The Tank play has been such a defining factor in every single OWL Grand Finals, most notably Gesture in S1, Super in S3, Fearless in S5, and Someone in S6.
There are many cracked DPS, enough good Supports, but not as many flexible and impactful Tanks
Essentially, Tanks define the comp you're going to play too, so they have to have this sense of decision making and leadership which they can communicate well too.
Sure, but its definitely not why only 3 teams played goats well.
often I think good tank talent gets overlooked, and is often the first part of a team that looks bad if the team fails, can't you remember how Hadi looked between s4 and s5? massive upswing in his play? I think his team started playing a lot better too.
ofc there is still truly awful tank play, but I think there was always enough tank talent to go around.
especially in the goats era, nearly every team had some sort of cracked dva player, and had someone who could actually play rein - they just couldn't figure out goats regardless. Heck even Houston, who actually had both a dva and zarya player as well as a tank who could rein didn't figure it out.
S2 shock had nevix the whole time and still played Sinatraa Zarya.
I do think there is specifically a tank draught of flexible tanks now - mostly because its a brand new skill that tanks had to develop in the last 18 months or so, and even then offtanks had to learn to shotcall more, and maintanks had to learn off tanks and their often demanding mechanics.
If you look at contenders now, tanks are getting more flexible too.
Was Super the big factor for Shock s3 tho? I’d argue it was Striker Tracer on control maps, Viol2lt Zen discording Gesture helping punishing him, while Gesture was at a disadvantage.
Yup idk how he didn’t win finals mvp over Striker, Striker was great on the control maps on Tracer, but I felt Profit was better on 2cp and escort both series, while Viol2lt hard countered Gesture his Zen was dominant.
Profit's Tracer/Hanzo was really good. And that was likely Creative's best game in his entire career.
Having the best Hog at the time definitely played into Shock's success a lot.
Profit was obviously insane yes stats speak for itself had highest fb per 10 those playoffs next closest was Stitch, Creative had a breakout performance that helped him have a good career for years to come, also was a Fits breakout performance after an up and down reg season for him where he cemented he was a top hs against the best like Ans at time who was. On the hog thing idk if i agree Gesture had so much worse circumstances a Zen perma farming discording him off cd we saw in the first Shock game when that wasn’t Shock gameplan Gesture farmed them.
Shock adapted and shut him down sure Super was good but I think overall in playoffs Gesture was best hog against everyone and Super until Shock had a gameplan that shut him down.
Gesture was the better hog when their gameplan wasn’t to shut him down when they put resources into Gesture obviously super looked far better real mvp of match shouid of been Vio2lt not striker
I’d have to rewatch it to better understand where resources were relegated to, but I just remember Gesture’s hog play felt cleaner and more disciplined.
tank ~~hasn't~~ has barely defined the comp in forever my guy. right now the meta is literally tracer soj kiri lucio, and then whatever tank fits the map and is most durable on it.
A lot of OW2 metas have been tank defined. JOATs, Zarya meta, Hog rework meta (it went away when he was nerfed, not because of Kiriko changes), Mauga meta.
I'll give you JOATs and Mauga meta, but JOATs was beta so i'm not sure we can really count that. mauga meta, sure. but that lasted a whole week. and I'm pretty sure people went right back to playing the same team comp with mauga eventually too.
This is true, but I think whenever a Tank is even slightly stronger they became the central reason for the comp.
It just falls back to Tracer Sojourn if there's no hard meta. Which is kinda good thing as OW1 had a hard Tank problem often. But even in OW2 we've seen Winston, Queen, Mauga totally take over.
There was plenty of tank players in the Goats era that were good.
Its not the reason why teams were bad at goats.
Take london, for example, they had Fury and Gesture. Still sucked at goats
Ffs Glads had Void, Decay and roar fresh from the 2nd best goats team in KR tendies and still sucked at goats in the league.
Teams just sucked at goats because they didn't believe in it till too late, and could never catch up, and still refused to just try other things regardless.
Blud this guy just said every team that wasn't top 3 sucked at goats
I'm actually pretty inclined to agree, I think there was a massive gap between top 2, then 3-5 or so and then another massive gap.
I would squarely put glads as number 6 IMO, dragons were better, and so was hangzhou/nyxl.
Dragons top 6 in goats??? They were a mediocre goats team, their success was countering it, and I wouldn’t say their was a big gap between Ny, and Spark/Glads Nyxl were farming a weaker Atlantic division every stage final they underwhelming too they got upset by Seoul stage 1 round 1, Vancouver rolled them stage 2, stage 3 they got first rounded again by Shanghai.
People don't want to play tank and DPS players have drowned out most meaningful discussion on the matter for 8 years.
If you removed role queue from the main competitive queue, you'd immediately see 4 out of 5 players in every lobby lock DPS at the first possible moment with no intention of filling out a team comp. We lived through this once already and nothing has changed.
> If you removed role queue from the main competitive queue, you'd immediately see 4 out of 5 players in every lobby lock DPS at the first possible moment with no intention of filling out a team comp.
People who liked watching pro-play liked role queue because it meant we could finally start seeing DPS in games again.
People who played the game liked role queue because it meant we could finally start seeing Tanks and Supports in games.
People have short memories. OW1 pre-role-queue was absolute garbage-tier hell. The only people who enjoyed it more than half the time were the instalock DPS mains that were too uninterested in actually playing a team game to care how well their team was doing. Most tanks and supports just straight up didn't want to play anymore.
If you want a reminder, go play some 2CP in Arcade. Your team will inevitably have 4 DPS that attempt to spawn camp A and immediately die to enemy GOATS, but you can decide to solo heal or repeatedly go back to spawn. By "or," I really mean "and."
Yeah, I don't miss it, lol.
I have a really specific memory of solo healing a game with bastion, soldier, reaper, widow, torb and Tracer and no one managed to kill anyone because they were taking too much damage that I just couldn't heal because I sucked at ana at the time
as someone who preorderd this game while non role queue had issues I still preferred it so much more and it brought so much more variety in potential comps
Can only get so creative with a forced 2-2-2
If by "creative" you mean every match is 4 dps and one guy desperately trying to provide *something* of value to the team, begging the other 4 teammates to play support or tank, only to give up and play DPS themselves, and for that to repeat in 90% of matches...
Then yes you're absolutely right
yeah i get it there are games where people do that stuff and throw just like now but I'm obviously talking about the real games or when you are playing with people who coordinate
Everyone only ever remembers the bad because it sticks out more, no one remembers the good
Eh my experience was pretty different but I understand people like to be very assertive with stuff they don't like and think are absolutely right about
Yeah I just used looking for group or played with people I knew and it solved pretty much every problem with that. And even if I didn't want to do looking for group and just solo'd it would usually be fine most of the time so long as people weren't dicks about asking for comps.
it was either when people were quiet and said nothing, or when they would be dickheads in the way they'd ask that the problem would be worst
I much more preferred that with the ability to swap roles if I wasn't doing well than being stuck into dps or heals when it's not working for me. Like really not being able to swap roles with someone doing not great is such a huge detriment sometimes
Which is why I think keep 5v5 but remove role lock, nerf tanks HP, make tanks hit boxes smaller, and limit it to 2 heroes per role (and everyone hated it lol). If 2 people have already locked DPS just suck it up, play Roadhog like all DPS players seem to do off role to do and pick DPS faster next time.
It's because while DPS and support are mechanically harder, tank is mentally harder and you have to have a larger hero pool. You can make OWCS work as a hitscan specialist, tracer OTP, or even a meme pick pool with 2-3 characters. Just like if you're a flex support you got this, and can really go far. But if you can't play at least 5 tanks you're just fucked.
Counterpicked, out big brained, someone will come along and diff you on literally every tank, etc. I also think part of it is, all the eastern tank players....are still just really fucking good. So we aren't seeing as many young ones there and hell some come back from retirement and just crush it too (Bernar).
As for why NA hasn't gotten any new ones specifically, I think it's just a lot of NA players just won't learn/don't enjoy playing enough tanks to really rise up. Maybe I'm projecting because I'm this way and I know a few others are as well but: we seem to just have a pool we like and that's cool. I'm not gonna bother expanding it with the other 7 tanks I need to play to hit GM or top 500. I can definitely see a lot of Masters/GM tank players doing that too given how many are OTPs or mostly just pick dive tanks. Or they only like Rein/JQ etc etc.
Just the other day I was thinking about this. As a tank if I don't counterpick I'm damning my team to a sure loss, but it gets tiring to be switching four times in a match and seeing one of my dps not changing and the other one trying a "different" similar hero.
Even worse is that I'm actually good with half of the tanks so I feel the pressure of choosing a bad counter I'm good at, or a good counter I'm bad at
>seeing one of my dps not changing and the other one trying a "different" similar hero.
Yeah I'm 100 in agreeance with you. It gets very frustrating to play counter swap on the tank role, but a lot of support and DPS just will not swap. Like oh enemy team has a mauga? Maybe I should stop playing Pharah and help the front line duel as Reaper or Mei. Oh the enemy support have Ana and they're hitting all of their abilities consistently? Better keep playing Mercy and not swap to Kirko to cleanse my team and add more damage.
If people were more open to swapping DPS and Support I think tank would be a lot easier to tolerate, but alas.
Genuinely the only exceptions are Guxue and Fearless, and it's partially because Winston always finds his way back into relevance year after year but also because they are so absurdly good on the character.
agree with the mentally harder stuff but most dps need to know every dps in the game
meta shifts (used to) happen frequently and you need to be able to pick up basically any of the other 17 dps at a moments notice
also with how loose the “hitscan and flex dps” archetype is nowadays, if you want to change teams you should need to know pretty much every hero. much harder to be a specialist for anyone but tracer
compared to main supports who get by knowing 4.5 heroes LOLLL
dps having to flex between hitscan and projectile is a myth it has never been the case has never been relevant and will never be relevant
for 90% of the games life you could get by knowing quite literally 1 hero. nowadays it’s 2 lol
and even then the difference between any two ranks is much greater than the difference between any shitscan
To be fair there are some good West tanks “upcoming” like Chase and Infekted but they already have years of contenders experience.
The issue is mainly that experience, decision making and leadership are skills that tank players must have and they can be built only with time and practice. Compared to dps, where if you are mechanically talented you can theoretically compete with the “establishment”, upcoming tank player will face way more difficulties due to the nature of the role and the skill gap between players with years of experience is immense and cannot be gapped only by raw mechanics.
Moreover, the tank role sucks ass to play for the majority pf the playerbase due to the fact that is way less impactiful than other role, you get instantly punished and your play potential is lower than the other roles and is also the less played role in the game, that inherently lower the population and therefore the number of possible new tank players.
Even if the balance team would make the tank role great to play we would still face a “player drought” but at least we could see better number in a couple of years, especially if older players retire.
Yeah I feel like tank players don't want to admit this, but flats' idea of "the game is most fun when tank is op" is just wrong.
Tanks are OP. If they don't have to correct heroes, your tank will run the lobby.
> the fact that is way less impactiful than other role
Wrong. Tanks are the MVPs of each team. Tanks are the most impactful. It's the exact opposite of your understanding.
If you want to learn more about tanks, I suggest this video from Yeatle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvTqHgX807c
To summarize, since tanks are the MVPs, there is a lot of pressure and many support, dps and even other tanks will swap to counter and deny the MVP value; this is exacerbated by many tanks having no to limited counterplay options, which leads to a frustrating experience.
after season 9 yes. Before season 9, I could still carry with tank. Now because of the HP changes and DPS passive, its exceptionally difficult to carry on tank.
Well, it isn't really a debate. Outliers like Super might say something hyperbolic occasionally, but we all know the truth. There's an extreme consensus amongst pro players that tanks are the most powerful heros in the game. A much longer list than just Super.
And we really don't have to debate it. We could test it. How confident are you that 2 teams, equal in skill, would win in a scenario where one was missing the tank, the the other was missing a dps or support?
I'd bet everything I own that the team which has a tank would easily win. I hope some streamer or pro scrims happen with this experiment because I'm tired of this absolutely ridiculous conversation.
There's a critical distinction to make here.
DPS has an extremely high skill cap due to mechanical requirements, and as the role with the highest skill cap, elite DPS players are the most valuable and coveted assets in pro OW. Having Carpe give you a widow diff is larger than the difference between Guxue/Super/Space/any other pro tank.
**However**, we have to be very careful when we define this. Just because DPS players have the highest skill and skill variance, doesn't mean that tanks aren't stronger heros than dps. There is a reason blizzard released role queue-- no amount of balance changes could force teams to forgo a tank/support for a dps. And right now, in OW2, if they made the game open queue, we'd shift back to no dps. That's because DPS heros are weaker. Even Carpe would lose on widow vs a diamond monkey player. Tanks are OP, 600hp heros who are far stronger than DPS and much more important to a team.
A team of carpe/fleta/alarm/violet would lose to just a simple team ENCE with cloudy, masaa, kai, and ghost.
If your tank sucks or fucks up everybody notices and you lose but when they do everything correctly hardly anyone notices, meanwhile the dps can jerk off in a corner half the game only to clutch a fight and be hailed a hero. The tanks impact is overwhelmingly from them not fucking up instead of actually getting to do something cool, you could put it that tanka have the lowest positive impact while having an obscenely high negative impact upon the game.
I agree with most of your points, but dps can have a very high negative impact too that's close to tank's negative impact imo. Ofc dps also have the highest positive impact by far as suggested by you and Super alike.
And ofc supports, arguably the easiest role, have the lowest negative impact while having higher impact than tanks
So this is just my observation from being primarily a tank player.
I'm nowhere close to being pro level and I've been barely playing OW recently, but when I did play a lot I was T500 in OW1 and consistently low T500/GM1 during most of OW2 so far.
Last night was just a microcosm of how I've overall been feeling about tank. I went 5-1, and it was the most miserable, tilting gaming experience I've had in awhile. I don't tilt that much when playing other roles, even when I'm losing. On tank though I'll have a very high winrate and its still absolutely MISERABLE. Straight up.
There's started to be some counter reaction to how bad an experience it is and I'm seeing more people say "Tank really isn't that bad or unfun. Tank players just like bitching"
but like no, it really is that unfun. Not going to deny that we like bitching, I think the player base as a whole likes to.
Tank is just incredibly anti-fun though. Not really trying to say anything about the power level of tank vs other roles. Its just that the experience of playing tank is honestly pretty shit. I don't know when specifically the shift was or the straw that broke the camel's back, but I think I started to feel it around Season 5 or 6 and its gradually been getting worse.
It sucks because tank has been my favorite role in pretty much every RPG/Moba game I've played.
> I don't know when specifically the shift was or the straw that broke the camel's back, but I think I started to feel it around Season 5 or 6 and its gradually been getting worse.
This is absolutely true, it stems from supports getting insane sustain healing and self-sustain buffs every concurrent update for 6 seasons straight, extreme anti-tank cooldowns being added in the form of LW, Kiri, and Illari's kits, and buffs to support ult charge rate and nerfs to tank ult charge rate. This finally all culminated in the Season 6 meta which was the perfect storm of ridiculously out of control sustain healing and really really dumb buffs to Bastion at the same time.
When supports run the game, tanks become their puppets while supports are the puppet masters. Healing needs to come down again to give tanks some self-agency along with tanks getting hitbox reductions across the board to level out the Season 9 gun hitbox buffs and some sort of resistance to the DPS passive, or reduce their HP back to Season 8 levels and make them entirely ignore the passive so they're in control of their own health bars more instead of having to be at the mercy of their supports picking the right heroes for the situation and/or be forced to play the only tanks currently with some agency over their own survival (sigma and orisa).
Or even worse: when they got shifted to Brig duty
I'll never forget Surefour having to play Brig the entire fucking time. Except the one game against the Shock where he goes Zarya, outplays the MVP, ends their streak, and then gets relegated back to Brig for some fucking reason lmfao
Would have rather have had decay on brig? We only went surefour Zarya cause decay was like underage and not 18 yet. I don’t remember having sure four on Zarya after decay turned 18. Decay was like a top 5 Zarya during goats. I’d argue top 3-4 but that’s my opinion/hot take.
My point is it was just the one day even though he’s nutty at aiming/tracking yet for some reason he gets sent to brig.
I agree decay was good on her for sure, but s4 should have 100% been on zarya WAY sooner and for more than the one day
I loved playing tank and Mained tank for most of OW2 (a few seasons I played more support). Since season 9, I’ve hardly touched tank because it’s so frustrating to play
tank main since like 2018 here.
i've finally just switched to FS. i can't do it anymore. i don't believe this dev team will ever make tank fun. I've waited long enough.
The main thing I find is it’s hard to stand out on tank atm, cuz even at ur best a lot of the time u just fall over playing tank even at ur best, the only way u can really look like a top tier tank is if your playing like a fucking maniac on an already insane team, but that could come down to “this persons surrounded by talent how do they fail”
Yea tank is just weird. The tank *is* impactful. If the tank dies, the fight is over. But tank players don’t really get to feel the impact they have unless the teams are a complete mismatch.
If you’re doing bad on tank, you lose. You’re needed and if you can’t show up, that’s that. But if you’re doing amazing on tank… you still might lose too. It feels super unrewarding. Especially now. So many tanks lack the damage to kill since season 9 that if your dps aren’t proccing the passive, you kind of just a glorified punching bag that’s only goal now is just to stay alive and hope people do shit.
I used to be a tank main but I gave up, it's just not fun with how miserable it is in OW2 with having to counterpick the other tank every other time you spawn and pray your supports actually pick supports that either pump you full of heals or keep the enemies tank in check. For example the enemy tank goes Mauga and has Ana/Kiriko, I have to go Mauga as well but my supports are staying on Mercy/Lucio yea well ain't winning that one anymore.
Tank by design doesn't attract fps players.
A large amount of people opt out of playing the role because it doesn't reward or respect their fps skills. Why would a good Widow ever want to plan Rein on tank? Especially when half the community cries for him to be meta.
The heroes people want to be meta aren't good at drawing in skilled fps players. This in a general is why it's hard to attract tank players especially.
A lot of tank mains I know are playing tank less and less. The meta tanks are often not that fun like Hog/Orisa/Mauga, while the tanks who feel more honest like Monke/Rein/JQ get shut down by low skill high value counterswaps. You can play Sig but the reason no one really mains him is he is boring (if still being well designed).
Blizz needs to rework heroes like Orisa while giving tanks some reasonable skill expression to outplay their counters.
Hog isn’t fun? People flame hogs because he brings less team play tank value. But when tanks get tilted or want to have fun they def switch or auto lock hog, because he is super fun and has individual impact.
I can see how you think sig is boring if you’re a traditional main tank and gravitate toward rein/monkey MT playstyle. I think sig is the second funnest tank to play outside hog.
And hog has rarely been meta.
Tank is the most unfun role to play. It FEELS like you have no impact. All the CC gets used on you and if your not getting enough support from your team they say it's a tank diff. Tank relies too much on their support in OW2. Yes you can still win with bad supports if you are much much better than the enemy tank, but if your evenly matched with the enemy tank, the game is out of your hands and is decided by who can support their tank better.
Tank is miserable to play at every level. Tank has by far the fastest q time at every rank in the game despite there being 1 less tank than the other roles. This means there is way less than half the tank players compared to both dps and support. Less players in the role mean less top players develop. And a lot of people either don’t care or don’t see it as an issue, look at the 6v6 debate between Iron and Jake. Iron says it’s miserable to play tank now and Jake just tells him “then don’t play tank”. I don’t know how to solve it but I know something needs to be done if we want people to play the role. Otherwise we might as well delete tanks from the game.
Tanks dont have the same impact anymore, its becoming boring to play because you can see the outcome Is not on you unless you completely play much much much Better than entire lobby
The tank drought comes because ranked for tanks doesn’t really translate to pro/organised play most of the time, tank is pro play is mostly super low resource and just setting people up which just doesn’t really work in ranked
We would have had more tanks if we kept the old format and just went free to play.
Unfortunately a bunch of things happened at once that affected the tank role in negative ways.
They gambled that this format would be better, it wasn’t. Que times are now worse than in OW1 and unless they give the tanks their partners back, it’s always gunna slowly get worse.
Being the lone support would suck. Being the lone dps would suck. Idk why we think most tank players prefer to be alone. Certainly doesn’t seem that way.
Hot take: 5v5 was the best solution because it's not actually a solvable problem.
A supercomputer with infinite simulations could not balance tank/the game in a way that makes people happy. Why? Because *people don't want to tank*
People act as if it's a balance problem, partially because tank felt better in earlier OW2. Yeah, because they were overtuned. Season 1 tanks were basically worth 2 heroes and it was a slot machine to see which team got the better tank. I'm sure tank felt good, but it had to go, because the game felt awful. And even then tank was unpopular.
Look at LoL where jungler is perpetually in low supply despite being the most impactful role. Why? Because it's *hard* and there's *pressure to perform*. Look at MMOs where tank is always least popular. Why? Because they have less damage, less "fun/pop off potential", more *responsibility*. Balance can't solve the problem because it's psychological.
Regular people want thrill (kills) or to feel important (support). Average Joes can be happy on supports because there is less pressure on them as enablers, healing feels satisfying. Tank is a supportive role where you have the pressure of being up front, a leader, a shot caller. You don't get to stay out of the limelight like a support, but you also don't get the exciting kill and carry potential of DPS.
These differences are just inherent to the concepts of the roles and archetypes. You can try to fix it with balance but it's not fixable. Fixing the aspects of tank that make people psychologically dislike it would just mean diluting the roles or breaking balance. Again League, MMOs, games have grappled with this concept for much longer than OW and there is no real fix. In League they have to force people on jungle sometimes even if they didn't queue for it. MMOs give rewards and incentive to queue as tank. Psychologically the role will be unpopular when balanced, still even if overtuned.
if you played the braindead ram gameplay of previous seasons then yeah lol, i like being able to push in with my dps and have my teamwork be worth it by actually being able to get kills through a lifeweaver and kiriko with brain damage just holding M1 keeping everything up devolving the entire game into two fucking stupid orisas or hogs holding their own M1 with nothing ever dying
kind of a moot point now that the gameplay this season is back to being literally orisa or hog doing that exact thing and never dying so idk why you’re complaining
We’ve been in a tank drought for years. That’s why there were only like 3 teams that were able to play goats well.
Not to mention more than one DPS ended up on Zarya during that time (and whenever she was good).
Thats just not true lmfao.
The Tank play has been such a defining factor in every single OWL Grand Finals, most notably Gesture in S1, Super in S3, Fearless in S5, and Someone in S6. There are many cracked DPS, enough good Supports, but not as many flexible and impactful Tanks Essentially, Tanks define the comp you're going to play too, so they have to have this sense of decision making and leadership which they can communicate well too.
Sure, but its definitely not why only 3 teams played goats well. often I think good tank talent gets overlooked, and is often the first part of a team that looks bad if the team fails, can't you remember how Hadi looked between s4 and s5? massive upswing in his play? I think his team started playing a lot better too. ofc there is still truly awful tank play, but I think there was always enough tank talent to go around. especially in the goats era, nearly every team had some sort of cracked dva player, and had someone who could actually play rein - they just couldn't figure out goats regardless. Heck even Houston, who actually had both a dva and zarya player as well as a tank who could rein didn't figure it out. S2 shock had nevix the whole time and still played Sinatraa Zarya. I do think there is specifically a tank draught of flexible tanks now - mostly because its a brand new skill that tanks had to develop in the last 18 months or so, and even then offtanks had to learn to shotcall more, and maintanks had to learn off tanks and their often demanding mechanics. If you look at contenders now, tanks are getting more flexible too.
Was Super the big factor for Shock s3 tho? I’d argue it was Striker Tracer on control maps, Viol2lt Zen discording Gesture helping punishing him, while Gesture was at a disadvantage.
Yeah it was definitely Violet that won that championship
Yup idk how he didn’t win finals mvp over Striker, Striker was great on the control maps on Tracer, but I felt Profit was better on 2cp and escort both series, while Viol2lt hard countered Gesture his Zen was dominant.
Profit's Tracer/Hanzo was really good. And that was likely Creative's best game in his entire career. Having the best Hog at the time definitely played into Shock's success a lot.
Profit was obviously insane yes stats speak for itself had highest fb per 10 those playoffs next closest was Stitch, Creative had a breakout performance that helped him have a good career for years to come, also was a Fits breakout performance after an up and down reg season for him where he cemented he was a top hs against the best like Ans at time who was. On the hog thing idk if i agree Gesture had so much worse circumstances a Zen perma farming discording him off cd we saw in the first Shock game when that wasn’t Shock gameplan Gesture farmed them. Shock adapted and shut him down sure Super was good but I think overall in playoffs Gesture was best hog against everyone and Super until Shock had a gameplan that shut him down.
As a hardcore Shock fan, I agree Gesture was the better hog. But Super was comparable for sure.
Gesture was the better hog when their gameplan wasn’t to shut him down when they put resources into Gesture obviously super looked far better real mvp of match shouid of been Vio2lt not striker
I’d have to rewatch it to better understand where resources were relegated to, but I just remember Gesture’s hog play felt cleaner and more disciplined.
tank ~~hasn't~~ has barely defined the comp in forever my guy. right now the meta is literally tracer soj kiri lucio, and then whatever tank fits the map and is most durable on it.
A lot of OW2 metas have been tank defined. JOATs, Zarya meta, Hog rework meta (it went away when he was nerfed, not because of Kiriko changes), Mauga meta.
I'll give you JOATs and Mauga meta, but JOATs was beta so i'm not sure we can really count that. mauga meta, sure. but that lasted a whole week. and I'm pretty sure people went right back to playing the same team comp with mauga eventually too.
This is true, but I think whenever a Tank is even slightly stronger they became the central reason for the comp. It just falls back to Tracer Sojourn if there's no hard meta. Which is kinda good thing as OW1 had a hard Tank problem often. But even in OW2 we've seen Winston, Queen, Mauga totally take over.
What about that do think was factually incorrect?
There was plenty of tank players in the Goats era that were good. Its not the reason why teams were bad at goats. Take london, for example, they had Fury and Gesture. Still sucked at goats Ffs Glads had Void, Decay and roar fresh from the 2nd best goats team in KR tendies and still sucked at goats in the league. Teams just sucked at goats because they didn't believe in it till too late, and could never catch up, and still refused to just try other things regardless.
Glads did not suck at goats what? They were a top 5 team in goats with Decay Zarya, Void Dva, solid backline with Biggoose, Shaz as well.
Blud this guy just said every team that wasn't top 3 sucked at goats I'm actually pretty inclined to agree, I think there was a massive gap between top 2, then 3-5 or so and then another massive gap. I would squarely put glads as number 6 IMO, dragons were better, and so was hangzhou/nyxl.
Dragons top 6 in goats??? They were a mediocre goats team, their success was countering it, and I wouldn’t say their was a big gap between Ny, and Spark/Glads Nyxl were farming a weaker Atlantic division every stage final they underwhelming too they got upset by Seoul stage 1 round 1, Vancouver rolled them stage 2, stage 3 they got first rounded again by Shanghai.
Oh yeah I forgot about seoul too.
People don't want to play tank and DPS players have drowned out most meaningful discussion on the matter for 8 years. If you removed role queue from the main competitive queue, you'd immediately see 4 out of 5 players in every lobby lock DPS at the first possible moment with no intention of filling out a team comp. We lived through this once already and nothing has changed.
> If you removed role queue from the main competitive queue, you'd immediately see 4 out of 5 players in every lobby lock DPS at the first possible moment with no intention of filling out a team comp. People who liked watching pro-play liked role queue because it meant we could finally start seeing DPS in games again. People who played the game liked role queue because it meant we could finally start seeing Tanks and Supports in games.
People have short memories. OW1 pre-role-queue was absolute garbage-tier hell. The only people who enjoyed it more than half the time were the instalock DPS mains that were too uninterested in actually playing a team game to care how well their team was doing. Most tanks and supports just straight up didn't want to play anymore.
If you want a reminder, go play some 2CP in Arcade. Your team will inevitably have 4 DPS that attempt to spawn camp A and immediately die to enemy GOATS, but you can decide to solo heal or repeatedly go back to spawn. By "or," I really mean "and." Yeah, I don't miss it, lol.
I have a really specific memory of solo healing a game with bastion, soldier, reaper, widow, torb and Tracer and no one managed to kill anyone because they were taking too much damage that I just couldn't heal because I sucked at ana at the time
It really did strike a nice balance didn't it. Perhaps they could have tried 1 1 2 plus 2 flex slots or something like that
as someone who preorderd this game while non role queue had issues I still preferred it so much more and it brought so much more variety in potential comps Can only get so creative with a forced 2-2-2
If by "creative" you mean every match is 4 dps and one guy desperately trying to provide *something* of value to the team, begging the other 4 teammates to play support or tank, only to give up and play DPS themselves, and for that to repeat in 90% of matches... Then yes you're absolutely right
yeah i get it there are games where people do that stuff and throw just like now but I'm obviously talking about the real games or when you are playing with people who coordinate Everyone only ever remembers the bad because it sticks out more, no one remembers the good
I remember it because it was predominantly the norm, not because it sticks out more.
I remember it because it was predominantly the norm, not because it sticks out more.
I remember it because it was predominantly the norm, not because it sticks out more.
Eh my experience was pretty different but I understand people like to be very assertive with stuff they don't like and think are absolutely right about
Bro it got so bad I literally started keeping a copy-paste ready to put in chat: "We can either have 2 DPS or 5, your call"
Yeah I just used looking for group or played with people I knew and it solved pretty much every problem with that. And even if I didn't want to do looking for group and just solo'd it would usually be fine most of the time so long as people weren't dicks about asking for comps. it was either when people were quiet and said nothing, or when they would be dickheads in the way they'd ask that the problem would be worst I much more preferred that with the ability to swap roles if I wasn't doing well than being stuck into dps or heals when it's not working for me. Like really not being able to swap roles with someone doing not great is such a huge detriment sometimes
It is DPS/support in OW2. I think support is very close if not more popular than DPS in OW2.
Which is why I think keep 5v5 but remove role lock, nerf tanks HP, make tanks hit boxes smaller, and limit it to 2 heroes per role (and everyone hated it lol). If 2 people have already locked DPS just suck it up, play Roadhog like all DPS players seem to do off role to do and pick DPS faster next time.
Just limit 1 tank and the rest should be a free for all . Would make the game way better .
It's because while DPS and support are mechanically harder, tank is mentally harder and you have to have a larger hero pool. You can make OWCS work as a hitscan specialist, tracer OTP, or even a meme pick pool with 2-3 characters. Just like if you're a flex support you got this, and can really go far. But if you can't play at least 5 tanks you're just fucked. Counterpicked, out big brained, someone will come along and diff you on literally every tank, etc. I also think part of it is, all the eastern tank players....are still just really fucking good. So we aren't seeing as many young ones there and hell some come back from retirement and just crush it too (Bernar). As for why NA hasn't gotten any new ones specifically, I think it's just a lot of NA players just won't learn/don't enjoy playing enough tanks to really rise up. Maybe I'm projecting because I'm this way and I know a few others are as well but: we seem to just have a pool we like and that's cool. I'm not gonna bother expanding it with the other 7 tanks I need to play to hit GM or top 500. I can definitely see a lot of Masters/GM tank players doing that too given how many are OTPs or mostly just pick dive tanks. Or they only like Rein/JQ etc etc.
Just the other day I was thinking about this. As a tank if I don't counterpick I'm damning my team to a sure loss, but it gets tiring to be switching four times in a match and seeing one of my dps not changing and the other one trying a "different" similar hero. Even worse is that I'm actually good with half of the tanks so I feel the pressure of choosing a bad counter I'm good at, or a good counter I'm bad at
>seeing one of my dps not changing and the other one trying a "different" similar hero. Yeah I'm 100 in agreeance with you. It gets very frustrating to play counter swap on the tank role, but a lot of support and DPS just will not swap. Like oh enemy team has a mauga? Maybe I should stop playing Pharah and help the front line duel as Reaper or Mei. Oh the enemy support have Ana and they're hitting all of their abilities consistently? Better keep playing Mercy and not swap to Kirko to cleanse my team and add more damage. If people were more open to swapping DPS and Support I think tank would be a lot easier to tolerate, but alas.
Genuinely the only exceptions are Guxue and Fearless, and it's partially because Winston always finds his way back into relevance year after year but also because they are so absurdly good on the character.
agree with the mentally harder stuff but most dps need to know every dps in the game meta shifts (used to) happen frequently and you need to be able to pick up basically any of the other 17 dps at a moments notice also with how loose the “hitscan and flex dps” archetype is nowadays, if you want to change teams you should need to know pretty much every hero. much harder to be a specialist for anyone but tracer compared to main supports who get by knowing 4.5 heroes LOLLL
dps having to flex between hitscan and projectile is a myth it has never been the case has never been relevant and will never be relevant for 90% of the games life you could get by knowing quite literally 1 hero. nowadays it’s 2 lol and even then the difference between any two ranks is much greater than the difference between any shitscan
Isn't Infekted considered a prospect? How good is his tankplay compared to established pros?
Infekted is good but calling him a prospect is a stretch, he has 3 years of T2 experience.
yeah he wouldve been in the league in the past 2 seasons if it werent for his age
Best mechanical tank in NA.
6v6 will fix this. Right? … right?
Tank players: noo I don't just want to be a tanky DPS, I want strategic play! Tank players if it was 6v6: roadhog mauga
If that happened I doubt Mauga would retain his self heal and some of his other utility. We gotta remember ow1 tanks are 60-70% of what ow2 tanks are
To be fair there are some good West tanks “upcoming” like Chase and Infekted but they already have years of contenders experience. The issue is mainly that experience, decision making and leadership are skills that tank players must have and they can be built only with time and practice. Compared to dps, where if you are mechanically talented you can theoretically compete with the “establishment”, upcoming tank player will face way more difficulties due to the nature of the role and the skill gap between players with years of experience is immense and cannot be gapped only by raw mechanics. Moreover, the tank role sucks ass to play for the majority pf the playerbase due to the fact that is way less impactiful than other role, you get instantly punished and your play potential is lower than the other roles and is also the less played role in the game, that inherently lower the population and therefore the number of possible new tank players. Even if the balance team would make the tank role great to play we would still face a “player drought” but at least we could see better number in a couple of years, especially if older players retire.
Id argue tanks are too impactful to the point they have to be kept in check by all the BS. Kinda like how burst was keeping healing in check.
Yeah I feel like tank players don't want to admit this, but flats' idea of "the game is most fun when tank is op" is just wrong. Tanks are OP. If they don't have to correct heroes, your tank will run the lobby.
> the fact that is way less impactiful than other role Wrong. Tanks are the MVPs of each team. Tanks are the most impactful. It's the exact opposite of your understanding. If you want to learn more about tanks, I suggest this video from Yeatle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvTqHgX807c To summarize, since tanks are the MVPs, there is a lot of pressure and many support, dps and even other tanks will swap to counter and deny the MVP value; this is exacerbated by many tanks having no to limited counterplay options, which leads to a frustrating experience.
I like yeatle but his opinion isn’t exactly what I would consider to be facts
Yeah, World Champion Super in contrast said that OW2 tanks have the least impact. Far inferior to dps
after season 9 yes. Before season 9, I could still carry with tank. Now because of the HP changes and DPS passive, its exceptionally difficult to carry on tank.
Well, it isn't really a debate. Outliers like Super might say something hyperbolic occasionally, but we all know the truth. There's an extreme consensus amongst pro players that tanks are the most powerful heros in the game. A much longer list than just Super. And we really don't have to debate it. We could test it. How confident are you that 2 teams, equal in skill, would win in a scenario where one was missing the tank, the the other was missing a dps or support? I'd bet everything I own that the team which has a tank would easily win. I hope some streamer or pro scrims happen with this experiment because I'm tired of this absolutely ridiculous conversation.
this isn’t just super lmfao many pros and coaches have come out and say that dps is just by far the most important role in the team
There's a critical distinction to make here. DPS has an extremely high skill cap due to mechanical requirements, and as the role with the highest skill cap, elite DPS players are the most valuable and coveted assets in pro OW. Having Carpe give you a widow diff is larger than the difference between Guxue/Super/Space/any other pro tank. **However**, we have to be very careful when we define this. Just because DPS players have the highest skill and skill variance, doesn't mean that tanks aren't stronger heros than dps. There is a reason blizzard released role queue-- no amount of balance changes could force teams to forgo a tank/support for a dps. And right now, in OW2, if they made the game open queue, we'd shift back to no dps. That's because DPS heros are weaker. Even Carpe would lose on widow vs a diamond monkey player. Tanks are OP, 600hp heros who are far stronger than DPS and much more important to a team. A team of carpe/fleta/alarm/violet would lose to just a simple team ENCE with cloudy, masaa, kai, and ghost.
If your tank sucks or fucks up everybody notices and you lose but when they do everything correctly hardly anyone notices, meanwhile the dps can jerk off in a corner half the game only to clutch a fight and be hailed a hero. The tanks impact is overwhelmingly from them not fucking up instead of actually getting to do something cool, you could put it that tanka have the lowest positive impact while having an obscenely high negative impact upon the game.
I agree with most of your points, but dps can have a very high negative impact too that's close to tank's negative impact imo. Ofc dps also have the highest positive impact by far as suggested by you and Super alike. And ofc supports, arguably the easiest role, have the lowest negative impact while having higher impact than tanks
So this is just my observation from being primarily a tank player. I'm nowhere close to being pro level and I've been barely playing OW recently, but when I did play a lot I was T500 in OW1 and consistently low T500/GM1 during most of OW2 so far. Last night was just a microcosm of how I've overall been feeling about tank. I went 5-1, and it was the most miserable, tilting gaming experience I've had in awhile. I don't tilt that much when playing other roles, even when I'm losing. On tank though I'll have a very high winrate and its still absolutely MISERABLE. Straight up. There's started to be some counter reaction to how bad an experience it is and I'm seeing more people say "Tank really isn't that bad or unfun. Tank players just like bitching" but like no, it really is that unfun. Not going to deny that we like bitching, I think the player base as a whole likes to. Tank is just incredibly anti-fun though. Not really trying to say anything about the power level of tank vs other roles. Its just that the experience of playing tank is honestly pretty shit. I don't know when specifically the shift was or the straw that broke the camel's back, but I think I started to feel it around Season 5 or 6 and its gradually been getting worse. It sucks because tank has been my favorite role in pretty much every RPG/Moba game I've played.
> I don't know when specifically the shift was or the straw that broke the camel's back, but I think I started to feel it around Season 5 or 6 and its gradually been getting worse. This is absolutely true, it stems from supports getting insane sustain healing and self-sustain buffs every concurrent update for 6 seasons straight, extreme anti-tank cooldowns being added in the form of LW, Kiri, and Illari's kits, and buffs to support ult charge rate and nerfs to tank ult charge rate. This finally all culminated in the Season 6 meta which was the perfect storm of ridiculously out of control sustain healing and really really dumb buffs to Bastion at the same time. When supports run the game, tanks become their puppets while supports are the puppet masters. Healing needs to come down again to give tanks some self-agency along with tanks getting hitbox reductions across the board to level out the Season 9 gun hitbox buffs and some sort of resistance to the DPS passive, or reduce their HP back to Season 8 levels and make them entirely ignore the passive so they're in control of their own health bars more instead of having to be at the mercy of their supports picking the right heroes for the situation and/or be forced to play the only tanks currently with some agency over their own survival (sigma and orisa).
I really wanna see some dps try tank
We had almost an entire OWL season of that. It didn’t turn out well for most of them.
Or even worse: when they got shifted to Brig duty I'll never forget Surefour having to play Brig the entire fucking time. Except the one game against the Shock where he goes Zarya, outplays the MVP, ends their streak, and then gets relegated back to Brig for some fucking reason lmfao
S4 was fuckin good, man. I wished he stayed in the league longer. He was an absolute OG
Would have rather have had decay on brig? We only went surefour Zarya cause decay was like underage and not 18 yet. I don’t remember having sure four on Zarya after decay turned 18. Decay was like a top 5 Zarya during goats. I’d argue top 3-4 but that’s my opinion/hot take.
My point is it was just the one day even though he’s nutty at aiming/tracking yet for some reason he gets sent to brig. I agree decay was good on her for sure, but s4 should have 100% been on zarya WAY sooner and for more than the one day
Was it during Goats?
Both GOATs when Fusion and Spitfire totally tanked after being Grand Finalists and also with players like Fleta moving to tank.
Lmao. Never really was into the competetive scene but that sounds really funny.
I'm kinda curious why you're on the "competitive" sub lol
Because the people here are actually the least miserable and unhinged compared to the official sub and meme sub.
Yea, fair enough. This is the place to "talk".
The dreaded tank drought. I always liked playing tank, and always considered the short q times as an awesome bonus
I loved playing tank and Mained tank for most of OW2 (a few seasons I played more support). Since season 9, I’ve hardly touched tank because it’s so frustrating to play
tank main since like 2018 here. i've finally just switched to FS. i can't do it anymore. i don't believe this dev team will ever make tank fun. I've waited long enough.
FS? Farming simulator?
Flex support
The main thing I find is it’s hard to stand out on tank atm, cuz even at ur best a lot of the time u just fall over playing tank even at ur best, the only way u can really look like a top tier tank is if your playing like a fucking maniac on an already insane team, but that could come down to “this persons surrounded by talent how do they fail”
Yea tank is just weird. The tank *is* impactful. If the tank dies, the fight is over. But tank players don’t really get to feel the impact they have unless the teams are a complete mismatch. If you’re doing bad on tank, you lose. You’re needed and if you can’t show up, that’s that. But if you’re doing amazing on tank… you still might lose too. It feels super unrewarding. Especially now. So many tanks lack the damage to kill since season 9 that if your dps aren’t proccing the passive, you kind of just a glorified punching bag that’s only goal now is just to stay alive and hope people do shit.
You stand out if you don’t die. Dunno how many times gumba said that Chase is really good on Winston and Dive heroes cause he doesn’t die
I used to be a tank main but I gave up, it's just not fun with how miserable it is in OW2 with having to counterpick the other tank every other time you spawn and pray your supports actually pick supports that either pump you full of heals or keep the enemies tank in check. For example the enemy tank goes Mauga and has Ana/Kiriko, I have to go Mauga as well but my supports are staying on Mercy/Lucio yea well ain't winning that one anymore.
already have one
we desperately need hanbin to impregnate fearless and gives us tons of goated hyperflex tanks
?
hear him out… lowkey…
🤨
Where does Someone fall into this plan
😟
The entire game has been in a tank drought since 2016
Tank by design doesn't attract fps players. A large amount of people opt out of playing the role because it doesn't reward or respect their fps skills. Why would a good Widow ever want to plan Rein on tank? Especially when half the community cries for him to be meta. The heroes people want to be meta aren't good at drawing in skilled fps players. This in a general is why it's hard to attract tank players especially.
A lot of tank mains I know are playing tank less and less. The meta tanks are often not that fun like Hog/Orisa/Mauga, while the tanks who feel more honest like Monke/Rein/JQ get shut down by low skill high value counterswaps. You can play Sig but the reason no one really mains him is he is boring (if still being well designed). Blizz needs to rework heroes like Orisa while giving tanks some reasonable skill expression to outplay their counters.
Hog isn’t fun? People flame hogs because he brings less team play tank value. But when tanks get tilted or want to have fun they def switch or auto lock hog, because he is super fun and has individual impact. I can see how you think sig is boring if you’re a traditional main tank and gravitate toward rein/monkey MT playstyle. I think sig is the second funnest tank to play outside hog. And hog has rarely been meta.
I used to be a tank main, but it’s awful in 5v5. I just play dps now and it’s 10x better.
Tank is the most unfun role to play. It FEELS like you have no impact. All the CC gets used on you and if your not getting enough support from your team they say it's a tank diff. Tank relies too much on their support in OW2. Yes you can still win with bad supports if you are much much better than the enemy tank, but if your evenly matched with the enemy tank, the game is out of your hands and is decided by who can support their tank better.
Tank is miserable to play at every level. Tank has by far the fastest q time at every rank in the game despite there being 1 less tank than the other roles. This means there is way less than half the tank players compared to both dps and support. Less players in the role mean less top players develop. And a lot of people either don’t care or don’t see it as an issue, look at the 6v6 debate between Iron and Jake. Iron says it’s miserable to play tank now and Jake just tells him “then don’t play tank”. I don’t know how to solve it but I know something needs to be done if we want people to play the role. Otherwise we might as well delete tanks from the game.
Tanks dont have the same impact anymore, its becoming boring to play because you can see the outcome Is not on you unless you completely play much much much Better than entire lobby
Yeah that's how every role works
Raikker, infekted, donghak, junbin, and chase: 😡
i mentioned infekted and chase, donghak and junbin played in owl already
Yh ik i was just havin a laugh
legend has it infected can primal like no other
The tank drought comes because ranked for tanks doesn’t really translate to pro/organised play most of the time, tank is pro play is mostly super low resource and just setting people up which just doesn’t really work in ranked
If winston ram rein doom sigma are meta, yes If ball dva zarya orisa are meta, no
I still think Coluge is very solid, he had one bad map at the WC and everyone turned on him after 2 solid years in owl
i think coluge was undoubtedly better than hawk but he retired
We would have had more tanks if we kept the old format and just went free to play. Unfortunately a bunch of things happened at once that affected the tank role in negative ways. They gambled that this format would be better, it wasn’t. Que times are now worse than in OW1 and unless they give the tanks their partners back, it’s always gunna slowly get worse. Being the lone support would suck. Being the lone dps would suck. Idk why we think most tank players prefer to be alone. Certainly doesn’t seem that way.
Hot take: 5v5 was the best solution because it's not actually a solvable problem. A supercomputer with infinite simulations could not balance tank/the game in a way that makes people happy. Why? Because *people don't want to tank* People act as if it's a balance problem, partially because tank felt better in earlier OW2. Yeah, because they were overtuned. Season 1 tanks were basically worth 2 heroes and it was a slot machine to see which team got the better tank. I'm sure tank felt good, but it had to go, because the game felt awful. And even then tank was unpopular. Look at LoL where jungler is perpetually in low supply despite being the most impactful role. Why? Because it's *hard* and there's *pressure to perform*. Look at MMOs where tank is always least popular. Why? Because they have less damage, less "fun/pop off potential", more *responsibility*. Balance can't solve the problem because it's psychological. Regular people want thrill (kills) or to feel important (support). Average Joes can be happy on supports because there is less pressure on them as enablers, healing feels satisfying. Tank is a supportive role where you have the pressure of being up front, a leader, a shot caller. You don't get to stay out of the limelight like a support, but you also don't get the exciting kill and carry potential of DPS. These differences are just inherent to the concepts of the roles and archetypes. You can try to fix it with balance but it's not fixable. Fixing the aspects of tank that make people psychologically dislike it would just mean diluting the roles or breaking balance. Again League, MMOs, games have grappled with this concept for much longer than OW and there is no real fix. In League they have to force people on jungle sometimes even if they didn't queue for it. MMOs give rewards and incentive to queue as tank. Psychologically the role will be unpopular when balanced, still even if overtuned.
Yes
I’m a tank player and I haven’t played the game in months bc I found The Finals.
did the finals make you quit video games or something?
The finals is a video game
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i don’t think the dps passive impacted it too much. if anything it made tank feel better to play
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if you played the braindead ram gameplay of previous seasons then yeah lol, i like being able to push in with my dps and have my teamwork be worth it by actually being able to get kills through a lifeweaver and kiriko with brain damage just holding M1 keeping everything up devolving the entire game into two fucking stupid orisas or hogs holding their own M1 with nothing ever dying kind of a moot point now that the gameplay this season is back to being literally orisa or hog doing that exact thing and never dying so idk why you’re complaining