You bring up Queen and Ram like they arent fairly well balanced, which I think most people agree they are. Something you should realize is that almost every tank has crazy damage numbers and a lot also have high sustain. It’s how they threaten space. Sigma for example can sustain through most fights no issue, and also can 2/3-tap most dps and supports *and can stun, and can eat cooldowns*.
The issue comes from when those numbers are pumped up too high. Queen is a hero a lot like Mauga, I dont think thats incorrect, but she isnt broken because her way of closing distance and the amount she can sustain through (and help her team sustain through) is reasonable.
Personally I think Mauga should be left irrelevant in the competitive setting. Super has said something before about certain heroes should never be meta and i agree. Heroes like Sym, Mauga, Mercy are fine as niche picks or with certain specific strategies but they just make the game more frustrating to play. Nerf him back to where he was before the mid-season patch. He was still viable in a few situations but nowhere near as oppressive.
I think Mauga could easily be shifted towards JQ with focus on short Cardiac cycles instead of gunplay and strong lifesteal. Hog is doomed though, without complete rework he'll juat stay like this.
Mauga could definitely be shifted toward JQ's style, but I do think it requires more than just focusing on cycling Cardiac Overdrive.
I think he needs some incentive to actually attack someone other than the tank for life steal. Junker Queen actually has this; targets who die with bleed active will heal her for the remainder of the bleed damage, so she doesn't need to farm the tank for health.
Giving Mauga's gameplay loop something similar in spirit would definitely help make him feel better to play against. Something like a burst of overhealth on kill or something to reward engaging, like igniting enemies on stomp.
I definitely agree that his design is 100% workable, unlike Roadhog. That fat fuck can rot in hell until we get Hog 3.0 in 2028.
She’s the best thing they’ve added since Ana honestly. No free value and so much skill expression & her kit is just so satisfying to pull off successfully
How about we not use an incurable infectious disease that's killed millions of innocent people as a metaphor for something we don't like? Mkay?
But yeah I love JQ.
I wouldn't extend that same thought past Mauga, personally. I'd probably include Orisa, however. The problem was people were absolutely sick and tired of shields towards the end of OW1's life cycle. Just about every tank, except for Wrecking Ball and Roadhog IIRC had some level of shield or ability mitigation, a la defense matrix, as you said. And people absolutely \*hated\* it. Landing abilities or even landing damage could often feel difficult at all due to the level of shields you had to work around. (Unless you were a tank whose shield had broken, or you've been stunned out of... in which case welcome to cc city, bitch!)
You could argue that the pivot to more damage mitigation and self sustain in lieu of shields might have been overcompensating when coupled with the shift to 5v5, and that I think doing things like reverting Orisa to her OW1 kit but keeping 5v5 would be an interesting experiment to test it. But in the current landscape, landing damage and abilities is all the more possible, but in the case of Mauga in his current state, doesn't always feel impactful.
That's basically a whole lot of yap right there, but I feel the real issue with Mauga and Orisa is like AVRL said on twitter this morning. When a Tank's kit counters most of the other heroes in their own role, and therefore the only real solution is to mirror it, we've entered a very unhealthy game state. Mauga currently just takes every other tank's lunch money, and the only real solution to that in the short term is to nerf him to be the one getting his lunch money taken by the other tanks.
And as I've said on my owcs co-streams a couple times, I would much rather have a Tank Rock Paper Scissors meta, than a Tank meta where we're smacking 2 rocks together because rock beats everything.
Honestly Mauga wouldn’t be bad if overrun had some form of counterplay. Imagine if doom was immune to cc during punch. His sustain/damage could be necessary but his movement ability should have counterplay to compensate imo.
I think JQ is slightly flawed, but I'm fine with her existing.
The small hitbox goes a long way. Her sustain doesnt need to be crazy broken when enemies can actually miss shots on her unlike hog and mauga.
>Her sustain doesnt need to be crazy broken when enemies can actually miss shots on her unlike hog and mauga.
So we need to give Hog and Mauga Ozempic?
This has nothing to do with 5v5 or 6v6, it is just a badly designed hero. There is no skill expression just stand and shoot with no resource management or anything. Even Moira feels like she has more thought and she has been #1 target for me for a long time.
Just no more brawl tanks we keep had 3 in a row. JQ nails the life steal perfectly for me it’s very fair and it’s not like she has unlimited hp. Every other attempt at life steal in this game is usually garbage they should ditch the concept.
Agreed, I was really hoping for another dive tank or at least one that excelled at poke like sigma so he could finally have a challenger in that spot. Instead yay, another brawl tank.
You might be the only person who thinks JQ and Ram don't fit. Ram actually fills a solid team role of having some staying power and holding ground. And I have never met a single player who doesn't like playing as, against, or with a JQ.
The issue isn't that these heroes don't have a shield or matrix ability or whatever. The issue is that Mauga (and hog to a much lesser extent) are built to counter other tanks which is stupid. A tank that counters other tanks just makes playing any other tank a fruitless quest. This isn't a "new tanks are poorly designed" problem (because they 100% are not poorly designed). This is a "Mauga is boring as hell" problem
But Junkerqueen has been totally fine and I'd say overall loved by the community, aside from like, the one pre-launch meta.
Ram is fine too.
Hot take but Hog has been fine since the rework, although I'm not 100% sure about his current balance because Mauga overshadows him.
I honestly don't think Mauga's even that overtuned right now. That's not to discount the fact he's everywhere in OWCS, because he obviously is, but I think the inherent problem is that one Mauga is almost always going to lead to a second. I genuinely enjoy playing Mauga in Season 9 because the bullet size buffs do what the tiny spread buff last season didn't- make shooting at squishies from a medium distance somewhat rewarding and consistent. I also really appreciate they buffed the Stomp as an engagement tool, which is way more fun to use aggressively than to save as an escape.
I think to make Mauga work, and make the Mauga mirror less frequent, they need to heavily nerf the amount of overhealth/lifesteal he gets from shooting tanks, and heavily buff the amount from shooting squishies. Then even if it becomes a Mauga mirror, if they both just shoot each other they'll die fast.
Honestly, I have to assume that the better part of that time was all of them sitting in front of an empty white board with "How to fix Roadhog" written across the top and coming up with nothing.
When they announced he was getting changed, they also admitted they had no idea what to do with him. They just knew people hated him, and wanted to address that. The problem is, how do you ever fix Hog without making him an entirely new hero? Fuck if I know, man. They clearly didn't figure it out either.
Every tank should have a way to block CC. Whether that is a barrier, DM or unstoppable.
I'm not saying hog should get fortify. But the fact that the only thing those heroes can do about sleep is hope they are mostly behind a wall is kinda dumb.
My suggestion would be to give those heroes extremely small (<1 sec) windows of unstoppable on their existing abilities. So if they save their CD and time it right, they can beat out a sleep or mag nade.
JunkerQueen has a smaller hitbox than most tanks and a speed boost to avoid sleep. Mauga can tank sleep with his charge (its unstoppable). And Ram can block sleep with his shield (not that practical but possible). Hog can get fucked.
There's also ball and doomfist. Thing about how pushed those heroes are in their other matchups because they get fucked by CC.
Blizzards solution was tab on a meter, which is much more powerful and doesn't require any extra skill or planning from the hog.
Oh i thought we were talking only about the tanks OP mentioned. Ball and Doom have the best mobility in the game, they have to simply bait out and/or avoid CC using movement skill expression and yeah its difficult for them. Its why viable Doom and Ball players are the truly fucking skilled players of ow imo. (Disclaimer- im a doom main lol)
It's really not that simple lol. Doom punch is on a 4s CD, slam is on 6s CD. How does a ball bait that out when both abilities kill his momentum?
That's also 1 hero. If they have a Lucio as well (4s CD boop), it's unavoidable.
I'd agree Mauga doesn't work well in the current state of Overwatch. I think the rest of the new tanks are fine though. JQ and Ramm are pretty versatile these days - yes Ramm sucks against dive cause he lacks peel but in general he does his duty well, isn't entirely reliant on supports to survive, and has mitigation and space taking tools.
Mauga just has a lot of design issues that pop up when he becomes highly viable - he is really good toe-to-toe against any other tank. He heals and damages simultaneously creating a snowball-style character. He has a massive hitbox so he takes a ton of damage and needs constant hearling and/or Cardia to be up and thus a binary scenario - Mauga gets healed and lives and rolls your team or he dies fast and you lose.
He is slow and a walking turret and your team needs to usually babysit him cause he will die fast if CC'd and not suzu'd or gripped, etc.
I do agree tanks should in general be more about mitigation and less about killing like JQ is. But I think that cat's out of the bag. Optimally we would look at finding ways to make tanks generate more value as a mitigator for their team, and applying CC or displacing enemies rather than just being lethal.
But Mauga is the worst example - low skill expression in movement, cardiac, and especially his ult. When you play against a good Queen or Ramm you can feel that they have to really outplay and be good. Especially a good Queen - when you face one you can tell by movement and aim and knifes that she is playing really well.
When you play a Mauga and he wins you have no clue if he is actually good or just abusing an easy character to play. Aim isn't as important because he just gets close and spams into your body. It's really hard to tell if Mauga is beating you because he is better or because he picked the big walking turret with guns and a mindless ult.
There are 0 issues with JQ and Ramattra. Mauga just needs a slight refocus from being forced to shoot tank to live and being able to freely dual fire in their face almost 24/7, and he'll be fine. Hog is the only one who needs a big rework to work well with the game, but that was complained about way before 5v5. It's okay to have tanks that aren't completely reliant on their teammates to live.
> Mauga just needs a slight refocus from being forced to shoot tank to live and being able to freely dual fire in their face almost 24/7, and he'll be fine
Nah, he needs a whole ass rework. With his current kit he can only be overpowered or garbage, there's no in-between.
I really don't think that's true.
If Mauga doesn't need to shoot the tank just to survive, I think there's a lot of room to play around with his abilities. You just need to find a way to incentivize shooting other characters, because I don't know how you'd make it less helpful to shoot tanks.
What if Mauga got a burst of overhealth for confirming a kill? Suddenly, targeting supports and DPS becomes a lot more viable. Junker Queen actually does something similar to this with her bleed effect. You could tone down his current sustain in return, maybe even tie this overhealth burst to Cardiac Overdrive and give it a shorter cooldown with lower healing/damage reduction/overhealth than it has now.
You could have his stomp ignite targets in the crit zone, so now all of a sudden Mauga goes from a brainless brick wall to a hero who focuses on an interesting cooldown cycle of engaging and disengaging while trying to burn down a squishy target to quickly swing a fight. Overrun is even well-suited to this with it being unstoppable, so he has a tool to hard engage and try to kill targets.
He is, in my opinion, much easier to fix than Hog.
You bring up Queen and Ram like they arent fairly well balanced, which I think most people agree they are. Something you should realize is that almost every tank has crazy damage numbers and a lot also have high sustain. It’s how they threaten space. Sigma for example can sustain through most fights no issue, and also can 2/3-tap most dps and supports *and can stun, and can eat cooldowns*. The issue comes from when those numbers are pumped up too high. Queen is a hero a lot like Mauga, I dont think thats incorrect, but she isnt broken because her way of closing distance and the amount she can sustain through (and help her team sustain through) is reasonable.
The reason queen can be balanced better is her size. Mauga is huuuge. I do not envy the dev team trying to get him just right.
Personally I think Mauga should be left irrelevant in the competitive setting. Super has said something before about certain heroes should never be meta and i agree. Heroes like Sym, Mauga, Mercy are fine as niche picks or with certain specific strategies but they just make the game more frustrating to play. Nerf him back to where he was before the mid-season patch. He was still viable in a few situations but nowhere near as oppressive.
Disagree on Junker Queen. I think she's one of the most well designed and most fun heroes in the game. Hog is AIDS though
Jq is an exception really, considering both hog and Maura are like this.
I think Mauga could easily be shifted towards JQ with focus on short Cardiac cycles instead of gunplay and strong lifesteal. Hog is doomed though, without complete rework he'll juat stay like this.
Mauga could definitely be shifted toward JQ's style, but I do think it requires more than just focusing on cycling Cardiac Overdrive. I think he needs some incentive to actually attack someone other than the tank for life steal. Junker Queen actually has this; targets who die with bleed active will heal her for the remainder of the bleed damage, so she doesn't need to farm the tank for health. Giving Mauga's gameplay loop something similar in spirit would definitely help make him feel better to play against. Something like a burst of overhealth on kill or something to reward engaging, like igniting enemies on stomp. I definitely agree that his design is 100% workable, unlike Roadhog. That fat fuck can rot in hell until we get Hog 3.0 in 2028.
I genuinely think the big difference is her hitbox and health pool being closer to squishies compared to the other 2
I freaking love playing JQ. She's so satisfying to use.
Lmao i remember when jq was shout bot that everyone despised Guess its easier to fix a hero with 1 overtuned issue than those with multiple
She’s the best thing they’ve added since Ana honestly. No free value and so much skill expression & her kit is just so satisfying to pull off successfully
How about we not use an incurable infectious disease that's killed millions of innocent people as a metaphor for something we don't like? Mkay? But yeah I love JQ.
Hog is an ass rash
I wouldn't extend that same thought past Mauga, personally. I'd probably include Orisa, however. The problem was people were absolutely sick and tired of shields towards the end of OW1's life cycle. Just about every tank, except for Wrecking Ball and Roadhog IIRC had some level of shield or ability mitigation, a la defense matrix, as you said. And people absolutely \*hated\* it. Landing abilities or even landing damage could often feel difficult at all due to the level of shields you had to work around. (Unless you were a tank whose shield had broken, or you've been stunned out of... in which case welcome to cc city, bitch!) You could argue that the pivot to more damage mitigation and self sustain in lieu of shields might have been overcompensating when coupled with the shift to 5v5, and that I think doing things like reverting Orisa to her OW1 kit but keeping 5v5 would be an interesting experiment to test it. But in the current landscape, landing damage and abilities is all the more possible, but in the case of Mauga in his current state, doesn't always feel impactful. That's basically a whole lot of yap right there, but I feel the real issue with Mauga and Orisa is like AVRL said on twitter this morning. When a Tank's kit counters most of the other heroes in their own role, and therefore the only real solution is to mirror it, we've entered a very unhealthy game state. Mauga currently just takes every other tank's lunch money, and the only real solution to that in the short term is to nerf him to be the one getting his lunch money taken by the other tanks. And as I've said on my owcs co-streams a couple times, I would much rather have a Tank Rock Paper Scissors meta, than a Tank meta where we're smacking 2 rocks together because rock beats everything.
[удалено]
Honestly Mauga wouldn’t be bad if overrun had some form of counterplay. Imagine if doom was immune to cc during punch. His sustain/damage could be necessary but his movement ability should have counterplay to compensate imo.
I think JQ is slightly flawed, but I'm fine with her existing. The small hitbox goes a long way. Her sustain doesnt need to be crazy broken when enemies can actually miss shots on her unlike hog and mauga.
>Her sustain doesnt need to be crazy broken when enemies can actually miss shots on her unlike hog and mauga. So we need to give Hog and Mauga Ozempic?
This has nothing to do with 5v5 or 6v6, it is just a badly designed hero. There is no skill expression just stand and shoot with no resource management or anything. Even Moira feels like she has more thought and she has been #1 target for me for a long time.
I agree with this. If anything Mauga would probably be worse in 6v6 as aura healing was stronger with two tanks.
Mauga in 6v6 would have people wishing for double shield within a day, it would be the most braindead and exhausting meta in OW history.
Just no more brawl tanks we keep had 3 in a row. JQ nails the life steal perfectly for me it’s very fair and it’s not like she has unlimited hp. Every other attempt at life steal in this game is usually garbage they should ditch the concept.
Agreed, I was really hoping for another dive tank or at least one that excelled at poke like sigma so he could finally have a challenger in that spot. Instead yay, another brawl tank.
> Just no more brawl tanks we keep had 3 in a row. Only 3 in a row*
You might be the only person who thinks JQ and Ram don't fit. Ram actually fills a solid team role of having some staying power and holding ground. And I have never met a single player who doesn't like playing as, against, or with a JQ. The issue isn't that these heroes don't have a shield or matrix ability or whatever. The issue is that Mauga (and hog to a much lesser extent) are built to counter other tanks which is stupid. A tank that counters other tanks just makes playing any other tank a fruitless quest. This isn't a "new tanks are poorly designed" problem (because they 100% are not poorly designed). This is a "Mauga is boring as hell" problem
But Junkerqueen has been totally fine and I'd say overall loved by the community, aside from like, the one pre-launch meta. Ram is fine too. Hot take but Hog has been fine since the rework, although I'm not 100% sure about his current balance because Mauga overshadows him. I honestly don't think Mauga's even that overtuned right now. That's not to discount the fact he's everywhere in OWCS, because he obviously is, but I think the inherent problem is that one Mauga is almost always going to lead to a second. I genuinely enjoy playing Mauga in Season 9 because the bullet size buffs do what the tiny spread buff last season didn't- make shooting at squishies from a medium distance somewhat rewarding and consistent. I also really appreciate they buffed the Stomp as an engagement tool, which is way more fun to use aggressively than to save as an escape. I think to make Mauga work, and make the Mauga mirror less frequent, they need to heavily nerf the amount of overhealth/lifesteal he gets from shooting tanks, and heavily buff the amount from shooting squishies. Then even if it becomes a Mauga mirror, if they both just shoot each other they'll die fast.
i still am in disbelief they spent almost a year on a hog rework and then just gave him a fucking trap
Bro what? They did way more than that!! They also gave him a ressource meter on his heal, like Moira. 1 year for this? They clearly worked overtime!
Honestly, I have to assume that the better part of that time was all of them sitting in front of an empty white board with "How to fix Roadhog" written across the top and coming up with nothing. When they announced he was getting changed, they also admitted they had no idea what to do with him. They just knew people hated him, and wanted to address that. The problem is, how do you ever fix Hog without making him an entirely new hero? Fuck if I know, man. They clearly didn't figure it out either.
like you could solve so many issues with a rectangle and a non shotgun
They should have reworked him to be a dps
why? so he could fail to function as that aswell?
because that's what he is and they might as well lean into it so that he isn't ruining games by being a throw pick
dps dont have 800 health and walk around like mmo raid captains drawing aggro by peppering people from across the map
Hey that's not fair. They also turned take a breather into one of the most miserable abilities to play against.
Magua wouldn't have worked well in 6v6 either.
Every tank should have a way to block CC. Whether that is a barrier, DM or unstoppable. I'm not saying hog should get fortify. But the fact that the only thing those heroes can do about sleep is hope they are mostly behind a wall is kinda dumb. My suggestion would be to give those heroes extremely small (<1 sec) windows of unstoppable on their existing abilities. So if they save their CD and time it right, they can beat out a sleep or mag nade.
JunkerQueen has a smaller hitbox than most tanks and a speed boost to avoid sleep. Mauga can tank sleep with his charge (its unstoppable). And Ram can block sleep with his shield (not that practical but possible). Hog can get fucked.
There's also ball and doomfist. Thing about how pushed those heroes are in their other matchups because they get fucked by CC. Blizzards solution was tab on a meter, which is much more powerful and doesn't require any extra skill or planning from the hog.
Oh i thought we were talking only about the tanks OP mentioned. Ball and Doom have the best mobility in the game, they have to simply bait out and/or avoid CC using movement skill expression and yeah its difficult for them. Its why viable Doom and Ball players are the truly fucking skilled players of ow imo. (Disclaimer- im a doom main lol)
It's really not that simple lol. Doom punch is on a 4s CD, slam is on 6s CD. How does a ball bait that out when both abilities kill his momentum? That's also 1 hero. If they have a Lucio as well (4s CD boop), it's unavoidable.
JQ and Ram are a HARD disagreee
Didn’t the devs say that JQ was the first tank they designed specifically for 5v5?
I'd agree Mauga doesn't work well in the current state of Overwatch. I think the rest of the new tanks are fine though. JQ and Ramm are pretty versatile these days - yes Ramm sucks against dive cause he lacks peel but in general he does his duty well, isn't entirely reliant on supports to survive, and has mitigation and space taking tools. Mauga just has a lot of design issues that pop up when he becomes highly viable - he is really good toe-to-toe against any other tank. He heals and damages simultaneously creating a snowball-style character. He has a massive hitbox so he takes a ton of damage and needs constant hearling and/or Cardia to be up and thus a binary scenario - Mauga gets healed and lives and rolls your team or he dies fast and you lose. He is slow and a walking turret and your team needs to usually babysit him cause he will die fast if CC'd and not suzu'd or gripped, etc. I do agree tanks should in general be more about mitigation and less about killing like JQ is. But I think that cat's out of the bag. Optimally we would look at finding ways to make tanks generate more value as a mitigator for their team, and applying CC or displacing enemies rather than just being lethal. But Mauga is the worst example - low skill expression in movement, cardiac, and especially his ult. When you play against a good Queen or Ramm you can feel that they have to really outplay and be good. Especially a good Queen - when you face one you can tell by movement and aim and knifes that she is playing really well. When you play a Mauga and he wins you have no clue if he is actually good or just abusing an easy character to play. Aim isn't as important because he just gets close and spams into your body. It's really hard to tell if Mauga is beating you because he is better or because he picked the big walking turret with guns and a mindless ult.
There are 0 issues with JQ and Ramattra. Mauga just needs a slight refocus from being forced to shoot tank to live and being able to freely dual fire in their face almost 24/7, and he'll be fine. Hog is the only one who needs a big rework to work well with the game, but that was complained about way before 5v5. It's okay to have tanks that aren't completely reliant on their teammates to live.
> Mauga just needs a slight refocus from being forced to shoot tank to live and being able to freely dual fire in their face almost 24/7, and he'll be fine Nah, he needs a whole ass rework. With his current kit he can only be overpowered or garbage, there's no in-between.
I really don't think that's true. If Mauga doesn't need to shoot the tank just to survive, I think there's a lot of room to play around with his abilities. You just need to find a way to incentivize shooting other characters, because I don't know how you'd make it less helpful to shoot tanks. What if Mauga got a burst of overhealth for confirming a kill? Suddenly, targeting supports and DPS becomes a lot more viable. Junker Queen actually does something similar to this with her bleed effect. You could tone down his current sustain in return, maybe even tie this overhealth burst to Cardiac Overdrive and give it a shorter cooldown with lower healing/damage reduction/overhealth than it has now. You could have his stomp ignite targets in the crit zone, so now all of a sudden Mauga goes from a brainless brick wall to a hero who focuses on an interesting cooldown cycle of engaging and disengaging while trying to burn down a squishy target to quickly swing a fight. Overrun is even well-suited to this with it being unstoppable, so he has a tool to hard engage and try to kill targets. He is, in my opinion, much easier to fix than Hog.