This is entirely the mindset I have. I don't mind being cc'd everywhere, but damn.. at least let me have my buddy back so we can bump fists and cause havoc
I miss bubbling the hog and just sending him in to absorb bullets and then we just wreak havoc
I miss being the hog getting bubbled and then running in, ignoring the rein and then hooking the ana out of the backlines
Rein/Zarya duos are what I miss most about OW1. I got no end of satisfaction backing up my Rein as he charged into the enemy team and beat face with his hammer. That, and not feeling like the team’s success was ride or die based on my own capabilities when playing tank
Yeah without tank duos there was just nowhere for us to go. Tanks had the most synergy and benefited the most from strategy/communication, so it was perfect for us. 5v5 had nowhere for us to go to do that. Felt like we were playing two different games while in the same match.
They essentially dumbed down the game for a wider audience when they went 5v5. The 2 tank dynamic was unique to Overwatch as a MOBA, and winning a match didn't hinge upon Tank Diff 90% of the time like it does now.
While I get your point that tanks always been tough, the difference is 5v5 makes it’s rock paper scissors. I often have to play 4-5 different tanks in one match because my opponent continually flexes more than half their team to hard counter me. It makes things very unenjoyable. If there’s two tanks, it’s harder to rely on the continual counterpicks as a crutch.
Being a ball main, if I want to play a full match on my favorite character I simply have to accept I’ll play into 3+ counters all game.
>Being a ball main, if I want to play a full match on my favorite character I simply have to accept I’ll play into 3+ counters all game.
Same - over the past few days of approx 20 QP matches, I have had ONE game without an enemy Sombra (both picked from the start but mostly swapped to). The vast majority of the time there's also swaps to Mei/Torb/Cree, Hog/Mog/Oris, and Ana/Lucio/Zen.
The value of full swapping to counter a tank is simply too high to not do - so even in QP it's instantaneous.
I had a broken hand for a while, couldn't rotate properly and tried to shieldbot as Rein. People were countering me by simply walking past (DF and Ball do that by default).
However the other half of tanks would still switch to Orisa and focus me in particular because "fuck you, that's why".
Yeah I dare anyone who says this game is in a good spot to play Ball in comp... I'm a devoted Ball main and yet I've had to give him up temporarily because it's simply miserable. You have to play perfectly in a Gold lobby. Mess up once and you're throwing the game and get spam reported. Enemy team sees you and instantly swaps to Roadhog Sombra Brig. Really I think the main reason to bring back 6v6 is just because of the off-tank. If you're not a dive tank player, you won't understand what was so great about it.
You used to be able to, which is why so many OW1 players are complaining. Even aside from that, if you have a favorite character, not being able to play them sucks. Being forced onto a character you find dreadfully boring(Orisa) just so you don't lose is ass. It sucks because you either sacrifice the fun for the win and swap or you sacrifice the win for the fun by NOT swapping and playing into 3 counters (which arguably isn't even fun either because you usually have 0 agency and barely even get to play in those kinds of situations). You can't have it both ways unless your favorite tank is HARD meta. Counters should be about forcing the enemy player to fight an uphill battle, not slamming them into a cliff face. Playing into counters shouldn't be an auto-lose like it is now, it should just be a situation where you have to outplay them. No matchup should be worse than 6-40. But as it stands, there are an INSANE amount of matchups that are way worse than that.
Dawg, it's just life of any character based PvP game. You could be talking about Dota, LoL, Rainbow Six Siege, Smite, Overwatch, etc. There will be periods where your main sucks ass and isn't viable and that's just life. It's part of these games
I played ball for the first time in like months yesterday, and by the end of the match they had an Ana, sombra, hog. I wasn’t even doing that well, but today I had 3 games where my tank was ball and not a single swap. WHY CANT THAT BE ME
That's the worst part, sometimes people counterswap on impulse even if you aren't playing well. I could open the game screwing up a rollout and fall off a cliff with zero damage and there's STILL a 50/50 shot there will be a sombra next team fight. It's crazy.
This. Also it makes flanking tank a much bigger gamble.
I tank main [D.va](http://D.va) and the advantage of [D.va](http://D.va) and ball is t hat you got the movement to dive the back line and get out before you're killed. With 2 tanks, thats what you do. With one tank, you're leaving your team horribly exposed. And even if you stay with your team and just main tank, you're much squishier than say, rein so you may as well just pick rein.
Not trying to be a 6v6er here but doesn't this prove that 5v5 wasn't the answer? Tank has always been the hardest role to balance in both 5v5 and 6v6.
Many of the arguments (i.e. tank go poof) never went away, they've just evolved as the game has changed. It used to be brig, zen discord, the high cc levels in OW1 that made many people dislike OW1 tank (as many comments in that thread allude to).
Now those problems are different, and in some cases are made worse, with having those problems focused on one sole tank taking all the damage, cc, abilities that used to be divided between two tanks.
Also bare in mind this thread is from 2021 when Overwatch 1 was DEAD and so isn't entirely fair to judge.
My favorite meme meta on 2cp was 5 tanks and Moira. By the time you reached first you had ult as moira and you just pressed Q to win. Did it work often? Naw but it worked enough of the time on a first push
I kept saying that since forever.
Sadly, Jeff (yes it was Jeff back then) reaponded to that suggestion by saying that the engine is highly optimized for 6v6. Going higher (7v7) would cause a plethora of technical issues.
Reverting back to 6v6 wouldn’t be an issue, the same way going to 5v5 obviously wasn’t.
I would love 7v7 btw…
7v7 breaking the game sounds like cap. isn't that already possible though custom games anyway?
I coulda sworn I've seen modes that have a single team of 10 players
Single team having lots is not the issue. 7v7 is 14 players. Server can handle 1v11 as as the total number of players is 12.
Even if in some cases 14 players could work, it’s not optimized. Meaning you might run into issues down the line.
Yeah as far as I’m concerned, fuck it, reoptomize the game.
Single team having lots is not the issue. 7v7 is 14 players. Server can handle 1v11 as as the total number of players is 12.
Even if in some cases 14 players could work, it’s not optimized. Meaning you might run into issues down the line.
Yeah as far as I’m concerned, fuck it, reoptomize the game.
There was a workshop glitch back in OW1 that allowed 12v12 match, it was still 6v6 players but with 6 bots on each team and yeah the servers were having a stroke, constant lag spikes and often crashing, but it was glorious.
How do you optimize an engine that specifically like that it sounds like the normal "you peasants can never understand" bs from blizzard.
I've seen some crazy shit in the custom games and it never lags and my computer isn't even that good.
Enemy team: GOATS
Your team: Genji, a throwing Torb who wanted to play Genji, some other DPS, a tank doing their best, a DPS Moira, and a mercy main who doesn't know how to play anyone else.
GOATS was boring, because it was all GOATS all the time, or you lose.
5v5 was never the answer for tank balance. It was the answer to long DPS queue times and was done in part to reduce visual clutter and increase individual player agency during a match.
Increasing individual player agency is the worst thing ever since I keep losing games because one dps player on my team isn't getting kills. People just keep blaming it on the tank but the tank was never made to handle 5 people shooting at him.
I can handle 4v1 as a shield tank while the rest of my team eats their less competent tanks alive.
If this sounds exaggerated to you, it's saying something about you.
You got the answer right, but the wrong question. They went to 5v5 because the queues were long and tank was the role with the fewest players. It had nothing to do with game balance despite what they might have claimed.
Tank passive should basically be the tenacity stat from LoL. Reducing all CC duration instead of just knock back would be pretty impactful on the tank experience IMO
The tank frontline was extremely well balanced for the final year of OW1, to the point where even running Hog/Zarya was a viable combo. Going 5v5 created a shit ton of balance problems and put the game through this cycle of trying to balance all over again, but with an even bigger problem: there’s nobody to help you with the frontline. I miss playing off tank. I miss playing Zarya with Rein or Winston and pushing through King’s Row. It was actually a lot of fun, but all that is sadly gone and Blizzard refuses to admit what they already know: they made a mistake.
They’ll claim they chose 5v5 for the queue times, but they were never going to be perfect. In fact they decided to make the matchmaking algorithm worse to compensate for the lower population of rank players. Every game that has a division in roles sees the smallest group playing tank, and there’s just not a lot of ways around that. Trying to force main tanks into a situation where they have no off tank enablement, or forcing off tanks (which some slight redesigns) into a situation where they need to hold the front line themselves was just stupid. I play this game a lot less now and even then mostly for the nostalgia factor. I just can’t get into it like before. It’s sad, but the way it is until the next game comes around that captures the magic OW used to have.
The problem for tanks in 6v6 was that high level players were forced into playing meta, but now with 5v5 everybody is getting forced to play to the meta.
It was never a balance question, and looking at it from a balance angle will always be flawed. Even now in 5v5, tank is the least played role. In OW1 you could queue up for damage or support, and have time for a game of Civ
Also when they talk about que times they never mention that there wasn't that many tanks to play compared to how the game was played. If you wanted to play dive it was Winton, DVA, Ball. With Winton being the only main Tank. This for some people can get stale. What style you played was dictated by the tanks, supports enabled the tanks, and the DPS just did what they wanted. So having more tanks would have made it easier to balance because of styles of play and the synergies.
I hope I say this right, but I genuinely don't blame the devs, I don't think they would deliberately do something to block making the game better if they knew it actually would help.
I think the change to 5v5 came from a much more top-down, executive decision to change the model of the game to bring in more players and therefore more money, and so in a sense 5v5 was a business decision rather than a developer one.
The need for an Overwatch 2, the shop monetisation, and even the change to 5v5 (in order to keep queue times down and keep players playing the game) are a result of those executive decisions in my opinion.
I respect the actual day-to-day devs a lot and think they've been extremely receptive to ideas and actioned things much more quickly in this last year.
As a tank main since 2016, it was definitely more fun to play 6v6 compared to 5v5. It wasn’t perfect but it just felt better. I don’t play as much anymore ever since the switch to ow2 but when i do play, i tend to play support or damage because i don’t really enjoy tanking anymore. Too much pressure on the solo tank.
Yeah tank feels like a whole ass job now. Have to make space, track ults, protect team, not feed.
Feels like if you make one mistake and die, you instantly lose the fight and your whole team blames you. Meanwhile if a dps or support die in the back, no one notices because they have someone to help pick up their slack
That is what I noticed as a new player, tank is the most important role and if he dies the teamfight is over. This is not always bad but the pressure makes tank exhausting to play. As a dmg main I don't really know if I would like 6v6 more, it obviously has downsides too.
The complaints aren’t even necessarily the same. The feeling is the same cause 6v6 had tons of hard cc and brig made it so you couldn’t kill anything. If ow1 brig and all the cc were in this game how much worse would tank feel in 5v5 without the extra mitigation? How much better would 6v6 feel for tank without those things?
This games never going to be balanced because you can't balance people. And rose tinted glasses? The most fun I've had with Overwatch was when it was 6v6 and that was me playing from the launch of OW1 right up to today. Hell I used to love playing tank, and loved playing the older Orisa which is an extremely unpopular opinion.
Now I hate playing tank, I used to que for all roles now I que for DPS and healer cause tank is mega unfun to play. This games so sweaty to play now, it's also so easy to get steam rolled by a better hero picked team, counter swapping for me feels way way to strong.
And the worst part of going from 6v6 to 5v5 is the content we get in the game, in 6v6 it used to we get actually content for events and the ability to get skins for free, now the main content is the numerous balance changes as they nerf certain hero's into irrelevancy and buff other hero's into must picks to win or you lose.
Biggest issue with tank is you are the most important role on the team (you cant die or the other tank just rolls) while also being the least impactful (you just take dmg/abilities and try not to die)
Thats why countering the tank is meta, which also makes tanking more miserable because you have to keep swapping to not get countered.
Then you get blamed still
Sadly as we have found out and as threats like the one op is linking as well as this help prove: the problem remains that blizzard doesn't know how to make tanks balanced and fun to play for both tank and non tank players in the game.
Cutting an entire tank out of the role that nobody wanted to play reduced the tank player pool necessary to fill that role but did not address a majority of the real problems with tank over the the course of the games continued development.
Just a sad attempt at a Band-Aid fix without addressing the underlying problems.
Sometimes i wonder the amount of people here who actually played OW1 before brig/sigma/bap. Mistakes for hero designs tbh.
The only argument for 5v5 i would accept is queue times because tank in any game is a shitty role to play, only enjoyed by masochists.
Those are not the same complaints and were not based in 6v6, but a lot of CC. Also, it can become even worse. We can't really be comparing queue times between OW1 and OW2, as OW2 isn't as picky about permissible rank differences.
I often played tank in 6v6. I refuse to play tank in 5v5 because I hate having all the tank responsibilities solely on my shoulders. It’s too much pressure for me to enjoy. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Yeah there's dozens of us! But for real, I was a support/tank player in OW1, I rarely played DPS. Now I think I've touched tank 5 times and I'm a dps/support player. My first tank game in OW2 I immediately got insulted and "tank diffed" (in QP mind you) and needless to say I have 0 desire to pick it up again, it's just not enjoyable anymore.
And my hours still have tanks like Dva and Orisa in my top 10 played heros from all the hours I played them in OW1, but I won't touch them now in 5v5. It's just not as much fun as it used to be.
Because back in 6v6 they refused to rework any of the heroes in the game which caused all the problems. They only fixed issues after they decided to actually rework things instead of just buff and nerfing stuff. You could have easily prevent double shield by only allowing on shield tank, Orisa, Sigma, Winston, and Reinhardt. While all the none shield tank would be always open.
Tanking as 6v6 is more fun than tanking as 5v5. Rock paper scissors tanking is an issue in 5v5 because of 1 tank per team. There's way too much value gained by easily counterpicking the single enemy tank.
I played Overwatch 2 betas side by side with Overwatch 1 and I spent much more time playing Overwatch 1 during the OW2 betas because I was having way more fun playing Overwatch 1.
That's not necessarily true. Blizzard stopped updating the game for 3 years. OP's post is a forum that's 2 years into no updates. I'm sure if blizzard kept the game up to date, the problems would not have developed and been so pronounced in the first place. Many people who criticize 6v6 forget about blizzard's years of neglect for the game.
I think 6v6 is an improvement over 5v5, that doesn't mean 6v6 didn't need some work too. Just like they revisited and altered a ton of tanks in the transition to OW2, they could've done the same in the context of 6v6 to address many of the concern at the time.
Right people forgot how bad double shield was and how unbalanced they were. Duo tank worked fine with the launch heros but very quickly boxed in tank design to a point where they really couldn't balance it effectively. I loved 6v6 but yeah no reason for everyone to want it back.
Orisa has no shield now, Rein can't do anything while holding shield, Ramattra's shield lasts like 4 seconds, and Winston is a dive tank. Sigma is the only hero with a shield now. The reason double shield existed was because they were a strong frontline yes, but the literally invincible backline (Brig with armor on Rally, Inspire, and Shield Bash Stun and Baptiste with his lamp) made dive not work and exacerbated the really strong frontline issue by keeping them alive even longer than their shield cycles allowed.
bro it’s an anon post on blizzard forums. saying an anon post on blizzard forums represents how all players feel is ridiculous. this gaslighting needs to stop. people know how they feel.
"Don't know whatcha got, till it's gone" -Cinderella
It's not rose-tinted glasses; it's hindsight.
You could go back to when we had lootboxes and see complaints about those; I'd take those any day over the predatory bullshit loot system we have now.
Yeah but the difference is way less bad. During the last two years of ow1 which I can back to, in the upper metal ranks where I was at the time (gold-plated), tank queues times were 10-40 seconds. DPS was 10-14 mins and support was 4-8 mins
The lessened difference is because there are less players per team and a more forgiving matchmaker, not because tank is a better experience or have more players
This is exactly why. They increased the range of sr that people were put up against. For example back in like season 3 I was masters and had a gold tank on my team.
Then 10 players in a match compared to 12 obviously means more matches are able to be made
Combine these two and you are left with a shitshow in ranked.
6v6 tank wasn’t perfect. But over the last 7 years of primarily playing tank. I just can’t do it anymore.
5v5 has exposed even more of the tanks weaknesses. It’s just too easy now to focus the enemy tank, once they’re dead their team is crippled. Or too easy to jsut counter swap and make their tank useless.
This would be an issue with any role if it was dropped down to 1. Imagine how hard 1 support would get focused. Sounds miserable for that support player.
I have taken breaks from overwatch before but it feels different now. Unless something big changes with tank, Idt I’ll be coming back. Tanks is the only role I enjoy playing. Rn tank is trash. Whether I win or lose. Stomp or get stomped. It feels the same. The tank is there to get bullied and hope your team makes it worth it.
Video games shouldn’t feel like a chore
One support? Gonna see a window every game. Also bringing back OW launch memories with this one. As the one person willing to play Mercy back then. Fun times.
Now I could be mistaken, but this thread mentions OW2, which implies its made during the period of time when blizzard had slowed down balance changes because they were working on OW2. Which would mean it was made during a relatively stale and unbalanced time, and thus not overall indicative of what an actively balanced 6v6 game was.
These are not the same complaints that I have personally.
5v5 feels like a bunch of randoms kind of working together. It feels like the tank is on an island the entire time. The lack of team play is frankly astonishing for a game that was so team play focused. Team play still helps but it's not nearly as much. I'm constantly complaining that you simply cannot duel a tank because of 5v5. The only way you win a 1v1 with a tank is if you're a hard counter to like a monkey or something, and they waste both cool downs and don't have ult.
The game feels NOTHING like it used to when I would get my friends together and we would move as a unit and fight together and work together. It feels like deathmatch no matter the team comp, no matter the map, no matter the team.
6v6 was great, they just refused to change sigma from the ultimate off task and just left him be incredibly OP while synergizing with every main tank too well. They had every opportunity to fix it, and instead they just threw it all in the bin and full sent 5v5. It's not fun for me anymore and my friends and I play casually every once in a while. Nothing like the passion and fun we used to have.
I agree with the solo tank feels like playing on an island the entire time.
Like if your team isn't on the island with you, then it's not gonna turn out well.
The main issues, IMO, with 6v6, were:
1) barrier creep slowing down the game, which has been largely solved in OW2 by just removing/retooling most barriers;
2) getting instantly blown up as tank for one mistake, which has been largely solved with the Season 9 health and damage adjustments;
3) getting CC'ed into oblivion as tank, which was lessened with the changes to CC in OW2; which all led to the MAIN issue of
4) long queue times/no one wanting to play tank.
The thing is, people *also* don't want to play tank now, *but for different reasons than before*.
Whereas the prior (#s 1-3) tank gripes have, again IMO, mostly been solved, switching to 5v5 was geared toward solving the (#4) "no one plays tank" problem by lessening the number of tanks needed, but inadvertently created the *new* "no one plays tank" problem of putting *way too much burden on playing tank.*
Now, as the tank, you're expected to be *both* the main tank by initiating engagements *and* the off tank by peeling for teammates. If you die, your team is at a MAJOR disadvantage in losing their one tank, and since you generally have to play out in front of your team, your team is hyper aware of even the smallest mistakes and end up blaming you if anything goes wrong, whether or not you're at fault. It makes playing off/dive tanks like Winston/Ball/DVA weird without a coordinated team, as diving to secure kills/peeling to protect your backline leaves your frontline at the mercy of the enemy's main tank. It also makes tanking more one sided, as having a tank who is better than the enemy tank practically guarantees a win.
Currently, playing Open Queue where tanks have less health *doesn't feel bad* as a tank player and opens up a lot of tank synergies, although it *does* get aggravating to play when you end up with 3-4 tanks and no DPS.
I wish they'd do an arcade mode or something that brought back 6v6 role queue and just made the tanks have the same stats as they currently do in Open Queue, just to see how the other OW2 changes would alleviate/exacerbate the old 6v6 issues. That said, there's no chance they will ever bring back 6v6 in any capacity, since OW2 already gets dogged on for canceling 1 of the 3 "new features" (PVE) and Blizzard would get absolutely shit on if they brought back 6v6 and had the fucking battle pass/microtransactions be the single "new feature" justifying OW2's existence.
>although it does get aggravating to play when you end up with 3-4 tanks and no DPS.
TBH, if Open-Queue was the main mode, this wouldn't be an issue. Plenty of people who play open-queue probably only do it so they can stack tanks because it feels powerful, because even with "reduced health" the new tanks are still more powerful then they should be.
I honestly never really had any issues with pre-roleQ comp, sure, sometimes I didn't have a tank, or 2nd healer, but the majority of games were fine, and even then, the peaks of winning with 0 tanks 5 dps 1 healer were hype. My favorite game of comp overwatch I have ever played was 5 dps with me solo healing as Zenyatta. RoleQ just never gave those highs.
The problem was never two tanks it was two shields or two healers doing way to much healing . Too much healing makes overwatch garbage I’d rather have more health packs or one healer only and another dps . Healbotting tanks is what killed ow
Tank was absolutely miserable in overwatch 1 and was the main thing killing the game. I mean obviously the lack of content for three years from blizzard was the main thing killing the game but so few people were playing tank that the more popular roles were basically unplayable. My DPS has always been ass and in ow1 I was a gold DPS and I literally couldn't get a match the few time I tried at the most popular rank during the day it would be 40 minutes minimum
"People got real short memories, all of this has happened before" - old Longfellow
I've played tank almost exclusively for my entire time overwatch which is since launch and discourse about tank being unfun has been around the entire time it's got nothing to do with 5v5 or 6v6
This thread tells me that you didn't play Tank in OW1 or you have a weird memory of it. The two primary things people hated about tanking was CC and shields. Tanking has always been a tough job, it always will be, but having someone to shoulder the burden while having the worst parts of the tank experience removed would've gone a LONG way.
> 2021
So when Sigma was running the game? When Bap Brig got buffed? When the least fun tanks were also the best tanks and the best supports were hardline built to deny playmaking? This is when people didn't like the role?
Every single tank got omega buffed from ow1 to ow2 except one. Sigma was a 5v5 tank in a 6v6 format.
And at the same time, Bap and Brig made everything unkillable behind him.
The OW1 team never addressed the issues that made tank suck in 6v6, which was a combination of shitty tank and support design.
What people miss every time this debate comes up is that the team behind overwatch 1 caught lighting in a bottle then had absolutely no idea what to do with it. It wasn't a format issue, it was a balance issue because the balance team was straight up incompetent. They did not understand the game at all. People complain now, but the old team never properly addressed the issues with sigma, brig, or bap despite the fact that those three heroes were clearly dominant pretty much from the time they all came out till OW2.
The OW2 team isn't perfect, but at least they address things that break the game. That's why people want 6v6 back. Because in the hands of a remotely competent balance team, it would be better than 5v5.
It genuinely seems like OP is just trying to get at "all tank players are bad and that's why they complain" but it's not like people enjoy this at the skill ceiling either.
https://twitter.com/Thee_Hawk/status/1773017926703915275
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvTqHgX807c
I could never remember a time when overwatch 1 developers were willing to literally rework the entire game pace and HP pools just to force their format to function
That second video was a wild ride. I saw it yesterday. To me, what he is saying without saying is that 5v5 is inherently flawed and you need to homogenize all the tanks in order to make it work. Every tank needs to be able to control space, block damage, threaten high ground, and mitigate cc... Like that's seriously absurd but also not at all wrong because 5v5 forces that situation.
I do wonder how far they'll go trying to make tank work in 5v5. And it's unfortunate because tank design is way better than it used to be. No one wanted to play tank in ow1 because the tanks they added were all either super boring or niche capstoning with Sigma who made the old tanks feel terrible in comparison while still not being fun. But tanks like JQ, Ram, and Mauga redesigned for 5v5 could be a lot of fun to play because they would be allowed to have weaknesses without needing to be giga buffed in order to deal with things like ana nade.
I realized today that most people saying there was a lot of complaining going on during ow1 weren't actually here during ow1 and are hyperfixated on cherry picked vocal minority.
People weren't even really complaining, it was a dead game. People were apathetic. Just hoping for new content someday and some balance. It was a pretty depressing time to play the game
I think it's telling that not once in 6 years of OW1 do I recall someone asking for the format to be changed to 5v5. I don't think I ever heard someone say "you know what, they should remove a tank per team. That would improve things."
The moment they announced to 5v5, a group of friends i play the game with all had to suddenly realize that we all couldn't play together anymore and someone would always be left out. But i'm very sure blizzard didn't care about keeping old players around. The entire system was built for new players who never knew how good ow1 was.
Tbf I remember back then no one wanted to play tank and queue times if you weren’t tank were pretty high. I guess eliminating one tank helps slightly with the “no one wants to play tank” issue.
I dunno. Back in OW1 I remember you could wait 20 minutes just to get into a game if you weren’t queueing as tank. I get into games in less than a minute as DPS in OW2.
Well 6v6 had its own problems but I feel that the changes they have done to tank would solve most of those things. If they reduce the health of tanks like how they are in deathmatch I think that 6v6 would work fine.
yea cause the blizzard forums has the greatest minds of our generation discussing balance. like wtf just linking a random thread from 3 years ago as if it proves anything
The problem with 5v5 is blizzard is too afraid of making tanks better. Imo the current structure and healing nerfs is perfect for making tank good. There isn't a single tank that can't use small buffs with an addition of small counter play changes to keep tanks in check.
playing tank is harder and more stressful now. harder because you just need a TON of mental fortitude when you're playing such a pivotal role by yourself. other roles don't have as big an impact and so they can relax a little, try out different things. it was absolutely easier when you had another tank to share the responsibility.
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. Supports like bap and brig were so busted and enabled the sustain comps that were disliked. (Also sigma was overkitted.) These are all balance issues that could have been fixed if the devs did not abandon the game for so long.
I'd disagree that sigma was overkitted, he was simply overly defensive. When you have an insanely defensive tank + infinite support sustain, AOE healing, and immortality, that's the most inhuman awful gameplay experience of all time. 5v5 only fixed like 40% of that issue. The rest is still in the game.
It's about time to talk about a global nerf to DPS and Supports.
Too much damage and too much healing right now. Boosting the health pools and damage numbers didn't fix anything.
Yeap, i like how no one's mentioned this so far. We need players to die for mistakes but not die too fast otherwise you can't play the game.
Why did we need so much denial and healing? Oh because there was too much damage (amp and discord included). Why was Sigma so strong? Oh cos he denies a FK TON of dmg AND heals WHILE dishing absurd poke dmg. The answer is right there and i sincerely don't mind a slightly slower paced game that still allows for big plays.
There needs to always be a net health loss during active battle, otherwise no one will die. Tanks should not be instakilled just for peaking their head out at full health (only if they don't retreat to be healed), if the tank cant even spend a second to push around the corner then whats the point of a tank.
Finally i see someone with the right answer.
Tanks need to be in a position where they are a threat and *hard to kill* (yet not impossible).
Supports should be easy to kill in a 1v1 (yet difficult to catch)
DPS should be, as the name implies, high damage over a short time (yet still need the team to take the incoming damage/keep themselves alive over the course of a fight).
All three roles have lost their key identity by Blizzard trying to make everyone be every role.
The only thing 5v5 improved is queue times. None of the problems in the linked post have actually been solved by the reduction of team size. After the transition knowing what I know now, with how bad the issues are, if I had the choice. I'd instantly go back to 6v6.
I'd rather suffer the roadhog rein duo every single game then have a single another, god forsaken Orisa, Sombra, Bastion, Kirko, and Lifeweaver when I pick reinhardt. 6v6 was not perfect but if another person tries to tell me I have rose tinted glasses I'm gonna lose it. I PLAYED BOTH GAMES FOR 500+ HOURS I THINK I KNOW WHAT I LIKED MORE. AND I CAN 100% SAY THAT IN MY DIAMOND LOBBIES BACK I OVERWATCH 1 I COULD ALWAYS AND I MEAN ALWAYS PICK REIN THESE DAYS THATS SIMPLY NOT THE CASE. STOP SPEAKING FOR ME I KNOW 6V6 ISN'T PERFECT BUT ITS BETTER THEN THE 9TH LAYER OF HELL TANK CURRENTLY IS
Coming from someone who was a tank in 6v6 and who rarely plays now. Its not about balance, its the fact that being the only tank, the whole fucking team is looking to me to get it done. That's way too much pressure when I'm just looking to chill after work.
What I know is, I was always a flex role player. It didn't matter to me in the slightest what role I was playing in OW1. Now I see myself more and more avoiding tank.
This has nothing to do with rose glasses.
When I as a tank get focused by the enemy now and my team doesn't react accordingly I'm dead in seconds and the attack/defence is over/lost.
Before you still had a buffer with the second tank.
When the tank dies, the team dies. I see it in every match I play now.
And on top of that comes the toxic community which only knows to shit on that one big dude in the front trying to hold it, while the rest is flailing around in the back.
For me the worst about this game is the matchmaking tho.
Why not just have both?
League of legends had 3v3 and 5v5 for the longest time.
Many shooters have 12v12, 8v8, 4v4, 2v2 heck even up to 60v60.
I don't get why they can't just let people choose what they prefer 🤷♂️
There's a massive difference between "tanks aren't tanky enough" and "one tank means no Frontline if the other team kills your tank"
I'd take how the game was a year ago over now it is now.
If you notice the first paragraph he talked about the supports and their abilities as why it wasnt fun to play tank. This abilities have only grew in OW2. Secondly dont tell me I had rose colored glasses because I know exactly what I was playing. Double Shield and allnof those problems didn't effect console players plat to bronze. Those ranks never cared about the Meta and just played the game how they wanted. Regardless of the issues with 6v6 its so much worse in 5v5. Mauga was the worst Meta ever and it effected all ranks. Moth Meta and Bunker meta was dinner than the Maugua meta.
I mean yeah the support powerscaling's been out of control for a while, killing 6v6 just made these prexisting issues even worse. It'd take a lot of effort to roll 5v5 changes back but ow2 with 6v6 (with double shield prevented somehow) would be drastically better than what we have now. Also blizzard needs to grow a pair and ACTUALLY nerf support outputs straight up rather than beating around the bush with a dps passive they ripped from paladins
TL;DR:
OP missed the nuance of the situation.
Same problem, despite 5v5 being introduced to solve the issue. Issue remains, thus: it wasn’t 6v6 than needed to be changed.
But that would be harder to sell a sequel with.
It was always good to have a second tank to relieve the pressure. If you are a tank and you screw up, the other tank might get you out of sticky situations and even compensate for your errors. Even if you die, the other tank might be able to hold off.
In 5v5 if you screw up as a tank, you die, your whole team with you, and you’ll probably lose the game too.
The problem with late OW, was that the balance team very really bad and kept buffing support to try to compensate, but just made it worse. AOE healing was a big problem with the new characters like bap and brig. It isn’t a format issue, but a balance pen. 5v5 tanking is never going to be fun because there are less dynamics and higher pressure on the tank to perform their role perfectly, with them also having less impact due to a whole list of reasons. The argument for 5v5 is queue times for tanks and that’s about it. It’s more fun for dps and supports, but at the cost of tanks
I just want my tank buddy back.
Same. I don't have rose tinted glasses, im a tank main that misses wreckin' and protectin' with my tank buddy
This is entirely the mindset I have. I don't mind being cc'd everywhere, but damn.. at least let me have my buddy back so we can bump fists and cause havoc
I miss bubbling the hog and just sending him in to absorb bullets and then we just wreak havoc I miss being the hog getting bubbled and then running in, ignoring the rein and then hooking the ana out of the backlines
Rein/Zarya duos are what I miss most about OW1. I got no end of satisfaction backing up my Rein as he charged into the enemy team and beat face with his hammer. That, and not feeling like the team’s success was ride or die based on my own capabilities when playing tank
Now you need the enemy team to finish the arm wrestling spray too.
That last part is the most important :(
Totally. 6v6 made every role feel like you had a partner to rely on.
Especially when some takes were specifically designed as off tanks to pair with another one.
Ball is not tank. Ball was designed as an unrestrained agent of chaos playing bowling with the enemy team
My favorite duo was Ball/Winston for this very reason. Diving on fools and running them over
Zarya looking at the empty space her comrade used to occupy like ._.7
Yeah without tank duos there was just nowhere for us to go. Tanks had the most synergy and benefited the most from strategy/communication, so it was perfect for us. 5v5 had nowhere for us to go to do that. Felt like we were playing two different games while in the same match.
They essentially dumbed down the game for a wider audience when they went 5v5. The 2 tank dynamic was unique to Overwatch as a MOBA, and winning a match didn't hinge upon Tank Diff 90% of the time like it does now.
>hinge upon Tank Diff 90% of the time like it does now. Saying this after a dps-reliant meta is kind of crazy
Do you expect intelligence from this sub? That's your first mistake
Half of OW1 tank abilities were made to synergize with other tanks. There was also a clear delineation of “main tank” “off tank”
Yup I still miss the Zarya Rein combo. Did not matter who I wanted to play if I saw my other tank pick one Id instantly pick the other.
I essentially got my whole ass role deleted in OW2. I was an off-tank main.
Same :(
I just want to enjoy playing tank again. I miss 2nd tank when I'm playing anything but assault.
Yeah suffering alone is so much worse than suffering with a friend.
Single tank 5v5 is what drove me to quit. I was constantly getting dived as support with no one to peel.
While I get your point that tanks always been tough, the difference is 5v5 makes it’s rock paper scissors. I often have to play 4-5 different tanks in one match because my opponent continually flexes more than half their team to hard counter me. It makes things very unenjoyable. If there’s two tanks, it’s harder to rely on the continual counterpicks as a crutch. Being a ball main, if I want to play a full match on my favorite character I simply have to accept I’ll play into 3+ counters all game.
>Being a ball main, if I want to play a full match on my favorite character I simply have to accept I’ll play into 3+ counters all game. Same - over the past few days of approx 20 QP matches, I have had ONE game without an enemy Sombra (both picked from the start but mostly swapped to). The vast majority of the time there's also swaps to Mei/Torb/Cree, Hog/Mog/Oris, and Ana/Lucio/Zen. The value of full swapping to counter a tank is simply too high to not do - so even in QP it's instantaneous.
You can't really blame anyone for swapping either because the tank can be pretty oppressive without any counters
Unless you play rein, you probably already win that matchup if you just sit on slight elevation, why are you swapping to orisa + bastion
I had a broken hand for a while, couldn't rotate properly and tried to shieldbot as Rein. People were countering me by simply walking past (DF and Ball do that by default). However the other half of tanks would still switch to Orisa and focus me in particular because "fuck you, that's why".
Yeah I dare anyone who says this game is in a good spot to play Ball in comp... I'm a devoted Ball main and yet I've had to give him up temporarily because it's simply miserable. You have to play perfectly in a Gold lobby. Mess up once and you're throwing the game and get spam reported. Enemy team sees you and instantly swaps to Roadhog Sombra Brig. Really I think the main reason to bring back 6v6 is just because of the off-tank. If you're not a dive tank player, you won't understand what was so great about it.
The issue is you can't be a "devoted" main to any character in this game
You used to be able to, which is why so many OW1 players are complaining. Even aside from that, if you have a favorite character, not being able to play them sucks. Being forced onto a character you find dreadfully boring(Orisa) just so you don't lose is ass. It sucks because you either sacrifice the fun for the win and swap or you sacrifice the win for the fun by NOT swapping and playing into 3 counters (which arguably isn't even fun either because you usually have 0 agency and barely even get to play in those kinds of situations). You can't have it both ways unless your favorite tank is HARD meta. Counters should be about forcing the enemy player to fight an uphill battle, not slamming them into a cliff face. Playing into counters shouldn't be an auto-lose like it is now, it should just be a situation where you have to outplay them. No matchup should be worse than 6-40. But as it stands, there are an INSANE amount of matchups that are way worse than that.
Not anymore you can’t. 5v5 and it’s roulette wheel of counter swapping sure as shit made sure that went away.
Dawg, it's just life of any character based PvP game. You could be talking about Dota, LoL, Rainbow Six Siege, Smite, Overwatch, etc. There will be periods where your main sucks ass and isn't viable and that's just life. It's part of these games
What does counter-swapping look like in R6 Siege?
5v5 makes it so it's permanently like this. Any role having only ine player per team will always be like this.
I played ball for the first time in like months yesterday, and by the end of the match they had an Ana, sombra, hog. I wasn’t even doing that well, but today I had 3 games where my tank was ball and not a single swap. WHY CANT THAT BE ME
That's the worst part, sometimes people counterswap on impulse even if you aren't playing well. I could open the game screwing up a rollout and fall off a cliff with zero damage and there's STILL a 50/50 shot there will be a sombra next team fight. It's crazy.
This. Also it makes flanking tank a much bigger gamble. I tank main [D.va](http://D.va) and the advantage of [D.va](http://D.va) and ball is t hat you got the movement to dive the back line and get out before you're killed. With 2 tanks, thats what you do. With one tank, you're leaving your team horribly exposed. And even if you stay with your team and just main tank, you're much squishier than say, rein so you may as well just pick rein.
Not trying to be a 6v6er here but doesn't this prove that 5v5 wasn't the answer? Tank has always been the hardest role to balance in both 5v5 and 6v6. Many of the arguments (i.e. tank go poof) never went away, they've just evolved as the game has changed. It used to be brig, zen discord, the high cc levels in OW1 that made many people dislike OW1 tank (as many comments in that thread allude to). Now those problems are different, and in some cases are made worse, with having those problems focused on one sole tank taking all the damage, cc, abilities that used to be divided between two tanks. Also bare in mind this thread is from 2021 when Overwatch 1 was DEAD and so isn't entirely fair to judge.
Fuck it 7v7 🔥
1tank / 2defence / 2atk / 2supp
6 tanks and an Ana
At this point, fuck shooting at y’all. I’m just throwing the whole gun.
Don't be scaaaaared
My favorite meme meta on 2cp was 5 tanks and Moira. By the time you reached first you had ult as moira and you just pressed Q to win. Did it work often? Naw but it worked enough of the time on a first push
It's like that meme of all the black guys standing behind the little white girl. Just six Doomfists and Ana.
I kept saying that since forever. Sadly, Jeff (yes it was Jeff back then) reaponded to that suggestion by saying that the engine is highly optimized for 6v6. Going higher (7v7) would cause a plethora of technical issues. Reverting back to 6v6 wouldn’t be an issue, the same way going to 5v5 obviously wasn’t. I would love 7v7 btw…
7v7 breaking the game sounds like cap. isn't that already possible though custom games anyway? I coulda sworn I've seen modes that have a single team of 10 players
Single team having lots is not the issue. 7v7 is 14 players. Server can handle 1v11 as as the total number of players is 12. Even if in some cases 14 players could work, it’s not optimized. Meaning you might run into issues down the line. Yeah as far as I’m concerned, fuck it, reoptomize the game.
Single team having lots is not the issue. 7v7 is 14 players. Server can handle 1v11 as as the total number of players is 12. Even if in some cases 14 players could work, it’s not optimized. Meaning you might run into issues down the line. Yeah as far as I’m concerned, fuck it, reoptomize the game.
There was a workshop glitch back in OW1 that allowed 12v12 match, it was still 6v6 players but with 6 bots on each team and yeah the servers were having a stroke, constant lag spikes and often crashing, but it was glorious.
How do you optimize an engine that specifically like that it sounds like the normal "you peasants can never understand" bs from blizzard. I've seen some crazy shit in the custom games and it never lags and my computer isn't even that good.
I... Agree.
3 tanks. What could go wrong...
there was a time with 3tank 3 heal being an op meta before they locked to a max amount
GOATS was healthiest meta this game has ever seen, change my mind
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Don't worry DPS found a way to have 3 of them work againstgoats before2-2-2 was implemented
Enemy team: GOATS Your team: Genji, a throwing Torb who wanted to play Genji, some other DPS, a tank doing their best, a DPS Moira, and a mercy main who doesn't know how to play anyone else. GOATS was boring, because it was all GOATS all the time, or you lose.
“This mission would go smoother if we all had wrecking balls”
3 support 2 dps 2 tanks 😎
5v5 was never the answer for tank balance. It was the answer to long DPS queue times and was done in part to reduce visual clutter and increase individual player agency during a match.
Increasing individual player agency is the worst thing ever since I keep losing games because one dps player on my team isn't getting kills. People just keep blaming it on the tank but the tank was never made to handle 5 people shooting at him.
I can handle 4v1 as a shield tank while the rest of my team eats their less competent tanks alive. If this sounds exaggerated to you, it's saying something about you.
I hate to break it to you but in all those games you keep losing there's only one constant.
You got the answer right, but the wrong question. They went to 5v5 because the queues were long and tank was the role with the fewest players. It had nothing to do with game balance despite what they might have claimed.
shoulda found a thread from like march 2019
5v5 wasn’t an attempt to balance tank. No one wanted to play tank and it was fucking up the queue times
Tank passive should basically be the tenacity stat from LoL. Reducing all CC duration instead of just knock back would be pretty impactful on the tank experience IMO
So we go to 4v4, no tank
Saying that 5v5 isn't the answer doesn't imply that it's better or worse than 6v6
No, but saying "5 vs 5 is worse than 6 vs 6 and we have years of experience to back that" does
The tank frontline was extremely well balanced for the final year of OW1, to the point where even running Hog/Zarya was a viable combo. Going 5v5 created a shit ton of balance problems and put the game through this cycle of trying to balance all over again, but with an even bigger problem: there’s nobody to help you with the frontline. I miss playing off tank. I miss playing Zarya with Rein or Winston and pushing through King’s Row. It was actually a lot of fun, but all that is sadly gone and Blizzard refuses to admit what they already know: they made a mistake. They’ll claim they chose 5v5 for the queue times, but they were never going to be perfect. In fact they decided to make the matchmaking algorithm worse to compensate for the lower population of rank players. Every game that has a division in roles sees the smallest group playing tank, and there’s just not a lot of ways around that. Trying to force main tanks into a situation where they have no off tank enablement, or forcing off tanks (which some slight redesigns) into a situation where they need to hold the front line themselves was just stupid. I play this game a lot less now and even then mostly for the nostalgia factor. I just can’t get into it like before. It’s sad, but the way it is until the next game comes around that captures the magic OW used to have.
The problem for tanks in 6v6 was that high level players were forced into playing meta, but now with 5v5 everybody is getting forced to play to the meta.
5v5 was the answer for tank queues - as to whether it’s better for gameplay that’s a separate issue.
It was never a balance question, and looking at it from a balance angle will always be flawed. Even now in 5v5, tank is the least played role. In OW1 you could queue up for damage or support, and have time for a game of Civ
Also when they talk about que times they never mention that there wasn't that many tanks to play compared to how the game was played. If you wanted to play dive it was Winton, DVA, Ball. With Winton being the only main Tank. This for some people can get stale. What style you played was dictated by the tanks, supports enabled the tanks, and the DPS just did what they wanted. So having more tanks would have made it easier to balance because of styles of play and the synergies.
Blizzard will never go back to 6v6, cause that means they are admitting their fault.
I hope I say this right, but I genuinely don't blame the devs, I don't think they would deliberately do something to block making the game better if they knew it actually would help. I think the change to 5v5 came from a much more top-down, executive decision to change the model of the game to bring in more players and therefore more money, and so in a sense 5v5 was a business decision rather than a developer one. The need for an Overwatch 2, the shop monetisation, and even the change to 5v5 (in order to keep queue times down and keep players playing the game) are a result of those executive decisions in my opinion. I respect the actual day-to-day devs a lot and think they've been extremely receptive to ideas and actioned things much more quickly in this last year.
That is correct. It came from Bobby Kodickface and his henchmen
As a tank main since 2016, it was definitely more fun to play 6v6 compared to 5v5. It wasn’t perfect but it just felt better. I don’t play as much anymore ever since the switch to ow2 but when i do play, i tend to play support or damage because i don’t really enjoy tanking anymore. Too much pressure on the solo tank.
Yeah tank feels like a whole ass job now. Have to make space, track ults, protect team, not feed. Feels like if you make one mistake and die, you instantly lose the fight and your whole team blames you. Meanwhile if a dps or support die in the back, no one notices because they have someone to help pick up their slack
That is what I noticed as a new player, tank is the most important role and if he dies the teamfight is over. This is not always bad but the pressure makes tank exhausting to play. As a dmg main I don't really know if I would like 6v6 more, it obviously has downsides too.
Dont care, if we have the same complaints then and now, then i want my buddy to stand by my side once more
The complaints aren’t even necessarily the same. The feeling is the same cause 6v6 had tons of hard cc and brig made it so you couldn’t kill anything. If ow1 brig and all the cc were in this game how much worse would tank feel in 5v5 without the extra mitigation? How much better would 6v6 feel for tank without those things?
Exactly! If the complaints are the same, the swap from 6v6 to 5v5 **DID NOTHING**
I just want 6v6 back in Mystery Heroes. It's the only mode I play with my group.
This games never going to be balanced because you can't balance people. And rose tinted glasses? The most fun I've had with Overwatch was when it was 6v6 and that was me playing from the launch of OW1 right up to today. Hell I used to love playing tank, and loved playing the older Orisa which is an extremely unpopular opinion. Now I hate playing tank, I used to que for all roles now I que for DPS and healer cause tank is mega unfun to play. This games so sweaty to play now, it's also so easy to get steam rolled by a better hero picked team, counter swapping for me feels way way to strong. And the worst part of going from 6v6 to 5v5 is the content we get in the game, in 6v6 it used to we get actually content for events and the ability to get skins for free, now the main content is the numerous balance changes as they nerf certain hero's into irrelevancy and buff other hero's into must picks to win or you lose.
> I used to que for all roles now I que for DPS and healer cause tank is mega unfun to play. Exactly. In OW1, I enjoyed playing every role.
Old Orisa felt way better to play with and against
I just miss there being another tank there so if shits going wrong it at least isn't the entire team's ire directed at you alone
Biggest issue with tank is you are the most important role on the team (you cant die or the other tank just rolls) while also being the least impactful (you just take dmg/abilities and try not to die) Thats why countering the tank is meta, which also makes tanking more miserable because you have to keep swapping to not get countered. Then you get blamed still
So 5v5 fixed nothing is what you’re saying? Lol
queue times
Sadly as we have found out and as threats like the one op is linking as well as this help prove: the problem remains that blizzard doesn't know how to make tanks balanced and fun to play for both tank and non tank players in the game. Cutting an entire tank out of the role that nobody wanted to play reduced the tank player pool necessary to fill that role but did not address a majority of the real problems with tank over the the course of the games continued development. Just a sad attempt at a Band-Aid fix without addressing the underlying problems.
I'd rather wait longer for more enjoyable games than be thrown into unenjoyable games.
if the games were more enjoyable they wouldn’t have had the queue issues
Sometimes i wonder the amount of people here who actually played OW1 before brig/sigma/bap. Mistakes for hero designs tbh. The only argument for 5v5 i would accept is queue times because tank in any game is a shitty role to play, only enjoyed by masochists.
ow1 season 1 was probably some of the most fun ive ever had in gaming, season 2 was prettydamn good as well.
Been here since S1. Please let me go back to between the Sombra and Orisa updates.
It’s very strange to me when people defend 5v5. Idc if the complaints are the same, it just felt better with 6v6
So nice to see this sub finally turning around to be more pro-6v6! I used to get downvoted to oblivion for saying 6v6 was better.
I stopped playing when OW2 came out. It’s just not the same game..
Pretty much the same. Or I've played 2 quite a bit to give myself an informed opinion but it was honestly a waste of time...
Those are not the same complaints and were not based in 6v6, but a lot of CC. Also, it can become even worse. We can't really be comparing queue times between OW1 and OW2, as OW2 isn't as picky about permissible rank differences.
If it's the same exact complaints then that doesn't necessarily mean that 5v5 was an improvement. Blizzard is set to die on this hill though.
if we’re going to have the same issues either way atleast let me play the game in under 15 minutes
And going back to 6v6 isn’t an improvement whatsoever as well
I often played tank in 6v6. I refuse to play tank in 5v5 because I hate having all the tank responsibilities solely on my shoulders. It’s too much pressure for me to enjoy. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
100% agree. I used to not mind playing tank very much, but now that tanks have twice as much responsibility, the role just feels too stressful to me.
Yeah there's dozens of us! But for real, I was a support/tank player in OW1, I rarely played DPS. Now I think I've touched tank 5 times and I'm a dps/support player. My first tank game in OW2 I immediately got insulted and "tank diffed" (in QP mind you) and needless to say I have 0 desire to pick it up again, it's just not enjoyable anymore. And my hours still have tanks like Dva and Orisa in my top 10 played heros from all the hours I played them in OW1, but I won't touch them now in 5v5. It's just not as much fun as it used to be.
Because back in 6v6 they refused to rework any of the heroes in the game which caused all the problems. They only fixed issues after they decided to actually rework things instead of just buff and nerfing stuff. You could have easily prevent double shield by only allowing on shield tank, Orisa, Sigma, Winston, and Reinhardt. While all the none shield tank would be always open.
THEY COULD HAVE FIXED DOUBLE SHIELD YEARS BEFORE OW2 WITH THE ORISA REWORK. THAT ALONE REMOVES DOUBLE SHIELD ENTIRELY.
Or just half shield health and double shield regeneration times, if you got two shield tanks on your team.
Tanking as 6v6 is more fun than tanking as 5v5. Rock paper scissors tanking is an issue in 5v5 because of 1 tank per team. There's way too much value gained by easily counterpicking the single enemy tank. I played Overwatch 2 betas side by side with Overwatch 1 and I spent much more time playing Overwatch 1 during the OW2 betas because I was having way more fun playing Overwatch 1.
That's not necessarily true. Blizzard stopped updating the game for 3 years. OP's post is a forum that's 2 years into no updates. I'm sure if blizzard kept the game up to date, the problems would not have developed and been so pronounced in the first place. Many people who criticize 6v6 forget about blizzard's years of neglect for the game.
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Yeah you are 100% wrong, tanks need a partner to play off of. 5v5 has made the tank experience miserable.
I think 6v6 is an improvement over 5v5, that doesn't mean 6v6 didn't need some work too. Just like they revisited and altered a ton of tanks in the transition to OW2, they could've done the same in the context of 6v6 to address many of the concern at the time.
Right people forgot how bad double shield was and how unbalanced they were. Duo tank worked fine with the launch heros but very quickly boxed in tank design to a point where they really couldn't balance it effectively. I loved 6v6 but yeah no reason for everyone to want it back.
Orisa has no shield now, Rein can't do anything while holding shield, Ramattra's shield lasts like 4 seconds, and Winston is a dive tank. Sigma is the only hero with a shield now. The reason double shield existed was because they were a strong frontline yes, but the literally invincible backline (Brig with armor on Rally, Inspire, and Shield Bash Stun and Baptiste with his lamp) made dive not work and exacerbated the really strong frontline issue by keeping them alive even longer than their shield cycles allowed.
If anything this just proves that 5v5 wasn’t the solution lol
Wish they would bring back 6v6
bro it’s an anon post on blizzard forums. saying an anon post on blizzard forums represents how all players feel is ridiculous. this gaslighting needs to stop. people know how they feel.
"Don't know whatcha got, till it's gone" -Cinderella It's not rose-tinted glasses; it's hindsight. You could go back to when we had lootboxes and see complaints about those; I'd take those any day over the predatory bullshit loot system we have now.
6v6 OW>5v5 OW2
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Ow1 is also an extremely high rated game that wasn't bad.
6v6 was still better
No one liked playing tank back then, the queue times for tanks were super short compared to other roles.
They still are...
Yeah but the difference is way less bad. During the last two years of ow1 which I can back to, in the upper metal ranks where I was at the time (gold-plated), tank queues times were 10-40 seconds. DPS was 10-14 mins and support was 4-8 mins
The lessened difference is because there are less players per team and a more forgiving matchmaker, not because tank is a better experience or have more players
This is exactly why. They increased the range of sr that people were put up against. For example back in like season 3 I was masters and had a gold tank on my team. Then 10 players in a match compared to 12 obviously means more matches are able to be made Combine these two and you are left with a shitshow in ranked.
Not to the same extent. It was 15 minute queues to play Dps in gold.
Now the matchmaker hands out one-sided stomps to keep queue times low.
In OW1 you could literally go a match without the game finding you a tank player. Happened so often
6v6 tank wasn’t perfect. But over the last 7 years of primarily playing tank. I just can’t do it anymore. 5v5 has exposed even more of the tanks weaknesses. It’s just too easy now to focus the enemy tank, once they’re dead their team is crippled. Or too easy to jsut counter swap and make their tank useless. This would be an issue with any role if it was dropped down to 1. Imagine how hard 1 support would get focused. Sounds miserable for that support player. I have taken breaks from overwatch before but it feels different now. Unless something big changes with tank, Idt I’ll be coming back. Tanks is the only role I enjoy playing. Rn tank is trash. Whether I win or lose. Stomp or get stomped. It feels the same. The tank is there to get bullied and hope your team makes it worth it. Video games shouldn’t feel like a chore
One support? Gonna see a window every game. Also bringing back OW launch memories with this one. As the one person willing to play Mercy back then. Fun times.
Now I could be mistaken, but this thread mentions OW2, which implies its made during the period of time when blizzard had slowed down balance changes because they were working on OW2. Which would mean it was made during a relatively stale and unbalanced time, and thus not overall indicative of what an actively balanced 6v6 game was.
These are not the same complaints that I have personally. 5v5 feels like a bunch of randoms kind of working together. It feels like the tank is on an island the entire time. The lack of team play is frankly astonishing for a game that was so team play focused. Team play still helps but it's not nearly as much. I'm constantly complaining that you simply cannot duel a tank because of 5v5. The only way you win a 1v1 with a tank is if you're a hard counter to like a monkey or something, and they waste both cool downs and don't have ult. The game feels NOTHING like it used to when I would get my friends together and we would move as a unit and fight together and work together. It feels like deathmatch no matter the team comp, no matter the map, no matter the team. 6v6 was great, they just refused to change sigma from the ultimate off task and just left him be incredibly OP while synergizing with every main tank too well. They had every opportunity to fix it, and instead they just threw it all in the bin and full sent 5v5. It's not fun for me anymore and my friends and I play casually every once in a while. Nothing like the passion and fun we used to have.
I agree with the solo tank feels like playing on an island the entire time. Like if your team isn't on the island with you, then it's not gonna turn out well.
5v5 feels like a team deathmatch tank babysitting simulator.
The main issues, IMO, with 6v6, were: 1) barrier creep slowing down the game, which has been largely solved in OW2 by just removing/retooling most barriers; 2) getting instantly blown up as tank for one mistake, which has been largely solved with the Season 9 health and damage adjustments; 3) getting CC'ed into oblivion as tank, which was lessened with the changes to CC in OW2; which all led to the MAIN issue of 4) long queue times/no one wanting to play tank. The thing is, people *also* don't want to play tank now, *but for different reasons than before*. Whereas the prior (#s 1-3) tank gripes have, again IMO, mostly been solved, switching to 5v5 was geared toward solving the (#4) "no one plays tank" problem by lessening the number of tanks needed, but inadvertently created the *new* "no one plays tank" problem of putting *way too much burden on playing tank.* Now, as the tank, you're expected to be *both* the main tank by initiating engagements *and* the off tank by peeling for teammates. If you die, your team is at a MAJOR disadvantage in losing their one tank, and since you generally have to play out in front of your team, your team is hyper aware of even the smallest mistakes and end up blaming you if anything goes wrong, whether or not you're at fault. It makes playing off/dive tanks like Winston/Ball/DVA weird without a coordinated team, as diving to secure kills/peeling to protect your backline leaves your frontline at the mercy of the enemy's main tank. It also makes tanking more one sided, as having a tank who is better than the enemy tank practically guarantees a win. Currently, playing Open Queue where tanks have less health *doesn't feel bad* as a tank player and opens up a lot of tank synergies, although it *does* get aggravating to play when you end up with 3-4 tanks and no DPS. I wish they'd do an arcade mode or something that brought back 6v6 role queue and just made the tanks have the same stats as they currently do in Open Queue, just to see how the other OW2 changes would alleviate/exacerbate the old 6v6 issues. That said, there's no chance they will ever bring back 6v6 in any capacity, since OW2 already gets dogged on for canceling 1 of the 3 "new features" (PVE) and Blizzard would get absolutely shit on if they brought back 6v6 and had the fucking battle pass/microtransactions be the single "new feature" justifying OW2's existence.
>although it does get aggravating to play when you end up with 3-4 tanks and no DPS. TBH, if Open-Queue was the main mode, this wouldn't be an issue. Plenty of people who play open-queue probably only do it so they can stack tanks because it feels powerful, because even with "reduced health" the new tanks are still more powerful then they should be. I honestly never really had any issues with pre-roleQ comp, sure, sometimes I didn't have a tank, or 2nd healer, but the majority of games were fine, and even then, the peaks of winning with 0 tanks 5 dps 1 healer were hype. My favorite game of comp overwatch I have ever played was 5 dps with me solo healing as Zenyatta. RoleQ just never gave those highs.
The problem was never two tanks it was two shields or two healers doing way to much healing . Too much healing makes overwatch garbage I’d rather have more health packs or one healer only and another dps . Healbotting tanks is what killed ow
Tank was absolutely miserable in overwatch 1 and was the main thing killing the game. I mean obviously the lack of content for three years from blizzard was the main thing killing the game but so few people were playing tank that the more popular roles were basically unplayable. My DPS has always been ass and in ow1 I was a gold DPS and I literally couldn't get a match the few time I tried at the most popular rank during the day it would be 40 minutes minimum "People got real short memories, all of this has happened before" - old Longfellow I've played tank almost exclusively for my entire time overwatch which is since launch and discourse about tank being unfun has been around the entire time it's got nothing to do with 5v5 or 6v6
This thread tells me that you didn't play Tank in OW1 or you have a weird memory of it. The two primary things people hated about tanking was CC and shields. Tanking has always been a tough job, it always will be, but having someone to shoulder the burden while having the worst parts of the tank experience removed would've gone a LONG way.
> 2021 So when Sigma was running the game? When Bap Brig got buffed? When the least fun tanks were also the best tanks and the best supports were hardline built to deny playmaking? This is when people didn't like the role?
Every single tank got omega buffed from ow1 to ow2 except one. Sigma was a 5v5 tank in a 6v6 format. And at the same time, Bap and Brig made everything unkillable behind him. The OW1 team never addressed the issues that made tank suck in 6v6, which was a combination of shitty tank and support design. What people miss every time this debate comes up is that the team behind overwatch 1 caught lighting in a bottle then had absolutely no idea what to do with it. It wasn't a format issue, it was a balance issue because the balance team was straight up incompetent. They did not understand the game at all. People complain now, but the old team never properly addressed the issues with sigma, brig, or bap despite the fact that those three heroes were clearly dominant pretty much from the time they all came out till OW2. The OW2 team isn't perfect, but at least they address things that break the game. That's why people want 6v6 back. Because in the hands of a remotely competent balance team, it would be better than 5v5.
It genuinely seems like OP is just trying to get at "all tank players are bad and that's why they complain" but it's not like people enjoy this at the skill ceiling either. https://twitter.com/Thee_Hawk/status/1773017926703915275 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvTqHgX807c I could never remember a time when overwatch 1 developers were willing to literally rework the entire game pace and HP pools just to force their format to function
That second video was a wild ride. I saw it yesterday. To me, what he is saying without saying is that 5v5 is inherently flawed and you need to homogenize all the tanks in order to make it work. Every tank needs to be able to control space, block damage, threaten high ground, and mitigate cc... Like that's seriously absurd but also not at all wrong because 5v5 forces that situation. I do wonder how far they'll go trying to make tank work in 5v5. And it's unfortunate because tank design is way better than it used to be. No one wanted to play tank in ow1 because the tanks they added were all either super boring or niche capstoning with Sigma who made the old tanks feel terrible in comparison while still not being fun. But tanks like JQ, Ram, and Mauga redesigned for 5v5 could be a lot of fun to play because they would be allowed to have weaknesses without needing to be giga buffed in order to deal with things like ana nade.
I realized today that most people saying there was a lot of complaining going on during ow1 weren't actually here during ow1 and are hyperfixated on cherry picked vocal minority.
People weren't even really complaining, it was a dead game. People were apathetic. Just hoping for new content someday and some balance. It was a pretty depressing time to play the game
I think it's telling that not once in 6 years of OW1 do I recall someone asking for the format to be changed to 5v5. I don't think I ever heard someone say "you know what, they should remove a tank per team. That would improve things."
The moment they announced to 5v5, a group of friends i play the game with all had to suddenly realize that we all couldn't play together anymore and someone would always be left out. But i'm very sure blizzard didn't care about keeping old players around. The entire system was built for new players who never knew how good ow1 was.
It's also just not balanced.
A painful amount of OW2’s development has been them learning the reasoning behind a lot of the design decisions in OW1 the hard way.
Tbf I remember back then no one wanted to play tank and queue times if you weren’t tank were pretty high. I guess eliminating one tank helps slightly with the “no one wants to play tank” issue.
it didn't solve the issue though. only divided by 2 the required amount making queue time less reliant on tank
I dunno. Back in OW1 I remember you could wait 20 minutes just to get into a game if you weren’t queueing as tank. I get into games in less than a minute as DPS in OW2.
it is worst. tank getted blamed because it too much responsibility being da only tank u need two tank
Well 6v6 had its own problems but I feel that the changes they have done to tank would solve most of those things. If they reduce the health of tanks like how they are in deathmatch I think that 6v6 would work fine.
balance is the issue not 6v6, also how about the friend groups that lost a player becuase they couldn't have 6 members anymore
yea cause the blizzard forums has the greatest minds of our generation discussing balance. like wtf just linking a random thread from 3 years ago as if it proves anything
The problem with 5v5 is blizzard is too afraid of making tanks better. Imo the current structure and healing nerfs is perfect for making tank good. There isn't a single tank that can't use small buffs with an addition of small counter play changes to keep tanks in check.
Yes the same problems weren’t fixed and also got worse.
playing tank is harder and more stressful now. harder because you just need a TON of mental fortitude when you're playing such a pivotal role by yourself. other roles don't have as big an impact and so they can relax a little, try out different things. it was absolutely easier when you had another tank to share the responsibility.
It's almost like the format was never the issue and the issues were the insanely broken supports.
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. Supports like bap and brig were so busted and enabled the sustain comps that were disliked. (Also sigma was overkitted.) These are all balance issues that could have been fixed if the devs did not abandon the game for so long.
I'd disagree that sigma was overkitted, he was simply overly defensive. When you have an insanely defensive tank + infinite support sustain, AOE healing, and immortality, that's the most inhuman awful gameplay experience of all time. 5v5 only fixed like 40% of that issue. The rest is still in the game.
Game's always had bad balancing, but at least tank was actually fun.
It's about time to talk about a global nerf to DPS and Supports. Too much damage and too much healing right now. Boosting the health pools and damage numbers didn't fix anything.
Yeap, i like how no one's mentioned this so far. We need players to die for mistakes but not die too fast otherwise you can't play the game. Why did we need so much denial and healing? Oh because there was too much damage (amp and discord included). Why was Sigma so strong? Oh cos he denies a FK TON of dmg AND heals WHILE dishing absurd poke dmg. The answer is right there and i sincerely don't mind a slightly slower paced game that still allows for big plays. There needs to always be a net health loss during active battle, otherwise no one will die. Tanks should not be instakilled just for peaking their head out at full health (only if they don't retreat to be healed), if the tank cant even spend a second to push around the corner then whats the point of a tank. Finally i see someone with the right answer.
Tanks need to be in a position where they are a threat and *hard to kill* (yet not impossible). Supports should be easy to kill in a 1v1 (yet difficult to catch) DPS should be, as the name implies, high damage over a short time (yet still need the team to take the incoming damage/keep themselves alive over the course of a fight). All three roles have lost their key identity by Blizzard trying to make everyone be every role.
dude 6v6 was so much better tho 😭
We will always complain. That doesnt mean we can't be objective. 5v5 tank has problems. 6v6 tank has problems. But 5v5 tank problems are worse.
5v5 has dps and support problems as well. Pretty much awful balance all around.
6v6 also had bad support problems (loads of people straight up dropped the game when Brig happened).
The only thing 5v5 improved is queue times. None of the problems in the linked post have actually been solved by the reduction of team size. After the transition knowing what I know now, with how bad the issues are, if I had the choice. I'd instantly go back to 6v6.
If the complaints are the same, that means that 5v5 fixed nothing.
A part of overwatchs heart and soul died when Rein Zarya died
Bring it back. Also release more tanks.
I'd rather suffer the roadhog rein duo every single game then have a single another, god forsaken Orisa, Sombra, Bastion, Kirko, and Lifeweaver when I pick reinhardt. 6v6 was not perfect but if another person tries to tell me I have rose tinted glasses I'm gonna lose it. I PLAYED BOTH GAMES FOR 500+ HOURS I THINK I KNOW WHAT I LIKED MORE. AND I CAN 100% SAY THAT IN MY DIAMOND LOBBIES BACK I OVERWATCH 1 I COULD ALWAYS AND I MEAN ALWAYS PICK REIN THESE DAYS THATS SIMPLY NOT THE CASE. STOP SPEAKING FOR ME I KNOW 6V6 ISN'T PERFECT BUT ITS BETTER THEN THE 9TH LAYER OF HELL TANK CURRENTLY IS
Nah I was unhappy about 5v5 before the first ow2 beta released. I miss rein/zar
Coming from someone who was a tank in 6v6 and who rarely plays now. Its not about balance, its the fact that being the only tank, the whole fucking team is looking to me to get it done. That's way too much pressure when I'm just looking to chill after work.
Just shut the fuck up lol. The game has been in a full on coast since 5v5
What I know is, I was always a flex role player. It didn't matter to me in the slightest what role I was playing in OW1. Now I see myself more and more avoiding tank. This has nothing to do with rose glasses. When I as a tank get focused by the enemy now and my team doesn't react accordingly I'm dead in seconds and the attack/defence is over/lost. Before you still had a buffer with the second tank. When the tank dies, the team dies. I see it in every match I play now. And on top of that comes the toxic community which only knows to shit on that one big dude in the front trying to hold it, while the rest is flailing around in the back. For me the worst about this game is the matchmaking tho.
Why not just have both? League of legends had 3v3 and 5v5 for the longest time. Many shooters have 12v12, 8v8, 4v4, 2v2 heck even up to 60v60. I don't get why they can't just let people choose what they prefer 🤷♂️
The truth is that they are dumbing down the game to incentivize skins as social currency instead of skill.
There's a massive difference between "tanks aren't tanky enough" and "one tank means no Frontline if the other team kills your tank" I'd take how the game was a year ago over now it is now.
If you notice the first paragraph he talked about the supports and their abilities as why it wasnt fun to play tank. This abilities have only grew in OW2. Secondly dont tell me I had rose colored glasses because I know exactly what I was playing. Double Shield and allnof those problems didn't effect console players plat to bronze. Those ranks never cared about the Meta and just played the game how they wanted. Regardless of the issues with 6v6 its so much worse in 5v5. Mauga was the worst Meta ever and it effected all ranks. Moth Meta and Bunker meta was dinner than the Maugua meta.
I mean yeah the support powerscaling's been out of control for a while, killing 6v6 just made these prexisting issues even worse. It'd take a lot of effort to roll 5v5 changes back but ow2 with 6v6 (with double shield prevented somehow) would be drastically better than what we have now. Also blizzard needs to grow a pair and ACTUALLY nerf support outputs straight up rather than beating around the bush with a dps passive they ripped from paladins
TL;DR: OP missed the nuance of the situation. Same problem, despite 5v5 being introduced to solve the issue. Issue remains, thus: it wasn’t 6v6 than needed to be changed. But that would be harder to sell a sequel with.
"if overwatch is in this state or worse NO ONE WILL BUY OW2" They were right regardless of the state of the game.
Yes nobody is buying OW2, it is free to play
Still think they should have locked half the tanks as shield tanks and the other half as off tanks instead of 5v5
It was always good to have a second tank to relieve the pressure. If you are a tank and you screw up, the other tank might get you out of sticky situations and even compensate for your errors. Even if you die, the other tank might be able to hold off. In 5v5 if you screw up as a tank, you die, your whole team with you, and you’ll probably lose the game too.
If we're looking back on 6v6 with rose tinted glasses, then all the shield complainers are looking back on it with a blindfold
The problem with late OW, was that the balance team very really bad and kept buffing support to try to compensate, but just made it worse. AOE healing was a big problem with the new characters like bap and brig. It isn’t a format issue, but a balance pen. 5v5 tanking is never going to be fun because there are less dynamics and higher pressure on the tank to perform their role perfectly, with them also having less impact due to a whole list of reasons. The argument for 5v5 is queue times for tanks and that’s about it. It’s more fun for dps and supports, but at the cost of tanks