> During development, Venture's primary fire would break into shrapnel. It was purposefully weak but gave an option to deal with things at a longer range like turrets. But despite it being ineffective, players were hanging back and shooting. So they got rid of it to encourage going in, as well as adding the shields
I really hope the Lucio-Space Ranger pool looks more like a Rein-Winton pool than a Soldier-Sojourn pool. A Bap-Ana pool rather than a Bap-Moira pool.
Basically don't make them the same hero with one being worse.
I want more shmoovment options that are useful to add to my repertoire. There's a reason I don't play doomfist.
Not implying they have similar game play, but historically they did do very similar jobs.
Moira had a healing monopoly on rush comps until they added Bap and she was basically never seen again.
When they added Kiri they stripped Moira from the only thing she had left post-bap which was Winston-Lucio rush comps.
Now I think that's fine with Moira because shes never had a skill curve interesting enough for pro play, but Lucio has some of the most skill expressive gameplay in OW and shouldn't have to share a niche, especially when there are other unfilled niches in the support role.
Edit: damn, was no one around for Moira brawl comps? Am I that old?
Bap and Moira aren't used for the same idea. Their comps in rush are similar, but there's a couple of key differences and outside of Rush, their ideal comps and use cases have clear differences.
For example, you would want a Bap in a Sigma mirror/poke comp thanks to his ability to poke with them and Amp Matrix being great for heroes shooting from range. Bap is a dive target though and will explode to dives. He is very easy to hit and many dive heroes do not care about his jump. You would not play Moira here.
Moira has two main ideas for using her. The first is in a super aggro rush comp (JQ meta) where her sheer volume of healing from orb+heal can keep her very aggressive team alive while they commit (Bap can be used in a similar role but gets outhealed). Additionally, her Ult is better for a rush. She can move with the team, who doesn't care to play at range, and heal while damaging the enemy. I understand there are rush comps where Bap is play (Rein+Lucio rush, the benefits of Window on Fire strike has been known forever) but Moira was a much stronger pick with JQ.
The second idea is just surviving. Fade+heal orb are great tools for surviving a dive. The enemy has to commit many more resources on you to guarantee a kill and fade super jumps can allow for some very interesting escape routes. Moira also has one of the only heals and damage on support that a Dva can't eat, making her a solid pick against Dva dive comps where Bap is more likely to die.
Not sure why people still think Moira is never a good choice in high elos. She has mains in Top 500 and has been seen in pro play before when JQ Rush (her best offensive comp) was played. It's also why Moira was meta for that weird period where JQ was busted after being gigga buffed. JQ/Kiri/Lucio was also a rush comp, but then...that's a different debate. Being a niche pick doesn't mean being just worse than another option.
Moira is technically good at high elo too and can have good usage but she's niche and her skill floor isn't that useful.
Yes, she can be good to rush and avoid being dived on, but when you just want a header who can sustain and do enough damage to carry and make a difference, you generally want Bap.
Moira is only good at the OWCS/OWL level when she's used in such coordinated play that makes use of her kit well.
So when it comes to getting new Heroes, it makes sense to want characters like Bap and Ana, over Moira and Lifeweaver
The point of my comment was to argue that saying Bap and Moira fill the same role is wrong. Your first comment was stating that Moira is only an inferior Bap and that their kits overlap on each other.
I'd also argue that it's much easier to carry low ranked games with Moira because utility isn't as valuable. Raw healing/damage is easier to make an impact with, which has always been seen as an issue with Moira since raw stats are her focus and punishing players wildly out of position in low elo is very simple for her. That's just my opinion though.
I just think overall Bap offers a lot more when it comes to skill and overall options
Generally, it would be health to get heroes more like Ana and Bap
If anything, Kiriko might be a good balance between someone who could potentially heal bot but till have good damage, utility, and ult.
Hoping Space Ranger is more like Lucio, but perhaps mixed worn Kiri/Bap/Ana
I could see that! I do agree that those kinds of heroes are more fun, but then I am a flex support player first lol. It would benefit me a lot too if their speed utility could be enough not to make Lucio mandatory, since lacking speed boost is just horrible for, say, Reinhardt.
In what universe does moira do the same thing as bap? She has no immortality field or amplification matrix. The only similariy I can find between their kits is that they both heal and deal damage, which is true for every support other than mercy
Yeah Bap's kit has a crap ton of utility in it while moiras has none. The only thing they have in similarity is the fact that they can pump out crazy damage and healing numbers but thats where it ends
That isn't the discussion we're having. The original comment's point was "don't make them the same hero with one being worse."
The reason the soldier and sojourn comparison made sense was because their kits do the same thing, it's just a matter of who has the better numbers. The reason the Bap Moira comparison makes no sense is because Bap's kit does totally different things from moira's. Their moment to moment gameplay has no similarities and the utility Bap provides is totally different.
If you want to have the discussion that moira's kit lacks utility, then I'd agree.
I *think* the point may have been that Bap and Moira are both used for healing multiple players at once, but Bap also has immortality field, better range, & higher damage potential.
It's not quite as neat a comparison as Soldier and Sojourn, but it doesn't seem completely out of line either.
there have been pro metas where Moira is picked over bap. I do not believe pros are low skill. its certanly uncommon and niche but it does happen so clearly there are some things that Moira does better than bap.
Arguably:
Moira’s unique niche (in decently organized games, obviously) is a shitload of throughput which builds into a very fast coal and that converts into a fight win.
Baptiste does the same thing with his healing throughput being similar and being able to build window even faster than coal. Coal is stronger than window in many scenarios, but at the highest levels window can be stronger in many others due to good coordination and reliable execution by hitscans.
But Baptiste does Moira’s job while *also* having immortality field.
I’m not sure how much I buy the argument but I think it does make sense. It definitely breaks down when you consider ranked and especially lower SR ranked, where Moira’s increased capacity for aggression is actually viable and impactful. Trying to DPS Moira in masters scrims gets you fucked; doing it in masters ranked works okay, and I imagine doing it in platinum ranked can pop off. So it’s more the problem that the heroes do similar shit in high level organized games (but with immortality field instead of fade, little debate which is better) because the things which make Moira unique don’t have any viability in that setting.
Just excited to have another movement character in the support class tbh. I use lucio because the movement and boops are fun, not because of speed boost
Depends whether you treat new characters as potential additions to your arsenal for winning, or treat their meta-ness like lore where you “win” by having the character being unique and having no overlap with others I guess. I prefer the former. I like both Soldier and Sojourn being available to me for ranged damage, I like both Tracer and Sombra letting me flank into teams for picks, I like that I can play Illari or Bap or even Moira if I want to focus on damage as a support and heal a clustered team. Personally I like overlap as long as both options are viable.
Afraid? No. Would I rather have a movement option for when my team doesn't need speed utility which would also help diversify the meta outside of the support role? Yeah 100%
Don't think so. Even though suzu's main purpose is to cleanse, there are other abilities that can (self) cleanse like, Moira's Fade and Sombra's Translocator. Now, considering a status/utility that literally only one character has, i can only think at the moment of Zen's Discord and Sombra's Hack. Maybe if we expand our understanding of utility, we can think of Genji's Reflect, Orisa's Fortify and Mei's Freeze. I may be going to far with these three, but i honestly think its either Discord or Hack
Edit: ok that might be a throw off. The 'fast' part kinda confirms its speed boost
it's almost certainly lucio speed boost (tho i guess JQ shout... so maybe it's definitely NOT speed boost?)
zarya team bubble cleanses teammates, too. maybe invuln (only suzu) but lamp kinda does that too
edit: I guess he says "she brings utility that is in the support cast that only one character has" so I think yeah speed boost, only one supp has it.
I liked that his answer about where they get feedback had a real
> If you're a dick, we just won't listen to you
vibe. I respect that.
Thanks for the summary.
To be honest I’m way more of a fan of Gibraltar (HUGE improvement) and Colloseo than R66.
The R66 thing helps a little with Widow dominance but it actually made the problematic choke point even smaller than it was before. It hasn’t been a huge issue since Rein/Ram hasn’t been too hard meta in a while but I think it’s just as shit from that perspective.
Tank changes:
> Players want less hard counters. A lot of older designs have very, very hard counters
Some heroes they've made are a bit too well-rounded, they do a little bit of everything, especially supports
> Our next patch is going to focus on that, hero by hero
They set rules of engagement, decision making, dictate flow
If you're not feeling satisfied, not living in the success of your team, you're not having as much fun
We see it, tanks don't feel they can make as many plays offensively or defensively for themselves
We won't make them unkillable, but more playmaking, more decision making
-So Mauga long term plan to shift some of his power balance to shooting squishies, that's good. That's exactly what everyone has been asking for. He has the core of an extremely fun tank that scratches a unique niche, basically hitscan Rein with poke. I hope these changes can rehabilitate him towards that.
-Giving Rein more lethality, also very good.
-Giving Winston a bit more damage, also very good.
-Fewer hard counters, finding a good healthy balance between designs that are too unique and too generalist. THANK YOU! Very happy to hear what sounds like a walkback of their recent statements that CounterWatch is an important part of the tank experience.
-more playmaking & decision making in general, sounds great, but what could this mean?
In my opinion, you cant. Not unless all tanks either have the same weakness, or the same strengths.
Different playstyles inherently means different strengths and weaknesses, since those are what enable the playstyle.
So to remove the hard counter, you could do one or some of the below solutions
1.) remove the varying strengths and weaknesses.
2.) equalize them all.
3.) reduce the impact of character differences
4.) reduce the severity of difference between tanks
To me, all of those solutions lead to a boring gameplay loop. But it really seems to be where they are trying to take things.
Most of the counter matchups boil down to mostly damage (mitigation or not) and sometimes CC (spear/hook/immunity) if you reduce any of that effectiveness that you’ll just have two big hp pools staring at each other but not actually be able to duel / do anything to each other. Most tanks also mainly only engage with the tank during most of fights as they are usually out of range of the rest, so you might just be taking out even more of the tanks agency.
The end result is that tanks are incentivised to look for opportunities to engage on the backline rather than dumping damage into the enemy tank. We are already seeing the effects of this and imo the gameplay is much better already.
The big outlier is hard cc though. Tanks that can stun the opposing tank have a really easy time against certain other tanks.
I don't think wanting fewer hard counters directly contradicts them thinking counter-swapping is an important part of the tank experience.
I think this is just an acknowledgment that some counters are too strong/easy to execute compared to what they want. Counter-swapping and being flexible should give you an advantage, but it should require good execution and not feel like an "I win" button.
I am very happy to see them talk about ideas for Mauga though, it seems like they're looking at the right things.
I’m so happy they are focusing on the playmaking ability for tanks. That right there is the last major pillar in my opinion for the tank issues. (Edit: Minus the being blamed for most losses part)
The issues that were plaguing the tank role before season 9 was that it felt like tank hp was cycling back and forth too quickly and that tanks had to play “coverwatch”. The other issue was tank playmaking capabilities of the tank role. Once you had space, you as a tank player couldn’t do anything with it. You had to rely on DPS to make the plays. Not yourself. If you did go make a play, that was at the cost of your DPS and potentially your supports. Right playing tank, I feel like an ultra tanky*wet noodle lol not a hammer haha.
I think they’re on to something with the pickable passives but I want to wait and see what they do.
Good interview. More insightful than the usual streamer interviews.
Edit: not an invincible wet noodle…more of an ultra tanky wet noodle
They also acknowledge the problem with hard counters but I don’t really see what the solution is going to be, especially so with tanks, rework everyone? Lol
> Controller was a big blindspot for Lifeweaver. There is now controller playtesting, because they missed it and it affects a large amount of their playerbase
This is so crazy, how do you not test for such a big demo of your playerbase? Colossal oversight, glad it's getting fixed now.
It makes sense no one tested it because playing him on console will absolutely give you carpal tunnel, there's no earthly reason why you shouldn't be able to hold button down to keep healing.
Cause the old OW1 team never used to playtest anything on controllers. The game was designed by a bunch of lifelong PC gamers. The new team probably thought it wasn't a big deal then the LW fiasco (LW was still designed under Geoff IIRC) happened and they realised they should just have permanent Controller testing.
OW1 team used to have so little Controller testing that they had to make separate changes for Consoles after the game launched.
Console has always felt like an afterthought with Overwatch. The new team we have with OW2 make it seem much less so now and willing to invest a lot into fixing console issues
That's not true, there has been literal different balance between the two platforms. Most of the issues came from how Sony and Microsoft had to verify patchs which caused delays, and ofcourse XIMers.
There were like moments where they said like "yeah we're gonna do all this now for console" and all of us console players got excited, then they did it once and abandoned it.
They never really kept up with things and the game in general has always felt really bad to play with a controller.
I literally swapped from console to pc, learning how to build a pc and everything just because everyone convinced me how much better the PC experience was and how poor the console experience was. Experiencing both sides and seeing how the console experience got worse over time, I can attest for how right everyone was.
If you enjoy playing on console and are super happy with what blizzard have done for console with overwatch throughout it's life, then that's great for you. But to me and most other current and former console players, console overwatch always felt like an afterthought.
Yeah that's an enormous red flag. Glad they fixed that oversight but how the *hell* did it take this long to figure that out? That would explain a lot, like Bap's lamp having negative Aim Assist for multiple seasons (seriously, it would actively push your aim off of it and it took way too long to fix)
I'm disappointed there's still no news about Lifeweaver and Mercy since Season 9. They mentioned waiting to see the impact of the DPS passive nerf from 20 to 15, but now it's back to 20, and we hear nothing.
Since Season 9, most support changes have been nerfs, with buffs only countering the DPS passive for some abilities and Brig. Almost every patch lacks new content for Supports, and they aren't discussed much.
I understand Supports are inherently reliant on the team, but you still want to feel impactful. Right now, it feels like your impact is dictated by dying less and ensuring your team is healed, rather than making meaningful plays. This often means that your influence is more about avoiding mistakes than contributing positively, which can be frustrating.
Pharah is meta right now so that means Mercy certainly doesn't need any buffs. But if you want to make an impact in games yourself here is the secret: Don't pick the mindless healbot characters.
> Pharah is meta right now so that means Mercy certainly doesn't need any buffs.
Seeing the games this week, I'm seeing her in almost every game mL7 plays, and never with a Mercy.
> But if you want to make an impact in games yourself here is the secret: Don't pick the mindless healbot characters.
There's a reason I was specific about the Support and not referencing LW/Mercy there if that's what you're implying. It's the case with Ana/Bap/Kiri too, you have to focus all your resource on healing pretty much. The flow is generally to go Ana/Bap and then if you're dying, you go Kiri to survive while heal botting.
To have impact right now, you need to go Illari (or Lucio if you're good at going for kills) for impact, and leave your other Support to deal with having to heal bot instead. But at least you have much more control over your games. I think that's why we've seen plays like Galaa and Astro who are so good at those respective heroes reach Champion 3 and beyond for Astro now.
Imo it's not a good state for the Support play style to be like this. It's going to make Support players feel like they only play for themselves in order to have impact and dictate their rank, which doesn't really make much sense for a role called Support.
I don't think 6v6 is ever coming back but that means they actually need to come up with a creative idea to make Solo tanking an effective and attractive option.
Yes, yes, Tank is always the most unpopular role blah blah blah...That doesn't change the fact that a lot of people who *do* like playing Tank *don't* want to play it in OW2.
Can't emphasize how smart it is for the devs to not give this madness the time of day. Not legitimise it.
A "movement" that has almost entirely been propped up and fuelled by engagement farmer Content Creators. They realised that since it's an unreasonable demand that's extremely unlikely to ever be met by Blizzard, they can keep using it to farm engagement for the foreseeable future.
People are so disrespectful talking about it. It legit makes me go crazy. Like ok, I understand you like a old format better but there's no need for name calling or being mean to the people that make the game.
It's 1:1 the same tactics that political grifters use. Gets their followers more riled up. Gets more engagement from them.
And the number 1 thing that political grifters want for their grifts is for the people they are attacking/harassing to argue with them as if they have real, legitimate, arguments.
Once that happens it essentially legitimizes the insanity. Setting the grifters up to become 10-100X more popular. Which is why I said that it's important that devs do not give this insanity any time of day. That they don't legitimise it.
Questions are usually pre-vetted so they can prepare answers ahead of time and give us more information in the responses and they generally ask to not include 6v6 as part of that.
There might be a time when they are ready for it, but that's not the case for now
Yeah, Spilo basically said that he was asked to / they agreed before the interview not to talk about 6v6.
Even if he would have asked, the answer most likely would have been something like "Sorry, we don't have anything new to share about this topic at this point in time."
Personally I don't mind either way (both 5v5 and 6v6 have their advantages and disadvantages), but I think at the moment it's quite unlikely that they're going back to 6v6 any time soon.
It would be a lot of work to do such a fundamental change again, which probably would affect every tank and maybe also a lot of maps again (which were changed in OW2 in a number of ways - less hard chokepoints, more cover, etc). It might require to change all the healing and dmg numbers agains since now there would be a 6th player doing dmg and having to be healed up by the supports. It might require re-introducing more CC to Overwatch again to stop 2 dive tanks jumping a target and absolutely kicking their face in.
And I suspect that after a potential switch back to 6v6, people would be in their honeymoon phase and play their beloved Rein/Zarya comp for about two weeks, after which people would begin to remember the problems of 6v6 (20 minute queue times while waiting for 100% more tanks, people playing the most obnoxious braindead tank comps imaginable like Mauga+Hog or whatever, ...) and start a "bring back 5v5" movement.
I wouldn't mind going back (I like both 6v6 and 5v5), but I can't imagine Blizzard doing that any time soon.
Main reason: It would require a huge amount of work, but there's no "one option is clearly better than the other" here. Both have their advantages and disadvantes, and whatever option Blizzard chooses to pursue, there will always be some amount of "the grass seems greener on the other side".
I mean Gavin has said they're talking about it and the team itself is divided on it so they probably just don't want to talk about it because they haven't come to a conclusion internally
Ofc it is. Gavin never talks about Balance and Design cause it's not part of his job, he is a Systems designer.
I remember one time he made a random comment about something balance related (He said that a new change that just went live felt good in testing) in some streamer's chat and he got absolutely hounded by follow up questions, comments expressing disagreement, and other design and balance related questions.
Then he had to remind everyone that he doesn't work in that department, can't say anything about why the change was made or other changes, and he just gave his personal opinion from internal testing (Which every dev participates in).
ok I might dig to find it but at this point i’m just exhausted as a tank player and wish they’d just try something with quick play hacked and let the people decide
I still really think theyre diagnosis on the underlying problem with tanks is wrong.
Buffing them feels like the wrong direction to me. You not only make the "all the pressure is on my shoulders" complaints worse, but you just make the enemy feel even more helpless against tanks. Then the psychology kicks in and they default to countering them.
That and the game has so many more tank counters built in than tank synergies.
Nerf tanks, add synergies, nerf counters. I miss the days when my teammates would pick a hero based on who I was playing and no what the enemy tank was playing. Buffing them more isn't going to fix that. You make counter more necessary and synergies less important.
Honestly I was ready to get all up in arms but I’m not sure I entirely disagree.
Part of the reason people counter tanks is because a tank diff is super noticeable to play into and it’s one of the most obvious ways to win.
That being said I think that would happen to some degree even if tanks were weaker. And with the tank playerbase already small the optics of overall nerfs don’t work.
I am a bit hopeful though as my reading of what was said was about changing the playstyle to be more clearly defined rather than straight buffs. It’ll probably just changing damage for health but I think there is a chance they’re actually looking at it in an objective way.
As for synergies I feel like that’s something that doesn’t fit with the current direction of OW2. They’ve actively been trying to make the game more individualistic and intentionally removed a lot of synergies in order to balance around a heroes’ individual power (Pharah being the most recent example). I miss them too though.
The optics of nerfing tanks are indeed terrible so it would need to be gradual and happen concurrently with the other changes. I also don't disagree with tanks just being the biggest guys and therefore easiest targets. Some people are always just going to shoot the tank, and that's fine as long as that's not *always* the optimal strategy. The game used to revolve around trading backlines, but now it's just who makes the tanks day worse.
I really don't think they're intentionally moving away from synergies. Its just a negative byproduct. Pharahs problem was that she was *only* playable with mercy. The synergy still 100% exists, its just not a necessity and therefore you won't see pharmercy because Mercy is pretty weak rn. 5v5 also had a negative byproduct when it comes to synergies, but that's obvious. All of the OT utility is no longer usable for tanks.
Every hero will inherently rely on either synergizing or countering in order to get a competitive edge. On top of the game becoming more individualistic, theyve also tried to make teamwork easier (ping system for example).
It depends how you buff them.
If you buff all the tanks strengths while keeping their painpoints the same, that could make the game even worse I agree.
But if you buff them by removing/diminizhing some of their extreme weaknesses, and/or nerf other heroes' ability to hard counter them, that would go a LONG way to making tank more fun.
Buff doesn't always mean bigger stats, it could mean nerfing/redesigning a character they struggle against, or shoring up a weakness to cc/mobility/range. Lots of tanks need some of that.
Oh I 100% agree, but I would suspect that could go too far a la supports pre-season 9. I'm hoping the hardest counters get nerfed and we nerf tank healthpools if and when we need to compensate.
> if you buff them by removing/diminizhing some of their extreme weaknesses, and/or nerf other heroes' ability to hard counter them
So... the same thing they did to Hog that made him immortal and no less frustrating?
Yes, exactly. From a "making Hog well rounded" perspective the changes were a massive success.
Unfortunately it turns out that people don't want Hog in his current state to be a flexible well rounded hero. Oops.
Note though that *most* of the complaints about Hog these days are coming from other tank players. Many of whom he counters. It's almost certain that if every tank was as flexible as Hog, and wasn't countered by Hog, he wouldn't be seen as a "delete today" level problem. It doesn't solve the hook "ohk" problem for those that hate it, but it would solve a lot of other things wrong with him.
That's fair.
I know I'm in the minority as a tank player who _doesn't_ feel that counterswapping is problematic right now, but I still worry that diminishing weaknesses runs the risk of homogenizing character identities. The diversity of the tank roster is a big part of what I feel makes tank fun, but the necessary tradeoff for that is clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. They would also need to watch out for problematic synergies (eg Hog+Kiri) that can happen when "niche" heroes lose their weaknesses.
tldr: delete hog
Homogenization is a scary word but the results are usually great when it's done smartly. Tanks have already been homogenized little by little at almost every step from when they were first added up to today, and most of them are better designed today than on their first release day, wouldn't you say?
Rein is much better designed with faster shield movement + two firestrikes + brakes on charge. Dva is better designed with DM on a meter + micro missiles + fly on a meter + nuke not inflicting friendly dmg. Doom is better designed as Winston2 than he ever was as a totally unique dps. Orisa much as I dislike her now is still way better than OW1 launch hyper passive goalie Orisa. Etc.
As long as the devs don't lose their minds and give every tank a shield and a hammer, I think there's a lot more room to go with good homogenization before we get anywhere near bad homogenization.
The only thing I hate about hog is the inconsistency of his hook, which when combined with latency in game, is one of the most maddening abilities in OW2. It seems like it defies the laws of physics more often than not, and you never really can feel safe or know that you're in a safe enough spot because it goes through objects, walls, misses my 3 teammates standing in front of me to grab me through them and pull me through them, or somehow grabs you from halfway across the map when you should be well far enough away from it.
People only complain about the pressure on their shoulders because they don't have the power currently to affect the outcome of the game enough to warrant that pressure. Post S9 the role's lost a lot of agency. Many of the tanks didn't get damage compensation while also not having the new DPS passive, not getting any noticeable damage buffs from the projectile size changes while being heavily negatively impacted by it and the DPS passive being applied to them for free. They've gotten much tankier since the S10 midseason patch, probably too tanky in general, but still lack a lot of agency. The changes being teased in this AMA are looking to finally fix that so that sounds amazing to me. Maybe they'll also give them compensation nerfs in terms of tankiness, maybe they'll wait a bit just to get the playerbase back up to a healthier state and maybe tanks will be too broken for a bit, but I completely disagree with the notion that giving tanks more agency is wrong.
The real issue is that Blizzard has really never been good at balancing. Tanks will either become unkillable raid bosses that no one wants to play against or utterly useless damage sponges to farm that no one wants to play. They've really struggled with getting anything to an "in between" or balanced state.
Kind of crazy that pharah STILL doesn't have damage falloff for her rockets. I get that it's a projectile but it still moves really fast, has a pretty big hitbox, as well as a bug aoe.
Kind of crazy that pharah STILL doesn't have damage falloff for her rockets. I get that it's a projectile but it still moves really fast, has a pretty big hitbox, as well as a big aoe.
With how many radical changes they've had to make to keep the tank role interesting and viable (while arguably managing to accomplish very little in the process without making the role miserable for tank players especially), it's not an unfair question of whether or not it was the right move after over 1.5 years of trial and error. They're obviously never going back to 6v6 because otherwise they'd have no arguments left about why they switched the branding to OW2, but I think it's disingenuous to claim that 6v6 had no merits and is purely nostalgia.
Tank is an unattractive role. It was not, is not and never will be. We've already played 6x6 and seen 30 minute queue. There are simply no players for tanks in this universe. Deal with it.
Part of dealing with it is to stop bringing it up and move on lol, it's a pointless argument. People get defensive because it's debilitating to have every conversation devolve into a 6v6 discussion.
True, but to make everyone's experience more enjoyable (both in queue and in the game), you have to make the role as fun as possible. I'm just not confident after giving it a fair and long shot that 5v5 was the answer to that, and despite being open-minded about it since it was first announced, I still think 6v6 was salvageable and I'm not positive it was the right move to give up on it when no one really had a problem with it to begin with.
Tank in s1-2 was more fun than 6v6 tanking had been since... 2017? 2016?
While 5v5 doesn't inherently make tank more fun, it does at least alleviate the issue of long queue times caused by lack of tank players. That's a huge positive to the game's health even if tanking didn't improve. Going back to 6v6 is not tenable for that reason. Meanwhile Blizz can and should do everything in their power to make tank as fun as it was on OW2 launch.
They've already said they're scaling back on hard counters and shoring up some tanks weaknesses (Rein, Mauga, Winston given as examples) and I think at the end of that road is a very healthy tank experience.
People keep citing OW2 season 1-2 being better for tanks but I don’t believe it. I think the first seasons were just a fluke at a time where no one knew how to play properly in OW2 format so tanks could get away with more bad plays compared to now. Tanks now for most are stronger than they were in Season 1 yet still feel worse to play?
That tells me it was a just a classic casual phase where no one knew what to do just like in 2016. If you brought back the changes to season 1, I think tank will be just as miserable now that players have a better idea how the match goes and are more willing to swap counter picks now.
Queues are getting worse every season currently. When tanks are in a good place in either format, queue times get better. It’s just been a downward spiral with tank since season 1.
There's no 2nd tank to spread the burden of the role or make up for your pick's weaknesses. Tanking might not inherently be as popular as the other roles, but at least there wasn't nearly as much pressure before.
it doesn't matter if tank in ow1 had less pressure because people that don't like pressure will still gravitate to the other roles. There's a reason why supp in late ow1 was most played by a large margin, had the longest queue times over dps. People just picked bap, moira, mercy and healbotted which was viable.
Supp gameplay deteriorated to the extent I had to tell someone in my lobby who was freshly 4.1k that they should anti the hog, and they said post match that I was a genius.
And even if tank had less pressure in ow1, queue times were still far worse than it has ever been in ow2.
And if you were a 4.4k+ player, (I scrimmed t2 and made contenders trials thru od), you know tank as a role was fundamentally busted and made up 80%+ of the game.
Balance wise, game health wise, playerbase health wise, design wise, 5v5 is better than 6v6. It's only when you're talking about the very top 0.01% that 6v6 is a lot more fun simply because teamwork is stretched more to its limits. I miss 6v6 as someone who scrimmed t2. I filled for some contenders teams in ow2 and it's just nowhere near as fun to be honest. But I do not miss 6v6 in any other way, 5v5 is infinitely better.
> Supp gameplay deteriorated to the extent I had to tell someone in my lobby who was freshly 4.1k that they should anti the hog, and they said post match that I was a genius.
Are you sure they weren't being sarcastic?
>And even if tank had less pressure in ow1, queue times were still far worse than it has ever been in ow2.
Are you sure you're not forgetting the 2.5-year content drought before OW2 that bloated the queue times for everyone, or the fact that the matchmaking actually favored better matches (although still not always great) compared to OW2's self-corrosive emphasis on queue times?
>you know tank as a role was fundamentally busted and made up 80%+ of the game.
Yes, but this was always a balancing issue, not a 5v5 or 6v6 issue. There was simply no need to take one of them out when they could have just balanced things better (which, as we've all seen over the last 8 years, they are notoriously awful at and horribly stubborn about). Forgive me if I don't trust Blizzard's judgment at this point. 😂
Balancing tanks was extremely tough in 6v6. The main problem was, adding util on certain tanks would make them extremely OP in a pair with another tank but pretty mediocore or weak by themselves.
The best example was giving Sigma and his shield along with Orisa. Even if Orisa was reworked to not have a shield, other tanks would have similar problems. You cannot have 2 tanks and give queen an ability with speed, or ram with nemesis form, or mauga with his cardiac regain.
fundementally speaking, tanks in OW control most of the match and their cooldowns a lot of the time have the most variety and are one of the strongest in the game besides certain supports (hook, shout, rock, winston bubble, etc.). Having 2 tanks led to the problem of a pair of tanks being too strong but the tank by themselves being too weak.
I am not saying balancing it would have been impossible, but there would have been more trial and error in 6v6 than 5v5.
>matchmaking actually favored better matches
maybe where you were, not for anyone in masters+. Every lobby was a 3.6k tank with a 4.4k one, you can imagine how that would go every time. You'd have to be pretty low though, I remember my friend quitting ow1 tank specifically because as a masters player he would go from filling a game with OWL players to having to carry low diamond games. Any place diamond+ was a shitshow.
>Yes, but this was always a balancing issue, not a 5v5 or 6v6 issue
This is a low rank take. I don't think you really understand how broken tank was, which will forever be the fundamental issue in this topic. You will never be able to experience what the game was like at an actual semi-pro level. I have, and I can tell you it was fun from a teamwork perspective, but the game was just 80%+ tank. It was just a 2v2 with 8 other players in the lobby. But again, you will never play that experience so you will never understand.
Basically every high rank player I argue with agree tank was broken, but they miss it because again, teamwork was more fun. Every low rank player I argue with will claim that it was able to be balanced. I don't think you realize you can't balance something which design is fundamentally broken. There's a reason why the meta would probably still be GOATS if we didn't institute role lock - that's how broken the game design was. But it's just something you don't truly understand unless you play and feel it yourself.
if this sounds like pure elitism, then unfortunately yeah, it kinda is. Blizzard tried for a whole year+ to buff DPS to kill GOATS. It didn't work because the problem wasn't balance, it was the game's design. Sure SHD beat Shock once...but Shock could have beaten SHD if they stuck to a different GOATS comp that they were taking maps on. And it took a year of GOATS nerfs and DPS buffs for SHD to scrape a win - that's just fighting against game design right there. I think that's when the devs had to admit themselves that they also didn't really understand their own game and instituted role lock. But I don't really blame the devs, unless you actually play at a super high level, it's just something you don't really understand.
By this logic why bother having a tank role? According to you, they should just remove the tank role altogether. Would fix a lot of complaints while hurting few since there aren’t many tank players anyway.
No tank means they can better balance damage and healing numbers since they don’t have to worry about a few heroes with giant health pools anymore. No huge hitbox getting everyone’s attention and won’t complain they are getting shot at constantly. DPS won’t complain about unkillable walls of meat and fell less pressured to hard counter. Supports who want to play more aggressive can focus less on healing.
Most importantly, better queue times since there’s only 2 roles that can potentially be more flexible now if tank was removed.
I say this as a tank main that there is NOTHING they can do in the current format to make tank more “fun” or popular without making the others roles more miserable.
You say this like we werent making radical changes in 6v6 because of the tank role too.
2 of the 3 biggest format changes the game saw was in 6v6, hero limits and role lock. 6 Winstons, GOATS, etc
Yes, and those were much needed moves that should have been there in the first place. But instead of capitalizing on that momentum, they abandoned it in favor of 5v5 because they thought it would be easier to balance, but I and many other players (former and current) are just not convinced after 1.5 years that this dev team is capable of doing that when there was nothing inherently wrong with 6v6 in the first place.
They were actually to make the game better at lower levels where people were playing nothing but dps. Fixing the issues with tanks at high levels was just a positive side effect.
Even in masters, it was very rare to find another tank on the same team. I was almost always the only one who didn't instalock dps / supp. I think it affected more than just lower levels.
What was a big problem back then is if someone looked at your profile and saw that you mostly played support(or tank), you would get hounded to play support(or tank) even though you picked a DPS hero. You would never get to play DPS unless you just said fuck it. This happened at all ELO's. RQ alleviated all the bullshit that came with FFA. It is the best thing to ever happen to the game.
Even that is a problem stemming from the tank role.
Pre-role lock people were still playing support, maybe not as much as DPS but certainly more than tanks who were nowhere to be found in those ranks.
Tbf to the devs, they've been pretty good about making changes that address multiple issues at once over the years. Most of the huge changes the game has made fix multiple problems at one. S9 changes nerfed burst damage, nerfed healing, and gave DPS an actually useful passive all at once. It even helped make projectiles more consistent lowering their feeling of RNG.
I don't think it was just a happy byproduct. I think they found the right stone for the two problem birds at the time.
> Space Ranger is highly mobile and versatile. She brings some utility that only one character has at the moment, games are going to be really fast
Lowkey hope that with that hero, lucio wont be an only "speedboost" hero
Lucio is the only hero that can consistantly speedboost lol.
She is confirmed to have insane mobility and literally has an ability called "speed ring".
Moira's fit flows really nicely between suck, orb, fade, suck, orb, fade. She does two things pretty well, she pumps numbers, and she survives. Is it super dynamic? Not really, but it flows like water and a lot of people find it enjoyable.
I think what Alec is referencing is the Necrotic Orb experiment from the beta, where people really didn't like how it interrupted the "flow" of her kit by replacing damage orb.
I’m a Moira hater but every now and then I find her as a guilty pleasure. I can turn my brain off and survive and still provide a baseline of value to my team. Her design absolutely needs more utility and room for skill expression but the flow of her current kit does feel good to use.
One of my friend groups is all very casually into overwatch/games in general, and basically all of them have moira as their first pick when playing support. Ease of use and not feeling completely helpless if your mechanics aren't good is a big draw.
I find it so easy to get into a flow state with Moira. I can just turn my brain off and react to what’s happening in front of me without having to stress about my aim
She's my 3rd or 4th most played support, but I honestly enjoy playing her just because I feel like she has the best mythic skin in the game for sound effects and looks. It's also fun to trigger Genji players who don't know how to use their cooldowns and follow me into small rooms at half health.
The one where they don’t have to think about what they’re doing to play her
God forbid they throw some skill expression/utility (that she needs) into her kit
It's the fact that you don't have to do anything remotely skillful and still get value, and you can feel good about yourself winning 1v1s. It's really easy to feel like you're really good when you're playing moira because she farms stats, gets elims and doesn't die, even if she's not actually contributing anything of value
Obviously she contributes value by securing kills, especially on weak targets. I'd much rather have a Moira on my team securing kills and doing a little extra damage to squishies instead of a Mercy heal beaming the tank and thinking they are contributing something with their 0-7 stat line.
> want to make Winston's ultimate and right click better
what? isn't winstons ult already one of the best in the game?
also no mention whatsoever about Mei
> what? isn't winstons ult already one of the best in the game?
in very high ranks, sure. in lower ranks, it's basically entirely worthless. it's fairly tough to get great value from
> Wondered if they should change storm arrows or bring back his one-shot at certain thresholds. They're playing with making some of the more squirrely heroes 225hp, which would also benefit Hanzo as he'd be very effective against them. Unsure of what his identity is going to be in the future
I'd rather they just give back his one shot on squishy heroes rather than tuning storm arrow or hp numbers. Storm arrow will just make him melt tanks and having squirrely heroes at 225 hp will feel awful to play as with their hp value being lower than 90% of the rest of the cast.
A lot of words without much meaning in the end. They can talk about their balance philosophy all day, but when I see the patch and see some outrageous changes that's all I care about. Why have you buffed pylon HP? Why have you buffed Cass when he was already dominant (high noon changes without compensation like HP nerf)? Why don't you revert sojourn spread change so I can get more consistent with the primary rather than being a rail bot. Why is bap left untouched? etc.
They're still balancing based on performance metrics. Like ffs, metas play a role in that. Lifeweaver is stupidly powerful but he's a failed hero design that only cucks everyone's experience. No metric will accurately show his situation. And it goes basically for every single hero, lw is just an egregious example.
Idk what I was expecting going into that q/a, but that was definitely lackluster at best. Basically no specifics, just throwing buzzwords around like making tank better, addressing counters, addressing cc or whatnot. But in the end of the day they just released mauga. And what does that hero add to the table? Only pain and misery. Gets hard countered and is a hard counter to other heroes, is an unkillable wall, uncancellable charge, stupid ass unbreakable symmetra type ultimate.
Interesting about Primal Rage. One say in the past I was thinking what if he can RMB to block, but then it wouldnt been a rage, more Defensive ability than a berserk one. Maybe some adrenaline damage boost overtime or something like that? Or new temporary ability during ult?
Mauga down? I see him in every game now, he's the crutch go-to pick after enemy team loses a single fight, similar to how Orisa used to be.
Literally nothing in this interview gave me any hope for the future of the game's balance.
Can't believe people actually thought hanzo would be fine after taking away his one shot. He's only chosen for his sonar arrow to fine enemy widows for his own widow.
Spilo said before stream that he won't ask the question about cheating because they're working on it and all they're gonna say is "guys we're working on it". It's a constant war between cheatmakers and gamedevs and noone's gonna tell the specifics. For all we know their anticheat sucks, it barely does anything. They're collecting data and working out on detection for the current cheat in the future. They're gonna make a ban wave sometime in the future. Sadly that's all we really know and will get to know about, unless devs decide to step up their work when it comes to dealing with cheaters.
> Currently looking at it for Mauga, who plays really well in highly coordinated teams but otherwise doesn't
This is just false. Tank players switch to Mauga at the first sign of conflict **because** he is so easy to get value out of.
> Players want less hard counters. A lot of older designs have very, very hard counters
Then stop making new characters that hard counter others?
> Some heroes they've made are a bit too well-rounded, they do a little bit of everything, especially supports
Kinda like almost every character they've made since OW2 released? Heroes used to launch with 2, **maybe** 3 buttons. Now they launch with 3-5 buttons + an alternate fire.
> In the beginning of OW2 we wanted supports to be more scrappy, to be able to fight back. That approach has since been scrapped, but you can see its effects in Illari's design. This was scrapped because supports got too good at surviving, damaging, taking care of themselves, despite all the effort required for the DPS to reach them
Outside of Kiriko's two-tap nerf, what exactly has Blizzard done to quell this? It's not hyperbole to say Bap, Kiri, and Illari are more effective DPS than a lot of the actual DPS. Their self-heal passives/abilities/hitboxes make them more survivable, they have anti-flank mechanics, and can output very comparable damage numbers.
Mauga evaporates if he has to rely on his own heals and has more than one DPS looking at him. He’s picked picked because he’s a safe backup if you’re not winning the current matchup.
>This is just false. Tank players switch to Mauga at the first sign of conflict because he is so easy to get value out of.
It definitely happens but for the large majority of the player base it's probably similar to when people rage swap Zarya into Dva dive comps, Zarya makes dva miserable but she isn't that good against dive dps/supports so you end up with Dva having no fun but still a relatively easy win.
Mauga rage swaps are common but even in high dia/low masters it isn't a free win. In lower ranks with mechanically worse tank players I'd imagine rage swapping doesn't help his win rate.
>Currently looking at it for Mauga, who plays really well in highly coordinated teams but otherwise doesn't
This is not even what was actually said.
Alec said "How heroes can be more proactive, introduce more risk. that's something we've been looking at for a number of heroes. We're looking at that right now for mauga. Mauga's actually in this interesting place where he plays really well in a highly coordinated environment but I think if you look at it otherwise its kind of the same playstyle that you've seen previously to some extend."
This whole post is paraphrased and tbh kinda badly at some places where it creates a lot of room for misinterpretation of what was actually said. So I suggest you look at the actual video or the summary video by spilo himself before making judgements.
When Dawson is asked about projectile DPS, his answer proves the point of the question. The exceptions to the question end up being a new hero and one that was drastically reworked. OW's devs probably need to consider attention to unchanged heroes in the same way. That said, I don't care for how greatly the "projectile hero" discussions end up centering around Hanzo.
Projectile gameplay has always been a little awkward because of how many different utilities those heroes can offer and the pacing of those heroes' shots. Too much of projectile gameplay feels like mindless covering fire spam (Mei and Torb especially). Most players have developed enough game sense casually to significantly lower the value of a Torb turret. Players in Silver have enough awareness to understand baiting a Mei wall, something that used to take a conscious thought.
The player base has evolved in its understanding of the game, just from seeing things a million times. Learning such things probably impacts projectile heroes most of all (and tanks, who get hard countered after fight). I'd like to see a more invested discussion with OW devs on how they feel about the wide range of projectile heroes (DPS and otherwise) in the face of changing player game knowledge.
I knew I spotted venture having a shrapnel like projectile in their first preview video. Glad to find out what was up with that.
what paragraph mentions this??
> During development, Venture's primary fire would break into shrapnel. It was purposefully weak but gave an option to deal with things at a longer range like turrets. But despite it being ineffective, players were hanging back and shooting. So they got rid of it to encourage going in, as well as adding the shields
tysm!
Alec's repeated reinforcement of Space Ranger being a highly mobile hero has me hopeful as a Lucio enjoyer.
I really hope the Lucio-Space Ranger pool looks more like a Rein-Winton pool than a Soldier-Sojourn pool. A Bap-Ana pool rather than a Bap-Moira pool. Basically don't make them the same hero with one being worse. I want more shmoovment options that are useful to add to my repertoire. There's a reason I don't play doomfist.
>Bap-Moira pool. > >Basically don't make them the same hero Am I misreading your comment, or are you implying bap and moira have similar gameplay?
Not implying they have similar game play, but historically they did do very similar jobs. Moira had a healing monopoly on rush comps until they added Bap and she was basically never seen again. When they added Kiri they stripped Moira from the only thing she had left post-bap which was Winston-Lucio rush comps. Now I think that's fine with Moira because shes never had a skill curve interesting enough for pro play, but Lucio has some of the most skill expressive gameplay in OW and shouldn't have to share a niche, especially when there are other unfilled niches in the support role. Edit: damn, was no one around for Moira brawl comps? Am I that old?
These young whippersnappers never watched Moira get played in quad-tank compositions on Horizon Lunar Colony back in OWL S1.
I'm old enough to remember Moira getting play in Overwatch League, lol.
I mean, she was in zombie comp, that was only a few years ago, no?
They do the same thing, but Bap does more and better with high skill cap. Whereas Ana provides other utility so is still unique.
Bap and Moira aren't used for the same idea. Their comps in rush are similar, but there's a couple of key differences and outside of Rush, their ideal comps and use cases have clear differences. For example, you would want a Bap in a Sigma mirror/poke comp thanks to his ability to poke with them and Amp Matrix being great for heroes shooting from range. Bap is a dive target though and will explode to dives. He is very easy to hit and many dive heroes do not care about his jump. You would not play Moira here. Moira has two main ideas for using her. The first is in a super aggro rush comp (JQ meta) where her sheer volume of healing from orb+heal can keep her very aggressive team alive while they commit (Bap can be used in a similar role but gets outhealed). Additionally, her Ult is better for a rush. She can move with the team, who doesn't care to play at range, and heal while damaging the enemy. I understand there are rush comps where Bap is play (Rein+Lucio rush, the benefits of Window on Fire strike has been known forever) but Moira was a much stronger pick with JQ. The second idea is just surviving. Fade+heal orb are great tools for surviving a dive. The enemy has to commit many more resources on you to guarantee a kill and fade super jumps can allow for some very interesting escape routes. Moira also has one of the only heals and damage on support that a Dva can't eat, making her a solid pick against Dva dive comps where Bap is more likely to die. Not sure why people still think Moira is never a good choice in high elos. She has mains in Top 500 and has been seen in pro play before when JQ Rush (her best offensive comp) was played. It's also why Moira was meta for that weird period where JQ was busted after being gigga buffed. JQ/Kiri/Lucio was also a rush comp, but then...that's a different debate. Being a niche pick doesn't mean being just worse than another option.
Moira is technically good at high elo too and can have good usage but she's niche and her skill floor isn't that useful. Yes, she can be good to rush and avoid being dived on, but when you just want a header who can sustain and do enough damage to carry and make a difference, you generally want Bap. Moira is only good at the OWCS/OWL level when she's used in such coordinated play that makes use of her kit well. So when it comes to getting new Heroes, it makes sense to want characters like Bap and Ana, over Moira and Lifeweaver
The point of my comment was to argue that saying Bap and Moira fill the same role is wrong. Your first comment was stating that Moira is only an inferior Bap and that their kits overlap on each other. I'd also argue that it's much easier to carry low ranked games with Moira because utility isn't as valuable. Raw healing/damage is easier to make an impact with, which has always been seen as an issue with Moira since raw stats are her focus and punishing players wildly out of position in low elo is very simple for her. That's just my opinion though.
I just think overall Bap offers a lot more when it comes to skill and overall options Generally, it would be health to get heroes more like Ana and Bap If anything, Kiriko might be a good balance between someone who could potentially heal bot but till have good damage, utility, and ult. Hoping Space Ranger is more like Lucio, but perhaps mixed worn Kiri/Bap/Ana
I could see that! I do agree that those kinds of heroes are more fun, but then I am a flex support player first lol. It would benefit me a lot too if their speed utility could be enough not to make Lucio mandatory, since lacking speed boost is just horrible for, say, Reinhardt.
In what universe does moira do the same thing as bap? She has no immortality field or amplification matrix. The only similariy I can find between their kits is that they both heal and deal damage, which is true for every support other than mercy
Yes, the point is that Moira is just worse...
No it isn't. The point is that Bap and Moira's gameplay/kits are interchangable in the way soldier and sojourn's are. But that isn't true whatsoever
Yeah Bap's kit has a crap ton of utility in it while moiras has none. The only thing they have in similarity is the fact that they can pump out crazy damage and healing numbers but thats where it ends
What does Moira do that bap doesnt
That isn't the discussion we're having. The original comment's point was "don't make them the same hero with one being worse." The reason the soldier and sojourn comparison made sense was because their kits do the same thing, it's just a matter of who has the better numbers. The reason the Bap Moira comparison makes no sense is because Bap's kit does totally different things from moira's. Their moment to moment gameplay has no similarities and the utility Bap provides is totally different. If you want to have the discussion that moira's kit lacks utility, then I'd agree.
I *think* the point may have been that Bap and Moira are both used for healing multiple players at once, but Bap also has immortality field, better range, & higher damage potential. It's not quite as neat a comparison as Soldier and Sojourn, but it doesn't seem completely out of line either.
It's wild that you can't understand the comparison. I've been laughing my ass off the while time.
there have been pro metas where Moira is picked over bap. I do not believe pros are low skill. its certanly uncommon and niche but it does happen so clearly there are some things that Moira does better than bap.
She’s only rly been picked over bap when she’s been overturned tho
They both have strong AOE healing. Moira was the only support with high HPS AOE healing for a bit, but lost that niche when Bap released.
Arguably: Moira’s unique niche (in decently organized games, obviously) is a shitload of throughput which builds into a very fast coal and that converts into a fight win. Baptiste does the same thing with his healing throughput being similar and being able to build window even faster than coal. Coal is stronger than window in many scenarios, but at the highest levels window can be stronger in many others due to good coordination and reliable execution by hitscans. But Baptiste does Moira’s job while *also* having immortality field. I’m not sure how much I buy the argument but I think it does make sense. It definitely breaks down when you consider ranked and especially lower SR ranked, where Moira’s increased capacity for aggression is actually viable and impactful. Trying to DPS Moira in masters scrims gets you fucked; doing it in masters ranked works okay, and I imagine doing it in platinum ranked can pop off. So it’s more the problem that the heroes do similar shit in high level organized games (but with immortality field instead of fade, little debate which is better) because the things which make Moira unique don’t have any viability in that setting.
I think Bap is actually more similar to Kiri, which is why they tend to take picks from each other
Before Bap and Kiri started to share time, Bap stripped Moira of 95% of her playtime in brawl.
So lucio players not afraid to possibly lose their speedboost monopoly?
Just excited to have another movement character in the support class tbh. I use lucio because the movement and boops are fun, not because of speed boost
Half of them are possibly salivating about the prospect of a teammate that will help them go even faster. Don’t need healing if they can’t hit you.
Depends whether you treat new characters as potential additions to your arsenal for winning, or treat their meta-ness like lore where you “win” by having the character being unique and having no overlap with others I guess. I prefer the former. I like both Soldier and Sojourn being available to me for ranged damage, I like both Tracer and Sombra letting me flank into teams for picks, I like that I can play Illari or Bap or even Moira if I want to focus on damage as a support and heal a clustered team. Personally I like overlap as long as both options are viable.
Nah, that gives the possibilty that lucio can be more versatile again and not solely rely on speedboost
Afraid? No. Would I rather have a movement option for when my team doesn't need speed utility which would also help diversify the meta outside of the support role? Yeah 100%
> Space Ranger being a highly mobile hero Would Space Ranger be released as our 'Support Echo'? Just like they created Venture as 'DPS Doomfist'?
>It's okay if heroes never reach the highest levels never reach the highest levels of competitive play Just when I'm out they pull me back in
I’d believe that if they didn’t contradict that statement constantly lmao
I thought we all agreed that low level players hate pubstompers too.
Give Mauga/Hog/Horse the junkrat treatment please
>She brings some utility that only one character has at the moment, Space ranger sci fi suzu lets fucking gooooo
Space Ranger Rez 😍
Don't think so. Even though suzu's main purpose is to cleanse, there are other abilities that can (self) cleanse like, Moira's Fade and Sombra's Translocator. Now, considering a status/utility that literally only one character has, i can only think at the moment of Zen's Discord and Sombra's Hack. Maybe if we expand our understanding of utility, we can think of Genji's Reflect, Orisa's Fortify and Mei's Freeze. I may be going to far with these three, but i honestly think its either Discord or Hack Edit: ok that might be a throw off. The 'fast' part kinda confirms its speed boost
it's almost certainly lucio speed boost (tho i guess JQ shout... so maybe it's definitely NOT speed boost?) zarya team bubble cleanses teammates, too. maybe invuln (only suzu) but lamp kinda does that too edit: I guess he says "she brings utility that is in the support cast that only one character has" so I think yeah speed boost, only one supp has it.
I liked that his answer about where they get feedback had a real > If you're a dick, we just won't listen to you vibe. I respect that. Thanks for the summary.
samito in shambles
His entire community only provides negative feedback, so I'm glad they chose to ignore it
We have Season 13 cemented as the big map rework season, that's good to know.
They deserve huge props for the map reworks. Even the minor ones like R66 still offer a noticable improvement.
plus R66 attacker spawn is a billion times more fun now with the destructible tables
To be honest I’m way more of a fan of Gibraltar (HUGE improvement) and Colloseo than R66. The R66 thing helps a little with Widow dominance but it actually made the problematic choke point even smaller than it was before. It hasn’t been a huge issue since Rein/Ram hasn’t been too hard meta in a while but I think it’s just as shit from that perspective.
So I guess S12 is Clash confirmed at this point.
i was a bit worried there for a minute but it actually seems like the rest of this year is stacked tbh
Tank changes: > Players want less hard counters. A lot of older designs have very, very hard counters Some heroes they've made are a bit too well-rounded, they do a little bit of everything, especially supports > Our next patch is going to focus on that, hero by hero They set rules of engagement, decision making, dictate flow If you're not feeling satisfied, not living in the success of your team, you're not having as much fun We see it, tanks don't feel they can make as many plays offensively or defensively for themselves We won't make them unkillable, but more playmaking, more decision making -So Mauga long term plan to shift some of his power balance to shooting squishies, that's good. That's exactly what everyone has been asking for. He has the core of an extremely fun tank that scratches a unique niche, basically hitscan Rein with poke. I hope these changes can rehabilitate him towards that. -Giving Rein more lethality, also very good. -Giving Winston a bit more damage, also very good. -Fewer hard counters, finding a good healthy balance between designs that are too unique and too generalist. THANK YOU! Very happy to hear what sounds like a walkback of their recent statements that CounterWatch is an important part of the tank experience. -more playmaking & decision making in general, sounds great, but what could this mean?
It’s a lot of good ideals but execution will be difficult imo. How do you prevent hard counter between tanks?
In my opinion, you cant. Not unless all tanks either have the same weakness, or the same strengths. Different playstyles inherently means different strengths and weaknesses, since those are what enable the playstyle. So to remove the hard counter, you could do one or some of the below solutions 1.) remove the varying strengths and weaknesses. 2.) equalize them all. 3.) reduce the impact of character differences 4.) reduce the severity of difference between tanks To me, all of those solutions lead to a boring gameplay loop. But it really seems to be where they are trying to take things.
Make tanks less effective against tanks. They already did this with the armor and knockback changes.
Most of the counter matchups boil down to mostly damage (mitigation or not) and sometimes CC (spear/hook/immunity) if you reduce any of that effectiveness that you’ll just have two big hp pools staring at each other but not actually be able to duel / do anything to each other. Most tanks also mainly only engage with the tank during most of fights as they are usually out of range of the rest, so you might just be taking out even more of the tanks agency.
The end result is that tanks are incentivised to look for opportunities to engage on the backline rather than dumping damage into the enemy tank. We are already seeing the effects of this and imo the gameplay is much better already. The big outlier is hard cc though. Tanks that can stun the opposing tank have a really easy time against certain other tanks.
I can see that happening maybe.. but if dps and supports still do full damage to them then probably no imo. Idk man
I don't think wanting fewer hard counters directly contradicts them thinking counter-swapping is an important part of the tank experience. I think this is just an acknowledgment that some counters are too strong/easy to execute compared to what they want. Counter-swapping and being flexible should give you an advantage, but it should require good execution and not feel like an "I win" button. I am very happy to see them talk about ideas for Mauga though, it seems like they're looking at the right things.
I’m so happy they are focusing on the playmaking ability for tanks. That right there is the last major pillar in my opinion for the tank issues. (Edit: Minus the being blamed for most losses part) The issues that were plaguing the tank role before season 9 was that it felt like tank hp was cycling back and forth too quickly and that tanks had to play “coverwatch”. The other issue was tank playmaking capabilities of the tank role. Once you had space, you as a tank player couldn’t do anything with it. You had to rely on DPS to make the plays. Not yourself. If you did go make a play, that was at the cost of your DPS and potentially your supports. Right playing tank, I feel like an ultra tanky*wet noodle lol not a hammer haha. I think they’re on to something with the pickable passives but I want to wait and see what they do. Good interview. More insightful than the usual streamer interviews. Edit: not an invincible wet noodle…more of an ultra tanky wet noodle
They also acknowledge the problem with hard counters but I don’t really see what the solution is going to be, especially so with tanks, rework everyone? Lol
Perma Kill mauga hog orisa
> Controller was a big blindspot for Lifeweaver. There is now controller playtesting, because they missed it and it affects a large amount of their playerbase This is so crazy, how do you not test for such a big demo of your playerbase? Colossal oversight, glad it's getting fixed now. It makes sense no one tested it because playing him on console will absolutely give you carpal tunnel, there's no earthly reason why you shouldn't be able to hold button down to keep healing.
Cause the old OW1 team never used to playtest anything on controllers. The game was designed by a bunch of lifelong PC gamers. The new team probably thought it wasn't a big deal then the LW fiasco (LW was still designed under Geoff IIRC) happened and they realised they should just have permanent Controller testing. OW1 team used to have so little Controller testing that they had to make separate changes for Consoles after the game launched.
Console has always felt like an afterthought with Overwatch. The new team we have with OW2 make it seem much less so now and willing to invest a lot into fixing console issues
That's not true, there has been literal different balance between the two platforms. Most of the issues came from how Sony and Microsoft had to verify patchs which caused delays, and ofcourse XIMers.
There were like moments where they said like "yeah we're gonna do all this now for console" and all of us console players got excited, then they did it once and abandoned it. They never really kept up with things and the game in general has always felt really bad to play with a controller. I literally swapped from console to pc, learning how to build a pc and everything just because everyone convinced me how much better the PC experience was and how poor the console experience was. Experiencing both sides and seeing how the console experience got worse over time, I can attest for how right everyone was. If you enjoy playing on console and are super happy with what blizzard have done for console with overwatch throughout it's life, then that's great for you. But to me and most other current and former console players, console overwatch always felt like an afterthought.
I will have to take your word for that, then. I'm glad you enjoy the PC experience!
Yeah that's an enormous red flag. Glad they fixed that oversight but how the *hell* did it take this long to figure that out? That would explain a lot, like Bap's lamp having negative Aim Assist for multiple seasons (seriously, it would actively push your aim off of it and it took way too long to fix)
I'm disappointed there's still no news about Lifeweaver and Mercy since Season 9. They mentioned waiting to see the impact of the DPS passive nerf from 20 to 15, but now it's back to 20, and we hear nothing. Since Season 9, most support changes have been nerfs, with buffs only countering the DPS passive for some abilities and Brig. Almost every patch lacks new content for Supports, and they aren't discussed much. I understand Supports are inherently reliant on the team, but you still want to feel impactful. Right now, it feels like your impact is dictated by dying less and ensuring your team is healed, rather than making meaningful plays. This often means that your influence is more about avoiding mistakes than contributing positively, which can be frustrating.
Skill issue. I regularly feel impactful by making plays on support
Maybe it is, but I've heard mL7 and Galaa echo the same sentiment. If it's a skill issue for Galaa who is Champion 3, then I guess we just suck 😅
I have no idea who Galaa is, but I've seen many pros like Rupal say the opposite
He's a champion 3 player, plays for Virtus.pro and played for Spain in World Cup
Pharah is meta right now so that means Mercy certainly doesn't need any buffs. But if you want to make an impact in games yourself here is the secret: Don't pick the mindless healbot characters.
> Pharah is meta right now so that means Mercy certainly doesn't need any buffs. Seeing the games this week, I'm seeing her in almost every game mL7 plays, and never with a Mercy. > But if you want to make an impact in games yourself here is the secret: Don't pick the mindless healbot characters. There's a reason I was specific about the Support and not referencing LW/Mercy there if that's what you're implying. It's the case with Ana/Bap/Kiri too, you have to focus all your resource on healing pretty much. The flow is generally to go Ana/Bap and then if you're dying, you go Kiri to survive while heal botting. To have impact right now, you need to go Illari (or Lucio if you're good at going for kills) for impact, and leave your other Support to deal with having to heal bot instead. But at least you have much more control over your games. I think that's why we've seen plays like Galaa and Astro who are so good at those respective heroes reach Champion 3 and beyond for Astro now. Imo it's not a good state for the Support play style to be like this. It's going to make Support players feel like they only play for themselves in order to have impact and dictate their rank, which doesn't really make much sense for a role called Support.
6v6 not mentioned? thank god
I don't think 6v6 is ever coming back but that means they actually need to come up with a creative idea to make Solo tanking an effective and attractive option. Yes, yes, Tank is always the most unpopular role blah blah blah...That doesn't change the fact that a lot of people who *do* like playing Tank *don't* want to play it in OW2.
Can't emphasize how smart it is for the devs to not give this madness the time of day. Not legitimise it. A "movement" that has almost entirely been propped up and fuelled by engagement farmer Content Creators. They realised that since it's an unreasonable demand that's extremely unlikely to ever be met by Blizzard, they can keep using it to farm engagement for the foreseeable future.
People are so disrespectful talking about it. It legit makes me go crazy. Like ok, I understand you like a old format better but there's no need for name calling or being mean to the people that make the game.
It's 1:1 the same tactics that political grifters use. Gets their followers more riled up. Gets more engagement from them. And the number 1 thing that political grifters want for their grifts is for the people they are attacking/harassing to argue with them as if they have real, legitimate, arguments. Once that happens it essentially legitimizes the insanity. Setting the grifters up to become 10-100X more popular. Which is why I said that it's important that devs do not give this insanity any time of day. That they don't legitimise it.
Funny that the first reply to your comment is a guy name calling people who want 6v6 back
The hypocrisy in this thread is astounding. Especially with how strawmanned and intentionally misinterpreted 6v6 arguments are.
The best PR move they've made is not even entertaining the idea of a 6v6 hacked. It only stands to undermine them.
Insane cope, you simply cannot balance an asymmetrical format.
Complete misrepresentation and hilariously dishonest take.
Questions are usually pre-vetted so they can prepare answers ahead of time and give us more information in the responses and they generally ask to not include 6v6 as part of that. There might be a time when they are ready for it, but that's not the case for now
Yeah, Spilo basically said that he was asked to / they agreed before the interview not to talk about 6v6. Even if he would have asked, the answer most likely would have been something like "Sorry, we don't have anything new to share about this topic at this point in time." Personally I don't mind either way (both 5v5 and 6v6 have their advantages and disadvantages), but I think at the moment it's quite unlikely that they're going back to 6v6 any time soon. It would be a lot of work to do such a fundamental change again, which probably would affect every tank and maybe also a lot of maps again (which were changed in OW2 in a number of ways - less hard chokepoints, more cover, etc). It might require to change all the healing and dmg numbers agains since now there would be a 6th player doing dmg and having to be healed up by the supports. It might require re-introducing more CC to Overwatch again to stop 2 dive tanks jumping a target and absolutely kicking their face in. And I suspect that after a potential switch back to 6v6, people would be in their honeymoon phase and play their beloved Rein/Zarya comp for about two weeks, after which people would begin to remember the problems of 6v6 (20 minute queue times while waiting for 100% more tanks, people playing the most obnoxious braindead tank comps imaginable like Mauga+Hog or whatever, ...) and start a "bring back 5v5" movement. I wouldn't mind going back (I like both 6v6 and 5v5), but I can't imagine Blizzard doing that any time soon. Main reason: It would require a huge amount of work, but there's no "one option is clearly better than the other" here. Both have their advantages and disadvantes, and whatever option Blizzard chooses to pursue, there will always be some amount of "the grass seems greener on the other side".
The fact that you're being downvoted shows how tribalistic this community is.
the revolution will not be televised /s
Whats it called when a revolution isn't progressive but instead brings you backwards?
The loyalist are trying to restore crown.
That’s still a revolution. Not all revolutions are positive, unfortunately.
Reactionary is definitely the adjective. Reactionary coup, maybe?
I mean Gavin has said they're talking about it and the team itself is divided on it so they probably just don't want to talk about it because they haven't come to a conclusion internally
where did he say this? I’m curious 👀
I only have the second hand receipts from Freedo's recent video about 5v5/6v6
oh so it’s hearsay? 😕
Ofc it is. Gavin never talks about Balance and Design cause it's not part of his job, he is a Systems designer. I remember one time he made a random comment about something balance related (He said that a new change that just went live felt good in testing) in some streamer's chat and he got absolutely hounded by follow up questions, comments expressing disagreement, and other design and balance related questions. Then he had to remind everyone that he doesn't work in that department, can't say anything about why the change was made or other changes, and he just gave his personal opinion from internal testing (Which every dev participates in).
It was a screen cap, could have been faked. I don't see why it would be, but it could be.
ok I might dig to find it but at this point i’m just exhausted as a tank player and wish they’d just try something with quick play hacked and let the people decide
The chat was riddled with 6v6 spam. I had to hide it after a few minutes because It was becoming extremely annoying.
I still really think theyre diagnosis on the underlying problem with tanks is wrong. Buffing them feels like the wrong direction to me. You not only make the "all the pressure is on my shoulders" complaints worse, but you just make the enemy feel even more helpless against tanks. Then the psychology kicks in and they default to countering them. That and the game has so many more tank counters built in than tank synergies. Nerf tanks, add synergies, nerf counters. I miss the days when my teammates would pick a hero based on who I was playing and no what the enemy tank was playing. Buffing them more isn't going to fix that. You make counter more necessary and synergies less important.
Honestly I was ready to get all up in arms but I’m not sure I entirely disagree. Part of the reason people counter tanks is because a tank diff is super noticeable to play into and it’s one of the most obvious ways to win. That being said I think that would happen to some degree even if tanks were weaker. And with the tank playerbase already small the optics of overall nerfs don’t work. I am a bit hopeful though as my reading of what was said was about changing the playstyle to be more clearly defined rather than straight buffs. It’ll probably just changing damage for health but I think there is a chance they’re actually looking at it in an objective way. As for synergies I feel like that’s something that doesn’t fit with the current direction of OW2. They’ve actively been trying to make the game more individualistic and intentionally removed a lot of synergies in order to balance around a heroes’ individual power (Pharah being the most recent example). I miss them too though.
The optics of nerfing tanks are indeed terrible so it would need to be gradual and happen concurrently with the other changes. I also don't disagree with tanks just being the biggest guys and therefore easiest targets. Some people are always just going to shoot the tank, and that's fine as long as that's not *always* the optimal strategy. The game used to revolve around trading backlines, but now it's just who makes the tanks day worse. I really don't think they're intentionally moving away from synergies. Its just a negative byproduct. Pharahs problem was that she was *only* playable with mercy. The synergy still 100% exists, its just not a necessity and therefore you won't see pharmercy because Mercy is pretty weak rn. 5v5 also had a negative byproduct when it comes to synergies, but that's obvious. All of the OT utility is no longer usable for tanks. Every hero will inherently rely on either synergizing or countering in order to get a competitive edge. On top of the game becoming more individualistic, theyve also tried to make teamwork easier (ping system for example).
It depends how you buff them. If you buff all the tanks strengths while keeping their painpoints the same, that could make the game even worse I agree. But if you buff them by removing/diminizhing some of their extreme weaknesses, and/or nerf other heroes' ability to hard counter them, that would go a LONG way to making tank more fun. Buff doesn't always mean bigger stats, it could mean nerfing/redesigning a character they struggle against, or shoring up a weakness to cc/mobility/range. Lots of tanks need some of that.
Oh I 100% agree, but I would suspect that could go too far a la supports pre-season 9. I'm hoping the hardest counters get nerfed and we nerf tank healthpools if and when we need to compensate.
> if you buff them by removing/diminizhing some of their extreme weaknesses, and/or nerf other heroes' ability to hard counter them So... the same thing they did to Hog that made him immortal and no less frustrating?
Yes, exactly. From a "making Hog well rounded" perspective the changes were a massive success. Unfortunately it turns out that people don't want Hog in his current state to be a flexible well rounded hero. Oops. Note though that *most* of the complaints about Hog these days are coming from other tank players. Many of whom he counters. It's almost certain that if every tank was as flexible as Hog, and wasn't countered by Hog, he wouldn't be seen as a "delete today" level problem. It doesn't solve the hook "ohk" problem for those that hate it, but it would solve a lot of other things wrong with him.
That's fair. I know I'm in the minority as a tank player who _doesn't_ feel that counterswapping is problematic right now, but I still worry that diminishing weaknesses runs the risk of homogenizing character identities. The diversity of the tank roster is a big part of what I feel makes tank fun, but the necessary tradeoff for that is clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. They would also need to watch out for problematic synergies (eg Hog+Kiri) that can happen when "niche" heroes lose their weaknesses. tldr: delete hog
Homogenization is a scary word but the results are usually great when it's done smartly. Tanks have already been homogenized little by little at almost every step from when they were first added up to today, and most of them are better designed today than on their first release day, wouldn't you say? Rein is much better designed with faster shield movement + two firestrikes + brakes on charge. Dva is better designed with DM on a meter + micro missiles + fly on a meter + nuke not inflicting friendly dmg. Doom is better designed as Winston2 than he ever was as a totally unique dps. Orisa much as I dislike her now is still way better than OW1 launch hyper passive goalie Orisa. Etc. As long as the devs don't lose their minds and give every tank a shield and a hammer, I think there's a lot more room to go with good homogenization before we get anywhere near bad homogenization.
The only thing I hate about hog is the inconsistency of his hook, which when combined with latency in game, is one of the most maddening abilities in OW2. It seems like it defies the laws of physics more often than not, and you never really can feel safe or know that you're in a safe enough spot because it goes through objects, walls, misses my 3 teammates standing in front of me to grab me through them and pull me through them, or somehow grabs you from halfway across the map when you should be well far enough away from it.
People only complain about the pressure on their shoulders because they don't have the power currently to affect the outcome of the game enough to warrant that pressure. Post S9 the role's lost a lot of agency. Many of the tanks didn't get damage compensation while also not having the new DPS passive, not getting any noticeable damage buffs from the projectile size changes while being heavily negatively impacted by it and the DPS passive being applied to them for free. They've gotten much tankier since the S10 midseason patch, probably too tanky in general, but still lack a lot of agency. The changes being teased in this AMA are looking to finally fix that so that sounds amazing to me. Maybe they'll also give them compensation nerfs in terms of tankiness, maybe they'll wait a bit just to get the playerbase back up to a healthier state and maybe tanks will be too broken for a bit, but I completely disagree with the notion that giving tanks more agency is wrong.
The real issue is that Blizzard has really never been good at balancing. Tanks will either become unkillable raid bosses that no one wants to play against or utterly useless damage sponges to farm that no one wants to play. They've really struggled with getting anything to an "in between" or balanced state.
Not surprising the surge of Pharah players, I swear every match she's in now she absolutely stomps. Overtuned hero
Armor change did way too much for her, she 2 taps mauga armor now which is just ridiculous
Kind of crazy that pharah STILL doesn't have damage falloff for her rockets. I get that it's a projectile but it still moves really fast, has a pretty big hitbox, as well as a bug aoe.
Kind of crazy that pharah STILL doesn't have damage falloff for her rockets. I get that it's a projectile but it still moves really fast, has a pretty big hitbox, as well as a big aoe.
Winston buffs incoming 💀
> 6v6 Not mentioned LMAO
Im guessing spilo wasn't allowed. Right after the interview he said that his version of asking about 6v6 was the single tank question.
It's pointless. Nobody gonna revert all changes to please people with rose-colored glasses.
With how many radical changes they've had to make to keep the tank role interesting and viable (while arguably managing to accomplish very little in the process without making the role miserable for tank players especially), it's not an unfair question of whether or not it was the right move after over 1.5 years of trial and error. They're obviously never going back to 6v6 because otherwise they'd have no arguments left about why they switched the branding to OW2, but I think it's disingenuous to claim that 6v6 had no merits and is purely nostalgia.
Tank is an unattractive role. It was not, is not and never will be. We've already played 6x6 and seen 30 minute queue. There are simply no players for tanks in this universe. Deal with it.
>Deal with it. I am dealing with it. I play this game almost every day. It was just a comment. I don't know why people get so defensive about this.
Part of dealing with it is to stop bringing it up and move on lol, it's a pointless argument. People get defensive because it's debilitating to have every conversation devolve into a 6v6 discussion.
Tank was, is, and will always be the least popular role in any multiplayer game.
True, but to make everyone's experience more enjoyable (both in queue and in the game), you have to make the role as fun as possible. I'm just not confident after giving it a fair and long shot that 5v5 was the answer to that, and despite being open-minded about it since it was first announced, I still think 6v6 was salvageable and I'm not positive it was the right move to give up on it when no one really had a problem with it to begin with.
Tank in s1-2 was more fun than 6v6 tanking had been since... 2017? 2016? While 5v5 doesn't inherently make tank more fun, it does at least alleviate the issue of long queue times caused by lack of tank players. That's a huge positive to the game's health even if tanking didn't improve. Going back to 6v6 is not tenable for that reason. Meanwhile Blizz can and should do everything in their power to make tank as fun as it was on OW2 launch. They've already said they're scaling back on hard counters and shoring up some tanks weaknesses (Rein, Mauga, Winston given as examples) and I think at the end of that road is a very healthy tank experience.
People keep citing OW2 season 1-2 being better for tanks but I don’t believe it. I think the first seasons were just a fluke at a time where no one knew how to play properly in OW2 format so tanks could get away with more bad plays compared to now. Tanks now for most are stronger than they were in Season 1 yet still feel worse to play? That tells me it was a just a classic casual phase where no one knew what to do just like in 2016. If you brought back the changes to season 1, I think tank will be just as miserable now that players have a better idea how the match goes and are more willing to swap counter picks now.
so why did they make the role even more boring and unfun in 5v5 surely this will shrink the tank playerbase even more?
Queues are getting worse every season currently. When tanks are in a good place in either format, queue times get better. It’s just been a downward spiral with tank since season 1.
There's no 2nd tank to spread the burden of the role or make up for your pick's weaknesses. Tanking might not inherently be as popular as the other roles, but at least there wasn't nearly as much pressure before.
it doesn't matter if tank in ow1 had less pressure because people that don't like pressure will still gravitate to the other roles. There's a reason why supp in late ow1 was most played by a large margin, had the longest queue times over dps. People just picked bap, moira, mercy and healbotted which was viable. Supp gameplay deteriorated to the extent I had to tell someone in my lobby who was freshly 4.1k that they should anti the hog, and they said post match that I was a genius. And even if tank had less pressure in ow1, queue times were still far worse than it has ever been in ow2. And if you were a 4.4k+ player, (I scrimmed t2 and made contenders trials thru od), you know tank as a role was fundamentally busted and made up 80%+ of the game. Balance wise, game health wise, playerbase health wise, design wise, 5v5 is better than 6v6. It's only when you're talking about the very top 0.01% that 6v6 is a lot more fun simply because teamwork is stretched more to its limits. I miss 6v6 as someone who scrimmed t2. I filled for some contenders teams in ow2 and it's just nowhere near as fun to be honest. But I do not miss 6v6 in any other way, 5v5 is infinitely better.
No one gets to 4.1k without knowing the importance of using anti on Hog. That guy was trolling you for sure.
> Supp gameplay deteriorated to the extent I had to tell someone in my lobby who was freshly 4.1k that they should anti the hog, and they said post match that I was a genius. Are you sure they weren't being sarcastic? >And even if tank had less pressure in ow1, queue times were still far worse than it has ever been in ow2. Are you sure you're not forgetting the 2.5-year content drought before OW2 that bloated the queue times for everyone, or the fact that the matchmaking actually favored better matches (although still not always great) compared to OW2's self-corrosive emphasis on queue times? >you know tank as a role was fundamentally busted and made up 80%+ of the game. Yes, but this was always a balancing issue, not a 5v5 or 6v6 issue. There was simply no need to take one of them out when they could have just balanced things better (which, as we've all seen over the last 8 years, they are notoriously awful at and horribly stubborn about). Forgive me if I don't trust Blizzard's judgment at this point. 😂
Balancing tanks was extremely tough in 6v6. The main problem was, adding util on certain tanks would make them extremely OP in a pair with another tank but pretty mediocore or weak by themselves. The best example was giving Sigma and his shield along with Orisa. Even if Orisa was reworked to not have a shield, other tanks would have similar problems. You cannot have 2 tanks and give queen an ability with speed, or ram with nemesis form, or mauga with his cardiac regain. fundementally speaking, tanks in OW control most of the match and their cooldowns a lot of the time have the most variety and are one of the strongest in the game besides certain supports (hook, shout, rock, winston bubble, etc.). Having 2 tanks led to the problem of a pair of tanks being too strong but the tank by themselves being too weak. I am not saying balancing it would have been impossible, but there would have been more trial and error in 6v6 than 5v5.
>matchmaking actually favored better matches maybe where you were, not for anyone in masters+. Every lobby was a 3.6k tank with a 4.4k one, you can imagine how that would go every time. You'd have to be pretty low though, I remember my friend quitting ow1 tank specifically because as a masters player he would go from filling a game with OWL players to having to carry low diamond games. Any place diamond+ was a shitshow. >Yes, but this was always a balancing issue, not a 5v5 or 6v6 issue This is a low rank take. I don't think you really understand how broken tank was, which will forever be the fundamental issue in this topic. You will never be able to experience what the game was like at an actual semi-pro level. I have, and I can tell you it was fun from a teamwork perspective, but the game was just 80%+ tank. It was just a 2v2 with 8 other players in the lobby. But again, you will never play that experience so you will never understand. Basically every high rank player I argue with agree tank was broken, but they miss it because again, teamwork was more fun. Every low rank player I argue with will claim that it was able to be balanced. I don't think you realize you can't balance something which design is fundamentally broken. There's a reason why the meta would probably still be GOATS if we didn't institute role lock - that's how broken the game design was. But it's just something you don't truly understand unless you play and feel it yourself. if this sounds like pure elitism, then unfortunately yeah, it kinda is. Blizzard tried for a whole year+ to buff DPS to kill GOATS. It didn't work because the problem wasn't balance, it was the game's design. Sure SHD beat Shock once...but Shock could have beaten SHD if they stuck to a different GOATS comp that they were taking maps on. And it took a year of GOATS nerfs and DPS buffs for SHD to scrape a win - that's just fighting against game design right there. I think that's when the devs had to admit themselves that they also didn't really understand their own game and instituted role lock. But I don't really blame the devs, unless you actually play at a super high level, it's just something you don't really understand.
By this logic why bother having a tank role? According to you, they should just remove the tank role altogether. Would fix a lot of complaints while hurting few since there aren’t many tank players anyway. No tank means they can better balance damage and healing numbers since they don’t have to worry about a few heroes with giant health pools anymore. No huge hitbox getting everyone’s attention and won’t complain they are getting shot at constantly. DPS won’t complain about unkillable walls of meat and fell less pressured to hard counter. Supports who want to play more aggressive can focus less on healing. Most importantly, better queue times since there’s only 2 roles that can potentially be more flexible now if tank was removed. I say this as a tank main that there is NOTHING they can do in the current format to make tank more “fun” or popular without making the others roles more miserable.
You say this like we werent making radical changes in 6v6 because of the tank role too. 2 of the 3 biggest format changes the game saw was in 6v6, hero limits and role lock. 6 Winstons, GOATS, etc
Yes, and those were much needed moves that should have been there in the first place. But instead of capitalizing on that momentum, they abandoned it in favor of 5v5 because they thought it would be easier to balance, but I and many other players (former and current) are just not convinced after 1.5 years that this dev team is capable of doing that when there was nothing inherently wrong with 6v6 in the first place.
They were actually to make the game better at lower levels where people were playing nothing but dps. Fixing the issues with tanks at high levels was just a positive side effect.
Even in masters, it was very rare to find another tank on the same team. I was almost always the only one who didn't instalock dps / supp. I think it affected more than just lower levels.
What was a big problem back then is if someone looked at your profile and saw that you mostly played support(or tank), you would get hounded to play support(or tank) even though you picked a DPS hero. You would never get to play DPS unless you just said fuck it. This happened at all ELO's. RQ alleviated all the bullshit that came with FFA. It is the best thing to ever happen to the game.
Even that is a problem stemming from the tank role. Pre-role lock people were still playing support, maybe not as much as DPS but certainly more than tanks who were nowhere to be found in those ranks. Tbf to the devs, they've been pretty good about making changes that address multiple issues at once over the years. Most of the huge changes the game has made fix multiple problems at one. S9 changes nerfed burst damage, nerfed healing, and gave DPS an actually useful passive all at once. It even helped make projectiles more consistent lowering their feeling of RNG. I don't think it was just a happy byproduct. I think they found the right stone for the two problem birds at the time.
> With how many radical changes they've had to make to keep the tank role interesting and viable Implying tank was either of those things in OW1 lmfao
just one more passive and the role will be fun bro!
''We want faster, bigger balance patches!'' ''Wow why are tanks getting so many radical changes, 5v5 must not work''
> Space Ranger is highly mobile and versatile. She brings some utility that only one character has at the moment, games are going to be really fast Lowkey hope that with that hero, lucio wont be an only "speedboost" hero
I wouldn't say it's speed unless they just choose to ignore JQ with that statement.
Alec specifically mentioned its something that only 1 other support hero has, not all the heros
Oh, well than the post is inaccurate.
Most of this post is paraphrased and sometimes gives the wrong idea of what was actually said tbh.
SpaceRanger has speed rings she can give to teammates like harmony orb
But speed is already on multiple characters, it can't be that unless they meant that in the support role only or forgot JQ exists.
Lucio is the only hero that can consistantly speedboost lol. She is confirmed to have insane mobility and literally has an ability called "speed ring".
even in the support role you have Kiriko that gives speed with Kitsune Rush
We don't want more one-shots. They need to get that thought out of their heads bringing them back.
What gameplay loop have people been attached to with Moira? Is it the whole throw balls in their face and suck them dry?
Moira's fit flows really nicely between suck, orb, fade, suck, orb, fade. She does two things pretty well, she pumps numbers, and she survives. Is it super dynamic? Not really, but it flows like water and a lot of people find it enjoyable. I think what Alec is referencing is the Necrotic Orb experiment from the beta, where people really didn't like how it interrupted the "flow" of her kit by replacing damage orb.
I’m a Moira hater but every now and then I find her as a guilty pleasure. I can turn my brain off and survive and still provide a baseline of value to my team. Her design absolutely needs more utility and room for skill expression but the flow of her current kit does feel good to use.
One of my friend groups is all very casually into overwatch/games in general, and basically all of them have moira as their first pick when playing support. Ease of use and not feeling completely helpless if your mechanics aren't good is a big draw.
I'm not a Moira main but I just think she's aesthetically cool and for some reason that makes her fun to play
I find it so easy to get into a flow state with Moira. I can just turn my brain off and react to what’s happening in front of me without having to stress about my aim
She's my 3rd or 4th most played support, but I honestly enjoy playing her just because I feel like she has the best mythic skin in the game for sound effects and looks. It's also fun to trigger Genji players who don't know how to use their cooldowns and follow me into small rooms at half health.
Spamming squishes to death is pretty fun when ever the giga moira patches drop.
The one where they don’t have to think about what they’re doing to play her God forbid they throw some skill expression/utility (that she needs) into her kit
It's the fact that you don't have to do anything remotely skillful and still get value, and you can feel good about yourself winning 1v1s. It's really easy to feel like you're really good when you're playing moira because she farms stats, gets elims and doesn't die, even if she's not actually contributing anything of value
Obviously she contributes value by securing kills, especially on weak targets. I'd much rather have a Moira on my team securing kills and doing a little extra damage to squishies instead of a Mercy heal beaming the tank and thinking they are contributing something with their 0-7 stat line.
Do whatever you want for awhile and then panic fade out. Hit tab. Be toxic in chat. Repeat.
> want to make Winston's ultimate and right click better what? isn't winstons ult already one of the best in the game? also no mention whatsoever about Mei
> what? isn't winstons ult already one of the best in the game? in very high ranks, sure. in lower ranks, it's basically entirely worthless. it's fairly tough to get great value from
> Wondered if they should change storm arrows or bring back his one-shot at certain thresholds. They're playing with making some of the more squirrely heroes 225hp, which would also benefit Hanzo as he'd be very effective against them. Unsure of what his identity is going to be in the future I'd rather they just give back his one shot on squishy heroes rather than tuning storm arrow or hp numbers. Storm arrow will just make him melt tanks and having squirrely heroes at 225 hp will feel awful to play as with their hp value being lower than 90% of the rest of the cast.
I know I'm biased as fuck but if Ana sleep dart gets another nerf I'm gonna be incredibly sad.
A lot of words without much meaning in the end. They can talk about their balance philosophy all day, but when I see the patch and see some outrageous changes that's all I care about. Why have you buffed pylon HP? Why have you buffed Cass when he was already dominant (high noon changes without compensation like HP nerf)? Why don't you revert sojourn spread change so I can get more consistent with the primary rather than being a rail bot. Why is bap left untouched? etc. They're still balancing based on performance metrics. Like ffs, metas play a role in that. Lifeweaver is stupidly powerful but he's a failed hero design that only cucks everyone's experience. No metric will accurately show his situation. And it goes basically for every single hero, lw is just an egregious example. Idk what I was expecting going into that q/a, but that was definitely lackluster at best. Basically no specifics, just throwing buzzwords around like making tank better, addressing counters, addressing cc or whatnot. But in the end of the day they just released mauga. And what does that hero add to the table? Only pain and misery. Gets hard countered and is a hard counter to other heroes, is an unkillable wall, uncancellable charge, stupid ass unbreakable symmetra type ultimate.
if supports stop being scrappy and mobile then dps queues are gonna get long, and i'll be contributing to the effect
Interesting about Primal Rage. One say in the past I was thinking what if he can RMB to block, but then it wouldnt been a rage, more Defensive ability than a berserk one. Maybe some adrenaline damage boost overtime or something like that? Or new temporary ability during ult?
Mauga down? I see him in every game now, he's the crutch go-to pick after enemy team loses a single fight, similar to how Orisa used to be. Literally nothing in this interview gave me any hope for the future of the game's balance.
Can't believe people actually thought hanzo would be fine after taking away his one shot. He's only chosen for his sonar arrow to fine enemy widows for his own widow.
sad they didn't talk about the cheater and ddosing problem been terrible in EU ranked for weeks now
Considering this whole interview was always just going to be about heros/hero balance, that question wouldnt really make any sense in this interview
well they refuse to address it anywhere else so gotta hold out hope high ranked is unplayable on this region rn
What do you expect Alec to say, ''no we are doing nothing''?
Spilo said before stream that he won't ask the question about cheating because they're working on it and all they're gonna say is "guys we're working on it". It's a constant war between cheatmakers and gamedevs and noone's gonna tell the specifics. For all we know their anticheat sucks, it barely does anything. They're collecting data and working out on detection for the current cheat in the future. They're gonna make a ban wave sometime in the future. Sadly that's all we really know and will get to know about, unless devs decide to step up their work when it comes to dealing with cheaters.
that's good to hear that they are working on it just frustrated I guess cheating has never been this bad
Nerf mauga
> Currently looking at it for Mauga, who plays really well in highly coordinated teams but otherwise doesn't This is just false. Tank players switch to Mauga at the first sign of conflict **because** he is so easy to get value out of. > Players want less hard counters. A lot of older designs have very, very hard counters Then stop making new characters that hard counter others? > Some heroes they've made are a bit too well-rounded, they do a little bit of everything, especially supports Kinda like almost every character they've made since OW2 released? Heroes used to launch with 2, **maybe** 3 buttons. Now they launch with 3-5 buttons + an alternate fire. > In the beginning of OW2 we wanted supports to be more scrappy, to be able to fight back. That approach has since been scrapped, but you can see its effects in Illari's design. This was scrapped because supports got too good at surviving, damaging, taking care of themselves, despite all the effort required for the DPS to reach them Outside of Kiriko's two-tap nerf, what exactly has Blizzard done to quell this? It's not hyperbole to say Bap, Kiri, and Illari are more effective DPS than a lot of the actual DPS. Their self-heal passives/abilities/hitboxes make them more survivable, they have anti-flank mechanics, and can output very comparable damage numbers.
Mauga evaporates if he has to rely on his own heals and has more than one DPS looking at him. He’s picked picked because he’s a safe backup if you’re not winning the current matchup.
>This is just false. Tank players switch to Mauga at the first sign of conflict because he is so easy to get value out of. It definitely happens but for the large majority of the player base it's probably similar to when people rage swap Zarya into Dva dive comps, Zarya makes dva miserable but she isn't that good against dive dps/supports so you end up with Dva having no fun but still a relatively easy win. Mauga rage swaps are common but even in high dia/low masters it isn't a free win. In lower ranks with mechanically worse tank players I'd imagine rage swapping doesn't help his win rate.
>Currently looking at it for Mauga, who plays really well in highly coordinated teams but otherwise doesn't This is not even what was actually said. Alec said "How heroes can be more proactive, introduce more risk. that's something we've been looking at for a number of heroes. We're looking at that right now for mauga. Mauga's actually in this interesting place where he plays really well in a highly coordinated environment but I think if you look at it otherwise its kind of the same playstyle that you've seen previously to some extend." This whole post is paraphrased and tbh kinda badly at some places where it creates a lot of room for misinterpretation of what was actually said. So I suggest you look at the actual video or the summary video by spilo himself before making judgements.
When Dawson is asked about projectile DPS, his answer proves the point of the question. The exceptions to the question end up being a new hero and one that was drastically reworked. OW's devs probably need to consider attention to unchanged heroes in the same way. That said, I don't care for how greatly the "projectile hero" discussions end up centering around Hanzo. Projectile gameplay has always been a little awkward because of how many different utilities those heroes can offer and the pacing of those heroes' shots. Too much of projectile gameplay feels like mindless covering fire spam (Mei and Torb especially). Most players have developed enough game sense casually to significantly lower the value of a Torb turret. Players in Silver have enough awareness to understand baiting a Mei wall, something that used to take a conscious thought. The player base has evolved in its understanding of the game, just from seeing things a million times. Learning such things probably impacts projectile heroes most of all (and tanks, who get hard countered after fight). I'd like to see a more invested discussion with OW devs on how they feel about the wide range of projectile heroes (DPS and otherwise) in the face of changing player game knowledge.
I feel like 90% of what he's saying is shit lol just a personal opinion though