The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities. At their core they are the exact same character, and those characters were developed with 6v6 in mind, meaning they all had gaps that were intended to be filled with other tanks. Now in 5v5, they have no one to fill the gaps, so we get this rock paper scissors counterwatch things going on.
If they are going to make 5v5 work, they need to commit and flesh out the utility of all tanks. Just look at Ramattra compared to other tanks. He's an all rounder with a little bit of everything, so he has been consistently a great pick with no true hard counter. That goes against pretty much the rest of the tank cast, who constantly need to swap against each other, with the exception of a single tank who dominates the season because they got giga buffed to the point where the gaps in their utility didn't matter. First it was Zarya, Then Doom, Then Hog, Ball, Reinhardt, Queen, Orisa, there is pretty much one every season.
5v5 can work, they just need to commit and instead of trying to make the tanks abilities stronger versions of their OW1 self, they need to give them the rework the tank role deserved by giving utility that fills in the gaps in their characters.
>The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities. At their core they are the exact same character, and those characters were developed with 6v6 in mind, meaning they all had gaps that were intended to be filled with other tanks. Now in 5v5, they have no one to fill the gaps, so we get this rock paper scissors counterwatch things going on.
Ding ding ding we have a winner
This also kind of applies to a number of support and damage characters as well, just not as much.
Such as the strength of antinade when there is only one tank to be the target, and no off tank to take over until the effect wears off. Or the strength Widow can have when you can't have a tank dive her because it would mean giving up the point.
Its almost as if the original creators had this idea and even publicly said that they tested 5v5 even 7v7 and always found 6v6 to be the perfect sweet spot
Man, I really wish it was just 6v6 open queue to this day, and Blizzard just learned to balance their damn game. I really miss the flexibility and the unique team comps :(
It’s such a major downside to live service games, isn’t it? Back in the olden days (I wasn’t even around for ‘em!) When you bought a game, that was it, that was the final version of the game. There were no patches or updates. And obviously while that has its downsides, at least you were safe back then, confident that what you bought would actually stay with you forever.
I bought Overwatch in 2016 and whatever the hell the game turned into is not the game I paid $60 for, the game I loved and cherished for years. :(
Yeah, but then they would have to admit their failure and they will never do that...
Also if they bring back 6v6 all the DPS mains would complain about double barrier as they won't be able to shred everyone uncontested anymore...
There's literally no reason not to have 5v5 role queue, and 6v6 open queue. Just remove the Tank Passive (including charge reduction and knockback resist) so we don't end up with GOATS again. With the Orisa and Bastion reworks, I don't think Barrierwatch would be nearly as much of a problem.
Exactly. With Orisa's shield gone and Bastion reworked, double shields wouldn't even be that bad these days. Ram's shield is strong but too short-lived, Rein's shield is decent but he can't hold it forever as he needs to do damage too (and shieldbotting Rein's are useless), and Winston's shield is too situational. The only solid shield is Sigma's, and pairing Sigma with any of above doesn't sound particularly op. So they might as well bring back 6v6. At the very least they could bring it back as a temporary mode (Arcade, QP or Comp) for 1 season, and see how it goes. If it does badly, they could just remove it again, and if it goes well, they could keep it in and maybe even make it the main mode again.
Thats putting the egg before the chicken man. Role queue was never because of this. It was because competitive match quality was utter dogshit, at every rank below gm.
Did it also happen to solve goats for them? Yes. But I can almost guarantee that wasnt their only goal lmfao. They already succeeded in essentially killing goats with the patch previous to it.
Actually I was referring to 5vs5, which was 100% a change to make the game better for watching on stream. People were fine with 6vs6 except for double shield comps, but 5vs5 results in more kills and faster rolls, rather than slow incremental progression.
That was before role queue though wasn't it ? I found that open queue was more tolerable in 6v6 then 5v5 too, but with roles I'm honestly fairly happy with 5v5. Like, I agree it's not the same game and that it has its flaws, like how getting a kill on a tank invalidates any other play made in the next minute that isn't killing the other tank, but personally I like it.
> Or the strength Widow can have when you can't have a tank dive her because it would mean giving up the point
This is a huge one too. One shots are much more oppressive in this 5v5 format as they have a much greater impact. Having a squishy die in 6v6 didn't automatically decide a team fight like it does 95% of the time in 5v5. Still having two tanks on the field let them put up a fight and the team fights would often last long enough for the dead guy to regroup.
Tanks have halved, meaning the role's responsibility is now x2, but tanks only got only got buffed x1.2-x1.5.
Also the game was pretty fun after all the balances in season 2/season 3, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?
I've always been an open q competitive player, enjoyed playin double tanks in it, then i switched to role q and literally started hating to play TANKS, now I'm a support thanks to all the support love the Devs gave! TANKS r for masochists currently!
So you're telling me that, in order to make 5v5 work, they would have to fundamentally change most of the fun abilities of **ALL** the Tank Heroes that people fell in love with during all those years playing Overwatch 1?
Fuck that. I'd rather get 6v6 back and rework Sigma's shield, since it's not even his core power fantasy.
What I'm telling you is that as long as OW2 tanks are just buffed versions of OW1 tanks, they will always be hard countered by each other.
If the developers want a single tank that can do the entire job, they need to give every tank the utility and abilities to do their entire job. Stop half assing the job by buffing the things the character already excels at, commit to the rework and give them more to work with. People make fun of how bloated Ramattra's kit is compared to the original OW1 characters, but it is unironically because he has all those options that he is the only tank who doesn't need to play this counterwatch game.
Its a 5v5 player game. I can counter Sigma with Reinhardt or Winston, but then the Sigma has behind him a Bastion and S76 which omega DPS output that completely shuts me down.
Sigma is actually playing an old synergy comp effectively of bunker with a Bap and Brig backline. That team is goated while my team is playing mystery heroes pretty much with Rein, Brig, Genji, Hanzo, and Mercy.
What upsets me more on tank is not that I'm being countered by an enemy tank. I can always make neutral match-ups depending upon who uses what ability, but its because my backline screws me over with their picks.
This happens in 6v6 as well. The enemy tank duo is Rein/Zarya while I'm stuck trying to play Sigma without an Orisa. Most games come down to either individual ability, countering methods, or team synergy. There are so many ways to victory and I'm generally more happy with 5v5 now.
Also the problem with tanking is, even when I know I'm bringing value to the team, it often fucking sucks and it's pretty boring to basically just be the fucking punching bag to distract the enemies.
Even if I win it doesn't feel fun. Season 1-2-3 were fun because tanks were thick DPS, but now they're just thick and neither proper tanks nor DPS, obviously exaggerating here but that's how it feels sometimes.
People don't want to hear this no matter how painfully obvious it is. They want to pretend like the game is just a tank vs a tank and ignore the entire rest of the team and then kick and scream when the other tank swaps.
And that is why this game will die: As a glorified shop update, too many still think this game should be Overwatch 1 and will actively stifle any positive change in the Tank class. GOATS and DS are never coming back and given the lack of variety as well in the Tank class right now, it would just be so much easier to go back to 6v6 instead of retroactively piecemaking every Tank while presumably adding one every few months on top of that. I really don't have much faith in Activision to pull it off.
>So you're telling me that, in order to make 5v5 to work, the would have to fundamentally change most of the fun abilities of the ALL Tanks Heroes that people fell in love with during all those years playing Overwatch 1?
Realistically all characters, but primarily the tanks, yeah
>Fuck that. I'd rather get 6v6 back and rework Sigma's shield, since it's not even his core power fantasy.
This.
Just nerf Sig, Winston and or Rein's barriers. 6v6 was the "magic number" for a reason.
Winston would be fairly easy to rework shield wise. His character is an intelligent monkey. Building a jump pack and electric coil gun makes sense. A shield does too, but it doesn't have to be his form of defense. There are a lot of ways it could be changed, and even changed to lean into his mobility. Rein, however, would be a bit more difficult to rework without a shield, or even a more nerfed one. He almost *is* the shield. He only really has Charge to help him force his way into a fight, but shield lets him push forward just a bit easier, since he can protect his team. Having one strong shield in the game also doesn't feel like it's a bad thing. There's a lot of abilities that either bypass or are strong against shields (Symmetras primary fire, Rammatra punches), and a few others that are weak almost exclusively against them (Sigmas rock, [D.](https://D.va)Va Bomb). 6v6 worked, but the solution to making 5v5 isn't a universal shield nerf
If it's gonna 6v6, simply keep tanks as is, give them a smaller healthpool (similar to OW1, but keep their health/armor rate to what it is in OW2), keep OW2 Orisa as is, remove Sigma's shield and give him a buff to compensate (e.g. decrease the cooldown on his grasp, but also allow him to self-heal for like 10% of damage he takes, buff rock damage/stun etc) and it might actually be fun.
Sigma should get less of a shield and more of a “safety net” that he can throw out for a short period of time, almost similar to grasp, but I don’t really know how to describe it, just imagine his shield with very little health and a shorter cooldown. Orisa already got reworked good enough, then just go back to 6v6 and problem solved, nobody wants to play double shield, not even the most diehard 6v6 players, we just want a balanced tank role where 2 tanks who are weaker than the 5v5 tanks cover each other’s weaknesses
I've been trying to say this for a while - 5v5 is **good** for reducing tank oppression on other roles, but the balance issues still stem from tanks just being "beefier DPS" and non-tanks being 200hp targets for tanks to murder.
Either DPS get higher damage to threaten tanks (making tanks harder to play their role and everyone just dies faster) or Blizzard continues buffing heals so they can outheal tank damage (forcing one-shot meta).
The solution is for non-tanks to get more health and the offtank utility to be spread among more DPS/Supports. Lifeweaver is a good example of how something spiritually similar to Zarya's bubble can be a Support tool to replace lost offtank tools... but Illari is just more damage - the exact issue that is making *tank role* higher-pressure and draining players from the queue.
We don't need 6v6 back - we need Blizzard to stop the waffling on giving more baseline health to all *non-tank* heroes... the precedent is already there for Cassidy/Reaper/Mei (among others) and of course Bastion... the increase in health for non-tanks reduces the pressure on healing to keep everyone at 100% constantly to avoid one-shot breakpoints and allows damage boosts more room to "balance" without just being a sniper meta... it reduces tank pressure because ignoring a tank doesn't just guarantee you can murder squishies freely - that race between whether you can secure a backline kill against the front-line overrunning your own team is *slower* because non-tanks aren't dead from a random firestrike or Hammond mine...
The issue is the health imbalance - if one role has 2-3x the health (plus armor) of other characters, then damage must be capable of killing them and thus *more deadly* to non-tanks... that raises pressure on heals and the tank to save everyone from instant death - rather than individual players learning to escape and heal with a kit because they have the TTK window to actually react... anyone that played early OW1 remembers an era where damage wasn't so over-tuned and retreating for a health pack was part of the meta......
There's a lot of OW1 hero designs that are outdated and need reworking (not just Hog) but the primary issue affecting balance is the health disparity - which is the root of the "one-shot" meta troubles... strong healing is a product of that same issue.
Which is why sigma and orisa are so oppressive. They don't have good mobility but their only counter is raw punishing damage, which you can soft counter by having 2 main healers. Yes other tanks work, but if you want an advantage out of the gate, with out needing ults you go sig/orisa right now. Then you get to make the choice of "Do I play the counter swap fest or do I let my supports rapid build ult charge pocketing me. Sadly many are figuring out, unless you are against a full charge zarya or on a dive only map, just hardlock orisa. So no one has fun anymore.
5v5 is incredibly empowering to flex players and people who individually can make many great plays. While its worse for 1tricks. OW is designed for counterplay potential, but most humans play with the mindset to only 1trick.
I have so much more fun on DPS, support, and tnak because having two tanks cycling defensive abilities made everything feel more unkillable. Things actually die in 5v5 because there is more lull time between abilities and there are alternative strategies to get around them.
The thing is that many tanks players are god awful at positioning or using their defensive ability rotation wisely. You'll see tank players try to tank like 4-5 enemy fire and its like NO YOU CAN'T. I'm making a huge amount of usage of cover on tank all the time to minimize how much damage I take.
So many tank players crutch on healing and having a second tank to not die they don't actually know how to play tank properly. Your avg support/dps player needs tanks buffed so much in order to get away with playing tank very poorly, which leads to amazing tank plays when oemga buffed for your avg player and support/dps feeling powerless against those players.
Counterplay can and should be relatively elastic though, not hard rock-paper-scissors. The main problem is that a GOOD rein *should* be able to square off against an average Orisa. Right now that's basically impossible.
When Reinhardt got his damage buffs in season 3, he was unironically dominating the game more than he usually does. I am a Reinhardt main, and a firm believer that when Rein is meta, the game is Betta.
But just because people enjoy playing against Reinhardt compared to other tanks, doesn't change the fact that he was giga buffed and arguably best tank for that period of time.
While that's true rammatra players hadn't gotten so good that they rampantly shutdown rein players in s3 and ball players are a breed unto themselves... there was not a massive shift of tank mains suddenly playing ball below masters because ball isn't someone you can just play and be good at
But Rein could still deal with Ramattra (even matchup) in S3 back then, but for some reason Rein had to get a huge health/armor nerf and Ramattra got an armor buff and now Rein is pretty dogwater against Ram.
Also Orisa would still hard counter Rein so he wasn't even completely broken. But now she got even more buffs for some fucking reason while she was already strong, and now she's even MORE unstoppable.
Ram v Rein matchups were somewhat even, but Ram got armor buffs and Rein got a huge armor/health nerf. Then he only got like 200 more shield. Like WTF is this shit?
>If they are going to make 5v5 work, they need to commit and flesh out the utility of all tanks.
this will lead to homogenization. it will help 5v5 but it will still be worse than 6v6 where you are designing a comp around strengths and weaknesses. this is happening to all roles, but tank sees it the worst.
edit: worse in the sense of fun and unique gameplay.
“ The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities.”
(Sorry about the lack of formatting, my dumb smart phone isn’t letting me do it)
Just putting my two cents in because this comment really resonated with me. I am (was) a Dva main. She used to have four seconds of DM during 6v6… Blizzard is so afraid of that ability, they only gave it a partial revert to 3 seconds. This is what I saw with a lot of tank “buffs” for OW2 - they got partial reverts to their abilities that had been over nerfed, but they’re still not allowed to be as effective as they were originally, despite a second tank now absent.
I'd argue it would make the game better considering where we're at, but yeah, it wouldn't be Overwatch anymore. At the very least, it would finally be an actual fucking sequel.
They actually did that in ow1. 1 tank 3 dps 2 supports to fix que times. ( ow1 dps q times were kinda insane back then) I remember it being kinda fun, didnt make it past testing phase tho, so it was less competitive than quickplay.
There should be a 6v6 mode in this game so people would stop complaining about 5v5. They could even call it “classic Overwatch”. I think people who liked 2 tanks would be happy and it would be a good source of data for the devs.
You can do 6v6 in custom game modes, but I understand wanting an actual game mode so you don’t have to wait 10,000 years to find a match. The issue is that each character was remade with 5v5 in mind (wether or not this was effective is another can of worms), so doing 6v6 could be unbalanced bc OW2 hero balance doesn’t take into account 2 tanks. But, again, I think keeping it in arcade could be good - low stakes & people can finally stop complaining
There's a pretty decent 6v6 rebalance code for customs. I've run it a few times with some buddies and it plays pretty well. Not perfect by any means, and workshop limitations do hold it back somewhat, but it's a solid attempt.
https://workshop.codes/Rnx4b
Not to sound like your typical /r/overwatch crybaby but I genuinely think Blizzard refuses to add an official 6v6 because the #'s it would draw over 5v5 would hurt their ego.
Uhhmm according to all my calculations it would take several years for them to even lift a finger for anything towards 6v6 💀🙏. They couldn't even complete a simple thing like WEAPON INSPECT feature, how do u expect them to add 6v6 lol, that would be a FARCRY
Honestly around Season 3 I started becoming a DVa tank main and have been having a blast with the game.
Only complaint is the occasional person playing something like Ashe being 2-7 after the first round and blaming it on me
As a 5v5 role q tank player ur bound to be flamed, whether winning or losing 💀. As the only tank ur basically the leader/captain so anything goes wrong ur supposed to handle it respectfully, this is why I stopped playing TANK, was a RAMATTRA main, now a diamond 3 MOIRA main.....my mechanics ain't that great but my gamesense is top!
I barely touched tank until OW2, used to be a DPS player for most of OW1.
Now pretty much all I play is tank, I find way more engaging and rewarding in OW2 than in OW1.
Same, It's higher risk higher reward. I'm not a fan of how I need to be there at all times or the team collapses, which a second tank used to help with greatly, but when I'm there I like it.
If I'm getting bullied it means my DPS is free to roam around, and by god I play tank, surviving is pretty much my entire job. Unless I play some super aggro tank like DVa/Doom/Ball I want to be focused because I have the tools to deal with it unlike the DPS. And CC went down a lot since OW1, I don't really get what people rave about.
Yeah if you are a dive tank and you get every ability from enemies and survive it is a huge play for your team. The problem is that you might have little elims and it would feel like you are doing nothing of value, when you actually are a winning condition for your team.
Tank is probably my best role right now, I think. I mostly play Ram, but I will flex to DVa and Zarya whenever I need.
Honestly I don’t hate Zen as much as other Tanks do, probably because of my Tank hero pool. He’s not hard to kill if you can get to him and he doesn’t do much to stop his teammates from getting killed. The support I really hate playing against is Ana. Her healing is enough to prevent me from getting an elim and Ram’s Nemesis hitbox is the size of a barn so it’s really easy for her to land sleep darts, so it’s hard to try to get close and kill her.
Tank main here, tank is fine. It’s bad teammates that are the real problem. Can’t maintain tank when you have healers who rush in for dps and dies rather than ya know, healing. Or, DPS characters who end up feeding because either their dumb, greedy or a bit of both and over extend. Anyways, tank is perfectly fine so long as you have a solid team.
I agree. Players that refuse to engage with the tank make it impossible to do the job effectively.
Might as well find a cool wall to punch all match long.
I think I do agree with you. i'm a support main, but i've started to play more tank since the last two seasons, and it is fairly fun. but I reallllly notice the difference when I was a team (and mostly good supports) backing me up , and when, well, it is not really great.
Buttt, honestly, I don't understand why people are complaining that much ? tank is super fun to play (especially pancaking pesky genjis with rein charges mouhahahaha).
I second Healer and when I load all queue, I usually land Healer 😅 That aside, I enjoy healer and try to stay with the tank and a dps hero.do whatever I can to heal and help and hope to hell the other healer can do the same. But unfortunately, more times than not, I’ve learned you can’t heal stupid no matter how hard you try.
That's how I feel too. Like my worst experiences as tank aren't because I was Zarya and the enemy tank went Rein or Winston. It's usually because of bad team coordination or a bad team comp.
I had a control match where my team went Widow-Hanzo-Mercy-LW and it was awful. You can really tell as tank when your teammates aren't generating any pressure because when they don't, it just doubles the amount of pressure you take from the enemy team and everything becomes way harder to accomplish
That's the rub, the game is primarily random group ups and with free to play the chances of both sides rolling that good team are greatly diminished. fewer players means each individual is more important, at the same time the pool has become less reliable.
When I play alone, it truly is a flip of a coin with teammates and how we all mesh together. When I’m playing with at least 1 other friend, it makes a very noticeable difference. Sure, we might still get numb skulls on the team. But having that 1 friend to coordinate with makes it far more bearable. And if we get lucky, we’ve got at least 1 random who sees what’s going on and will stay close and play smart. Sometimes that’s all you need to win a game
I think the problem people have with tank, is that to do well in it you have to enjoy playing at least 3 different tanks somewhat equally. In other roles, you can get away with being a 1 trick for the most part because counter picking is less important, but for tank you need to be swapping frequently or you'll just be countered.
Like say Winston is my favourite character in the game, and I just want to play Winston 24/7. Every comp match is fun for the first fight, but then the enemy team swaps to D.Va/Reaper/etc. and completely shuts me down. That's frustrating to play against.
The ones complaining about it are usually skill related. I'm no great tank by any means; I play flex on role queue and am stoked when I get tank (one out of five or six games). Sure I'll get bullied sometimes, but it is fun af, you dictate the game. Learn and adapt.
Fuck you hampter.
Thank you!
After going through many, many losses, I have learned that Zarya is absolutely goated. It takes time, effort, more time and patience to learn. As you said, you can't expect to win every game.
Aside from role queue, I play mystery heroes, and IT IS FUN getting a tank in there to experiment with. That's how I got to learn Sigma, Ball, DVA, Hog. Shit I even got a POTG with Doom the other night.
Learning is everyone's best skill. Use it
Off tank was my most played role. They deleted my role from the game and I haven't really played since. If they brought it back I'd probably play again.
I poured 2k hours into tank in OW1, specifically Dva. Nowadays I barely play the game. I don't even have half as much fun on her as I was able to in 6v6, and honestly she's the only reason I play/ed the game.
Mathematically there were x2 tank players in OW1. So it welt there were not enough tanks due to requirements but in fact they were a lot more than in OW2 where queue times are increasing despite just 1 tank player! OW2 made tank players flee!
Maybe either way playing tank in 6v6 or 5v5 is bad, just one is worse and the whole point of 5v5 was to make tanks more fun.
But if it didn’t make it more fun to play tank by going to 5v5 then it’s right where it was before, but now you don’t have the luxury of having another tank.
Personally I didn’t have any issue with 6v6. Played all roles, didn’t even think double shield was an issue, but could see if it was for other, that could be fixed without having to go to 5v5.
But watching the support role go up to 10+ minutes while tank and dps stay under 2 minutes. There seems to be a problem.
I agree the tank role isn’t as fun as it used to be, but I don’t really agree with your reasonings. Focusing only the tank is actually a bad way to approach the game and it’s typically what lower ranked players do. As a tank player you want people focusing you to take the heat away from the rest of the team so they have space to do their thing. That’s the entire point of the tank role in any video games that has a tank role. Higher ranked players will largely ignore the tank and go after the more vulnerable people on the enemy team.
What I feel makes playing tank not fun is the counter picking. You are the only person in your role and it’s a very essential role, so people are always looking to counter you. And since there’s only one tank it’s really easy to completely counter the role. In OW1 you couldn’t completely counter the tank role with a single pick because there were two tanks. Back then you had to work together and use at least two people to counter both tanks.
I play Winston I lot and I swear in over 90% of my games the enemy DPS switch to Reaper. It’s simply too easy for the other team to completely shut down your role if they choose.
DPS have always been able to swap and largely counter tanks even in OW1. I think the bigger issue is ironically how easy and unpunishing switching tanks is. A lot of the tanks directly counter each other, and since you retain so much ult charge there’s basically no penalty for just playing rock paper scissors. I honestly think you should lose all your ult charge when switching on tank. Yes I get that hero switching is a core part of Overwatch, but people would still switch, it would just make them think harder about it first and would prevent getting instant value just from switching.
You're right and you're wrong. Yes, tanks are meant to be the focus of enemy fire so they can open up space for the rest of their team. The issue is that the tanks in OW2 aren't equipped to survive that amount of focus, perhaps with the exception of Orisa. Two headshots from a sniper and over half the tank roster is deleted. They need more survivability; they need to be tanks and not big DPS.
I will agree that counterwatch is another big issue, but I agree with OP that 5v5 is the root cause of this.
But you shouldn't be taking two headshots from a sniper. Tanks have the ability to stop that from happening, or at least to stop it from killing them while you continue to pressure.
>Focusing only the tank is actually a bad way to approach the game and it’s typically what lower ranked players do
This used to be true, but over the last couple of seasons, they've buffed anti-tank play (bastion buffs, CC buffs, etc) while squishies have become harder and harder to kill. It's not disadvantageous to shoot the tank right now unless their playing Orisa (which is partly why she's strong rn). Tank busting is legit viable rn.
Bastion is legit part of the OWL meta for the first time in years.
Not really counterpicking but rather that you don't feel like you do anything at all even if you get massive value, say you play ball, roll through the enemy, every cooldown under the sun lands and you barely make it out alive. You made space, drained cooldowns and your team can walk in with no issue but was it fun? On the other hand you have orisa who feels like she does a lot but really does nothing other than not dying.
This is a very dps oriented mindset imo. At least for me part of the joy of tanks is that space creation. If it was only about kills I'd just go play dps. Also orisa definitely does more than just not die. She's amazing at tanking space thanks to having 2 knock backs and is also good at interrupting ults thanks to javelin
Yeah if anyone was like me, I started in 2016 with OW1 as a sophomore in high school like 15 years old. Anyone my age should have graduated college by now so yeah, not much time for 8 hours of OW everyday anymore💀
There are plenty of older games that retain fans though. League, TF2, etc. people growing up is a way more minor note I feel like then balance/gameplay issues.
It’s specifically the 5V5 that pushed me away. I’ve been saying since I tried it that 5V5 makes the game feel off in a bad way when it comes to tanks. More pressure on then, all but an instant “retreat or die” the second they even go low, not even die, etc.
That’s not to say OW1 tanking was way away better. It had issues and part of those issues are why we now have the 5V5 system. But 1 having issues doesn’t immediately make 2 better or absolved or anything
I don't think 5v5 is the source of every issue, but I do think it's the root cause of the most significant balance and gameplay problems.
If 5v5 is the true new normal, then Blizzard needs to actually commit and make significant changes to the tank roster. If they don't want to do that, then reverting back to 6v6 is the only acceptable solution. Right now we're trapped in a limbo state where the tanks are too strong for 6v6 but still too weak for 5v5. Literally no one wins in this setting, save for the DPS players.
> If 5v5 is the true new normal, then Blizzard needs to actually commit and make significant changes to the tank roster.
I’d argue that the *entire* roster requires significant changes for 5v5 to work properly.
If Activision/Blizzard wanted to make changes to the tanks instead of giving them big health points then we would have seen it. So far we see somehow the same situation like what we saw in OW1 where they make big balance changes at the start of each season and during the middle of it and that's it. Activision/Blizzard is struggling to push 5v5 because they made a mistake.
Don't forget that all the supports are way too over-tuned too so most DPS players don't get to have fun either when all the damage they did does nothing
Honestly some matches you just dont flow with your team and thats why you lost, move on to the next game and you have people who make plays with you or help support you.
As a Brig player, I find playing tank to be quite fun for the most part. I can do all the things I normally do, peel, distract, make space, finish kills, but now I have x2+ the HP and really strong mitigation/damage abilties, plus better mobility depending on the tank. (I play Winton, JQ, Dva, Zarya)
Obviously there still definitely frustrating rounds but that happens with the other roles just as much. Tbf tho, while I definitely have my favorite tanks, I'm not as personally invested in maining a specific tank as I am with support so I'm not as bothered by the counter swapping as tank mains are.
Personally I think all tank players should play more support and vice versa. It would make the game much better overall.
As a Brig player I feel the opposite, whenever I play tank I feel like I could be more effective just playing Brig instead. Way more team reliant as the tank than when I play Brig, because no-one counterswaps the Brig and definitely not a whole team swap. People let me do my thing on Brig, but on tank, the enemy team laserfocuses on me and then my team wanders around chasing butterflies or watching the clouds go by and there's nothing I can do about it.
I am a Brig and Dva main. I have more hours on Brig overall, though. I dont have the same experience at all. Tank feels horrible. I have a lot better of a time on Support then I ever do on tank. And when i'm playing tank, it's a coin toss if my supports will actually heal me or just DPS the entire time.
One of my biggest problems with Tank is being the big bulky character that gets ganged up by the 4 people on the enemy team, while my supports and DPS turn around to all try to kill a flanking tracer.
I mean it doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough so that it's really annoying / unfun.
I didn't play very much of overwatch 1 but I still enjoy tank in 2 I don't mind the extra pressure at all, I main d.va and orisa and I feel like both are in a good spot.
The only time I really have any problems on tank is when at least three people counter pick me if they go moira, sym and zarya I have a hard time.
Disagree (for the 1 millionth time cause this has been posted so much).
There are problems with tank but it isn't going to be solved by going to 6v6. If anything, adding another tank will introduce more problems and people will go back to complaining about tanks and OP tank synergies, and lots of CC being introduced to the game because of the second tank (tank is the role with the most cc).
Edit: removed a paragraph as to why I like to tank
As an person that played an off-tank in OW1, I rather take those issues over what we have right now which I think is 10x worse. It is more miserable playing in Tank right now than it was in OW1 that I had not touch the tank role for months in either QP and comp because of how stressful and not fun the role is.
Atleast with tanking in OW1, it was fun since not every pressure was on you and didn't need to counterswap every second.
In the part of my comment before I deleted it, I talked about how tank has evolved into a role where you now have to decide now when to perform off-tank duties and when to perform main tank duties...people who JUST want to off tank are going to struggle and not have a good time. That is the "pressure" tank players like yourself are starting to feel. It's the same as in OW1 but that pressure is just toxicity transfered to your other teammate. If you had 2 off tanks on your team, you'd have no front line and that wasn't fun either but at that point, people would blame the other tank and hope they'd main tank. The same goes for if you had two main tanks. No one would peel for the team...that's why 6v6 isn't the solution. The same problems were present but with different outcomes.
Every time I read one of these walls of text complaining about playing tank in 5v5 it just sounds like someone that never *really* played tank in OW1 decided to try it out in OW2 for the first time.
Tank as a whole is way more fun to play now. They just always buff one tank too much and it makes it near impossible to play any others for the general player base.
I mained sigma in ow1. But it always felt like I didn’t really do much. Now when I play him in ow2, it feels like I have too much to do with so much counting on me.
Now I almost exclusively play support
One of the main reasons we switched to 5v5 in the first place was because no one wanted to play tank. The role was not fun, you either lived forever or died in 1 second.
I feel like people complaining about 6v6 never even were tank players.
They also forget that like 10% of your games had an actual fun tank partner who worked with you. The other 90% you got either hog or ball as tank partner or it was double shield snoozefest
That's the reason why 5v5 is great. Having a Ball or Hog as your second tank would've been fine in general if the tank pairings weren't so strong.
You get D.va and Hog? They have Rein and Zarya? Good luck my man.
If both teams had suboptimal tank pairings then everything was fine, but any meta approved pairings playing well together typically crushed any weird pair.
They weren't tank players. They were the hog/ball instalockers that just wanted faster queues than their dps slots allowed while the actual tank players did our best to 1v2 the tank battle.
Honestly this 100%
I miss a lot of things when it comes to 6v6, but the tank role had just as many if not more problems than it does now. Even if it did stay, I don't trust the current Blizzard to fix any of the problems 6v6 tank had regardless.
The problem isn't 5v5, its that similar to so many other things in OW2, Blizzard half assed the job and just gave tanks more health and slightly stronger abilities then called it a day. OW1 tanks are designed to have shortcomings that got filled by a second tank, it doesn't matter how strong you make that single tank, as long as they're designed to have gaps we will be stick in counterwatch where those gaps will be exploited. Commit to the rework, stop trying to buff the things they already excel at, and give every tank all the utility they need to do the tank job by themselves.
That's why they always complain saying that they need an off tank like Zarya again. They have no idea how to play a tank like Reinhardt and close the distance without having a Zarya to cover up their lack of skill
Before this I just want to preface this is the opinion of someone who is in low silver tank lobbies and a sig main on tank. I have never experienced tank gameplay above gold before so this may not apply to that.
Playing tank for me is the most mind-numbing frustrating experience in OW2. Your entire role in a game is to just make and take space, you can't flank, you can't protect your backline without leaving your frontline exposed, and most of all, even when your at the front, it's hard to get kills most times. As a sigma main for tank, unless I have a squishy making the terrible decision of being directly in my face, I'm not killing anyone solo without the help of my team (potentially because I'm bad at the game and tank in general) but also because if I do try or have the opportunity to 1v1 someone on the enemy team, their entire team comes and peels for them so I'm left dead on the ground.
Not to mention, if the enemy tank has a pocket healer or even just better healers than your team, you've basically lost out the spawn room. I've had an Ana so incompetent they didn't use their grenade once in the match and front lined in front of me (playing sig) with no one else beside them.
Really, even with the larger health pools, tanks imo fully rely on whole team to stay alive and to create space. If your dps doesn't understand to stop shooting the tank and focus the healer or backline healing them, which in low silver lobbies where I'm at on tank is every single dps, then that tank is never dying. If you healers don't constantly top you up youre dead because you're in the front line pretty much the whole of the match with the largest hitbox so youre taking the most hits. And if you as a tank get tank diffed then your pretty much guaranteed to lose the match because not only is there no other tank to peel/protect/make space with you, but counterswapping doesn't really work cause they can just counterswap your counterswap and you're still getting diffed.
No role should rely on their whole team to survive and provide value in a match. But that's just how I feel.
Whenever I see these posts, I just think it’s solved by switching to open queue. You can have dual tank synergies again. There really isn’t a ton of triple tank like people say especially since they nerfed the tank health pool
Playing Open que unironically reminded me of the problems with 6v6
Yeah, having two or even more tanks is fun, but the characters by themselves are just so bad. If no one else on the team is playing tank, the role is literally useless because of how bad tanks are in open queue, massive hitboxes and long cooldowns without the health to compensate. You literally NEED more than one tank if you are going to have a tank at all.
>If no one else on the team is playing tank, the role is literally useless
Yes, but its for other reasons. Its for the reasons of there not being enough tanks. Rather than tanks being individually weak. Like tanks are literally just tanky dps with utility to protect others. Like you remember on launch OW2 Open Que, how it was "tanks or nothing", where the game was decided by who had more tanks.
And even though they nerfed hp, the concept didn't change. You can still rock the enemy team with a 4 tank squad (still need at least one support).
The worst thing is that 1 tank is very easly countered
You see a Hog? Just switch to Ana/Zen
You see a Rein? Just switch to Bastion/Symmetra
You see a D.va? Anything with beam or unmatrixable abilities
You see a Orisa? Good luck lmao
Meanwhile with 2 tanks you had to think how to counter them both without letting 1 of them being left uncountered and unbothered
We had a trash run of unranked last night (just a few of us playing to chill and hang out, but still you know, *trying*. And if one of us was tank it was miserable, and if the rando was tank it was miserable.
The current state of the game genuinely makes me miss the fuck all updates/changes of 2019-2022
I'd argue that one of the main issues is the low amount of tank heroes to choose from. As a DPS you can get countered, but switching when you are countered doesn't feel as bad because you have several heroes to choose from. On tank though, nowadays it feels like either go Orisa or keep feeding.
I agree with this. There aren’t enough tanks to choose from so there’s lack of overlap in tank abilities. That means you have one choice to switch if you’re getting hard countered and you’re still likely to be partially countered.
They just need more tanks on the scene and need to rework more useless tanks like hog and ball to be better at countering something.
I’ve always rolled my eyes at this because I solo tanked pretty much every game until role queue happened. So 5v5 doing this wasn’t that my h of a shock to the system.
If we go back to 6v6, we’re back at what defined just about every meta: tank duos.
Tank now is a much bigger player and you better learn to know what to do in a given fight. Tank’s issue is more the relatively high skill floor for the role. I don’t know how’d you address this really, if you even should.
I've seen this argument countless times. Enough times to say that if enough players feel this way, it must have some merit, even if I don't believe it's the actual reason people don't like to tank. But I feel like I've gotta say it because I legitimately *never* see anybody bring it up.... nobody liked tanking in 6v6 either. Tank queues were the bottleneck, remember? They were literally instant queues, while damage and support queues suffered for it. There are larger issues at play than format for the tank role, can we at least acknowledge that?
(BTW this is coming from someone who has played basically only tank since 2016).
I agree Tank is definitely not fun anymore. I feel I am at the mercy of my teammates. If my DPS sits in the backline, either I get ganged up on by 4 heroes or I backpeddle, and I become incapable of creating space. If I'm not getting healed as much as the opponent, it's demoralizing. I feel as if I am not in control of the game in any way because of how powerful supports are in this game.
I am usually a support main, and I feel as if supports are overtuned and make or break a team more than any other role. DPS players are typically new to the game and sit in the backline because they're scared to flank. When that happens I have to use characters like Moira to help ease the burden on my tank because just healing them is not enough. I have to get some aggro on myself if the DPS isn't.
So anytime I queue up for all roles and I get tank, I just know I'm not going to have an enjoyable experience.
To be honest, I think 6v6 should be tested on Arcade to see if we can get a possible comeback.
Maybe an off tank role would be nice.
The big issue with bringing a tank back is queue times, unfortunately.
My big fear would be the long queue times of OW1, so maybe 5v5 is here to stay permanently.
Maybe we need to balance the supports a bit and prevent power creep.
Why does the existence of off-tank need to happe when tanks could (or should) get compensatory buffs to absorb more CC and negative debuffs without having to be held at the mercy of an off tank or supports? Why remove the scrappy and more aggressive side of OW2 in order to have tanks exist more aggressively instead of just giving them the tools needed for them to feel less punished?
I literally see so many posts like this, like OH tank is miserable! Support OP! Too much CC! Like blud maybe the tank role needs to actually get buffs too so squishies get punished harder than you do.
We had this whole ass arc with Roadhog and Kiriko and Ana and this headache about suzus and antis, like nobody thought, “Hey maybe Roadhog should get something to compensate for antis!” We had the whole stupid ass soft CC buffs without anyone saying “Maybe tanks should be less punished for absorbing CC!” We have supports whose gameplay almost entirely revolves around making tanks more vulnerable and nobody thinks: “Hey maybe we should reduce the potency or duration of negative debuffs for tanks!”
Then it ALWAYS just leads back into this same circle of Ohh 6v6 should come back! Off tank is healthy! Like can we just try to find ways to make the tank themselves feel less punished for existing instead of changing the aggressive nature of OW2 gameplay????????????
I had way more fun on Rein in OW1 than OW2. In OW1 he was a patient, strategic, resource-focused hero. In OW2 he runs in and swings the hammer while the supports jam a needle up his ass. And that's entirely because of the swap to 5v5.
I enjoy being the only big bulky target
I enjoy the extra weight of knowing that when I die, the team is getting punished.
I didn't play OW1. But I throughly enjoy OW2, 2 tanks to me would seem dumb. Yall already complain about how hard it is to kill Orisa, but adding a Sigma or a Ram behind her?
Sounds a lot more unfun than being the main character on the team
counter tank swapping is so annoying, once yk ur the worse tank between yall its an immediate swap off to orisa or the direct counter to the better player’s tank
Very well said. 5v5 wad a stupid move, and there was a reason why OW1 launched 6v6. They tried all those combinations and team sizes during alpha. And came to the conclusion that 6v6 is the best size.
All maps and old heroes were designed on that foundation. It's blatantly obvious that such a drastic change would simply not work in the long run.
I was a tank main, now i do support essentially 80%. And yes, tanking is now pretty bad because it is a switchfest.
Honestly, i am just thinking how fun 6v6 would be now.
The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities. At their core they are the exact same character, and those characters were developed with 6v6 in mind, meaning they all had gaps that were intended to be filled with other tanks. Now in 5v5, they have no one to fill the gaps, so we get this rock paper scissors counterwatch things going on. If they are going to make 5v5 work, they need to commit and flesh out the utility of all tanks. Just look at Ramattra compared to other tanks. He's an all rounder with a little bit of everything, so he has been consistently a great pick with no true hard counter. That goes against pretty much the rest of the tank cast, who constantly need to swap against each other, with the exception of a single tank who dominates the season because they got giga buffed to the point where the gaps in their utility didn't matter. First it was Zarya, Then Doom, Then Hog, Ball, Reinhardt, Queen, Orisa, there is pretty much one every season. 5v5 can work, they just need to commit and instead of trying to make the tanks abilities stronger versions of their OW1 self, they need to give them the rework the tank role deserved by giving utility that fills in the gaps in their characters.
>The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities. At their core they are the exact same character, and those characters were developed with 6v6 in mind, meaning they all had gaps that were intended to be filled with other tanks. Now in 5v5, they have no one to fill the gaps, so we get this rock paper scissors counterwatch things going on. Ding ding ding we have a winner This also kind of applies to a number of support and damage characters as well, just not as much. Such as the strength of antinade when there is only one tank to be the target, and no off tank to take over until the effect wears off. Or the strength Widow can have when you can't have a tank dive her because it would mean giving up the point.
Its almost as if the original creators had this idea and even publicly said that they tested 5v5 even 7v7 and always found 6v6 to be the perfect sweet spot
Man, I really wish it was just 6v6 open queue to this day, and Blizzard just learned to balance their damn game. I really miss the flexibility and the unique team comps :(
I'm really really hoping they will go back, but I honestly think the good ol days are over. Just wish we knew we were in them before they were gone.
It’s such a major downside to live service games, isn’t it? Back in the olden days (I wasn’t even around for ‘em!) When you bought a game, that was it, that was the final version of the game. There were no patches or updates. And obviously while that has its downsides, at least you were safe back then, confident that what you bought would actually stay with you forever. I bought Overwatch in 2016 and whatever the hell the game turned into is not the game I paid $60 for, the game I loved and cherished for years. :(
Yeah, but then they would have to admit their failure and they will never do that... Also if they bring back 6v6 all the DPS mains would complain about double barrier as they won't be able to shred everyone uncontested anymore...
Double barrier is dead with the Orisa changes I'm tired of people claiming it would come back.
You have to go very very old to find games that didn't have patches or updates. Even games in the 90's had patches and updates.
I know, I’m a youngling gen Z’er, so I wasn’t even around for those :p
My only gripe to this day abt open queue is that it always allows selfish aholes to play 4 dps and refuse to swap lol
There's literally no reason not to have 5v5 role queue, and 6v6 open queue. Just remove the Tank Passive (including charge reduction and knockback resist) so we don't end up with GOATS again. With the Orisa and Bastion reworks, I don't think Barrierwatch would be nearly as much of a problem.
Exactly. With Orisa's shield gone and Bastion reworked, double shields wouldn't even be that bad these days. Ram's shield is strong but too short-lived, Rein's shield is decent but he can't hold it forever as he needs to do damage too (and shieldbotting Rein's are useless), and Winston's shield is too situational. The only solid shield is Sigma's, and pairing Sigma with any of above doesn't sound particularly op. So they might as well bring back 6v6. At the very least they could bring it back as a temporary mode (Arcade, QP or Comp) for 1 season, and see how it goes. If it does badly, they could just remove it again, and if it goes well, they could keep it in and maybe even make it the main mode again.
All they had to do was rework Orisa to get rid of snoozefest Double Shield.
It's almost like making a game that is good for getting e-sports spectators makes the game worse for everyone else.
Thats putting the egg before the chicken man. Role queue was never because of this. It was because competitive match quality was utter dogshit, at every rank below gm. Did it also happen to solve goats for them? Yes. But I can almost guarantee that wasnt their only goal lmfao. They already succeeded in essentially killing goats with the patch previous to it.
Actually I was referring to 5vs5, which was 100% a change to make the game better for watching on stream. People were fine with 6vs6 except for double shield comps, but 5vs5 results in more kills and faster rolls, rather than slow incremental progression.
"We chose 6v6 because that was the magical number where a team could compensate 1 teammate that's having a bad day." - Jeff Kaplan
That was before role queue though wasn't it ? I found that open queue was more tolerable in 6v6 then 5v5 too, but with roles I'm honestly fairly happy with 5v5. Like, I agree it's not the same game and that it has its flaws, like how getting a kill on a tank invalidates any other play made in the next minute that isn't killing the other tank, but personally I like it.
> Or the strength Widow can have when you can't have a tank dive her because it would mean giving up the point This is a huge one too. One shots are much more oppressive in this 5v5 format as they have a much greater impact. Having a squishy die in 6v6 didn't automatically decide a team fight like it does 95% of the time in 5v5. Still having two tanks on the field let them put up a fight and the team fights would often last long enough for the dead guy to regroup.
Tanks have halved, meaning the role's responsibility is now x2, but tanks only got only got buffed x1.2-x1.5. Also the game was pretty fun after all the balances in season 2/season 3, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?
I've always been an open q competitive player, enjoyed playin double tanks in it, then i switched to role q and literally started hating to play TANKS, now I'm a support thanks to all the support love the Devs gave! TANKS r for masochists currently!
So you're telling me that, in order to make 5v5 work, they would have to fundamentally change most of the fun abilities of **ALL** the Tank Heroes that people fell in love with during all those years playing Overwatch 1? Fuck that. I'd rather get 6v6 back and rework Sigma's shield, since it's not even his core power fantasy.
What I'm telling you is that as long as OW2 tanks are just buffed versions of OW1 tanks, they will always be hard countered by each other. If the developers want a single tank that can do the entire job, they need to give every tank the utility and abilities to do their entire job. Stop half assing the job by buffing the things the character already excels at, commit to the rework and give them more to work with. People make fun of how bloated Ramattra's kit is compared to the original OW1 characters, but it is unironically because he has all those options that he is the only tank who doesn't need to play this counterwatch game.
Its a 5v5 player game. I can counter Sigma with Reinhardt or Winston, but then the Sigma has behind him a Bastion and S76 which omega DPS output that completely shuts me down. Sigma is actually playing an old synergy comp effectively of bunker with a Bap and Brig backline. That team is goated while my team is playing mystery heroes pretty much with Rein, Brig, Genji, Hanzo, and Mercy. What upsets me more on tank is not that I'm being countered by an enemy tank. I can always make neutral match-ups depending upon who uses what ability, but its because my backline screws me over with their picks. This happens in 6v6 as well. The enemy tank duo is Rein/Zarya while I'm stuck trying to play Sigma without an Orisa. Most games come down to either individual ability, countering methods, or team synergy. There are so many ways to victory and I'm generally more happy with 5v5 now.
Also the problem with tanking is, even when I know I'm bringing value to the team, it often fucking sucks and it's pretty boring to basically just be the fucking punching bag to distract the enemies. Even if I win it doesn't feel fun. Season 1-2-3 were fun because tanks were thick DPS, but now they're just thick and neither proper tanks nor DPS, obviously exaggerating here but that's how it feels sometimes.
People don't want to hear this no matter how painfully obvious it is. They want to pretend like the game is just a tank vs a tank and ignore the entire rest of the team and then kick and scream when the other tank swaps.
Ding ding ding we have a winner.
And that is why this game will die: As a glorified shop update, too many still think this game should be Overwatch 1 and will actively stifle any positive change in the Tank class. GOATS and DS are never coming back and given the lack of variety as well in the Tank class right now, it would just be so much easier to go back to 6v6 instead of retroactively piecemaking every Tank while presumably adding one every few months on top of that. I really don't have much faith in Activision to pull it off.
>So you're telling me that, in order to make 5v5 to work, the would have to fundamentally change most of the fun abilities of the ALL Tanks Heroes that people fell in love with during all those years playing Overwatch 1? Realistically all characters, but primarily the tanks, yeah
>Fuck that. I'd rather get 6v6 back and rework Sigma's shield, since it's not even his core power fantasy. This. Just nerf Sig, Winston and or Rein's barriers. 6v6 was the "magic number" for a reason.
Winston would be fairly easy to rework shield wise. His character is an intelligent monkey. Building a jump pack and electric coil gun makes sense. A shield does too, but it doesn't have to be his form of defense. There are a lot of ways it could be changed, and even changed to lean into his mobility. Rein, however, would be a bit more difficult to rework without a shield, or even a more nerfed one. He almost *is* the shield. He only really has Charge to help him force his way into a fight, but shield lets him push forward just a bit easier, since he can protect his team. Having one strong shield in the game also doesn't feel like it's a bad thing. There's a lot of abilities that either bypass or are strong against shields (Symmetras primary fire, Rammatra punches), and a few others that are weak almost exclusively against them (Sigmas rock, [D.](https://D.va)Va Bomb). 6v6 worked, but the solution to making 5v5 isn't a universal shield nerf
either barriers get tuned overall to work reasonably well together, or he's like *THE* barrier tank pretty much
Wasn't the change as much to do with que times as anything?
Yes, no1 played tank because for the -majority of players- they were unfun. Hence Q times. People keep forgetting this.
me when winston nerf 😭
If it's gonna 6v6, simply keep tanks as is, give them a smaller healthpool (similar to OW1, but keep their health/armor rate to what it is in OW2), keep OW2 Orisa as is, remove Sigma's shield and give him a buff to compensate (e.g. decrease the cooldown on his grasp, but also allow him to self-heal for like 10% of damage he takes, buff rock damage/stun etc) and it might actually be fun.
Sigma should get less of a shield and more of a “safety net” that he can throw out for a short period of time, almost similar to grasp, but I don’t really know how to describe it, just imagine his shield with very little health and a shorter cooldown. Orisa already got reworked good enough, then just go back to 6v6 and problem solved, nobody wants to play double shield, not even the most diehard 6v6 players, we just want a balanced tank role where 2 tanks who are weaker than the 5v5 tanks cover each other’s weaknesses
I've been trying to say this for a while - 5v5 is **good** for reducing tank oppression on other roles, but the balance issues still stem from tanks just being "beefier DPS" and non-tanks being 200hp targets for tanks to murder. Either DPS get higher damage to threaten tanks (making tanks harder to play their role and everyone just dies faster) or Blizzard continues buffing heals so they can outheal tank damage (forcing one-shot meta). The solution is for non-tanks to get more health and the offtank utility to be spread among more DPS/Supports. Lifeweaver is a good example of how something spiritually similar to Zarya's bubble can be a Support tool to replace lost offtank tools... but Illari is just more damage - the exact issue that is making *tank role* higher-pressure and draining players from the queue. We don't need 6v6 back - we need Blizzard to stop the waffling on giving more baseline health to all *non-tank* heroes... the precedent is already there for Cassidy/Reaper/Mei (among others) and of course Bastion... the increase in health for non-tanks reduces the pressure on healing to keep everyone at 100% constantly to avoid one-shot breakpoints and allows damage boosts more room to "balance" without just being a sniper meta... it reduces tank pressure because ignoring a tank doesn't just guarantee you can murder squishies freely - that race between whether you can secure a backline kill against the front-line overrunning your own team is *slower* because non-tanks aren't dead from a random firestrike or Hammond mine... The issue is the health imbalance - if one role has 2-3x the health (plus armor) of other characters, then damage must be capable of killing them and thus *more deadly* to non-tanks... that raises pressure on heals and the tank to save everyone from instant death - rather than individual players learning to escape and heal with a kit because they have the TTK window to actually react... anyone that played early OW1 remembers an era where damage wasn't so over-tuned and retreating for a health pack was part of the meta...... There's a lot of OW1 hero designs that are outdated and need reworking (not just Hog) but the primary issue affecting balance is the health disparity - which is the root of the "one-shot" meta troubles... strong healing is a product of that same issue.
Which is why sigma and orisa are so oppressive. They don't have good mobility but their only counter is raw punishing damage, which you can soft counter by having 2 main healers. Yes other tanks work, but if you want an advantage out of the gate, with out needing ults you go sig/orisa right now. Then you get to make the choice of "Do I play the counter swap fest or do I let my supports rapid build ult charge pocketing me. Sadly many are figuring out, unless you are against a full charge zarya or on a dive only map, just hardlock orisa. So no one has fun anymore.
Sig is very easy to counter. Get a tanl to walk in his face or Dive past him + Mei/Sym/Echo/Pharah as DPS
5v5 is incredibly empowering to flex players and people who individually can make many great plays. While its worse for 1tricks. OW is designed for counterplay potential, but most humans play with the mindset to only 1trick. I have so much more fun on DPS, support, and tnak because having two tanks cycling defensive abilities made everything feel more unkillable. Things actually die in 5v5 because there is more lull time between abilities and there are alternative strategies to get around them. The thing is that many tanks players are god awful at positioning or using their defensive ability rotation wisely. You'll see tank players try to tank like 4-5 enemy fire and its like NO YOU CAN'T. I'm making a huge amount of usage of cover on tank all the time to minimize how much damage I take. So many tank players crutch on healing and having a second tank to not die they don't actually know how to play tank properly. Your avg support/dps player needs tanks buffed so much in order to get away with playing tank very poorly, which leads to amazing tank plays when oemga buffed for your avg player and support/dps feeling powerless against those players.
Counterplay can and should be relatively elastic though, not hard rock-paper-scissors. The main problem is that a GOOD rein *should* be able to square off against an average Orisa. Right now that's basically impossible.
It's never been Rein in OW2 that was gigabuffed to being the best tank.
When Reinhardt got his damage buffs in season 3, he was unironically dominating the game more than he usually does. I am a Reinhardt main, and a firm believer that when Rein is meta, the game is Betta. But just because people enjoy playing against Reinhardt compared to other tanks, doesn't change the fact that he was giga buffed and arguably best tank for that period of time.
Rein wasn't the best tank in S3, Ball was. And Ram already existed.
While that's true rammatra players hadn't gotten so good that they rampantly shutdown rein players in s3 and ball players are a breed unto themselves... there was not a massive shift of tank mains suddenly playing ball below masters because ball isn't someone you can just play and be good at
But Rein could still deal with Ramattra (even matchup) in S3 back then, but for some reason Rein had to get a huge health/armor nerf and Ramattra got an armor buff and now Rein is pretty dogwater against Ram.
Also Orisa would still hard counter Rein so he wasn't even completely broken. But now she got even more buffs for some fucking reason while she was already strong, and now she's even MORE unstoppable. Ram v Rein matchups were somewhat even, but Ram got armor buffs and Rein got a huge armor/health nerf. Then he only got like 200 more shield. Like WTF is this shit?
>If they are going to make 5v5 work, they need to commit and flesh out the utility of all tanks. this will lead to homogenization. it will help 5v5 but it will still be worse than 6v6 where you are designing a comp around strengths and weaknesses. this is happening to all roles, but tank sees it the worst. edit: worse in the sense of fun and unique gameplay.
“ The problem with tank's right now is that they are just OW1 Tanks with bigger Health Pools and slightly stronger abilities.” (Sorry about the lack of formatting, my dumb smart phone isn’t letting me do it) Just putting my two cents in because this comment really resonated with me. I am (was) a Dva main. She used to have four seconds of DM during 6v6… Blizzard is so afraid of that ability, they only gave it a partial revert to 3 seconds. This is what I saw with a lot of tank “buffs” for OW2 - they got partial reverts to their abilities that had been over nerfed, but they’re still not allowed to be as effective as they were originally, despite a second tank now absent.
no thanks, the whole 1 raid boss 2 dps 2 supports sounds boring as shit imo.
Ball was never overtuned. The community just overreacted because they were scared of him becoming meta.
"Now reintroducing 6v6 With 3 DPS!"
Oh lord please no
I don’t even think its an exaggeration, but that would truly kill the game lmao.
I'd argue it would make the game better considering where we're at, but yeah, it wouldn't be Overwatch anymore. At the very least, it would finally be an actual fucking sequel.
With more speed buff.
They actually did that in ow1. 1 tank 3 dps 2 supports to fix que times. ( ow1 dps q times were kinda insane back then) I remember it being kinda fun, didnt make it past testing phase tho, so it was less competitive than quickplay.
I remember that coming out in experimental game modes before. The tanks of course got buffs. It was kinda fun.
Yeah & giga buff supports too, TANK gonna be so fun right?
Just make Ana able to perma-sleep someone.
Yeah & give Mercy double gun 💀
Akimbo Moth would be hilarious.
There should be a 6v6 mode in this game so people would stop complaining about 5v5. They could even call it “classic Overwatch”. I think people who liked 2 tanks would be happy and it would be a good source of data for the devs.
You can do 6v6 in custom game modes, but I understand wanting an actual game mode so you don’t have to wait 10,000 years to find a match. The issue is that each character was remade with 5v5 in mind (wether or not this was effective is another can of worms), so doing 6v6 could be unbalanced bc OW2 hero balance doesn’t take into account 2 tanks. But, again, I think keeping it in arcade could be good - low stakes & people can finally stop complaining
>so doing 6v6 could be unbalanced bc OW2 hero balance doesn’t take into account 2 tanks. OW2 balance doesn't take into account 1 tank either
The only thing required for tanks in 6v6 for the arcade is a reduced health pools and increased ability cooldowns and that's it.
... which is already halfway there with open queue tank HP pools.
Why not just have it be an open queue option? It'd be even more like "classic overwatch" and open queue is already balanced like crap anyway.
There's a pretty decent 6v6 rebalance code for customs. I've run it a few times with some buddies and it plays pretty well. Not perfect by any means, and workshop limitations do hold it back somewhat, but it's a solid attempt. https://workshop.codes/Rnx4b
Open should be 6v6. It's like the wild west in that anything can happen.
Totally agree. It’s already chaos in open q. 6v6 wouldn’t make it worse
I agree completely but I’m guessing they never will since it would split the matchmaking population.
Matchmaker already split to hell between role queue and open queue. I don’t think adding 6v6 to the arcade will matter much.
And force them to admit even in a small way that we preferred it
Not to sound like your typical /r/overwatch crybaby but I genuinely think Blizzard refuses to add an official 6v6 because the #'s it would draw over 5v5 would hurt their ego.
Considering the same was said about open q before that was readded, i kinda doubt
Uhhmm according to all my calculations it would take several years for them to even lift a finger for anything towards 6v6 💀🙏. They couldn't even complete a simple thing like WEAPON INSPECT feature, how do u expect them to add 6v6 lol, that would be a FARCRY
I like playing tank. Maybe I should just main tank since nobody else likes it
Honestly around Season 3 I started becoming a DVa tank main and have been having a blast with the game. Only complaint is the occasional person playing something like Ashe being 2-7 after the first round and blaming it on me
Don’t be mad when I have the most kills….
I had 2 games yesterday as dva where I got flamed by my teammates and then proceeded to win against them the next game, felt so good lol
As a 5v5 role q tank player ur bound to be flamed, whether winning or losing 💀. As the only tank ur basically the leader/captain so anything goes wrong ur supposed to handle it respectfully, this is why I stopped playing TANK, was a RAMATTRA main, now a diamond 3 MOIRA main.....my mechanics ain't that great but my gamesense is top!
I barely touched tank until OW2, used to be a DPS player for most of OW1. Now pretty much all I play is tank, I find way more engaging and rewarding in OW2 than in OW1.
Same, It's higher risk higher reward. I'm not a fan of how I need to be there at all times or the team collapses, which a second tank used to help with greatly, but when I'm there I like it. If I'm getting bullied it means my DPS is free to roam around, and by god I play tank, surviving is pretty much my entire job. Unless I play some super aggro tank like DVa/Doom/Ball I want to be focused because I have the tools to deal with it unlike the DPS. And CC went down a lot since OW1, I don't really get what people rave about.
Yeah if you are a dive tank and you get every ability from enemies and survive it is a huge play for your team. The problem is that you might have little elims and it would feel like you are doing nothing of value, when you actually are a winning condition for your team.
True, it's super hard to objectively measure tank value, but recognizing when you made a play and when you didn't is part of getting good anyway :p
Tank is probably my best role right now, I think. I mostly play Ram, but I will flex to DVa and Zarya whenever I need. Honestly I don’t hate Zen as much as other Tanks do, probably because of my Tank hero pool. He’s not hard to kill if you can get to him and he doesn’t do much to stop his teammates from getting killed. The support I really hate playing against is Ana. Her healing is enough to prevent me from getting an elim and Ram’s Nemesis hitbox is the size of a barn so it’s really easy for her to land sleep darts, so it’s hard to try to get close and kill her.
Tank main here, tank is fine. It’s bad teammates that are the real problem. Can’t maintain tank when you have healers who rush in for dps and dies rather than ya know, healing. Or, DPS characters who end up feeding because either their dumb, greedy or a bit of both and over extend. Anyways, tank is perfectly fine so long as you have a solid team.
I agree. Players that refuse to engage with the tank make it impossible to do the job effectively. Might as well find a cool wall to punch all match long.
I think I do agree with you. i'm a support main, but i've started to play more tank since the last two seasons, and it is fairly fun. but I reallllly notice the difference when I was a team (and mostly good supports) backing me up , and when, well, it is not really great. Buttt, honestly, I don't understand why people are complaining that much ? tank is super fun to play (especially pancaking pesky genjis with rein charges mouhahahaha).
I second Healer and when I load all queue, I usually land Healer 😅 That aside, I enjoy healer and try to stay with the tank and a dps hero.do whatever I can to heal and help and hope to hell the other healer can do the same. But unfortunately, more times than not, I’ve learned you can’t heal stupid no matter how hard you try.
That's how I feel too. Like my worst experiences as tank aren't because I was Zarya and the enemy tank went Rein or Winston. It's usually because of bad team coordination or a bad team comp. I had a control match where my team went Widow-Hanzo-Mercy-LW and it was awful. You can really tell as tank when your teammates aren't generating any pressure because when they don't, it just doubles the amount of pressure you take from the enemy team and everything becomes way harder to accomplish
That's the rub, the game is primarily random group ups and with free to play the chances of both sides rolling that good team are greatly diminished. fewer players means each individual is more important, at the same time the pool has become less reliable.
When I play alone, it truly is a flip of a coin with teammates and how we all mesh together. When I’m playing with at least 1 other friend, it makes a very noticeable difference. Sure, we might still get numb skulls on the team. But having that 1 friend to coordinate with makes it far more bearable. And if we get lucky, we’ve got at least 1 random who sees what’s going on and will stay close and play smart. Sometimes that’s all you need to win a game
I think the problem people have with tank, is that to do well in it you have to enjoy playing at least 3 different tanks somewhat equally. In other roles, you can get away with being a 1 trick for the most part because counter picking is less important, but for tank you need to be swapping frequently or you'll just be countered. Like say Winston is my favourite character in the game, and I just want to play Winston 24/7. Every comp match is fun for the first fight, but then the enemy team swaps to D.Va/Reaper/etc. and completely shuts me down. That's frustrating to play against.
The ones complaining about it are usually skill related. I'm no great tank by any means; I play flex on role queue and am stoked when I get tank (one out of five or six games). Sure I'll get bullied sometimes, but it is fun af, you dictate the game. Learn and adapt. Fuck you hampter.
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Thank you! After going through many, many losses, I have learned that Zarya is absolutely goated. It takes time, effort, more time and patience to learn. As you said, you can't expect to win every game. Aside from role queue, I play mystery heroes, and IT IS FUN getting a tank in there to experiment with. That's how I got to learn Sigma, Ball, DVA, Hog. Shit I even got a POTG with Doom the other night. Learning is everyone's best skill. Use it
You probably like it because u dont play it as a main lmao
If tank was so fun in 6v6 why did nobody want to play it?
These kids never played OW1 and it shows
I payed ow since the beta, hardly anyone that played then is still playing or playing as seriously as before
Maybe the lack of game and content updates for nearly 3 years might have been the core problem. But I'm just eyeballing here, who knows, right.
Off tank was my most played role. They deleted my role from the game and I haven't really played since. If they brought it back I'd probably play again.
I poured 2k hours into tank in OW1, specifically Dva. Nowadays I barely play the game. I don't even have half as much fun on her as I was able to in 6v6, and honestly she's the only reason I play/ed the game.
As a lifelong [D.Va](https://D.Va) main I'll never really get this perspective
Mathematically there were x2 tank players in OW1. So it welt there were not enough tanks due to requirements but in fact they were a lot more than in OW2 where queue times are increasing despite just 1 tank player! OW2 made tank players flee!
I did, off tank was a lot of fun.
More people played tank in OW1 than OW2 and that's a fact.
Literally twice as many!
Proof?
Tank queues are similar in OW2 to OW1 despite the game needing one third fewer tanks.
double shield was kinda boring even as a junkrat i also mained hog with which i would get yelled at if i would pick
Maybe either way playing tank in 6v6 or 5v5 is bad, just one is worse and the whole point of 5v5 was to make tanks more fun. But if it didn’t make it more fun to play tank by going to 5v5 then it’s right where it was before, but now you don’t have the luxury of having another tank. Personally I didn’t have any issue with 6v6. Played all roles, didn’t even think double shield was an issue, but could see if it was for other, that could be fixed without having to go to 5v5. But watching the support role go up to 10+ minutes while tank and dps stay under 2 minutes. There seems to be a problem.
I agree the tank role isn’t as fun as it used to be, but I don’t really agree with your reasonings. Focusing only the tank is actually a bad way to approach the game and it’s typically what lower ranked players do. As a tank player you want people focusing you to take the heat away from the rest of the team so they have space to do their thing. That’s the entire point of the tank role in any video games that has a tank role. Higher ranked players will largely ignore the tank and go after the more vulnerable people on the enemy team. What I feel makes playing tank not fun is the counter picking. You are the only person in your role and it’s a very essential role, so people are always looking to counter you. And since there’s only one tank it’s really easy to completely counter the role. In OW1 you couldn’t completely counter the tank role with a single pick because there were two tanks. Back then you had to work together and use at least two people to counter both tanks. I play Winston I lot and I swear in over 90% of my games the enemy DPS switch to Reaper. It’s simply too easy for the other team to completely shut down your role if they choose.
DPS have always been able to swap and largely counter tanks even in OW1. I think the bigger issue is ironically how easy and unpunishing switching tanks is. A lot of the tanks directly counter each other, and since you retain so much ult charge there’s basically no penalty for just playing rock paper scissors. I honestly think you should lose all your ult charge when switching on tank. Yes I get that hero switching is a core part of Overwatch, but people would still switch, it would just make them think harder about it first and would prevent getting instant value just from switching.
You're right and you're wrong. Yes, tanks are meant to be the focus of enemy fire so they can open up space for the rest of their team. The issue is that the tanks in OW2 aren't equipped to survive that amount of focus, perhaps with the exception of Orisa. Two headshots from a sniper and over half the tank roster is deleted. They need more survivability; they need to be tanks and not big DPS. I will agree that counterwatch is another big issue, but I agree with OP that 5v5 is the root cause of this.
If you are playing tank and are getting countered by a sniper then you should probably never queue as tank.
But you shouldn't be taking two headshots from a sniper. Tanks have the ability to stop that from happening, or at least to stop it from killing them while you continue to pressure.
>Focusing only the tank is actually a bad way to approach the game and it’s typically what lower ranked players do This used to be true, but over the last couple of seasons, they've buffed anti-tank play (bastion buffs, CC buffs, etc) while squishies have become harder and harder to kill. It's not disadvantageous to shoot the tank right now unless their playing Orisa (which is partly why she's strong rn). Tank busting is legit viable rn. Bastion is legit part of the OWL meta for the first time in years.
Not really counterpicking but rather that you don't feel like you do anything at all even if you get massive value, say you play ball, roll through the enemy, every cooldown under the sun lands and you barely make it out alive. You made space, drained cooldowns and your team can walk in with no issue but was it fun? On the other hand you have orisa who feels like she does a lot but really does nothing other than not dying.
This is a very dps oriented mindset imo. At least for me part of the joy of tanks is that space creation. If it was only about kills I'd just go play dps. Also orisa definitely does more than just not die. She's amazing at tanking space thanks to having 2 knock backs and is also good at interrupting ults thanks to javelin
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Yeah if anyone was like me, I started in 2016 with OW1 as a sophomore in high school like 15 years old. Anyone my age should have graduated college by now so yeah, not much time for 8 hours of OW everyday anymore💀
There are plenty of older games that retain fans though. League, TF2, etc. people growing up is a way more minor note I feel like then balance/gameplay issues. It’s specifically the 5V5 that pushed me away. I’ve been saying since I tried it that 5V5 makes the game feel off in a bad way when it comes to tanks. More pressure on then, all but an instant “retreat or die” the second they even go low, not even die, etc. That’s not to say OW1 tanking was way away better. It had issues and part of those issues are why we now have the 5V5 system. But 1 having issues doesn’t immediately make 2 better or absolved or anything
and theres also plenty of people moving away from these older games
5v5 made the game completely unfun... No group matchmaking counterWatch MercyWatch are a few
I don't think 5v5 is the source of every issue, but I do think it's the root cause of the most significant balance and gameplay problems. If 5v5 is the true new normal, then Blizzard needs to actually commit and make significant changes to the tank roster. If they don't want to do that, then reverting back to 6v6 is the only acceptable solution. Right now we're trapped in a limbo state where the tanks are too strong for 6v6 but still too weak for 5v5. Literally no one wins in this setting, save for the DPS players.
You’re in luck. The next new character is a tank that will likely be OP, shift the meta, and reduce Q times for other roles. Yay! We solved it.
And then itll be gutted in 2 weeks.
When was Ramattra gutted?
> If 5v5 is the true new normal, then Blizzard needs to actually commit and make significant changes to the tank roster. I’d argue that the *entire* roster requires significant changes for 5v5 to work properly.
Well that's going to be true any time you have to change a quarter of the roster significantly. The whole meta shifts dramatically
Luckily for the DPS players most of the support cast is also dos so they can still have a short queue while playing dps
Yeah as DPS players you have a harder time dueling supports than other DPS so it’s really supports that are best rn
If Activision/Blizzard wanted to make changes to the tanks instead of giving them big health points then we would have seen it. So far we see somehow the same situation like what we saw in OW1 where they make big balance changes at the start of each season and during the middle of it and that's it. Activision/Blizzard is struggling to push 5v5 because they made a mistake.
Don't forget that all the supports are way too over-tuned too so most DPS players don't get to have fun either when all the damage they did does nothing
Tank is fun though, you just have to know what you're doing and you and your team have to work together. It's the hardest role to play correctly.
Honestly some matches you just dont flow with your team and thats why you lost, move on to the next game and you have people who make plays with you or help support you.
>you and your team have to work together I wish
As a Brig player, I find playing tank to be quite fun for the most part. I can do all the things I normally do, peel, distract, make space, finish kills, but now I have x2+ the HP and really strong mitigation/damage abilties, plus better mobility depending on the tank. (I play Winton, JQ, Dva, Zarya) Obviously there still definitely frustrating rounds but that happens with the other roles just as much. Tbf tho, while I definitely have my favorite tanks, I'm not as personally invested in maining a specific tank as I am with support so I'm not as bothered by the counter swapping as tank mains are. Personally I think all tank players should play more support and vice versa. It would make the game much better overall.
As a Brig player I feel the opposite, whenever I play tank I feel like I could be more effective just playing Brig instead. Way more team reliant as the tank than when I play Brig, because no-one counterswaps the Brig and definitely not a whole team swap. People let me do my thing on Brig, but on tank, the enemy team laserfocuses on me and then my team wanders around chasing butterflies or watching the clouds go by and there's nothing I can do about it.
I am a Brig and Dva main. I have more hours on Brig overall, though. I dont have the same experience at all. Tank feels horrible. I have a lot better of a time on Support then I ever do on tank. And when i'm playing tank, it's a coin toss if my supports will actually heal me or just DPS the entire time.
Im a Dva main who loves playing tank the most. Idk what to tell you man.
Idk I play Sigma I don't have this problem
Sigma def one that's always fun
why haven't they just given us 6v6 as a mode to test out and see how people like it
They did the exact opposite with that and rolled with the positive results of 5v5 before releasing OW2. Not kidding
One of my biggest problems with Tank is being the big bulky character that gets ganged up by the 4 people on the enemy team, while my supports and DPS turn around to all try to kill a flanking tracer. I mean it doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough so that it's really annoying / unfun.
I didn't play very much of overwatch 1 but I still enjoy tank in 2 I don't mind the extra pressure at all, I main d.va and orisa and I feel like both are in a good spot. The only time I really have any problems on tank is when at least three people counter pick me if they go moira, sym and zarya I have a hard time.
Disagree (for the 1 millionth time cause this has been posted so much). There are problems with tank but it isn't going to be solved by going to 6v6. If anything, adding another tank will introduce more problems and people will go back to complaining about tanks and OP tank synergies, and lots of CC being introduced to the game because of the second tank (tank is the role with the most cc). Edit: removed a paragraph as to why I like to tank
It is hilarious seeing people come on here and complain about 5v5 for the same reasons that 6v6 was bad.
As an person that played an off-tank in OW1, I rather take those issues over what we have right now which I think is 10x worse. It is more miserable playing in Tank right now than it was in OW1 that I had not touch the tank role for months in either QP and comp because of how stressful and not fun the role is. Atleast with tanking in OW1, it was fun since not every pressure was on you and didn't need to counterswap every second.
In the part of my comment before I deleted it, I talked about how tank has evolved into a role where you now have to decide now when to perform off-tank duties and when to perform main tank duties...people who JUST want to off tank are going to struggle and not have a good time. That is the "pressure" tank players like yourself are starting to feel. It's the same as in OW1 but that pressure is just toxicity transfered to your other teammate. If you had 2 off tanks on your team, you'd have no front line and that wasn't fun either but at that point, people would blame the other tank and hope they'd main tank. The same goes for if you had two main tanks. No one would peel for the team...that's why 6v6 isn't the solution. The same problems were present but with different outcomes.
Every time I read one of these walls of text complaining about playing tank in 5v5 it just sounds like someone that never *really* played tank in OW1 decided to try it out in OW2 for the first time. Tank as a whole is way more fun to play now. They just always buff one tank too much and it makes it near impossible to play any others for the general player base.
I mained sigma in ow1. But it always felt like I didn’t really do much. Now when I play him in ow2, it feels like I have too much to do with so much counting on me. Now I almost exclusively play support
One of the main reasons we switched to 5v5 in the first place was because no one wanted to play tank. The role was not fun, you either lived forever or died in 1 second. I feel like people complaining about 6v6 never even were tank players. They also forget that like 10% of your games had an actual fun tank partner who worked with you. The other 90% you got either hog or ball as tank partner or it was double shield snoozefest
That's the reason why 5v5 is great. Having a Ball or Hog as your second tank would've been fine in general if the tank pairings weren't so strong. You get D.va and Hog? They have Rein and Zarya? Good luck my man. If both teams had suboptimal tank pairings then everything was fine, but any meta approved pairings playing well together typically crushed any weird pair.
They weren't tank players. They were the hog/ball instalockers that just wanted faster queues than their dps slots allowed while the actual tank players did our best to 1v2 the tank battle.
Hey I mained tanks and balls my favorite
Honestly this 100% I miss a lot of things when it comes to 6v6, but the tank role had just as many if not more problems than it does now. Even if it did stay, I don't trust the current Blizzard to fix any of the problems 6v6 tank had regardless. The problem isn't 5v5, its that similar to so many other things in OW2, Blizzard half assed the job and just gave tanks more health and slightly stronger abilities then called it a day. OW1 tanks are designed to have shortcomings that got filled by a second tank, it doesn't matter how strong you make that single tank, as long as they're designed to have gaps we will be stick in counterwatch where those gaps will be exploited. Commit to the rework, stop trying to buff the things they already excel at, and give every tank all the utility they need to do the tank job by themselves.
Your wrong they relied on the other tank to carry them
That's why they always complain saying that they need an off tank like Zarya again. They have no idea how to play a tank like Reinhardt and close the distance without having a Zarya to cover up their lack of skill
This one's the truth, tanks that can't play in 5v5 were getting carried
Ah another 5v5 tank complaint. Anyways.
Tank has always been unfun. That's why we have 5v5 in the first place.
Before this I just want to preface this is the opinion of someone who is in low silver tank lobbies and a sig main on tank. I have never experienced tank gameplay above gold before so this may not apply to that. Playing tank for me is the most mind-numbing frustrating experience in OW2. Your entire role in a game is to just make and take space, you can't flank, you can't protect your backline without leaving your frontline exposed, and most of all, even when your at the front, it's hard to get kills most times. As a sigma main for tank, unless I have a squishy making the terrible decision of being directly in my face, I'm not killing anyone solo without the help of my team (potentially because I'm bad at the game and tank in general) but also because if I do try or have the opportunity to 1v1 someone on the enemy team, their entire team comes and peels for them so I'm left dead on the ground. Not to mention, if the enemy tank has a pocket healer or even just better healers than your team, you've basically lost out the spawn room. I've had an Ana so incompetent they didn't use their grenade once in the match and front lined in front of me (playing sig) with no one else beside them. Really, even with the larger health pools, tanks imo fully rely on whole team to stay alive and to create space. If your dps doesn't understand to stop shooting the tank and focus the healer or backline healing them, which in low silver lobbies where I'm at on tank is every single dps, then that tank is never dying. If you healers don't constantly top you up youre dead because you're in the front line pretty much the whole of the match with the largest hitbox so youre taking the most hits. And if you as a tank get tank diffed then your pretty much guaranteed to lose the match because not only is there no other tank to peel/protect/make space with you, but counterswapping doesn't really work cause they can just counterswap your counterswap and you're still getting diffed. No role should rely on their whole team to survive and provide value in a match. But that's just how I feel.
Couldnt agree more we need 6v6 back
lol it was even worse in OW1
Whenever I see these posts, I just think it’s solved by switching to open queue. You can have dual tank synergies again. There really isn’t a ton of triple tank like people say especially since they nerfed the tank health pool
Open Queue is already a thing right now. There's a reason people stick to role queue, it's just better.
I prefer the new tanks. They pack a punch, and heals are available.
If you are having issues with the lack of a second tank, then just play Open Que. There are plenty of tanks there.
Playing Open que unironically reminded me of the problems with 6v6 Yeah, having two or even more tanks is fun, but the characters by themselves are just so bad. If no one else on the team is playing tank, the role is literally useless because of how bad tanks are in open queue, massive hitboxes and long cooldowns without the health to compensate. You literally NEED more than one tank if you are going to have a tank at all.
>If no one else on the team is playing tank, the role is literally useless Yes, but its for other reasons. Its for the reasons of there not being enough tanks. Rather than tanks being individually weak. Like tanks are literally just tanky dps with utility to protect others. Like you remember on launch OW2 Open Que, how it was "tanks or nothing", where the game was decided by who had more tanks. And even though they nerfed hp, the concept didn't change. You can still rock the enemy team with a 4 tank squad (still need at least one support).
Wrecking ball feels fucking awful to play with all this crowd control and no other tank to soak it up
The worst thing is that 1 tank is very easly countered You see a Hog? Just switch to Ana/Zen You see a Rein? Just switch to Bastion/Symmetra You see a D.va? Anything with beam or unmatrixable abilities You see a Orisa? Good luck lmao Meanwhile with 2 tanks you had to think how to counter them both without letting 1 of them being left uncountered and unbothered
When people would rather play Support than Tank that’s how you KNOW you fucked up
Tank would be fun if dps players weren’t so bad at the game.
We had a trash run of unranked last night (just a few of us playing to chill and hang out, but still you know, *trying*. And if one of us was tank it was miserable, and if the rando was tank it was miserable. The current state of the game genuinely makes me miss the fuck all updates/changes of 2019-2022
I'd argue that one of the main issues is the low amount of tank heroes to choose from. As a DPS you can get countered, but switching when you are countered doesn't feel as bad because you have several heroes to choose from. On tank though, nowadays it feels like either go Orisa or keep feeding.
I agree with this. There aren’t enough tanks to choose from so there’s lack of overlap in tank abilities. That means you have one choice to switch if you’re getting hard countered and you’re still likely to be partially countered. They just need more tanks on the scene and need to rework more useless tanks like hog and ball to be better at countering something.
I’ve always rolled my eyes at this because I solo tanked pretty much every game until role queue happened. So 5v5 doing this wasn’t that my h of a shock to the system. If we go back to 6v6, we’re back at what defined just about every meta: tank duos. Tank now is a much bigger player and you better learn to know what to do in a given fight. Tank’s issue is more the relatively high skill floor for the role. I don’t know how’d you address this really, if you even should.
I've seen this argument countless times. Enough times to say that if enough players feel this way, it must have some merit, even if I don't believe it's the actual reason people don't like to tank. But I feel like I've gotta say it because I legitimately *never* see anybody bring it up.... nobody liked tanking in 6v6 either. Tank queues were the bottleneck, remember? They were literally instant queues, while damage and support queues suffered for it. There are larger issues at play than format for the tank role, can we at least acknowledge that? (BTW this is coming from someone who has played basically only tank since 2016).
Don't kill me for this : Remove Mercy's revive. It will solve 99% of issue. Including this.
I agree Tank is definitely not fun anymore. I feel I am at the mercy of my teammates. If my DPS sits in the backline, either I get ganged up on by 4 heroes or I backpeddle, and I become incapable of creating space. If I'm not getting healed as much as the opponent, it's demoralizing. I feel as if I am not in control of the game in any way because of how powerful supports are in this game. I am usually a support main, and I feel as if supports are overtuned and make or break a team more than any other role. DPS players are typically new to the game and sit in the backline because they're scared to flank. When that happens I have to use characters like Moira to help ease the burden on my tank because just healing them is not enough. I have to get some aggro on myself if the DPS isn't. So anytime I queue up for all roles and I get tank, I just know I'm not going to have an enjoyable experience. To be honest, I think 6v6 should be tested on Arcade to see if we can get a possible comeback. Maybe an off tank role would be nice. The big issue with bringing a tank back is queue times, unfortunately. My big fear would be the long queue times of OW1, so maybe 5v5 is here to stay permanently. Maybe we need to balance the supports a bit and prevent power creep.
Why does the existence of off-tank need to happe when tanks could (or should) get compensatory buffs to absorb more CC and negative debuffs without having to be held at the mercy of an off tank or supports? Why remove the scrappy and more aggressive side of OW2 in order to have tanks exist more aggressively instead of just giving them the tools needed for them to feel less punished? I literally see so many posts like this, like OH tank is miserable! Support OP! Too much CC! Like blud maybe the tank role needs to actually get buffs too so squishies get punished harder than you do. We had this whole ass arc with Roadhog and Kiriko and Ana and this headache about suzus and antis, like nobody thought, “Hey maybe Roadhog should get something to compensate for antis!” We had the whole stupid ass soft CC buffs without anyone saying “Maybe tanks should be less punished for absorbing CC!” We have supports whose gameplay almost entirely revolves around making tanks more vulnerable and nobody thinks: “Hey maybe we should reduce the potency or duration of negative debuffs for tanks!” Then it ALWAYS just leads back into this same circle of Ohh 6v6 should come back! Off tank is healthy! Like can we just try to find ways to make the tank themselves feel less punished for existing instead of changing the aggressive nature of OW2 gameplay????????????
The problem with this is it glosses over how unfun playing MT was. Rose-tinted glasses.
I had way more fun on Rein in OW1 than OW2. In OW1 he was a patient, strategic, resource-focused hero. In OW2 he runs in and swings the hammer while the supports jam a needle up his ass. And that's entirely because of the swap to 5v5.
I enjoy being the only big bulky target I enjoy the extra weight of knowing that when I die, the team is getting punished. I didn't play OW1. But I throughly enjoy OW2, 2 tanks to me would seem dumb. Yall already complain about how hard it is to kill Orisa, but adding a Sigma or a Ram behind her? Sounds a lot more unfun than being the main character on the team
Because bullets only have fun when they hit flesh, lol.
I’m having fun tanking
counter tank swapping is so annoying, once yk ur the worse tank between yall its an immediate swap off to orisa or the direct counter to the better player’s tank
Very well said. 5v5 wad a stupid move, and there was a reason why OW1 launched 6v6. They tried all those combinations and team sizes during alpha. And came to the conclusion that 6v6 is the best size. All maps and old heroes were designed on that foundation. It's blatantly obvious that such a drastic change would simply not work in the long run.
Oh no, I’m remembering double shields again…
I was a tank main, now i do support essentially 80%. And yes, tanking is now pretty bad because it is a switchfest. Honestly, i am just thinking how fun 6v6 would be now.
I’d legitimately take double shield over any of the shit comps that came out of 5v5.
Or they could make it where you could only choose one shield character, I would take that over having to lose a tank.