They won’t. They’ll test a bunch of options next year. Then inevitably stick with 5v5.
If they were doing that, they wouldn’t need to run tests on team compositions, as they’ve alluded to.
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Yeah a straight return to 6v6 would mean a lot of work their end reworking heroes. And would require major acceptance that the lack of tank players will massively extend queues again.
If you’re a player the started playing in OW2, and gotten used to the 1,2, 3 minute queues… are you really going to be happy at the idea of 15-20 minute DPS queues. That sort of queue time isn’t really health for a casual game mode.
I think they will look for a happy middle ground that means sticking to 5v5. Like the idea of their has to be a minimum 1 per role and max 2 per role. But you can swap between them…
That would mean having to rework how MMR and rank % is distributed the player after each match. I’d imagine they will hope it isn’t popular as that isn’t a quick job.
Personally I don’t think the tank role will ever be properly balanced in 5v5 due to reasons others have mentioned here, if you’ve ever played tank at a medium or even higher level you can recognize complexity, counterskill play, and fight structure having been stripped from the game due to the change.
I think 5v5 as a hero NUMBER format may work. A way that could make this happen is to convert all tanks into DPS heroes and create 3 new categories. Offense, Defense, Healer.
2 Offense, 2 Defense, 1 healer.
Healers:
All of the Main Healers with high HPS (not to be confused with main supports) would be in the healer category like mercy, lifeweaver, juno, moira. The other current healers would be turned into Defense heroes and have their healing numbers and utility reduced. These heroes were chosen due to their higher offensive pressure (damage) and utility to battles like lamp, nade, suzu. I would also nerf these abilities heavily with their move into the defense category.
Offense:
All of the offense heroes would be most of the DPS we have now, characters typically played in the comp known as cheese would be moved to defense (Symmetra, Bastion, Torb). Some reworked tanks could be offense as well, like JQ and Doom. I prioritize tanks with more offensive pressure and mobility to rework into this category. Tanks with shields and a lot of defensive utility with low mobility are better candidates for defense category.
Defense:
The Defense heroes would be those cheese heroes (Sym, Bastion, Torb) + reworked dps/healer hybrids + some reworked tanks. Mostly the old “main tanks” like winston, rein, sigma, ram.
All of these heroes would have the standard health pools, with the reworked tanks having a reduced hitbox + around 100 more hp than regular dps heroes. It’s enough to let them not explode due to larger hitboxes, but also not too much hp to allow goats to come back.
I would also rework almost all aoe healing that exists outside of a large cooldown, eg. Brig inspire, moira m1, bap m1. Having only 1 main healer will allow us to be fair in heavily reducing the HPS of the healers that moved to defense with character reworks.
This solution also removes que time issues by shuffling tanks into more popular roles.
It is quite a bit of work, but blizzard has already scrapped and shuffled the game around like this several times (5v5 change, hitbox and health number changes, full hero reworks).
The easy answer is going back to 6v6 2020 October patch, but if we can’t, my solution is likely the best chance we have to get a decent game again.
Exactly. Or just bring back OW, and see which game dies first.
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