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you would think i hate this game with how much i complain about it
Some weeks ago, a prominent Overwatch streamer, Seagull, released a video titled The State of Overwatch. This video touched upon several topics that had--and continue to be--discussed frequently by the player base over the past year, such as:
-Game balance after the introduction of Brigitte and the increasing dominance of tank/support heavy compositions;
-The ultimate "meta" essentially boiling down to "have more than the other team"
-General feeling of the matchmaker being inadequate, leading to games where teams have multiple players with identical/overlapping hero pools;
-The team nature of the game means that when your team is working well together you feel great, but if you're not you feel helpless and this contributes to toxicity and the urge to blame those around you;
-All of the above combining so that actually playing Overwatch becomes frustrating and unpleasant and ends with players leaving the game altogether
The reaction to the video has been mixed; there's widespread agreement that Overwatch isn't all that fun to play anymore, but no real consensus as to why these issues exist, or on what to do to address them. I'm no different; there are a lot of aspects of Overwatch design, balance, and approach to matchmaking/social features that have bugged me for a long time, some for years at this point, and now seems as good a time as any to voice them.
Sorry, this is going to get...whiny.
If you have beenunfortunate enough to frequent nearly any Overwatch discussion board/discord, the overwhelming complaint at the moment is the strength of triple tank/triple support, specifically the Reinhardt/Zarya/D.va/Lúcio/Moira/Brigitte 'GOATs' composition, with the widespread belief that nerfing (or, for the truly salty, deleting) Brig hard enough will cause these kinds of comps to fall out of the meta as her abilities are a centerpiece of the comp.
I don't think the current Brig changes on the PTR (Shield Bash can't go through barriers, damage reduced to 5, buffs to her Inspire passive) will have a significant impact on the efficacy of GOATs; the changes to Shield Bash mean she won't be as effective as an initiator but that just means she'll be played a bit closer to the backline and that she will be dependent on her team to give her opportunities to land a stun. The increase in Brigitte's passive healing actually seems like a TERRIBLE idea, as a HUGE strength of GOATs and its variants is the sheer amount of healing and damage mitigation that is constantly in play. The idea underlying any tank/support comps comes down to "Let's stack as much healing and barriers as we can;" in GOATs the AOE healing and barriers are constant and there are very few hero combinations that can hope to break through it before they get run over by the deathball. The safest option when going against it is to mirror it and hope you manage your abilities better.
This concept of stacking similar abilities to reduce the opposing team's options is a significant factor influencing metagame development; dive was all about abusing high-mobility heroes to bully more static comps out of the meta, ending with mirror comps and or dive comps where the only difference was whether you ran Genji, Sombra or Widowmaker alongside Tracer. The effectiveness of stacking abilities is something that will always plague Overwatch just by nature of its design, and is likely to get worse, not better, over time. It's necessary to add more support and tank heroes as those classes are starved of variety when compared to DPS, which takes up over half the current roster...but support and tank abilities tend to amplify the effectiveness of each other in a way that pure damage skills do not. (basically: two sources of healing is good, three sources of it is better; barriers work in a similar fashion, but running six DPS doesn't really translate to six times the damage output of a team with no DPS)
So now you have this issue where the abilities that literally define the support and tank classes have this potential to become overwhelmingly strong...but only in fairly specific configurations, so it's not obvious what needs to be changed. Like, when it comes to Brigitte-Lúcio synergy alone--their combined passives + payload healing is something like 46 HPS, nearly as much as having a pocket Mercy. Whose healing do you reduce in this situation? Do you nerf Sound Barrier or Rally to stop the strategy of layering them to essentially give your team invincibility for six seconds? Any kind of nerf will make the changed character less useful overall, and there's not a guarantee that the efficacy of the oppressive strat will be altered. It's a nightmare to balance and while I get the frustration that comes with seeing characters you like to play constantly getting hit with nerf bat (albeit gently, and over the course of several months) but it's also kind of necessary. :(
....and I had a lot more, but it's late and I don't even know if this is coherent. I think maybe it's not????
For tomorrow (possibly): Map design/spawn point advantage/why so many games in overwatch end with "i don't know how we won/lost that round"; ultimates being too good at what they're supposed to do; aaaaand it's bullshit i can only avoid 2 people at any given time
-Game balance after the introduction of Brigitte and the increasing dominance of tank/support heavy compositions;
-The ultimate "meta" essentially boiling down to "have more than the other team"
-General feeling of the matchmaker being inadequate, leading to games where teams have multiple players with identical/overlapping hero pools;
-The team nature of the game means that when your team is working well together you feel great, but if you're not you feel helpless and this contributes to toxicity and the urge to blame those around you;
-All of the above combining so that actually playing Overwatch becomes frustrating and unpleasant and ends with players leaving the game altogether
The reaction to the video has been mixed; there's widespread agreement that Overwatch isn't all that fun to play anymore, but no real consensus as to why these issues exist, or on what to do to address them. I'm no different; there are a lot of aspects of Overwatch design, balance, and approach to matchmaking/social features that have bugged me for a long time, some for years at this point, and now seems as good a time as any to voice them.
Sorry, this is going to get...whiny.
If you have been
I don't think the current Brig changes on the PTR (Shield Bash can't go through barriers, damage reduced to 5, buffs to her Inspire passive) will have a significant impact on the efficacy of GOATs; the changes to Shield Bash mean she won't be as effective as an initiator but that just means she'll be played a bit closer to the backline and that she will be dependent on her team to give her opportunities to land a stun. The increase in Brigitte's passive healing actually seems like a TERRIBLE idea, as a HUGE strength of GOATs and its variants is the sheer amount of healing and damage mitigation that is constantly in play. The idea underlying any tank/support comps comes down to "Let's stack as much healing and barriers as we can;" in GOATs the AOE healing and barriers are constant and there are very few hero combinations that can hope to break through it before they get run over by the deathball. The safest option when going against it is to mirror it and hope you manage your abilities better.
This concept of stacking similar abilities to reduce the opposing team's options is a significant factor influencing metagame development; dive was all about abusing high-mobility heroes to bully more static comps out of the meta, ending with mirror comps and or dive comps where the only difference was whether you ran Genji, Sombra or Widowmaker alongside Tracer. The effectiveness of stacking abilities is something that will always plague Overwatch just by nature of its design, and is likely to get worse, not better, over time. It's necessary to add more support and tank heroes as those classes are starved of variety when compared to DPS, which takes up over half the current roster...but support and tank abilities tend to amplify the effectiveness of each other in a way that pure damage skills do not. (basically: two sources of healing is good, three sources of it is better; barriers work in a similar fashion, but running six DPS doesn't really translate to six times the damage output of a team with no DPS)
So now you have this issue where the abilities that literally define the support and tank classes have this potential to become overwhelmingly strong...but only in fairly specific configurations, so it's not obvious what needs to be changed. Like, when it comes to Brigitte-Lúcio synergy alone--their combined passives + payload healing is something like 46 HPS, nearly as much as having a pocket Mercy. Whose healing do you reduce in this situation? Do you nerf Sound Barrier or Rally to stop the strategy of layering them to essentially give your team invincibility for six seconds? Any kind of nerf will make the changed character less useful overall, and there's not a guarantee that the efficacy of the oppressive strat will be altered. It's a nightmare to balance and while I get the frustration that comes with seeing characters you like to play constantly getting hit with nerf bat (albeit gently, and over the course of several months) but it's also kind of necessary. :(
....and I had a lot more, but it's late and I don't even know if this is coherent. I think maybe it's not????
For tomorrow (possibly): Map design/spawn point advantage/why so many games in overwatch end with "i don't know how we won/lost that round"; ultimates being too good at what they're supposed to do; aaaaand it's bullshit i can only avoid 2 people at any given time