So 4 years of being a Zarya main, an off tank that really shines and reaches her full potential when she pairs with a second tank, rotating bubbles on the front line and so on. You’re telling me all that is now over and I have to hold the front line alone? Or just choose a different tank than my main, that has a shield?
This decision by Blizzard makes zero sense.
Time to adapt evolve and move forward
Same with every patch, just on a much bigger scale.
Zarya looks like she will be pretty strong if this was released tomorrow.
I’d be maining Zarya I think. She gets 4 bubbles… should be good survivability and charge.
Changing the number of players in a game is a huge change, it’s not a regular patch update change, or tweaking some numbers for abilities. It will completely change the dynamics of playing tank.
I do not approve and I think I’m not alone.
Are you watching the stream?
All of the tanks are changing completely. So it will be a whole new(ish) role to learn.
If you play tanks aggressively now, you will probably adjust a lot more easily than the little wimps that play passive tanks and wait about for others to do thing.
Sucks a bit for the pro and aspiring pro tank players. Even less chances to get on teams now… and you can’t really swap roles that simply at that level.
You are 100% not alone my friend, I’ll make my own post later on. Play a lot of Rein and Sig myself and love my Zarya co-tanks. This change has purely been made to reduce the queue times because people only want to play the ‘‘pow pow’’ classes. Instead of fixing this by say, release interesting new tanks and supports with overwatch 2 so that there are as many to choose from and main as there is in the dps category, they choose the easy way out. Already looking forward to the toxicity when I don’t want to play Winston on Gibraltar as the single tank. Also it gets you wondering, what was all this balancing good for the past 2 years? They finally had a reasonable meta for competitive, now we just go into no-mans land in terms of balancing again.
I appreciate your adapt and overcome attitude but some things are simply not logical. Forcing us to solo tank after 5 years of being used to 6v6, in return for a few extra bubbles and the ability to cancel charge is not a smart move
I get that. Problem is it is a different role completely now. It is now “tank” it is more “brawler”.
Every tank is changing, Winston has a longer range ability now too so he has a chance to kill you if you try to run away.
Nice little change they just dropped… Mei’s primary only slows people, and doesn’t freeze people.
As they have just said, they want people to play the game aggressively. So this should be able to do that.
(oh, people get less ult charge from shooting tanks, so Hog isn’t going to be a fat ult battery walking about throwing games)
One thing it seems to completely kill is BORING bunker comps. So games should feel much more fluid. And less ults in a game. That is a good change.
well the big thing is that the tank role have been a major issue, it’s underplayed for several reasons and i kinda called that this probably would happen, if nothing else had to change for the health of the game.
idk, I have a bad feeling about this change. I think many tank mains will share my sentiments, but only time will tell. I hope it goes well but something tells me upon release, Blizzard will spend the next 6 months trying to correctly balance the game to work around just one tank. It has the potential to go the mass rez route where people will be asking for a revert or a “nostalgic” 6v6 arcade mode.
So much for hyping up the sequel only to ruin it with this 5v5 nonsense. Not a fan.
trust me there’s not enough tank mains for them to matter, at this point recruiting new people to the role would far outweigh any losses in that regard.
and really the only reason you would want the secondary tank is to share the burden of protecting your team or have a buddy that got your back, but more often than not that’s not what’s gonna happen.
the secondary tank only makes sense in a functional teamwork environment but for overwatch that’s not what this game is, it’s also a major roadblock to the tempo of the game as a whole aswell.
with 1 less tank, the tank is less important in a fight and is more expendable and doesn’t mean you pretty much lose the engagement if they go down so it opens up more things for a tank how they wish to play aswell.
just think about the position you are in as a zarya if your other tank goes down really early and you have 2 enemy tanks to contend with, now that is never a problem again.
and if you listened closely, they are looking at CC which is a huge thing for tanks in general, they are considering of making tanks the only role that has CC, mccree might not even have his flashbang.
the game most likely will play a lot closer to what it did at launch atleast to begin with, but then how it pans out we can only speculate on.
That’s a valid point. Making the game more exciting and inviting, ultimately driving up player numbers and revenue do matter more than appeasing the feelings of some purists.
That’s pretty much the whole point of competitive and vc, something I love. But alas, it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. I’m open to testing the new structure. It’s just that my gut doesn’t have a good feeling about this.
Fair point.
Even though I hate it with a passion every time they change Zarya, I’m in favor of the whole tank line up getting a refresh and some fun buffs, because I think I speak for many players when I say they are pretty boring and underwhelming to play, I’m just not sure 5v5 is the way to go about it.
But let’s see. Time will tell. I hope I’m wrong about this and it all goes well.
Well, only they have the data. And as I saw someone put it, the player base is probably split 1,2,2 in terms of people wanting to play those roles anyways.
It will improve que times (probably not a massive impact though), it will make tanks infinitely easier to balance.
Every tank is getting tweaked, be it small changes like D.Va had. To a rework like Orissa is getting (hence why she wasn’t available to the teams in the PvP stream last night.
The passive changes to tanks and supports make a big difference too.
Well imagine this, every tank is gonna be more offensive like zarya and you won’t need that secondary tank because the frontline is not a static thing anymore.
there’s a lot more natural cover and many more ways to circumvent chokepoints so it becomes more of a whack-a-mole type of play and if you liked how dive functioned in terms of coordination in competitive then that’s more what’s gonna happen.
it’s gonna be very flowy and very high tempo and less about just building ult-charge to break the enemies position since there’s less tanks to build ult from and the tank you can build ult from doesn’t actually give you all that much ult charge anymore.
it’s definitly gonna be different, but it’s gonna be a whole lot more aggressive, you’re not gonna see a rein hold up his barrier to protect a space on the map, he’ll firestrike and charge to close the distance since he doesn’t need to be as scared of dying because there’s 1 less overall damage source and enemies won’t be as clumped to be able to just focus fire him as easily.
both sides will be aggressive and try to outmaneuver one another and there’s a lot more individual play that you can do from each role because there’s not a secondary tank that’s focused on negating a ton of stuff.
tanks as a concept are gonna be a whole lot different to play.
but hey i have yet played it myself so i’m also in the same position as you are to some degree that i might not even like it or don’t know if it’ll actually fix the tank disparity.
but i am actually happy that they are atleast trying to make a concerted effort to changing the status quo of how the game plays as of right now because it’s pretty miserable.
when i go into a game i don’t even think about my own plays because most likely they don’t matter that much, as long as i can keep myself alive and just soak up damage then i’ve pretty much done my job it feels like, everything else is up to the other two roles.
you remember when flats was asked to just play reinhardt even though he contributed literally nothing to the fight except that he soaked a lot of damage and died every time but the team won because of it, well that sums up how it feels to play tank a lot of the time for the other tanks, because a winston won’t actually kill anything that’s getting pocketed, only distract.
if i had to explain how i play winston it’s mostly about just throwing down bubbles to either save my team from ultimates or to split the enemy teams healer away from the rest of their team or zoning a dps that’s making too much trouble all while trying to charge my ult by cleaving as many as possible so that i can maybe kill a support or dps by juggling them across the map into a hidden corner away from their team so the supports can’t keep them alive and so i don’t get shredded.
or i push the enemy tanks out of position so that my team can just kill them really easily.
now that doesn’t sound as exciting, but winston got a long range sniping ability now and that will have significant implications to how much burst a winston can do and how much easier he can follow up on a low hp target, that alone will make winston a lot more fun to play even if they didn’t implement 5v5 or anything else.
but yeah, basically every tank is gonna play a lot more like d.va, hog and zarya and ball, that’s why you didn’t actually see any major changes to them.
Playing as a tank duo since beta. You’re not alone by any stretch of the imagination.
I never come to the forums, because balance changes and anything else that’s come and been great, or terrible, I’ve always had faith they’d pull it together eventually and get it right or it was something I couldn’t care less about to begin with i.e. Lucioball. Tank duo and the mental game that comes with it is the most satisfying gaming experience I’ve ever had (I don’t particularly like being CC’d to death every other game but, we’ll glance over that since there are CC changes coming).
DON’T DO IT BLIZZARD!
(This is probably why Jeff left right? He’s a tank main like us. Good man Jeff, farewell.)
5v5 sucks soooo much. smurfs will be dominating since their impact will be greater now that the players of the enemy team are less.
No, Jeff left because he was offered a better paid job with less stress and less having to deal with community things.
That is a bold, and hard to prove claim.
I wouldn’t be worried, there aren’t that many smurfs, and when it goes F2P that will dilute the impact they have further with the short term influx of new players.
That was maybe not so obviously a joke about the general sentiment of my post. Who knows exactly why, that’s his own business.
I don’t want to see this game’s potential for synergistic plays ruined, that’s all. You remove a tank, you lose diversity in play and possibilities in every single match. I’ve no doubt that the new tanks will be “fun” to play, but I don’t want that at the expense of overall engagement and excitement in moment to moment/game to game gameplay.
I get that.
But it will still have the same potential for that. Just new plays, new strats, and new options.
It will be different. Different isn’t always bad. But the game needs to adapt.
As they said last night the game as already changed so many times, and quite drastically from day 1. And they tried all the variables (4v4, 7v7, 1-4-1, 1-3-2 and so on) and 5v5 was the best option.
From what I can tell… If you play the game passively and wait for things to happen, you will struggle unless you change how you play. If you are the aggressive play making type, this will be perfect for you.