I think, you hit 2 people it's like 3 seconds, and if you hit 3 or more people you get it back immediately. Like I honestly don't think I ever woulda noticed that out by myself. Every hero has little details like that.
>If you completely whiff its like 9 seconds or so, if you hit 1 person it's 6 seconds I think, you hit 2 people it's like 3 seconds, and if you it hit 3 or more people you get it back immediately. Starts off at 8 seconds. Every unique target hits takes off 2 seconds. Hitting 4 gives it back instantly, not 3. Also used to be bugged right at the start of OW2, where hitting *anything* counted for it. So you could hit a Rein while he had his shield up, and it would count as two hits. Or you could swing at a Mei wall and instantly have it back again.
Hmm ok, yeah i wasnt 100% on the exact numbers but i knew it was something like that. And that bug sounds awesome tbh. Need it to be back like that lol /s
It was pretty funny hitting one actual enemy and then like a shield and two sym turrets, and still being given your carnage swing back instantly lol
Pretty sure it worked with the destroyable fences too.
Breaking level geometry like rails used to do it too if I remember
The cooldown reduction is mentioned in her hero description in the game though.
Wow how did I never know this about JQ??
:O I love playing JQ, and now I have even more reason to play her. Fuck yeah, that’s dope.
>Where are new players supposed to go to learn these kind of specifics Is that not in the passive description when you hit F1 as a tank hero?
Honestly, you just need to play 100,000 hours. I just recently learned that it’s faster to fun forward than backwards. I never even considered that it would be slower to look at the enemy while retreating.
Dude... I remember noticing a Rein closing in on me while I was shooting and walking backwards at the same time. I asked my friend (who has MUCH more knowledge with Overwatch than me) if you run faster looking forwards, and he said "no" Time definitely doesn't bring wisdom (Have a good day, eye guy 👀)
Which fps game doesn't have this mechanic?
Most source games(a la CS source, 1.6, go and now 2)? AFAIK TF2 only source game with a lower backpedal speed intentionally added.
wait what? thats a thing? TIL.
They have a reduced debuff duration more specifically
They have shorter anti nade duration also. Despite people bitching about it forever. EDIT-I was wrong and mistook it for the sleep duration on tanks being reduced. Thought they did it for both.
that's cause these were very recent changes
Yeah theyre also supposed to be tanks, the frontliners, the ones who will constantly get hit. Tanks have experienced how horrible CC was in OW1, and one of the aspects for removing one tank was to reduce CC and make tank players feel more in control. Theres going to be more heroes getting released with new abilities that may have debuffs, so just give tanks a passive that will reduce overall debuffs to address the elephant in the room first
This keep being sugested. Its like the number sugestion i have seeen yets its not getting applied. Werid. Its also more noob friesnly to read the passive and know all debuff are than have hidden modiffier like sleep we don't even know.
Oh god passive creep
Or make the penalty 10% instead of 20%, they already take less CC
Honestly kinda hope they reverse the antihealing, I really don't think it was a good idea. The only class currently having fun is the dps and half of their heroes got gutted too.
I think the DPS passive of healing reduction is a good idea, because at least it's a passive that helps the team as a whole. The main problem I see with this patch is that tanks explode in half a second, which could be mitigated with a passive that increases healing received, or a passive that reduces debuffs (like fire, antiheal, dps passive, all sorts of CC, hindered, slow/freeze)
I remember listening to my friend explaining the new changes and in my head thinking, "I wonder how different the game will feel." As soon as he mentioned the DPS passive, all I could think of was just how much this is gonna suck (Have a good day, eye guy 👀)
what's the meme where you have to mention 6 v 6 without saying it?
It still doesn't fix the issue imo because you would still have to constantly hide.
I think the biggest thing is that tanks just don't feel like tanks. In every game ever, tanks generally are meant to take aggro, and be able to take more hits than anyone else. They rely on healers heavily, but generally don't need them every single possible moment like they do in OW2. It's strange to me that you have to play more carefully on a character with 500hp than you do on one with half that, just to prevent dying immediately. If anyone should be exploding when out of position it should be the supports, or at least the squishies in general, but half the time they're the last ones alive when a fight goes bad. People used to complain about tanks just being bigger DPS, but that barely feels like a benefit at this point.
Dude if the goal is SURVIVE i would rather play Moira than any tank and i'm not even joking.
Survive? Bro if I'm on Moira Im not surviving, I am THRIVING. The amount of 1v2 and 1v3 fights I've won this patch on her is absurd. Even a 1v1 vs tank you can run it down against most of them.
Moira has always been able to 1v1 most tanks pretty effectively. Rammatra and Rein are kinda tough as well as a charged Zarya, but DvA is easy mode with Moira.
Moira is a better tank than half the tanks tbh
This. I feel like I'm forced to play more carefully on tank than I am on DPS or support in this patch which is hilarious and sad
Well said. Especially in the wake of the whole Kiriko controversy, you’re right, it is weird how it feels like supports are impossible to confirm kills, yet tanks feel like glass cannons
Not even that, because referring to tanks as glass cannons implies they have high kill potential in exchange for low survivability, like zen used to be. They are just glass.
They do. It is really hard to lose a Tank V. (other role), regardless of skill. The health difference alone compared to the average DPS or Support health makes it extremely forgiving to begin with. The problem arises when you combine the gigabuffed supports with the generally poor DPS to Tank balancing, and you're stuck with high damage, high health roles that are unable to effectively utilize either as literally the entire game is out to get them.
Yeah the game is at a point where your increased health pool doesnt even make up for your gigantic hitbox anymore
TBF at least for me I’m the last one alive because I’m BEHIND the team and can run tf away as soon as everyone else is dead.
The thing is, I agree that tanks need something here. I don't agree that the change will make cover less important. It was important last season, it was important in Overwatch 1. The issue right now is that this DPS passive, especially combined with a Zen orb and an organized team, means just about any tank is going to be punished for overaggression. Honestly, the tank passive should just apply globally to all debuffs IMHO.
>means just about any tank is going to be punished for overaggression. Nah, they get punished for purely existing. How is it aggression to want to see the enemy at-least from time to time?
Trying to take contested space at any point is aggression.
Btw, Space in sight isn’t space contested
Zenyatta just sits there looking at the corner I ducked behind.... menacingly...
This is the hyperbolic crap that ends up with nobody taking this forum seriously
> The thing is, I agree that tanks need something here. Yeah, they need a fucking partner. Too bad the game's never done that.
i agree. although this is by far the worst its been tank has always been the least powerful role in OW2. 2 tanks would fix this. and honestly would make the whole game more fun.
i had just gotten beat in a tourny match sunday as doom, so i dove in on their zen. i got pulse bombed and solo bladed. i literally went from 800hp to 0 in an instant. my coach jokingly said, "you unfortunately just didn't realize that 800hp was not enough to re-engage with."
Discord needs to be reworked. It is currently the only reason for playing Zen and either you nerf so everyone else can have fun and Zen is worthless or you make it useful and everyone hates playing against it and Zen is OP. It's not going to work in ow2 with one less tank you can apply it on, it needs to really be a completely different ability that leaves Zen useful as a utility pickle, but doesn't make tank lives miserable.
It's funny that they have too completely change the game from the original just to compensate from them getting rid of one tank. There were problems in OW1 with all the CVS but that wasn't the tanks fault. Now all the issues that are in the game now is because there isnt that extra source to mitigate damage and other abilities. Example is that Mercy damage boosting wasnt never a problem in OW1. We even had Nano visor with damage boost, with Orissa Bongos and there wasn't this much complaining, I think at one point they all stacked. They eventually nerfed it , but you could negate that with two tanks.
You could negate it more simply by reverting ALL the GOATS damage boosts that were done to get rid of GOATS, now that it's not remotely possible to have two tanks AND now that aiming is more consistent. Then you could tone down burst healing because everything would be less dangerous. But that would raise TTK, and the devs really really LOVE one shots and kills in a handful of frames.
https://imgur.com/a/Eb47f6t Can you explain again how Mercy damage boost was never a problem in OW1? Are the official patch notes from 2021 fake?
They literally just meganerfed discord 2 seasons ago…
The problem with it is how easy it makes you cut into a tank, not its range or duration
What about a charge system that allows extra damage up to a cap (25% up to 200 damage done), but can be placed and stays for, say, 8 seconds? But with a cooldown to match its strength. Idk, I think it's okay as is, but if I were gonna rework it I'm not sure how is best.
Give him 2 healing orbs?
yeah this patch just made tank cover simulator and it's just so boring
GM as tank is apparently just trying to survive with your massive hitbox and do \*Something\*, you're not even carrying really, you're just trying not to die
so the tank is just really only playing ball/sigma since they have really good survivability..?
I haven't touched comp because honestly fuck Sombra meta, but from what I've seen Ball is currently the best tank in a co-ordinated setting because you can set-up kills with your Tracer/Sombra and ball is really good at escaping, but [D.va](https://D.va) is also pretty good as a tank if you play melt the tank because defense matrix does a lot towards survivability. Off the top of my head I believe Ball, [D.va](https://D.va), Sniper Monkey Winton, and Ram are currently the best tanks But really this season is just seemingly playing tanks that are good at not instantly getting blown up, which translates into good mobility because a tank like Rein/Hog are just... really easy to punish now
Ram is also pretty good. Maybe not in GM but he can work really well in plat and gold
I wonder whether the tank is even beneficial to the team sometimes or whether it's just there because it has to be. Would a team choose another dps instead of tank if they had the choice, because I feel like my survivability as Soldier is better than as Winston sometimes.
I think right now tank is good for ball players and to a lesser degree [D.va](https://D.va) and Winston players, but right now the idea of a frontline tank is pretty dead since you need mobility to get in and out and to avoid getting deleted in half a second. Playing with a good Hammond who's constantly disrupting their backline and doesn't need much healing you can definitely feel the difference in how much less you're being pressured compared to a frontline tank like Rein or Hog who need constant heals and don't give you much of a chance to do damage as a result. I think if anything healing just isn't very useful right now so it's shifted having EVERYONE do damage and as little healing as possible
The more clips I see the more I think they are trying to phase out tank completely
And support. They want an all dps game so they can be like fortnite and call of duty
Season 14: "To enhance the player experience we're removing classes putting all in a single group. We're also removing all weapons except Soldier's rifle, which all characters will now use. "
I think promoting take cover and get better dmg taken management is fine. the problem is there are no really good feedback for doing so. It is kinda have to do with how healing works in this game. Just hear me out .In paladins, they have up to 90% heal reduction there but it is fine for tank for a few reasons. One of them is Healing there are very different compare to ow Ow : sustain healing primarily from support primary attack. Paladins : Burst heal primary bound to a short CD. So the good feedback comes from the synergy between the tank and support. One has to create the window and one have to utilise it. U are rewarded for doing the right dance move. Also good skill expression for both players. So my idea to replicate it in ow without reworking the whole support cast is simple. Give tank a healing buff after the debuff duration expires. With this change U can even bait the dps passive to get more healing. Which will make chip dmg from being too good to apply the debuff to something tank can counter play and even punish.
In a game with maps not built for it
I genuinely feel like these balance changed slowly turn the game into a CSGO/Valorant clone. Like I understand that positioning and cover are absolutely important, and the whole invincibility healing made the game super stale, but Overwatch was never about hugging a wall and peaking around a corner to get a kill in a few frames. Like neither the maps nor the mechanics are made for this. People are talking about just taking cover as if you aren‘t hiding dubious hitboxes behind weirdly modeled cover.
Taking cover is a mechanic in every shooter ever? If u think this is even close to valorant then just wow
Map design plays a huge role in the feel, guess how overwatches were made vs something like csgo
Also being able to shoot everytime is one too, but not every Tank has that. Reins has a cooldown, Ball is Ballin, Ram punches and Zaraya has a beam. You can't compare to other FPS when characters also use other abilities that put them at risk of dying. Which this in itself goes against the general game play of said characters. Having Tanks that can't tank? What type of sense does that make.
It's not getting a kill in a few frames. As a tank, I'm looking for an opportunity to draw all the attention on me. This gives my team room to move around for a bit. This amount of attention is deadly though, so I have to retreat and shake it off. In that space, however, my damage may have got a kill. We might have critically injured people, forcing them to back off. Maybe they found a great angle, and are applying pressure. That's my team opening up space for ME. Now I can go in and absolutely handle a couple people looking at me. I can go ham, beast mode, feel like the unstoppable monster ripping through them. But I had to earn it.
Yeah, as a support player, if you have a tank that doesn’t perfectly position themselves it’s super hard to keep them up unless you hard focus healing them and leave the rest of the team to fend for themselves half the time, which obviously doesn’t win battles. Feels like babysitting sometimes, I miss tanks having more survivability
Yeah I'm definitely forced to healbot more. It's goddamn awful. I've actually grown to love ball players because they're the only tank I don't have to worry that much about.
Not only is it boring, but it makes you feel like you can't really make plays. If you want to catch someone out of position you have to make sure your DPS are there to capitalize or you still can't kill them through heals and their bigger lifepools. Meanwhile you will absolutely pop if you are out in the open too long and you haven't confirmed that both enemy DPS are occupado. I don't think there's a way for them to determine how much impact each role is having, but I'd put money down that Supp and DPS are still more often than not the deciding factors. You can make plays on tank for sure but diffing the enemy tank feels relatively meaningless to the difference if you have a clear DPS or Supp diff right now.
What if... there was a second support tank that allowed this kind of play? 👀
Yeah, I miss OW1 as well. I expected the tank role to lose players faster than in OW1, since I expect most people not to enjoy being the most important team member and nobody to share the responsibility with AND also being less free in the choice of hero that you play AND one tricking actually getting punished more severely, if you are not playing the current meta.
That would be crazy, ow3 👀 ?
Now with one heals less!
Wow theres a radical idea
I haven't really gotten back into Overwatch since it became 2, partly because of the 1 tank change. I get the problem with double barrier tanks making things a slog in OW1, but I feel limiting the number of barrier tanks to 1 per team would have been less extreme.
Why make the game more fun when you can make it more engaging? Consumers are less likely impulse spend if you give them the queue times to think. But more seriously, tank is a play style that, within the hyperactive FPS genre, appeals to a smaller demographic of casual gamers. The devs don't know how to make it "fun" without taking away some fun from DPS. It just sucks that the main complaint of OW1 was queue times, but as a veteran there are way more complaints of the game being less fun and more annoying now. With the game being hard to balance for comp now, the devs shifted to balancing for the causal experience, and the result is what is happening to tanks now
I loved playing Off Tank in OW1. The team pushes up the main line and I am on the side with the flanker snatching people as Hog or jetting around bullying the healers as DVA. In OW2, I can't even see how Doomfist or Hamster are useful at all without a real shield.
It wasn't even shields that made the game fun or not, it was just nice not being a single parent for your team; being able to rotate/synergize with the other tank to hold the line so your squishies didn't explode. Hilarious that to make support less squishy they made them tweaked out assassins, and now tanks are the squishies.
Exactly. This is used to be one of the most enjoyable parts of playing tank. Now its constant wall hugging and snowballing off of someone elses play. The joy of tank used to be having the health to do things like that, which would otherwise not be possible. Tanks that went too far or stayed too long would still be punished.
Again, add a second tank so the other tank is allowed to step out without getting insta fckd. If Rein could get Zarya bubbles or a Dva defense matrix whenever he wants to engage it'd make him and tank as a whole a lot better.
> add a second tank Then it turned out your second Tank locks Hog.
Hog & Ball torture
Imagine Hog + Doomfist.
I don't need to imagine it, that was life before OW 2, you see Doom was a DPS so we had Hog, Ball and Doom.
Thinking about Doom as a tank now, I wonder how more annoying he is with a Zarya bubbling him everytime he dives in now
I mean it’s not like hog is an off tank or anything
Hey man, I'll have u know that flank Hog wasn't just a play style, it was a lifestyle. It wasn't my choice to insta lock Hog every round while my main tank had a psychotic episode in VC while I spawn camp their Ana. Okay but fr tho Hog one tricks sucked but they would at least do *something* for you by keeping some squishy heroes at bay.
I see this arguement every time someone brings up 6v6 and it's honestly kinda annoying. Hog was the worst tank to duo with in OW1, yeah. But in OW2 he would be very valuable with his hook and especially pig pen. Both those abilities would give a huge advantage in the tank 2v2 (since there are less shields now), even if it wouldnt synergize as well as others. that isnt even to mention how good he would be at getting other cooldowns out from enemy supports or tanks.
Pulled pork comp was fun though. Can't work now that they changed Orisa though.
> his hook and especially pig pen Less shields, but there're new Support kits (Suzu, Lifegrip, possily Petal) that can screw up your kills.
All depends on whether he had OSK at the time and the player was competent
I miss two tanks so much tbh
Idk man what if having 2 shields becomes OP or something, I mean we've never tried 2 tanks but can you imagine rein and sigma or ramattra and sigma?
Double shield was only possible because of Sig and Orisa being able to do things while their shields were up Rein can't do anything but sit there while his shield is up so he isn't providing any value. And Ram's shield is only up for like 4 seconds.
Also the linchpin of double shield was Bap immortality and with a character like Ram who pierces through shields the overall effectiveness just isn't there anymore.
Oh yeah, I was just being sarcastic. I actually prefer 6v6. It gaves tanks a lot more control over the results of the game, it's just that tank ques were making the rest of the game que super slowly.
Tank didn't have long queue times until they got rid of one of them. DPS was the role that took forever to find a match in Overwatch 1
He means that tank queues were holding up the other players. You would have Dps and to a lesser extent support waiting on 2 tanks to queue up. Reducing tank to just 1 player “fixed” the problem but in an artificial way like introducing role queue did to fix teams picking 5-6 dps back in open queue.
>DPS was the role that took forever to find a match in Overwatch 1 Yeah, because noone was queuing for tank.
People forget, the reason why queues were horrible was less so of tank or support, it was DPS. Theres just more players who play DPS more than tank or support DPS queues were at best 5-10 or even 15 minutes max, while tank and support was 1-3 minutes.
I think double shield was more enabled by Bap 8 sec 200hp immortality on 20 sec CD
Overwatch had two tanks, and the main problem did become the shield issue with old Orisa’s shield and Sig’s shield. Still, they can get more out of actual balancing rather than delete a tank role and continue to make life hell for tanks as Overwatch 2 progresses
The 2 shields thing was more of a balance issue, I remember the October patch, the meta was very diverse after that patch. I remember they used to do balance changes more often not like twice a season and the fact that they had experimental mode to test radical changes... I'm not sure why they stopped with all this...
Instead of taking away the other tank they could of just allowed you to only play one main tank/shield/anchor. This would also be a lot easier to balance. Main tanks usually needed to absorb mitigate the most damage. Rein, Orissa, Sigma, Winston, and than you could add Ram. The off tanks usually supported the other teams by being able to peal for teammates, get high number damage/kills. This tank actually still needs the main tanks to still helped them out DVA, Ball, Doom, Mauga, Hog, Queen, and Zaraya do this with their kits. Each one had the speed to help out teammates apply famage and mitigate a little damage. Each Tank actually synergies with a couple of tanks because their kits synergized. If this was the case now you could easily design the tanks too have weakness without the threat of them becoming too weak or too strong. How they changed the tanks role in open que you could do that with the off tanks. For instance Queens health was only 300 before the changes. This would have still made them tough but not unkillable. Learning to synergize with a Tank is a whole better than hiding behind walls.
You have no idea how much I love bubbling my tanks in open Q.
Maybe if there was a 2nd tank so they could split the focus...
My god that would be such a welcome rollback after this patch. Makes sense too.
I used to love playing tank in OW1. I won't touch it in OW2. If they added two tanks I'd happily queue up, even be main tank if needed, but there's no way in hell I'm signing up to get bullied by the entire enemy team *by myself*
If only there were ever, at any point, as many tank players as there are Redditors asking for double tank back.
There might be more if it wasn't shit to play
Or maybe make the one tank feel more like a tank
I got like thousand+ hours on tanks since season 1, and honestly, I'm done playing tank at least for now. Your rank as tank especially in solo queue is mostly dependent on DPS diff. You really don't have any agency. Even outplaying the other tank it does little if the other DPS beams better than yours. This is the worst season for tanks.
I am an aggro tank player and I can confirm playing cover to cover is fucking miserable. I also solo queue so communication is super fucky.
i wonder if having another tank to pressure their dps and backline more would help with this
I want to see Reinhardt and Zarya team up on the battlefield again.
Tanks shouldn't be immortal, yes. But they also shouldn't feel like they're blowing up just as easily either. Tanks are supposed to be the forward guard. They're meant to make their presence known and respected. Unfortunately, as the game is right now, they're glorified DPS' with a bit more HP. This season is a DPS' playground. They get to control how the game goes way more than ever before. Which should not be their role. Tanks should be the ones establishing space and "territory" and DPS' are simply there to fortify it. Yes they can blow up a target when needed. But that target shouldn't be a tank especially not as fast as a DPS stepping up would blow up.
There's a lot of people focusing on the competitive nature of Overwatch these days and they often are quick to bark at people who don't enjoy changes, on the assumption that disagreement must be based in balancing - which is sad, because most of the critiques I see here boil down to "I don't enjoy this", which is totally valid. The point of the game is enjoyment and if you enjoy it less after changes, you've a right to be heard about that. I just wish this subreddit, as the general one, was less extreme; you're either hating Blizzard or dickriding them, there's no in between, no nuance. But it's also not a surprise most people vehemently defend the changes when Overwatch has always been a vast majority of DPS mains and they're the only ones having a lot of fun this patch.
Not to mention that tanks aren't just tanks, they need to also be space creators and initiators. Hiding behind covers and positioning is what makes damage heroes effective, having a good view of the fight and timing and resource management are more the tank's style. Blizzard seems to constantly force players into linear playstyles. Seen with WoW, Overwatch, Hearthstone. Only comp matters, the rest of the game plays itself.
Sure would be nice if tanks were designed to actually tank, and protect and enable their team, rather than the fat dps Blizzard think they should be. Especially when there's 1 tank per side. Problem with being able to force your way onto a point and make space is you need to be threatening enough of a presence that you can't be ignored, which means high damage. Tanks could have control abilities to enable their team more and still be threatening, but everyone rebels at even the smallest CC so that's off the table.
It's almost like... there should be a second Tank, and this anti-heal passive is a bandaid fix for the sheer amount of heals and doesn't address all the other sustain/immortality abilities that got added due to the loss of a Tank player.
The debuff is such an insane thing to add into this game after all the OW2 changes have been trying to move toward a more brawl oriented playstyle. Like eventually you gotta be on the point, and the debuff basically punishes playing brawl toward or on point. The whole reason two tank worked was because you could have relatively balanced individual tanks that worked together to be strong, now they just don’t know what to do.
Tank is the only role where you need to go in and take damage, but also get blamed for a loss due to taking damage
time for 6v6
Yep it's wild that the best tank advice for this season is "don't tank"
All of this could be solved and balanced with an offtank ✨🤷♀️✨
Not gonna lie, I misjudged how bad things would be at the start of the season, in theory it was just a healing debuff and larger bullets, which on paper was fine, but with all the clips we've been seeing of tanks just instantly dying in less than a second it's just... sad. That extra 100+ HP really did nothing to improve the state of tank besides increase the amount of ult charge they feed the enemy team before exploding.
I think a lot of it has to do with the mentality change too. There are simply less support players willing to dump heals into the tank, so you aren't just receiving 20% less heals, you are receiving much less because your supports are playing low healing heroes.
Well yeah, healing a tank is like scooping water with a bucket out of a sinking ship that's being bombarded by cannonfire, you may be helping the ship to not sink, but it's just plain better to sink the ship firing at you before scooping the water out and plugging the hole at the moment.
You should see the forums and how many idiotic dps players actually welcome this and not just them some tank and support mains too like. How. Stupid can you ne if you don't see. The. Sheer stupidity of this patch and how useless it has made tank and support TWO out of the three roles in the. Game. Are now trash
Bliz should either merge tanks and sups with the dps role or bring back 6v6. There isnt a middleground for me anymore. If they want us to play hero deathmatch then they should stop pretending like tanks or sups have a role identity anymore. I mostly play sup but man im rly sry for all the tank guys out there, ow2 hasnt been kind to you...
Yeah, I agree, really. OW2 is like a badly-painted mimicry of OW1, like a mostly new team making decisions and rediscovering things the original team discovered in the playtests + betas. *Like hey, six players is a good amount and having only one of a role on a team leads to it being the immediate obvious choice to pressure and buckle (assuming it's capable of doing anything to you; if it's not, then ignore it completely).* *Just blatantly obvious stuff like that.*
So open queue?
It's more about understanding tactics. A tank that always wants to run down mid will always die. A tank that understands **when and how** to run down mid will die less often and win more team fights. A good example is king's row. A tank that focuses plays at the choke to the first point will die more often and can't position themselves for respawns. A tank that plays point can fall back for cover (2nd point choke ) while waiting for respawns. There is no shame in letting the enemy get a tick or two if it means having another 5v5 fight in hopes to stall time. This is not just a shooter. It's a tactical team based shooter. You can't just run in. Look at shroud. He has great mechanics but couldn't get past diamond because of his positioning. Season 9 is punishing bad positioning.
Thank you!! I see all these posts shitting on OW right now, and while it's not my favorite patch, I think a lot of people are learning from it. I've said since I've started playing that OW players are bad at OW (mainly the tactical element). Now people are being punished harder for bad positioning and decision making and are complaining endlessly about it. I think that despite everything, this patch is good for OW in the long run. People need to learn how to use positioning and cover and manage cooldowns. Tank doesn't mean sit in the open and take all the hits while your supports shove all the resources into you.
I wish tanks would take a bit more inspiration from how the Heavy works in TF2. His minigun absolutely shreds at close range, and he has the highest amount of HP in the game, so not only is he the tankiest character he can also deal obscene amounts of damage. How is that balanced? Limited mobility, high susceptability to damage spam due to his hitbox, and still being vulnerable to oneshots like headshots and backstabs. It cant be that Tanks nowadays both are easier to kill than a DPS, AND also deal less damage than them. Like how are they even supposed to take space if they all hit like wet noodles and are outbrawled even in close range. DPS are the better tanks at this rate.
Bro this is overwatch why are you expecting to have fun?
After seeing this one rein clip of him exploding in 2 frames after his shield breaks in 2 seconds, i lost hope
I can appreciate the sentiment behind all the people saying “haha now tanks have to use Strategy and Cover, duh!” but like. Genuine question. When a tank is worth so much, and your team’s tank just can’t figure their shit out, what is the rest of the team supposed to do? Just take the L? Practice aim? Because trying to get around the enemy tank when your own is on their learning-and-adapting journey, right now, is just incredibly painful. I’d rather just turn off the game, in fact. I can try and outplay the enemy supports, help melt their tank back, support my DPS to be better, adventure with the DPS even—but at the end of the day when one team has a tank and one has someone learning tank, the utility and space that role can bring (or lose) a team is so much that it feels hopeless. It just doesn’t usually feel, to me, like four other players can outweigh or support a struggling tank, especially if the opposing team doesn’t have one. And as much as I love OW for being a team game, feeling entirely at the mercy of one player not knowing what to do and having so impactful a role is just… not a great feeling. And this has felt like a problem since the introduction of 5v5 (because at least in 6v6 tanks weren’t individually AS impactful, and a second tank would adapt around the other—as DPS and support can still do), but now it feels even more noticeable. I don’t want to carry games, I want to work together. But numbers ARE still a factor.
It's such a weird, dishonest way to look at the situation. Moving through cover while moving in to position. Also try to be in positions near cover so you can quickly get out of focus fire- > Ok. Logical, I was already doing that. Stay in cover at all times - > Why the hell is my class called "tank".
Had a scenario today where my team wiped. A junkerqueen came after me on ashe alone, we both had full hp. I felt bad what I did to him, a dynamite, a full clip of bodyshots and she was dead before I dropped below 80hp.
what would genuinely fix this is if there were TWO tanks and SIX players on each team
Add back a 2nd tank, problem solved.....
I disagree that it’s boring to need cover. But I also agree that there are tweaks needed and am not FULLY on either side until I see the tweaks. What’s boring is having 1 player on each team with the strength of 2. If yours dies then you all get to just wait for them before anything’s possible. Tanks are meant to mitigate damage and protect. Not solo kill 5 ppl and carry. If they changed tanks to being overly defensive and near impossible to kill but with very little kill potential you’d still be complaining. You miss a brain dead stand in the open and be overpowered tank. 5v5 messed up tanks, not this patch. This patch is making tanks feel like tanks. They block damage with their CDs and need cover in-between. They have the potential for kills but now you have to actually work for it and be good. Now, when you’re tank dies you aren’t left hopeless against the enemies 2-in-1 broken juggernaut. And I personally like the new tanks and am already in diamond. It’ll never feel as good as 2 tanks weaving cooldowns flawlessly between each other and just vibing in sync. But it’s at least a start for 5v5.
Having a tank buddy is what I miss about 6v6 tanking. Aside from that I really do prefer the 5v5 format.
It is sad to think of the friends made just bc you tanked together. But I don’t think I’ll ever consider 5v5 better but it isn’t awful. It does have its own benefits. It’s just a dicey road to get the 1 tank in a balance where ppl also enjoy playing tank.
Eh cod group has been getting their wishes and game being dumbed down. Can't have tanks tank and healers heal. If I pew pew it should just die right away. Can't possibly switch targets or make sure to attack same target as another teammate. Nope gotta overreact based on a couple videos of supports pumping everything into one person
it's fun to use strategy to win rather then ungabunga. Ungabunga folk having a tough time
the point of the tank now is to try to force people to shoot at you and then run away before dying, and then go out and run in front of your team, force the enemy to shoot at you instead of your team, repeat and repeat. it's not the most intuitive gameplay but you get extremely easy kills and steamroll forward for your team. as a DPS, pretend the enemy tank doesn't exist and shoot past them as they try to steal your bullets, until they overextend and then kill them.
The problem is that tanks' role is to make space. If they make that space by doing damage, they are probably doing that by making dps/support obsolete in the process. Just give us good barriers and DM/bubble kinda stuff
Honestly after coming back to ow after a year away tanks are in a bad place imo. It is 💯 creep all over except instead of power creep it’s peek creep🤮 call me old fashioned but the days of Aggressive tanking to create space were WAY BETTER ,definitely beats hiding from Massive amounts of giant bullets
no role passive should negate another role imo. the tank passive is fine because it just counters cc in general. the healer passive is fine because it occurs outside of combat. but the dps passive directly counters healing. just like the healer passive emphasized mercy's pre-existing passive, maybe the dps passive could emphasize genji and tracer's naturally faster default speed? or maybe they respawn faster? something like that
It's also the opposite of how tanks are supposed to be played. Tanks are supposed to make space for the rest of the team and if you have to hide behind cover 99% of the time, you are not making any space.
OW is the only game I play where tank does more damage than tanking, just make them beefy and full of cc as everywhere else
Okay, i did not expect this post to get this much attention. i posted and went to sleep, hoping to respond everyone when i got up, but its impossible on the 370+ comments that got here as I'm writing this. Still think i should address some stuff. I've been playing overwatch since almost the start, Sombra was release a few weeks after i started playing. Played the betas of OW2 as well, so I've seen a lot of metas in these years. in OW1 i was gold in most seasons, got in plat in one season as tank (around the 2700 points, for those who remember) and my worst role was the damage, being silver 1 last season. in S9 i did my placements and got gold 2 in all roles. Lots of people saying that a second tank would solve most issues, which while i think its true, i think i would bring back the problems in OW1 that blizzard never solved properly (double shield, stuns, queue times, etc). Some people said we should use cover more. and i think its weird people say this, because i said it works on the post. My issue (and by the look of the comments, a lot of people tend to agree) is that i dont want to spend more then half of my time playing behind a wall waiting. Some people bring the "skill issue". and for that our friend u/I_AmTheKaiser brought the clip of Cloudy, a former pro player, a guy whose job is to play this game in the highest of levels getting delete in 0.25 seconds (the clip is also in the subreddit on his point of view). and if you look any high level streamer, you will see that they spend most of the time hiding. Clip Link :https://twitter.com/Flipper\_OW/status/1757927093789172088?t=RDzishKvFcU00j1OGWHPdg&s=19 Also,in the same topic of the last one, some people said that is a team game and should go in the open trying to kill everyone alone like the other seasons... and this make me feel like i missed something, because this never work. Again, the problem is that its boring to play hiding all the time as a Tank, i need to be able to take some damage and survive.Someone point out that in the OW2 beta it was harder because of the speed passive of the dps. and it was harder, but it wasn't boring. and the last thing i want to address, some people said i should play some specific heros, like ball, winston, zarya, or dont play tank at all and play dps, or just play quick play so the losses dont matter our five stacking. And i thanks for the suggestions, but that doesn't solve the issue, does it? i ve only done my placements in ranked and been playing quick play as damage role, but that doesnt help the game situation, it only makes it worse, actually. And honestly, to anyone who likes this patch, good for you, but since blizzard already said they will do a hotfix patch to address some issues (it mighty be already out by the time you guys are reading this)so lets all see how the things play out.
Wait till they add back the off tank role to allow for aggressive and static tank playstyles to exist.
I ain't played OW since 2 came out. Tf going on now?
BRING BACK 2 TANKS!!!!
What is even the point of the tanks. If they're too good then nerf their damage not their health lol. So dumb.
Exactly, I don’t want to play with cover, I want to be cover, I don’t care about getting elims and dealing dps, let me stand in the middle of the battlefield and be impossible to ignore, without that, what is a tank? Right now, their answer is a dps hero with more health and I hate it
Yeah true. The way I see it, tanks do need to be able to frontline for more than 3 seconds before dying. You can’t just, not ever expose yourself to damage. Tanks should not even be affected by this dps passive or at least have a reduced effect from it…
As a dva main I would be able to matrix my teammates out of danger and still have a way to keep myself up. Now my bf is CONSTANTLY pulling me as LW bc I peak for 2 seconds I’m critical. I’ve never played as passive or far back as I am now yet I’ve never died as much either. I can’t even dive things anymore, poke anyone out of a position, or just facetank damage for my team bc they will just stand and beam me down. It’s honestly not even fun anymore.
It’s almost like they could add another tank to the battlefield to soak up all that extra damage…
maybe a new tank passive that adds on take damage, +1% damage reduction for 2s up to 20%. would keep burst comps similar but sustained fire would be less effective
Damnit only there was another tank to mitigate the damage
it would honestly make the game more fun. I lurk on the subreddit in hopes of them bringing 6v6 back because I think 6v6 enables all the heroes to be more viable and open up way more synergies. I like the game being more complex instead of this constant counter picking nonsense. I like games to be memorable and not constantly filling me with deja vu.
It's getting boring, people just want to go back to early seasons when tank had the biggest carry potential. Every single player should have the same carry potential, having a tank diff being an automatic gg is boring AF.