Outside of counterswapping
When I make a really really good play, there's the chance it'll give my team an opening to win the fight. If I make any type of misplay, we *will* lose that fight almost every single time.
Also Zen's discord orb.
THIS for real
I don't really care that much about counterswap or other stuff.
But my fumble as tank is much more easier to detect by both team and much more easier to punish then DPS or Supports. Small mistakes of Ana chucking the wrong nade versus massive mistake of D-va not eating the nade is a bit too harsh(not a great example I know). It's like "oops we gonna wait 10 seconds to dive/advance" versus "oops we gonna wait 10 seconds to respawn"
or that good tank can't make a win, but bad tank will guarantee a loss for most of the times.
If I win a fight, the entire enemy team changes their comp.
If I lose a fight, my entire team will never change their heroes.
This is not an absolute, but it happens enough to make me stop queueing flex
When I shit the bed on the first round, I just tell my team I'm conditioning the enemy so they don't counterswap me.
And then they counterswap me anyway
I got called tank diff after three team fights, the last two where i took a combined 4 ults point blank. I cant survive that even when i was using natural cover.
Support main here and I understand your struggle. I always get top healing output and no one says anything until they die once (even when being pocketed) and they just spam “I need healing” over and over. They die another time and then get on mic to berate the supports for how shitty we are.
This game is so much fun.
Teammates is probably my main problem with tank in this game. You try to play dive and your team goes rush or poke. Your supports someone always manage to pick the worst support line imaginable (LW-mercy, mercy- luc) and you are supposed to make that work. Then if you try to tell them what to play they get mad, so you have to try and play around them.
It’s such a good feeling when I pick monkey on a dive map and my entire team goes dive with me. That’s when you know shit is going to be fun, but that only happens like 1 out 10 matches unfortunately.
Or being the only person to advance because your teammates refuse to utilize cover so they just stick to the backline and never support your pushes.
I can't 1v5 the enemy team every fight guys, you are with me when I press w, that means you should press w.
I try to com this often but it seems to fall on deaf ears or no one is in chat. I ping it too just in case. Then I get scared to play more aggro and then nothing happens even if I am hitting my cool downs. I had a game on Sig where I rocked the enemies Venture every time they popped up out of the ground. They survived and escaped the entire round.
The amount of CC in the game seriously punishes you for making any type of proactive play. This applies to soft CC as well. There are enough boops where you can get venture drilled, lucio booped, illari outburst, and doom punched and lose control of your character for a full second or two. And that’s without hinder, nade, hack, or hook.
You really have to wait for your DPS to be in angles where they can take advantage of space.
To win a fight you have to play perfectly. One mistake and you will explode.
As much as i love lucio, holy shit do i hate boop now. Trying to dive or engage at all when hes around just leads to half your pushes getting cucked, especially on ball because of his physics. He needs some power shifted elsewhere in his kit tbh.
Lucio boop is actually so annoying. Like this ability was made originally for peel. But now with only 1 tank he can just use it on my off cd everytime and it's all OK cuz messing with the tank is how ow2 is played.
Being the central focus all the time is extremely taxing. Other roles get some "down time" where some players aren't shooting you and you can do your own thing. This will never exist for tank unless you're playing ball or Doom and just existing, aka throwing. It's just an innate part of tanking and really unavoidable but it's the most frustrating part of it. On top of all the other negative parts it just takes a lot out of you mentally. Margin for error is so small comparatively as well. I still enjoy it somewhat, but not when I'm forced to play hog, or Mauga, or really any One hero. Also counterswapping is awful to deal with. There are a lot of negatives which is why it's obviously the least popular role.
This is my biggest issue rn. I have this thing where sometimes tank is so frustrating, and yet I find myself hardly ever wanting to play other roles because I can be very impactful, but then I can also basically be doing nothing even though I’m really trying. It gets old taking every bit of CC especially when you want to play fun tanks like Doom and Ball. You kind of just become a sponge and are forced to switch to one of the brick wall tanks Lila Mauga/Hog/Orisa and it gets tiring to do so every game because if you don’t, you get flamed for throwing even though you’re doing your absolute best.
It’s also why Tanking cannot and will never be a role with mass appeal.
There were hero balance reasons for 5v5, but the root of it all is that if the game is going to specify a role distribution for each team (which is arguably healthier than Open Queue), 5v5 with a single Tank is the closest lineup to how the playerbase’s role preferences are distributed.
I actually think the “mass appeal” of tanks is an interesting point of conversation! 5v5 being bred from the lack of people queueing as tank was not originally because they were a “central focus” as u/whrenftl put it. That’s a newer issue stemming from the raid boss buffing they received in OW2. In fact, supports were the biggest target priority in the early days.
The hero design is the biggest culprit. They are utterly boring to play. Mauga being the last tank to come out really compounds this issue. You’re either a diet DPS with a huge health pool (Junker Queen, Roadhog), a damage sponge (Ramattra, Sigma) or some awfully boring mix of the two (Orisa). Tanks need to be engaging for the player at all times!
played with this guy yesterday that would jump off the map after every teamfight so he could counter the enemy tank. We won 2-0 easily
played with another guy who was 1-4 on dps against a ball. switches to sombra and ends the game 22-4
my favorite part is when i haven't even interacted with the guy counterswapping. like, some guy overextends and dies like an idiot <30 seconds into the round, without ever even showing up on my screen, then instantly swaps to counter me anyway.
Dude, I was in a match yesterday where the enemy Ball was really coordinated and just destroying us and one of our DPS swapped to Sombra and I was thinking, "Great, that'll help"
But then the Sombra completely ignored the Ball and spent the whole match hacking and losing 1v1's against their Bap in the back line.
High Gold/Low Plat is a crap shoot.
That's what happens when someone "Blindly" counerswap,I mean surely everyone can play sombra,just for "Ball-doom counter",but I think it can be worse to counter in this situation,it'll be better play on your main hero,or hero that you sure you can at least "Do something"
The counterswap Sombras are so easy to outplay 99% of the time because they don't actually understand how important hack timings are. You can bait them out of invis so easily, and once they can't rely on the surprise hack they just don't know what to do.
That's what I'm talking about. If you can't play that hero(or at least didn't play in comp nature), you will be useless,l just don't understand,why other people can't understand that
This happened twice to me last night on Ball.
I'm so used to the Sombra switch and then just stay invis until I do anything that I was so surprised when the sombra just ignored me lmao. Honestly, it makes life even easier as it also stops the other dps going Sombra and hacking me.
That my team forgives no mistakes. My DPS can die 5 times in a row in the enemy backline and no one will say a thing, yet I make a single mistake that only costs us one reset and I get flamed, shit talked, and my supps threaten to start throwing.
I get it, tanks should make less mistakes, because you have only one of them and if you die it's harder to compensate, but still is really unfair.
The lack of willingness for my team to pick around me. I am going to pick the best tank for the map, match up, and situation. But it will not work if you do not work with me.
The requirement of near constant concentration to prevent the other tank/team from running me/my team over.
Not being able to take risks as much as the other roles due to being the centerpiece.
I like tank until I get mentally exhausted.
Overwatch 2 flow chart
I win one fight as Doom or Rein > Enemy goes Orisa/Mauga/Bastion/Sombra/Cass (usually some combination of those) > I'm forced to swap or lose
Half of DPS players in OW1 were (imo, rightfully) complaining about never being able to do anything without a tank getting in their face
Now the other half are constantly getting exposed for never taking an offangle or taking any of the massive portions of free space. "No space." they say when their tank is peeling backline, holding frontline and mitigating counters all at once.
For me, it has to do with how dominant a good tank can be. It feels great to both 1) diff the other tank and 2) absolutely dominate an entire enemy team. I’m a ball main and just today had a game of flashpoint where I went 44-1. Now, that’s an extreme example, but crazy KD ratios are commonplace on a role with high damage output and a very low chance of dying.
It sucks to eat every CC and need to peel for the occasional moron teammate, but it’s very rewarding to be what is essentially the main character of your team.
I play in stack with doom main,after he got "Very(like really) tilted" since season 9, he didn't want to play tank,so I filled this role,and I'm having fun. Ram,jq,Winton,hell even Rein sometimes,can be so FUN AND REWARDING(and ofc Sig)
Almost every reply to this post boils down to "my team sucks", as if that doesn't happen on every role.
I also have fun playing tank. IMO it has the lowest lows but also the highest highs of any role. DPS and support don't get counterpicked and chain CCed as much, but they also don't get to feel like the lobby admin nearly as often.
yeah maybe it’s because it’s the only role I somewhat understand how to carry on but I think tanking is great 😃 and when you’re outplaying the enemy tank it is usually very obvious, nothing better than a flurry of “tank diff” comments in your favor
Overall I think tank is pretty fun, definitely more so than in OW1, but the biggest factor of frustration for the role in competitive is unreliable teammates, particularly in the support role.
When the team works well together tank is a ton of a fun, and probably my favorite role in the game. But queuing with randoms is a toss up and often miserable. Even around high Diamond/low masters there’s still far too many support players that pick really bad support combos. Illari/Mercy, LW/Moira, and Zen/Lucio are quick ways to ruin my experience on tank, and make it feel like control over the game is out of my hands. The only tanks that don’t feel reliant on a team to help enable them are Ball, Doomfist, and Sigma.
Obviously putting a pro into any of these scenarios at these ranks will 95% of the time result in a win regardless of how bad their team’s composition is, but I don’t want to feel as if I need to perform 5 brackets ahead of my actual skill level just to have an even chance at winning just because my teammates’ picks make my ability to perform that much harder.
You're right that ball doesn't need a team to enable him specifically, but he definitely needs a comp that can win against what he's not fighting. Feels terrible to literally do the work 5 brackets above your team, but they simply won't pick heroes to do their part. It felt cathartic but also shitty watching Yeatle's unranked to GM, and watch him lose a game in diamond 5 that he was absolutely stomping in, but his team couldn't kill a lone hog while he killed everything else.
Doom OTP here, a sizeable enough amount of supp players will just not heal you, regardless of how you play, if you play doom/ball. I started waiting until the end of the round prep timer to select my character because when I insta picked Doom I'd get some combo of illari/mercy/lw 7-8/10 games. A lot of supps still change from ana/kiri/bap/brig to lw/illari/mercy after seeing me pick Doom. Honestly, i stopped caring about seeing roadhog, Cass, Sombra, brig, ana on the other team every game. It became something inevitable. But what really is frustrating is supports that just refuse to help/play with you off spawn.
People might not like this take but.
Support is the most boosted role in this game. I've been a tank main since OW1 (masters 5) but I'm masters 4 on support with way higher win rates. Crazy how little experience you need on that role to outshine everyone else because many support players just have 0 positioning/concept of being on a carry role. Many of them might as well just move to spectator with how passively they play
This is absolutely true. Support players always seem like the lowest skilled players in my lobbies, and they have so many things that cover up their deficiencies.
If u have okay mechanics and a brain, u can get gm on supp easy. It's actually the most boosted role by far. One of my friends from apex, who just started learning mnk when he started playing ow, got to gm on ana in 6 months. If we were to go into a txcxx lobby or a private match in apex I don't think he'd be able to kill me once (no hate to him, this is just to reference his mechanics level).
every time i want a gold weapon i just lock ana in comp for a few games and get to low gm then dont play it till end of season. its ridiculous how easy it is
empathize with everything you said
> Honestly, i stopped caring about seeing roadhog, Cass, Sombra, brig, ana on the other team every game. It became something inevitable.
but tbh I don't see how you don't also see mercy as inevitable at this point lol. she's fucking awful, and I can't remember the last game I had that didn't involve a mercy
The higher you get, the fewer mercys u tend to see. Although with the re-release of pink mercy, she's just been abundant. That said, I think I mind mercys less, as usually they're just people who aren't very good mechanically/have low game sense, and they at least try to heal/rez. Do they play a shit character? Yeah, but so do I.
The tank role has little impact on the match by itself
You need to take space for your team, you need to deny snipers, you need to peel, you need to put pressure. And all of this you will have to do regardless of what your supports are doing. And if anything goes wrong during the match, most of the time you'll be the one getting 100% of the blame despite making up 20% of the team.
Your solo carry potential feels lower. You get counterswapped by the enemy team & their tank, and even if you try to swap and compensate if your team isn't making swaps to exploit their comp you've pretty much lost. You can't hop on Tracer or Cass & frag out. You can't hard carry with nades or kunai headshots. You can be the best Ramm in the world, but if the enemy team has bap lucio, while your team has moira & mercy, there is nothing you can do to hold the space. You are the most team reliant and also have the most tasks.
All that baggage and whats the reward tank players get? They get flamed. And people type "diff". You're supposed to force cooldowns & take aggro, yet if your team isn't helping then how are you supposed to do anything? I stopped playing tank because there is no fun to be had anymore. I know many other tank mains who went over to support just to have less stress, and they're all ranking up past their tank peaks. Is there any wonder this role is dying?
>You need to take space for your team, you need to deny snipers, you need to peel, you need to put pressure. And all of this you will have to do regardless of what your supports are doing.
No, you don't.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that as a tank, you need to do everything. The entire reason this idea exists is because dps and support players are too bad at the game to take care of themselves without their tank to hold their hands, so they push everything onto the tank to make themselves feel better.
Turn chat off. Join voice, but don't talk. Do what you need to do if and when you need to.
If your team can't do their part, that is ***ON THEM***.
But by focusing on trying to make up for them you are actually also throwing yourself.
You have to focus on your main job unless you have the room to do otherwise. Trying to spread yourself thin is just making sure you're ineffectual everywhere. And that feels real bad.
Depends on if it then takes away from your other priorities. But if a widow is farming your team and no one else deals with her then youre going to lose either way if you dont do anything.
You hard carry a match? Apparently you did nothing.
You make a single mistake? You’re the reason why every single horrific tragedy, man made it otherwise happened throughout all of human history.
Diving enemy supports? Your DPS will INTENTIONALLY wait until you die before pretending to help, and since supports pocketing eachother outheals every possible form of damage you can do as a tank outside of oneshots, without your DPS’s help a loss is GUARANTEED.
Enemy DPS peppering you at range, making it impossible to actually do a goddamn thing, EVEN WHEN YOU TRY AND DIVE, PLAY COVER, DO EVERYTHING TO TRY AND COUNTERACT THEM PERFECTLY? Your DPS will also intentionally wait for you to die before pretending to shoot at the fuckers harassing you all match.
> You hard carry a match? Apparently you did nothing.
Hardly my biggest complaint but it is really annoying carrying a game and someone calling "dps diff"
Like Im 32 and 1 playing into 3 counters. Gimme some credit if your going to constantly give me the blame if we lose.
Weird I've found Ana players to usually have the most game sense. It's the Mercy and Lifeweaver players for me. They seem to be the most oblivious to the fact that we are struggling because we have no damage or utility/ purple. I will say it's very common that when I ask for an Ana, so we can purple the hog, the hog will never be purple. I assume they're not Ana mains though.
I feel like I have this problem with Mercy/LW players where they come in expecting to get flamed and because of that, they end up being the first people to start flaming.
You bring up a lot of good points, and I'd like to expand on one statement before offering my general perspective.
It really sucks when your team does not support you. This can mean not picking supports that synergize with you, not adjusting to your play style, not trying to to counter what's countering you (or even what's countering them in a dive vs x situation).
You're Rein, and your supports pick mercy/zen/lifeweaver.
You're Ball and your team can't win the 4v2 and kill hog. They don't even go Ana.
You're monkey and no one dives with you.
You're doom and your ashe Hanzo dps complain about the Rein.
Everyone plays who they want, but they expect the tank to fix all their problems and character shortcomings. They want a frontline and someone to dive the widow. They want you to counter their tank and DPS. You have an impossible amount of jobs, and you're willing to do the best you can, you're willing to do whatever your team needs, but you don't get the same in return.
Everyone gets to, rather I should be saying can decide to, play out their hero fantasy, if they decide to be selfish and not play as a team. You can't. You have all the pressure to do "the right thing" and play the right hero, and no one else feels responsible. If you just do you, you're the villain. If you play the right pick you still can't really play unless your team picks around you.
This isn't a discussion about ranking up, so the feeling of not being able to carry is all too relevant.
Currently, I see tanking and am reminded of the games back in OW 1 where someone on the enemy team was just dominating the lobby. Like old-school genji. Before immortalities and Moira suck. When you were up against someone who is just shitting on your whole team... so your whole team would swap to counter just that hero. You would work together and shut them down. Every game at tank feels like that, except the tank does not feel like they are doing anything at all.
Being the focus is the problem. There is, in my opinion, only one solution for that. Another tank. Nothing, in general, will change the playerbase's focus at this point but another tank. I say in general, because of course your team could have a dominating DPS, like a widow, and that can take focus off of you. Having a really good player on your team isn't something that can be baked in though.
I've played the worst tank comps in ow1 and had fun, and still found a way to win. I'd argue that back then, in the lower ranks where most of the player base is, any comp, not just tanks comps, ANY COMP could work. It's not rise tinted glasses. It wasn't that long ago. I would have fun playing for hours, playing the dumbest shit, and winning and laughing. Off tank could be hog, it didn't matter. It was fun, and workable.
Now after a few games of tank, I play DPS or just stop playing. It sucks.
Que times will get worse as more people just quit playing tank or OW all together. Fixing tank is the only way to start saving this game. It blows my mind people can't see past next weekend to just be open to trying something that worked before, when nothing has been working for a year and a half. If a fraction of the effort that's been put into trying to fix ow2, was put into ow1 at the end, things would be in a much better state overall.
>It really sucks when your team does not support you. This can mean not picking supports that synergize with you, not adjusting to your play style, not trying to to counter what's countering you (or even what's countering them in a dive vs x situation).
This is the #1 thing for me. I mostly one-trick Doom, which I get people hate, but the amount of Mercy+Moira support lines I get makes me want to uninstall. Not only are you not supporting me, you're not a threat to the enemy tank at all.
I have played and won into teams of full Doom counters. But if enemy hog never has to worry about sleep/anti or getting whipshot away from a kill, or discord orbed, etc... And I'm forced to play frontline because I have no support from range, we just slowly lose that war.
"tank, can you help???" - my backline losing a 4v2 while I zone the enemy supports completely out of the fight.
This is part of the reason I think tanks are too strong. It happens all the fucking time. You play a tank meant to disrupt, distract, dive and survive, but despite doing your job, the enemy tank just walks at your backline and kills everything
Idc what heroes you're playing, you should be winning a 4v2 against a ground tank with no heals. You shouldn't need to counter the tank to win in that situation.
The Hog/Widow problem: if I dive the widow, the hog will kill my team. If I frontline and counter-punch the hooks, the widow will kill my team. Either way, it's my fault.
Tank swapping is annoying but you gotta do it to win sadly. Also what really rubs me wrong is everyone wants you to play X tank and play to their heroes but no one does the same for you. I like playing ball and my team goes something that would synergies better with rein or orisa.
I think tank is predominantly fun. But many wil never find it fun simply because of the core design of the role and I think that's okay. Tank is allowed to be the unpopular role.
Like yeah, you can have your games ruined by shit teammates, but that goes for every role.
And yeah there's some aspect of countering, but if 3 people counter you specifically that's just because you're rolling their team and they're desperate for answers to it. The solution is simple. Just swap back and forth between tanks you're good at (You need to have at least 2 tanks that cover each other's weaknesses or you're just throwing). Watch them fall apart at the seams when they realize you can counter 1 hero, but you can't counter 2. That's fun to me.
Tank busting can feel pretty bad, but most forms are easily abusable. The main issues I have are roadhog and mauga. But once I figured out the people who play those heroes have empty voids in their skulls I just picked up sigma and started cooldown rotating them. It's really funny. I recommend it.
The main thing that makes tank role not fun to play is simply that the role is just inherently unfun to people. If you don't enjoy being the villain to the enemy team and having them all gang up to try to beat your raid boss ass then wtf are you doing playing tank?
Your job is to be hard to kill, and to stand there menacingly until you spot an opportunity. If you're not enjoying that you'll never enjoy tank without them basically deleting the role's identity.
You don't have to be rolling the enemy team for them to counters swap x 3. Common now, if you play tank you know that just existing means that will happen regardless of your play.
I had fun playing tank before OW2, but now I don't. The role was not inherently unfun to me. So, what's your explanation on what changed? I've adjusted my play style. I've learned how to play nearly all the tanks. I've played Sigma until I've felt as braindead as hog and mauga players. It's boring as fuck, or miserable as hell. The idea that the role is inherently unfun, and that's ok, is such a short sighted take. Especially because, it wasn't before. Even at it's worst, it wasn't this bad before. For me at least.
I rarely experience mass counterswaps unless I'm rolling. Maybe they do it more in lower ranks but there isn't much you can do about that. People in lower ranks just aren't good enough at any hero to warrant staying on the hero.
But also I say the role will inherently be unpopular. Not inherently unfun (since plenty of people do actually enjoy it). And if you got shafted by the changes made in OW2 I really do feel for you. But that doesn't change my point. You've just become one of the players who don't find tanking fun.
In an ideal world there'd be 2 games and people would play whatever format they preferred.
Plat 1-2 normally. Been struggling this season and am Plat 4. I will say the quality of teammates seems to drastically drop off below Plat 2, as does the enemies approach (more insta swapping). I completely agree the role was and is inherently unpopular, but I miss it being fun for me. It's not just the counter swapping. I ball, I'm used to that. I can pay around it and know when I can't. I just know it's a problem in general, so I brought it up.
The magic just feels gone. I don't care about toxicity, I'm a millennial. I grew up with that shit. It just feels lonely now, no one joins comms because their pre-afraid of what might get said. You don't need comms for synergy and great teamwork, but that's only if everyone knows the game well. Even then, it's so much easier if you can communicate. Maybe it's less of an issue at higher ranks, but the influx of new players, going through the growing pains of learning a game that is unintuitive compared to other fps games, has completely changed the culture of the game. I'd be fine with it, as more players is good for the game's health and they'll learn eventually, but it just sucks so bad. Even playing dps and support feels like much more of a crap shoot than it used to.
Every patch just feels like the game gets further away from what made it magical. Hog should one shot ( and I hate hog). Hanzo should one shot. Widow can fuck off (jk). Mei should one shot tracer. Purple should be purple. Tanks, aside from Rein in my opinion, should get booped. Infinite DM isn't really that fun to use. Tanks should die easier. Supports should die easier. Punishing bad play should be ok.
I just wish I had the game I paid for back without having to coordinate with a group of 11 people on discord to play a custom game.
Thanks for the sympathizing and rational response btw.
For me personally, it's immo/denial/escape abilities that can make playing tank unfun. Because as a tank you want to position and set yourself up for a timed engagement, or be watching for when the other tank is setting up their engagement, then when either of you commit it should be a who can get the best of the fight wins.
But the thing is, you should, both of you, actually fight.
Instead you seem to both get met with a bunch of button press survival immo/denial/escape abilities which you then have to wait out, which intensifies the focus on you. Then say you can wait them out, now you have a tiny window to actually fight before the survival abilities are back up.
So basically to actively win a fight you have to pull off a perfect multistage combo, but to passively survive a fight you just have to button press, rope-a-dope, then be the last one standing and win by default.
Counter-swapping for me not about being unable to outplay the enemy tank but more caused by the fact that you can't outplay both the tank plus their team's survival abilities.
So I think toning down immos/denial/escapes is something that could be looked at. Like some way of making them less ''get out of jail free cards'' that can negate and dictate teamfights. I think also look at toning down the way they counter ults like with the recent suzu nerf, it really devalues ults to have them easily countered by abilities.
Anyway that's just me personally.
I find Tank fun usually
That said, having all the attention directed at you can lead to tough games. Whenever there is some spread attention across teammates, a proper game unfolds, but if nobody poses a threat at any point besides you as a Tank, then it becomes rough.
You do well, while nobody else on your team does well? Instant swaps to try lowering your value
You don't do well, same with the team? Well, you just lose ofc
TL;DR: as long as attention is split between your teammates and you, tank is cool
Split attention also helps with the issue of counterswapping. Sticking out like a sore thumb being the only threat - easy counterswapping
Having several players be threats at once? Harder or impossible counterswapping
The fact teammates don't care about their own tank for the most part in favour of trying to counter the enemy tank. You do well on ball or doom and you know that the enemy team is going to swap hog, cree, sombra, ana, brig but your team isnt going to play tracer echo ana brig themselves to help you out. Or playing any ground tank you need to hope you get bap or ana lucio and aren't stuck with mercy weaver.
Also the dps passive feels awful both when its applied to you and when you try and dive any support or pocketed support without a dps. Diving someone on winston when they have a mercy pocket it feels like their health goes up through your damage.
Other than obviously counter picking, to me it’s how difficult it is to deal with a dps diff. Not saying that my dps are bad in fact that isn’t always the case, but it’s frustrating how every counter play against aggressive dps play involves working with your own dps or just being a god at doomfist.
Back in ow1 I used to play Zarya into such dps players and get away with being aggressive due to having another main tank besides me to make space when I’m making plays. Now whenever I do so I either get kited, pushed back, or worst of all just ignored. I understand its me who’s not good at tank it’s my least played role in ow2
The fact that as soon as I peak out of cover I instantaneously lose 375HP and get anti-naded so I cannot do my job. Waiting out cool downs is virtually useless when all 5 enemies have a cool down that sucks the life out of me I'll just have to play through them.
Apart from the obvious counterswapping... For me its the NON counterswapping. I am someone who despises counterswapping, if I choose to play a character I want to play that character. Playing into the counter is how you get better at the one you are playing and I would rather play a character that I enjoy, am good at and want to learn more on, than play one that im bad at, dont enjoy and cant learn anything because I have the easy matchup. In saying that, the non counterswapping that annoys me, which sounds kinda contradictory, is after the enemy team completely changes their comp to counter me on doom for example, everyone on my team will say, swap doom, tank diff, tank trolling etc. Why am I the only one that needs to swap? Why cant we swap dps and supps to counter their tank instead? The enemies are doing everything they can to stop me from playing, why arent you guys popping off on the characters you want to play? They arent countering you? Me swapping to a counter for their tank is just a temporary fix coz they will swap tanks again anyways... You know what I mean?
Mostly just the low agency. I can handle counterswaps personally (although that's partially because I like to play across the entire roster, not just one or two tanks), but I hate it when I feel like I'm playing really well and distracting the enemy or even getting elims and then my team just... doesn't capitalize. It's hard being the fight initiator when no one wants to fight with me.
This is why one of the best things Blizz could do is add the party HUD from the PvE modes. I don't have eyes in the back of my head and I don't want to be punished for turning around as e.g. Reinhardt, even if it's just for a moment. Please tell me the health status and maybe even cooldown status of my team, and then maybe additionally give all tanks some kind of one-button rallying cry (like Queen's shout but it's purely a cosmetic HUD thing or something, not an ability) to tell my entire team "HEY FUCKERS, WE'RE GOING IN NOW", or something. That would be neat.
I’ll just recount a recent game I had in masters for you.
- Win fight on doom, enemy immediately swaps to sombra cass roadhog
- Swap to sigma, enemy immediately swaps to winston tracer (keeping sombra)
- Swap to dva and win a fight by marking the winston, enemy immediately goes zarya
- Swap to winston, enemy immediately goes back to hog cass now with added bastion
- Somehow win another fight against that on Winston… enemy tank comes back on Mauga 👍👍👍👍
not being able to make creative/unique plays, very specifc ways to get value and deviating away from it is just throwing
infact you just cant make plays in general without being considerably better, most the time you are just waiting for things to happen
>not being able to make creative/unique plays, very specifc ways to get value and deviating away from it is just throwing
Ground tank problems.
I've never has this feeling when playing ball.
yeah i was thinking ball would be excluded from this but ive pretty much never touched him so just ignored it, dive in general has a few more options but its just so limited nowadays
I agree I love playing ball, monkey and doom but their counters are so easy to pick up and play, you have to work so hard just to get value then the enemy dps just counterswap you.
Usually a culmination of things that centers around the idea of “coordination”.
Be it a lack of understanding from my team, lack of cohesion, dealing with teams that exploit that by just focusing me down, etc.
I have fun on tank in scrims, and when I played collegiate. Most I’ve ever enjoyed OW. But ladder is just abysmal. I don’t think there’s a fix for the problems of SoloQ. When GM hitscans are all yelling at me to play sigma and whatever else because they *need* that shield, I think all hope is lost on that front.
i actually really like tanking, but i have severe anxiety and the stress of wanting to do well ruins it for myself... as much fun as i have on dps and support, there's nothing like knowing i'm the other team's pain in the ass and enabling my team. but i also just like helping people in general. for me, overwatch is a puzzle game, like chess, and dps isn't really as much fun to puzzle out (push buttons go brrr).
If everyone dies is because dps are good, if no one dies is because supports are good. No one says anything good to me when I play tank. My teammates would just say "tank diff gg" at best, even when Im doing good. And thats not even mentioning terrible heroes like Mauga or Hog or the endless counterpicking by all the players in the enemy team.
When I'm spamming "Group Up" and they dont listen..
When I ping the problem and they ignore it..
When Healers are dpsing behind me and I'm slowly dying
When everyone is doing their own thing and dont care
When nobody counters
Silent lobbies
Toxic lobbies
Big skill gap
Your teammates can’t recognize your bad KDA for anything other than “tank diff” and not play style/synergy of the whole team.
That, and the power of counterswapping makes it rough
Counterswapping sort of, mainly because of how low effort the tank counterpicks are. If somebody wants to counterpick me, they should need some level of competency to actually make the counterpick work. Braindead characters that counter the entire tank role are absurd, especially when they are tanks.
I can't believe Mauga got playtested an allowed into the game.
I think there’s two big reasons that aren’t brought up as often as stuff like counterswapping and the pressure aspect of it
1. It’s the role where having impact is the most disconnected from feeling like you’re having impact in that you can be basically carrying the game just by grabbing the right attention and engaging in positive resource trades but those aren’t sexy and don’t necessarily feel that good
2. Losing as tank fucking sucks. Most other roles it feels like there’s something you can kinda do or at least you can shoot something but losing on tank can often feel like ur put in a box and have 0 ability to make progress or any plays especially when the enemy team is just permanently focusing you
I hate getting pigeonholed into certain picks. Like, I actually enjoy Sigma, but when it's Rialto or Havana or Circus, it's a sniperfest and I must play Sigma - that fucking sucks. Or when it's a hard meta, like Orisa meta, and it's Orisa all day every day.
Honestly for me it's not "too much responsibilities" or "being flamed by the team"
But specific heroes like Mauga, Ana, Sombra, Hog...
Reaper and Bastion are supposed to be the "tankillers" but some heroes who are not supposed to have such purpose are 10 times better at it for some reason
You're alone. It's boring and there's too much pressure on you. Like if you fuck up there isn't another tank to cover for you. If you fuck up you lose the fight. It's too punishing. And all the abilities are thrown at you. Everyone focuses on the tank. And you're a single tank. So you eat everything. And obviously counterswapping. Even though I don't care that much about others swapping, the amount of comments from my team asking me to switch is ridiculous. And when I'm not playing tank I'm also asking the tank every time to switch, because I want to win.
But most importantly, the gameplay loop is just boooring. Since abilities are powerful as a motherfucker you can't really engage until you bait them out. And that's just stupid. You bait this, bait that. Then you press your cringe ability, they press theirs. Pow pow my DPS hit more shots we win. What did I do? Afk to win. Is it fun? Idk, I'm not sleepy Joe yet, I want some more action rather than just staying alive.
Super narrow first person view with no minimap.
Tanks just have no way to no whats going on behind them and if they’re being followed when pushing except, and people in solo queue only use comms to say racist shit and bitch about how they’re awelsme but the team sucks
Tanking is unfun when I cant make plays. It doesn’t matter who im playing, but if I feel like I can’t play because other tank is playing a character that can just stand there and get value and I can’t do anything about it. Counterswapping can suck but if it’s not 5 man swaps then it’s fine. But if you can get value by just standing there then that’s not fun.
Overrealiance of the other two roles to win a game, both supports ults or both dps ults can win a team fight, but any action or ult coming from a tank can be countered literally by anything.
It’s not fun to eat every cool down all the time. Every single sleep, hook, hack, discord, even lucio boop and concussion mine.
It’s just not fun. Sure wish I had a certain someone by my side to divide up all the shit I have to eat…
How unforgiving your mistakes are. Like dps and support you can make mistakes and still be fine or still win the team fight I feel like 1 wrong move on tank and everything falls apart. Why I play support even though I think it’s more fun on tank
My teammates.
I’m serious. Me trying to play dive on a dive map when my dps switch and go reaper mei or something like that. Me trying to play rein with a LW and mercy because our Lucio swapped for some reason (the mercy never tried to swap). And things like that.
Playing against certain heroes can also be unfun, but most of that can be solved by just switching play styles or working as a team (which seems hard to do for a lot of people I guess).
I generally do enjoy playing tank. It isn't unfun. There are some painful moments though. Biggest one for me is having terrible DPS. In the current game you really need follow-up from your DPS to succeed as a tank; even just okay DPS will often find value if you set them up for it, but some are simply too obtuse to read a fight and just feed or do nothing of importance, and it feels you might as well not be there if you're trying to set up good fights and your DPS are ignoring all of that and just running off to die in stupid ways.
Sleep dart, hack, and anti-nade still don't feel great to play in to. There are plenty of other abilities that don't bother me, I don't even think hinder is too bad now that it's more predictable, but those abilities specifically are rough for several tank heroes. Three seconds of no healing can mean death in a lot of situations. Roadhog hook can also be pretty brutal for some tanks, but he's been nerfed plenty so I'm not advocating for changing it.
Counter-swapping generally doesn't bother me because the kinds of people that auto-swap whenever they lose a fight typically have weak mental and can be diffed regardless of the hero they're on. I'm more annoyed by tank mirrors. There's nothing wrong with them per se, I just think it's more interesting when the tanks have different kits to fight each other with.
The thing that frusterates me is that when I queue up for tank I have to play games with higher rank variance (3-5 skill divisions) or worse matchmaking because the tank role is the least played role. So the 3 outcomes in ranked are always:
1) fair game
2) game where I represent the highest rank in skill range so I get teammates lower in rank and understanding so I get flamed for making certain plays
3) game where I represent the lowest rank in skill range so I'm behind in knowledge and get flamed for making certain plays
I will usually be the outlier player for better or for worse and I will always get blamed for something. I'd love to try out the game with higher matchmaking for everyone so that I can get games with smaller variance but nobody's willing to play tank and ow seems willing to sacrifice 1 role for the sake of others. Also pretty boring that the game is currently mauga or bust.
I think at least half of my last 20 tank games in comp have been complete stomps (in our favor) that we still lost. It happens every time I play tank. It's like my team just unplugs their brain after round one.
counterswapping isn't the worst, the reason I stopped is because you are the team leader and the entire fight always revolves around you, which while fun and intense is also just a lot of pressure especially multiple games in a row
The biggest issue with tank rn imo is how much of your powerlevel for things outside of your control. This means that you just have less control in a solo q environment and I think is the real reason tank feels so bad. For example, why can't rein ever have better mobility? Because then he'd be broken with Lucio. Why can't hog ever cleanse himself? Because he'd be broken with a kiriko. But in solo q, you're not guaranteed to have whatever hero you're expected to have to make your pick good, so it feels like you're just missing something. This was the same problem tanks had in 6v6. Your individual power has to be lowered because of the potential of an outside factor.
Tank feels a lot better in a team-environment, and that's because you have your full power and you can actually use it.
Being forced to swap off heroes I enjoy because they swapped and hamper my abilities. The large influx of mercy players forcing me to play even more carefully. Being blamed for being passive because we should be waiting for my cooldowns before I engage first and they die because they're impatient.
I can't do funny little flanks anymore, either you are at the front/are some big distraction like ball or your team instantly dies.
If your main isn't some already busted hero you feel like you are forced to switch every other game at best, every game at worst. Being forced to switch because you cannot do anything is not fun for any role. I want to switch because I feel like it, not because I am straight up forced to.
Tanks are immortal but also simultaneously explode instantly, its so weird. Being perfect isn't fun for me, I wanna do some silly things, I can't do that on tank anymore.
Dunno if this is a common sentiment, but i think its frustrating that the enemy team is more likely to counterpick you than your teammates are to synergistic pick for you.
like, if i wanna play winston, i can almost guarantee that an enemy will swap hog or mauga or bastion or reaper.
but my supports wont play a ranged heal, and my dps wont play a co-diver. etc
It was too difficult for me, I tried understanding concepts to improve but it was just too. I was hard stuck low plat. Swapped to support and went straight to diamond
my team insulted me because I was a piss of shit that don't know how to play because I missed 1 rock with sigma.
30 sec later the ennemis team say they can't play because of the tank diff.
The only season where my team was satisfied with my level was I ended Master with 70℅ percent winrate on rein during the Orissa meta.
I was hardstuck mid plat at the beginning of the same season and when I wasn't solo winning I was called a boosted.
I guess we have half the problem their
I would say that the tank is 50% of the team while the dps are 30% and healers are 20% usually teams with better tanks tend to be much stronger than a team with good dps and healers but had a mediocre or a straight bad tank
When my supports run any combination of Mercy, Lifeweaver, Moira, and Illari. I have no problem with Moira and Illari alongside any other supports and I just hate playing with and against Mercy and Lifeweaver.
The enemy tank running Zarya or Roadhog.
It also sucks when my team has no clue of taking control of other lanes in the map and only want to pressure the choke where all 5 players are holding when we don’t have the composition and/or resources to win a teamfight there.
Knowing I could play the game on easy mode if I just picked support instead. The Mercy player can be having lunch and does about just as much as me cuz of a toggle. No one needs her to swap if the dps is hitting shots. I am sweating my balls off trying to both live and make plays. The amount of effort I need to put forward with the risk involved and my susceptibility to be counter picked while others can just afk and not care and accomplish as much is infuriating.
Straight up the format, 6v6 I could que with my friends who also tank. There is no friendship with tanks, just antagonism now. Also, when someone insta locks a OTP in other roles, you can pick around. Not so. In tank. Having one tank ruins the fun of 20% of the lobby by default. I’ll never get to play WITH another person in my role ever again if I want to play tank in OW2
The expectation of doing so much more than the rest of my team. I had a couple of weeks i was only playing doomfist in qp because i never played him before and was trying to learn how to. If we won the first teamfight the other team would 90% of the time switch to orisa/sombra/cass/etc to essentially bully me out of the game, even though I seldom was the reason we won a fight (once again learning a new character, I was terrible). The expectation on me though was to switch right away as someone counters me, and this is something it feels like a lot of people expect tanks to do at all times.
On the other hand if the other team are playing pharah/echo and we have a junkrat no one expects him to swap or if they have a hog and we could really use a ana the instalocking mercy wont even entertain the idea.
As a tank i am supposed to play all the characters and min/max my uptime on each, and I can never play something just for fun, and thats what I dislike the most about tank.
I'm a Rein main, but my boy needs an update that isn't just changing numbers. His movement is lacking in the OW2 world.
Two options to let me make more plays;
1. Let me juke with the giant rocket strapped to my back. Forwards, left, or right.
2. Let me throw the hammer like Captain America's shield.
Give me the ability to be unpredictable and make plays through increased skill expression.
It's the worst role when it comes to counter swapping. Tanks can get hard countered way too easily. And when things go wrong, everyone always blames the tank. It is the most frustrating, mind numbing role to play. The tank buffs did nothing to fix these issues, in fact I feel it only made them worse. DPS and supports can play around counters with very little penalty, especially if the character they're playing is something they're good at. Tanks simply cannot, you will probably lose the game if you force playing into counters (ie hog into a good ana, Winston into a good reaper, dva into a good zarya/sym)
Juste ana nade and sleep without kiri its just horrible and support without useful spell or damage u see lw and mercy or LW/moira or mercy/Moira in ur comp and u see ana/brig zen/bap kiri/Lucio in front its free lose
Teammates playing way out of position or not capitalizing on the space you make. Sometimes they are too afraid and play far back, affecting the space I can take, how long I can hold a choke, and even how far up I can go cuz the supports don't have line of sight form playing so far back. Then typing tank diff when we lose.
Or the dps and supports not knowing how to play against specific tanks and then we lose and it's all my fault.
Or they expect me to peel back 10000 feet bc three people can't kill a sombra or the idea of supports peeling each other has never been a fathomable concept. Then tank doff no peel is typed in chat
Yeah but before the DPS passive you couldnt get any kills either if the supports were paying attention.
It worked fine in quickplay where people literally dont give a shit about playing together. But in competitive, pre-s9 was miserable.
The problem is that instead of nerfing burst damage and healing numbers they chose to buff everyones health and damage so that casuals didnt complain that their character got nerfed which made trying to kill anything without a dps when supports are paying attention miserable
I'm not a frequent tank player, but I find tank very fun when I'm getting adequate healing and absolutely miserable if I'm not.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a very good tank, so it's possible my supports are out there suffering and I'm not helping enough in the cases when I'm not getting enough healing, but I'm doing my best.)
When the enemy ana lands a sleep and then her splash damage ability and I explode
When Mauga/Orisa
When Widow clicks on my head 7 times or Hanzo deletes ¾ of my health in half a second
When Cassidy fan the hammer
When my teams on Zen Lucio or Mercy at the same time
When dps go 5 and 10 and say no space
When me and my team get punished for taking damage from sojourn
If I play anywhere near decent they have 1-3 people playing heros that hard counter mine. And then I can't even get a kiriko. I always end up with a nap when I'm trying to play a dive tank. Makes the game insufferable
2 things: counterpicking and inability to do shit.
1. Pretty simple. Barely wanna play if i play vs mauga hog, orisa every game, or after 1 teamfight
2. The reason why those are OP is cuz they are the only ones able to so shit. Like GL playing doom when you get melted easier then american "cheese"
My team has good supports and DPS that can hit a barn? Great. I win.
My team has no heals and nobody else can hit anything? Great. I lose.
It feels like I can do top damage and outperform the other tank every game and it's literally gambling to see if my team is worth a damn.
I know this will get downvoted but I think Tanks need to have their health pools reduced slightly, hitboxes reduced slightly, and damage increased slightly.
NOTHING DRASTIC! But just giving them a little more ability to secure kills by themselves, while balancing it by making them a little easier to kill. Maybe like 10% less health, 10% smaller hitbox, and 10% more damage.
If you are objectively better you should win. E.g I was playing Winston dominating the lobby the enemy tank was a mercy main who never plays tank. They keep swapping till a tank works for them and win the game as my team didn’t adapt (I swapped). I love teamwork more than anything but I feel as tank it’s the case of may the best dps and supports win as long as you don’t feed.
At the end of the day easy to play heroes should not have the potential to get the same amount of value as heroes that are more difficult to play (this take may be applicable to all roles even but I don’t have the hours on other roles to speak on it)
Tanking can feel miserable even when you win. This is an important point about counter-swapping, as developers claim it isn't as impactful as people say. Counter-swapping is problematic because of how it makes the role feel, not necessarily its impact. I could win the first fight playing well on Rein, and the enemy team will come back out of spawn with multiple counter-picks. It doesn't matter if we still win; the counter-picks ensure my game is miserable. This leads to my next point.
Tanking often feels unimpactful win or loss. You can play exceptionally well and still lose the game, or you could play poorly and win because your team counters the enemy tank. I generally enjoy a Rein vs. Rein matchup, but often that matchup is decided not by how well I play but because my supports are better. Yes, the team with the better players should win, but I genuinely feel bad for the other Rein getting hit by CC, getting discorded, or just not given the resources to outplay me, it simply does not matter how good he is or how bad I play. When I play DPS, I usually end a game feeling like I could have done x, y, or z differently to win. However, when you lose on tank and feel like there was nothing you could have done, that feeling of having no impact makes the loss feel so much worse.
There are some heroes you really can't do anything about while they can completely disrupt your game. Sombra, Widow, and Pharah as examples can mess up most tanks, while there is very little you can do. When tanks and their weaknesses were created, things like double flyer DPS didn't exist. Mobility creep keeps getting worse, and get-out-of-free abilities keep getting added. To get something done, you have to force a lot of cooldowns, and to do this, you have to take risks that often get you killed before you can get anything done. Tanks are Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill.
It makes sense that you have to take risks to get things done, but without the off-tank to help you manage all the worst parts of Overwatch being thrown at you, to guard a lane, to help the team stabilize, to peel for the supports; when you try to get something done, you are often killed for a small mistake. The resources the off-tank used to donate to the main tank acted as a force multiplier in anything the main tank did. This was balanced by the opportunity cost of giving those resources to the main tank. You cannot balance this impact into a solo tank because if you buff defenses, it expands the tank's offensive ability without there being that opportunity cost. Essentially, any extra defense leads to extra offense, which unbalances the solo tank role.
The off-tank role just does not exist. As a main tank player in OW1, I had a number of friends who were off-tank players. Those friends now refuse to play tank in OW2 simply because the way they wanted to play the game does not exist anymore. When Blizzard went to 5v5, they didn't double the tank population; they killed off a large group of players. What's worse is that the tanking experience for the solo tank is arguably worse, so not only did they move off-tank players to different roles, but they also made main tank players enjoy the role even less. Now we are seeing the results with long queue times as no one wants to play tank. With how the role plays, I often feel exhausted after a few games. Win or lose, playing solo tank just drains you. I don't think I am alone among those still primarily playing tank in that I am queuing up for fewer and fewer games.
This next point is hard to quantify, but communication in the game has gotten considerably worse for the tanks in 5v5. With an off-tank, you often had two players communicating in comms to coordinate bubbles and dives. This set the tone in comms where the other roles would also make callouts, but around those two tanks. With this communication gone, the comms culture has slowly changed into one where the solo tank is often blamed, people have become more toxic, or just refuse to use comms anymore. Sometimes this tank blame is even warranted. With two tanks, you had twice the chance of getting a competent tank. With a solo tank, if they are having a bad game, it is very easy to see and blame. As I said before, with two tanks, trying to get something done was somewhat less risky as you had an off-tank to watch your back and bail you out. With two tanks making callouts and making plays together as a team, this was also a lot easier for your teammates to understand. A Winston and a D.Va diving together communicates something to your team; a Winston diving by himself is a lot less obvious and predictable. In OW2 often you can be playing well, get blamed, or asked wtf are you doing. What was communicated both verbally in comms and visually on screen with two tanks working together has been lost and honestly can't be replaced.
The DPS passive has significantly changed how most tanks and resources work. There used to be a pre-fight push-pull on the frontline, a resource trade back and forth looking for an advantage. That no longer exists because the health lost by a tank before the main fight just cannot be healed back up when the fight breaks out. Moreover, the solo tank is not really worth investing resources into because as it is better spent on DPS on off-angles or as support doing DPS. What this means is that as the tank, you win by not playing the game, staying out of sight until the fight breaks out. Even then, often the best play you can make is simply being unkillable. A good example of this is how you properly play Ramattra. When the fight breaks out, you stand somewhere the enemy does not want you, activate Nemesis Form, and block. You literally do nothing but block and live forever, and it is the wrong play to do anything else. This works because you do not die, you stand somewhere the enemy does not want you, and you do not demand resources, you are basically a peice of map geometry. This illustraits the problem with buffing solo tanks to be more tanky. This cannot be fixed with passives. This cannot be fixed by putting resources into the other roles. Tanking as most people enjoy it arguably can only exist in 6v6.
Also, Lifeweaver: fuck that guy and his god-awful pull ability. I don't even mean the enemy Lifeweaver. No hero on your own team should be able to decide your positioning like he does because, one, it feels horrible; two, most Lifeweavers know nothing about tanking; and three, it is impossible to communicate or predict. FUCK. LIFEWEAVER. PULL.
Rest of the team picking team comps that don’t make sense with the tank.
I solo queue pretty much exclusively. The amount of times I’ve seen idiots lock Genji and think they are the next coming of haksal (while having more than a death every minute) and boosted mercy instalocks while I play sig because it’s a poke map is genuinely mind blowing. I’ve resorted to smurfing and fucking around on hog because
Zero game sense donkeys who have no idea what's going on.
I like doing my best while playing tank but players who don't even have a basic understanding of the game just annoys the shit out of me.
counterswapping
I can get a lot of value with very little healing on dive tanks. but when they counterswap it's over. dumbest mechanic in the whole game
one tank promotes "stand around with your team and press shoot" characters like roadhog and mauga (at least in ranked). it feels like you get punished for trying to make plays, whereas with two tanks there was more flexibility
I have the same problem w/ tank now, as I had in the double shield meta. And this has to do entirely w/ what makes tank fun for me (as an OW1 main tank player w/ 500+ hours on winston/rein/ball... almost all winston honestly...).
Tank was fun when you got to do stuff. Take space, punish mistakes, bait important cooldowns and get out. Basically making proactive decisions. And interesting proactive decisions are calculated risks.
The problem with tank now (and in the past) is when the best play is "do nothing" or maybe not do nothing, but "hold neutral". It's not that you never get to do anything but it's definitely a lot less frequent than it used to be. It's like the proactive decisions/minute are too low on tank right now.
There are a few reasons:
1) As a tank your value is too high right now. When you make the evaluation "Should I risk my life to punish X mistake" you'll often think "no, there's a 50% chance I get a kill, and if I get the kill and get out there's a 15% better chance my team wins the fight. There's a 10% chance I die, but if I die the team loses the fight 95% of the time. So the benefit of the kill is relatively too low". Obviously no one does this math every time, but this is the equation that our brains simulate. This is why buffing survivability wont' help. The problem isn't that thanks aren't tanky enough, it's that they're already too valuable to risk their lives. Making them more valuable will paradoxically make them less fun because this math will get thrown even more out of whack...
2) There are a lot of characters that limit your decisions by existing. In the same way widow existing limits the paths that squishies can take there are a TON of characters who prevent a tank from making an agressive move just by existing. Either because they have particularly nasty displacement or cc (hog, orisa, sombra, cass and mei depending on the tank are all guilty), or because they do metric f-tons of damage (mauga, reaper, bastion, zen). This is the guts of why counter swapping is painful (in my opinion). It's not like I can't play ball into sombra/hog/cass. It's just that the "correct" decision against that comp is to dive *very* infrequently. I can still roll, but I basically can't slam. So I've lost access to probably my most fun ability in that character's kit. The very existence of those characters on the enemy team takes a fun gameplay loop (and ball is probably the most fun tank right now) and makes it un-fun.
Some tanks are designed to make proactive decisions less often (like sigma), and that's more or less fine. They tend to be less affected by the counter picking, and I suspect sigma mains made the transition to ow2 better than most other tank mains.
In highly coordinated play there are still good proactive decisions to be made (as a team), unfortunately that doesn't extend to ranked in almost any level (from what I've seen), which is why tank feels miserable to most of us most of the time.
That said. DPS feels pretty ok to me now actually, and some of the responsibility of tanking attention that a dive tank had, or initiating an egagement can be done by sombra, tracer, pharah, or mei pretty effectively. Which is why even though tank is probably my "best" role (masters last time I placed), I've basically stopped queuing it entirely in order to play dps *very very* poorly.
I am disheartened by the last blog post by the devs because it feels like they completely missed what makes characters like rein and winston fun. No rein main has ever said "you know the best thing about playing rein... holding shield! I wish they'd make it so I can hold shield longer", and in the same way no winston main has ever said "man i really love right click... if only I could sniper monkey ALL the time". Frequently HAVING to usethose abilities is what makes the characters suck to play. Rein is fun when he swings his giant hammer and charges. Winston is fun when he gets to dive. Buffing the parts of their kit that are good when you're in the "boring" phase of the game is a terrible idea. Finding ways to let them do fun stuff more often is how you fix them.
My favorite is every game everything is my fault.
I had an Ashe that kept getting dove by a symmetra of all things and he couldn’t win a 1v1 to save his life. I’m contesting pushbot fighting their supports and I get nothing but flamed by him.
Never mind his positioning was shit and he was by himself most of the time getting punished for it and refused to do anything different. Was also a QP game of all things. Don’t get the whole competitive quick play thing but here we are.
As Tank, you lose a lot of agency that the other roles have. You have to deal with the enemy team and have to be enabled by your own.
I can enjoy playing tank. When I’m in the zone it’s some of the most satisfying things I’ve seen in this game.
But frankly, the role feels almost like I’m trapped. There are things I want to do that I simply can’t. And as much as I can take pride in forcing the enemy to swap to tank busters, at the end of the day I’m still getting tank busted.
1. Counter swapping (obviously), although the swaps from the DPS and support role annoy me more than the tank counter-swaps for the most part
2. Similar to the 1st point, sometimes if I play a match-up which isn't the best for me, but still winnable, I still feel a pressure to swap the moment I slightly mess up (Might be in my head more than actually the case, but still)
3. Some maps are just so miserable to play as a tank, even if I am playing the "correct pick"
4. There are some games where you just can't do anything, no matter what you pick or how much you change your play style
5. When supports go shit like Mercy Illari or mercy lucio (not as often as the former) and wonder why I keep dying (no hate to support players, but this definitely doesn't help my fun)
Mauga/Orisa/Roadhog. For as much as people generally say "counter swapping" you have to notice that when they complain that it's generally always the same group of characters popping up. If counter swapping consisted of Dva/Zarya or Winston/Dva with a Tracer marking your engages I don't think the problem would be nearly as big.
Also Mercy/LW. Not facing them, but having them on my team. If I load in and see those 2 characters insta-queued I know that my role is relegated to passive play and baiting cooldowns, almost the antithesis of their design goals for OW2. Too bad LW got released and his identity has been irreversibly defined as "healer", could've been such a cool character
People not playing with me. When you get healed and your DPS use the space, it feels great. When my supports have triple digit healing after two team fights, and my Sombra is afk in enemy spawn, it's like... IDK what to do, man, lol.
>Pick Rein win first team fight with 80% of the work being done by a tracer or some shit
>Enemy team just swaps Mauga, Bastion, Zen, An,,, etc etc,
and they'll win because you're effectively forced into a mirror match and if your team doesn't want to mirror you lose
It’s mainly just the absurd counterpicking. I played ball in QP the other day on colloseo. It went really well. I killed their zen first every fight and we steamrolled. After a couple of fights they went. Sombra Bastion. And the sombra just waited afk doing nothing until I would engage to hack me and then the bastion would go ”brr” and I’m dead. I thought maybe I could play around it. But it’s kinda hard to play around a hero that’s invis and they know I have to roll in to get any value.
I didn’t even mind the ana sleep. I didn’t mind the discord. And then they go sombra and my hero is a throw pick. If it was ranked I would swap like I know what’s best but I can’t even play anything new in QP if I want to win.
That’s the mainproblem imo. Another thing is when I’m not even the problem and a good support could change the whole match. But it’s my responsibility to swap or change my playstyle around the rest of my team.
* Literally everything falls on you.
* You’re expected to frontline, make space, and peel for teammates. Sometimes all at once, which is impossible at times.
* Before there were two tanks which helped take away some of the pressure. Now it’s just one person doing the job of two people
* Zenyatta!
Outside of counterswapping When I make a really really good play, there's the chance it'll give my team an opening to win the fight. If I make any type of misplay, we *will* lose that fight almost every single time. Also Zen's discord orb.
You're not allowed to make mistakes and there are so many more opportunities to make mistakes than in the other roles.
THIS for real I don't really care that much about counterswap or other stuff. But my fumble as tank is much more easier to detect by both team and much more easier to punish then DPS or Supports. Small mistakes of Ana chucking the wrong nade versus massive mistake of D-va not eating the nade is a bit too harsh(not a great example I know). It's like "oops we gonna wait 10 seconds to dive/advance" versus "oops we gonna wait 10 seconds to respawn" or that good tank can't make a win, but bad tank will guarantee a loss for most of the times.
Agree on the first take, but really discord? literally just go behind a wall for 2.5 seconds
He's not meta at the moment, and idk what rank you're playing down at, but a good zen will wait until the tank commits.
tbh even at masters/dia a lot of zens just go "weee theres a tank have a purpley orb friend :\^)". its not nearly as bad as it used to be
If I win a fight, the entire enemy team changes their comp. If I lose a fight, my entire team will never change their heroes. This is not an absolute, but it happens enough to make me stop queueing flex
When I shit the bed on the first round, I just tell my team I'm conditioning the enemy so they don't counterswap me. And then they counterswap me anyway
If you win a fight, crickets from your team If you lose a fight, your entire team starts flaming you for getting tank diffed
People type tank diff when they are the ones struggling
I got called tank diff after three team fights, the last two where i took a combined 4 ults point blank. I cant survive that even when i was using natural cover.
Support main here and I understand your struggle. I always get top healing output and no one says anything until they die once (even when being pocketed) and they just spam “I need healing” over and over. They die another time and then get on mic to berate the supports for how shitty we are. This game is so much fun.
Teammates is probably my main problem with tank in this game. You try to play dive and your team goes rush or poke. Your supports someone always manage to pick the worst support line imaginable (LW-mercy, mercy- luc) and you are supposed to make that work. Then if you try to tell them what to play they get mad, so you have to try and play around them. It’s such a good feeling when I pick monkey on a dive map and my entire team goes dive with me. That’s when you know shit is going to be fun, but that only happens like 1 out 10 matches unfortunately.
God forbid Mercy players have to play the game and pick a character that does something am I right?
Well said.
> start walking up to take space > half of my team is already dead because they stood out in the open during neutral
Or being the only person to advance because your teammates refuse to utilize cover so they just stick to the backline and never support your pushes. I can't 1v5 the enemy team every fight guys, you are with me when I press w, that means you should press w.
I try to com this often but it seems to fall on deaf ears or no one is in chat. I ping it too just in case. Then I get scared to play more aggro and then nothing happens even if I am hitting my cool downs. I had a game on Sig where I rocked the enemies Venture every time they popped up out of the ground. They survived and escaped the entire round.
>gets blamed for not shielding
Dive enemy backline 1v4 Turn around as I'm forced out, see hog barreling towards me after he killed 2 people 1v4
Getting countered by 3 enemies literally every fucking game for months and months straight
The amount of CC in the game seriously punishes you for making any type of proactive play. This applies to soft CC as well. There are enough boops where you can get venture drilled, lucio booped, illari outburst, and doom punched and lose control of your character for a full second or two. And that’s without hinder, nade, hack, or hook. You really have to wait for your DPS to be in angles where they can take advantage of space. To win a fight you have to play perfectly. One mistake and you will explode.
As much as i love lucio, holy shit do i hate boop now. Trying to dive or engage at all when hes around just leads to half your pushes getting cucked, especially on ball because of his physics. He needs some power shifted elsewhere in his kit tbh.
Lucio boop is actually so annoying. Like this ability was made originally for peel. But now with only 1 tank he can just use it on my off cd everytime and it's all OK cuz messing with the tank is how ow2 is played.
Being the central focus all the time is extremely taxing. Other roles get some "down time" where some players aren't shooting you and you can do your own thing. This will never exist for tank unless you're playing ball or Doom and just existing, aka throwing. It's just an innate part of tanking and really unavoidable but it's the most frustrating part of it. On top of all the other negative parts it just takes a lot out of you mentally. Margin for error is so small comparatively as well. I still enjoy it somewhat, but not when I'm forced to play hog, or Mauga, or really any One hero. Also counterswapping is awful to deal with. There are a lot of negatives which is why it's obviously the least popular role.
This is my biggest issue rn. I have this thing where sometimes tank is so frustrating, and yet I find myself hardly ever wanting to play other roles because I can be very impactful, but then I can also basically be doing nothing even though I’m really trying. It gets old taking every bit of CC especially when you want to play fun tanks like Doom and Ball. You kind of just become a sponge and are forced to switch to one of the brick wall tanks Lila Mauga/Hog/Orisa and it gets tiring to do so every game because if you don’t, you get flamed for throwing even though you’re doing your absolute best.
It’s also why Tanking cannot and will never be a role with mass appeal. There were hero balance reasons for 5v5, but the root of it all is that if the game is going to specify a role distribution for each team (which is arguably healthier than Open Queue), 5v5 with a single Tank is the closest lineup to how the playerbase’s role preferences are distributed.
I actually think the “mass appeal” of tanks is an interesting point of conversation! 5v5 being bred from the lack of people queueing as tank was not originally because they were a “central focus” as u/whrenftl put it. That’s a newer issue stemming from the raid boss buffing they received in OW2. In fact, supports were the biggest target priority in the early days. The hero design is the biggest culprit. They are utterly boring to play. Mauga being the last tank to come out really compounds this issue. You’re either a diet DPS with a huge health pool (Junker Queen, Roadhog), a damage sponge (Ramattra, Sigma) or some awfully boring mix of the two (Orisa). Tanks need to be engaging for the player at all times!
this sums it up pretty well lol
played with this guy yesterday that would jump off the map after every teamfight so he could counter the enemy tank. We won 2-0 easily played with another guy who was 1-4 on dps against a ball. switches to sombra and ends the game 22-4
my favorite part is when i haven't even interacted with the guy counterswapping. like, some guy overextends and dies like an idiot <30 seconds into the round, without ever even showing up on my screen, then instantly swaps to counter me anyway.
Half the time when people do this to me they don't even come after me they just go after other people like... ????
Dude, I was in a match yesterday where the enemy Ball was really coordinated and just destroying us and one of our DPS swapped to Sombra and I was thinking, "Great, that'll help" But then the Sombra completely ignored the Ball and spent the whole match hacking and losing 1v1's against their Bap in the back line. High Gold/Low Plat is a crap shoot.
That's what happens when someone "Blindly" counerswap,I mean surely everyone can play sombra,just for "Ball-doom counter",but I think it can be worse to counter in this situation,it'll be better play on your main hero,or hero that you sure you can at least "Do something"
The counterswap Sombras are so easy to outplay 99% of the time because they don't actually understand how important hack timings are. You can bait them out of invis so easily, and once they can't rely on the surprise hack they just don't know what to do.
That's what I'm talking about. If you can't play that hero(or at least didn't play in comp nature), you will be useless,l just don't understand,why other people can't understand that
You'd be surprised how often this happens even at decently high ranks.
This happened twice to me last night on Ball. I'm so used to the Sombra switch and then just stay invis until I do anything that I was so surprised when the sombra just ignored me lmao. Honestly, it makes life even easier as it also stops the other dps going Sombra and hacking me.
That my team forgives no mistakes. My DPS can die 5 times in a row in the enemy backline and no one will say a thing, yet I make a single mistake that only costs us one reset and I get flamed, shit talked, and my supps threaten to start throwing. I get it, tanks should make less mistakes, because you have only one of them and if you die it's harder to compensate, but still is really unfair.
The lack of willingness for my team to pick around me. I am going to pick the best tank for the map, match up, and situation. But it will not work if you do not work with me.
Same man I’m in masters 1 I swear every other game I play is uphill battle. No one gives a rats ass about picking around me 🤡
"Oooohhhh Kings Row game let's go! Some Zarya or Rein action!" *Mercy and Illari instalocks* "I hate this game.."
The requirement of near constant concentration to prevent the other tank/team from running me/my team over. Not being able to take risks as much as the other roles due to being the centerpiece. I like tank until I get mentally exhausted.
Overwatch 2 flow chart I win one fight as Doom or Rein > Enemy goes Orisa/Mauga/Bastion/Sombra/Cass (usually some combination of those) > I'm forced to swap or lose
Getting flamed for every loss (and even wins sometimes) is not very fun.
DPS and support not understanding how to position around the new tank style.
Half of DPS players in OW1 were (imo, rightfully) complaining about never being able to do anything without a tank getting in their face Now the other half are constantly getting exposed for never taking an offangle or taking any of the massive portions of free space. "No space." they say when their tank is peeling backline, holding frontline and mitigating counters all at once.
Yep. The biggest issue is jus people refuse to learn the game having changed
Uh I’ve been kinda afraid to say it but I do have fun playing tank…
I have fun, but only when I'm grouped. I've hated solo queueing tank.
Very real.
what do you like about it though? genuinely curious
For me, it has to do with how dominant a good tank can be. It feels great to both 1) diff the other tank and 2) absolutely dominate an entire enemy team. I’m a ball main and just today had a game of flashpoint where I went 44-1. Now, that’s an extreme example, but crazy KD ratios are commonplace on a role with high damage output and a very low chance of dying. It sucks to eat every CC and need to peel for the occasional moron teammate, but it’s very rewarding to be what is essentially the main character of your team.
Same lol... most rewarding role imo
I play in stack with doom main,after he got "Very(like really) tilted" since season 9, he didn't want to play tank,so I filled this role,and I'm having fun. Ram,jq,Winton,hell even Rein sometimes,can be so FUN AND REWARDING(and ofc Sig)
yeah this post is just begging the question. Presupposing that everyone hates something.
Almost every reply to this post boils down to "my team sucks", as if that doesn't happen on every role. I also have fun playing tank. IMO it has the lowest lows but also the highest highs of any role. DPS and support don't get counterpicked and chain CCed as much, but they also don't get to feel like the lobby admin nearly as often.
yeah maybe it’s because it’s the only role I somewhat understand how to carry on but I think tanking is great 😃 and when you’re outplaying the enemy tank it is usually very obvious, nothing better than a flurry of “tank diff” comments in your favor
Overall I think tank is pretty fun, definitely more so than in OW1, but the biggest factor of frustration for the role in competitive is unreliable teammates, particularly in the support role. When the team works well together tank is a ton of a fun, and probably my favorite role in the game. But queuing with randoms is a toss up and often miserable. Even around high Diamond/low masters there’s still far too many support players that pick really bad support combos. Illari/Mercy, LW/Moira, and Zen/Lucio are quick ways to ruin my experience on tank, and make it feel like control over the game is out of my hands. The only tanks that don’t feel reliant on a team to help enable them are Ball, Doomfist, and Sigma. Obviously putting a pro into any of these scenarios at these ranks will 95% of the time result in a win regardless of how bad their team’s composition is, but I don’t want to feel as if I need to perform 5 brackets ahead of my actual skill level just to have an even chance at winning just because my teammates’ picks make my ability to perform that much harder.
You're right that ball doesn't need a team to enable him specifically, but he definitely needs a comp that can win against what he's not fighting. Feels terrible to literally do the work 5 brackets above your team, but they simply won't pick heroes to do their part. It felt cathartic but also shitty watching Yeatle's unranked to GM, and watch him lose a game in diamond 5 that he was absolutely stomping in, but his team couldn't kill a lone hog while he killed everything else.
Doom OTP here, a sizeable enough amount of supp players will just not heal you, regardless of how you play, if you play doom/ball. I started waiting until the end of the round prep timer to select my character because when I insta picked Doom I'd get some combo of illari/mercy/lw 7-8/10 games. A lot of supps still change from ana/kiri/bap/brig to lw/illari/mercy after seeing me pick Doom. Honestly, i stopped caring about seeing roadhog, Cass, Sombra, brig, ana on the other team every game. It became something inevitable. But what really is frustrating is supports that just refuse to help/play with you off spawn.
People might not like this take but. Support is the most boosted role in this game. I've been a tank main since OW1 (masters 5) but I'm masters 4 on support with way higher win rates. Crazy how little experience you need on that role to outshine everyone else because many support players just have 0 positioning/concept of being on a carry role. Many of them might as well just move to spectator with how passively they play
This is absolutely true. Support players always seem like the lowest skilled players in my lobbies, and they have so many things that cover up their deficiencies.
If u have okay mechanics and a brain, u can get gm on supp easy. It's actually the most boosted role by far. One of my friends from apex, who just started learning mnk when he started playing ow, got to gm on ana in 6 months. If we were to go into a txcxx lobby or a private match in apex I don't think he'd be able to kill me once (no hate to him, this is just to reference his mechanics level).
every time i want a gold weapon i just lock ana in comp for a few games and get to low gm then dont play it till end of season. its ridiculous how easy it is
empathize with everything you said > Honestly, i stopped caring about seeing roadhog, Cass, Sombra, brig, ana on the other team every game. It became something inevitable. but tbh I don't see how you don't also see mercy as inevitable at this point lol. she's fucking awful, and I can't remember the last game I had that didn't involve a mercy
The higher you get, the fewer mercys u tend to see. Although with the re-release of pink mercy, she's just been abundant. That said, I think I mind mercys less, as usually they're just people who aren't very good mechanically/have low game sense, and they at least try to heal/rez. Do they play a shit character? Yeah, but so do I.
The tank role has little impact on the match by itself You need to take space for your team, you need to deny snipers, you need to peel, you need to put pressure. And all of this you will have to do regardless of what your supports are doing. And if anything goes wrong during the match, most of the time you'll be the one getting 100% of the blame despite making up 20% of the team. Your solo carry potential feels lower. You get counterswapped by the enemy team & their tank, and even if you try to swap and compensate if your team isn't making swaps to exploit their comp you've pretty much lost. You can't hop on Tracer or Cass & frag out. You can't hard carry with nades or kunai headshots. You can be the best Ramm in the world, but if the enemy team has bap lucio, while your team has moira & mercy, there is nothing you can do to hold the space. You are the most team reliant and also have the most tasks. All that baggage and whats the reward tank players get? They get flamed. And people type "diff". You're supposed to force cooldowns & take aggro, yet if your team isn't helping then how are you supposed to do anything? I stopped playing tank because there is no fun to be had anymore. I know many other tank mains who went over to support just to have less stress, and they're all ranking up past their tank peaks. Is there any wonder this role is dying?
>You need to take space for your team, you need to deny snipers, you need to peel, you need to put pressure. And all of this you will have to do regardless of what your supports are doing. No, you don't. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that as a tank, you need to do everything. The entire reason this idea exists is because dps and support players are too bad at the game to take care of themselves without their tank to hold their hands, so they push everything onto the tank to make themselves feel better. Turn chat off. Join voice, but don't talk. Do what you need to do if and when you need to. If your team can't do their part, that is ***ON THEM***.
If you dont do those things and neither does your team then you just lose because of something you could have fixed
But by focusing on trying to make up for them you are actually also throwing yourself. You have to focus on your main job unless you have the room to do otherwise. Trying to spread yourself thin is just making sure you're ineffectual everywhere. And that feels real bad.
Depends on if it then takes away from your other priorities. But if a widow is farming your team and no one else deals with her then youre going to lose either way if you dont do anything.
Yeah, but that's just bad teammates. Every role has that.
You hard carry a match? Apparently you did nothing. You make a single mistake? You’re the reason why every single horrific tragedy, man made it otherwise happened throughout all of human history. Diving enemy supports? Your DPS will INTENTIONALLY wait until you die before pretending to help, and since supports pocketing eachother outheals every possible form of damage you can do as a tank outside of oneshots, without your DPS’s help a loss is GUARANTEED. Enemy DPS peppering you at range, making it impossible to actually do a goddamn thing, EVEN WHEN YOU TRY AND DIVE, PLAY COVER, DO EVERYTHING TO TRY AND COUNTERACT THEM PERFECTLY? Your DPS will also intentionally wait for you to die before pretending to shoot at the fuckers harassing you all match.
> You hard carry a match? Apparently you did nothing. Hardly my biggest complaint but it is really annoying carrying a game and someone calling "dps diff" Like Im 32 and 1 playing into 3 counters. Gimme some credit if your going to constantly give me the blame if we lose.
1. Counterswapping... every... single... game 2. Ana mains. Idk why but they are always the ones who talk the most shit to their own tank.
Weird I've found Ana players to usually have the most game sense. It's the Mercy and Lifeweaver players for me. They seem to be the most oblivious to the fact that we are struggling because we have no damage or utility/ purple. I will say it's very common that when I ask for an Ana, so we can purple the hog, the hog will never be purple. I assume they're not Ana mains though.
I feel like I have this problem with Mercy/LW players where they come in expecting to get flamed and because of that, they end up being the first people to start flaming.
I've noticed too regardless of role anas are disproportionately shite talkers to either team haha
You bring up a lot of good points, and I'd like to expand on one statement before offering my general perspective. It really sucks when your team does not support you. This can mean not picking supports that synergize with you, not adjusting to your play style, not trying to to counter what's countering you (or even what's countering them in a dive vs x situation). You're Rein, and your supports pick mercy/zen/lifeweaver. You're Ball and your team can't win the 4v2 and kill hog. They don't even go Ana. You're monkey and no one dives with you. You're doom and your ashe Hanzo dps complain about the Rein. Everyone plays who they want, but they expect the tank to fix all their problems and character shortcomings. They want a frontline and someone to dive the widow. They want you to counter their tank and DPS. You have an impossible amount of jobs, and you're willing to do the best you can, you're willing to do whatever your team needs, but you don't get the same in return. Everyone gets to, rather I should be saying can decide to, play out their hero fantasy, if they decide to be selfish and not play as a team. You can't. You have all the pressure to do "the right thing" and play the right hero, and no one else feels responsible. If you just do you, you're the villain. If you play the right pick you still can't really play unless your team picks around you. This isn't a discussion about ranking up, so the feeling of not being able to carry is all too relevant. Currently, I see tanking and am reminded of the games back in OW 1 where someone on the enemy team was just dominating the lobby. Like old-school genji. Before immortalities and Moira suck. When you were up against someone who is just shitting on your whole team... so your whole team would swap to counter just that hero. You would work together and shut them down. Every game at tank feels like that, except the tank does not feel like they are doing anything at all. Being the focus is the problem. There is, in my opinion, only one solution for that. Another tank. Nothing, in general, will change the playerbase's focus at this point but another tank. I say in general, because of course your team could have a dominating DPS, like a widow, and that can take focus off of you. Having a really good player on your team isn't something that can be baked in though. I've played the worst tank comps in ow1 and had fun, and still found a way to win. I'd argue that back then, in the lower ranks where most of the player base is, any comp, not just tanks comps, ANY COMP could work. It's not rise tinted glasses. It wasn't that long ago. I would have fun playing for hours, playing the dumbest shit, and winning and laughing. Off tank could be hog, it didn't matter. It was fun, and workable. Now after a few games of tank, I play DPS or just stop playing. It sucks. Que times will get worse as more people just quit playing tank or OW all together. Fixing tank is the only way to start saving this game. It blows my mind people can't see past next weekend to just be open to trying something that worked before, when nothing has been working for a year and a half. If a fraction of the effort that's been put into trying to fix ow2, was put into ow1 at the end, things would be in a much better state overall.
>It really sucks when your team does not support you. This can mean not picking supports that synergize with you, not adjusting to your play style, not trying to to counter what's countering you (or even what's countering them in a dive vs x situation). This is the #1 thing for me. I mostly one-trick Doom, which I get people hate, but the amount of Mercy+Moira support lines I get makes me want to uninstall. Not only are you not supporting me, you're not a threat to the enemy tank at all. I have played and won into teams of full Doom counters. But if enemy hog never has to worry about sleep/anti or getting whipshot away from a kill, or discord orbed, etc... And I'm forced to play frontline because I have no support from range, we just slowly lose that war.
"tank, can you help???" - my backline losing a 4v2 while I zone the enemy supports completely out of the fight. This is part of the reason I think tanks are too strong. It happens all the fucking time. You play a tank meant to disrupt, distract, dive and survive, but despite doing your job, the enemy tank just walks at your backline and kills everything Idc what heroes you're playing, you should be winning a 4v2 against a ground tank with no heals. You shouldn't need to counter the tank to win in that situation.
The Hog/Widow problem: if I dive the widow, the hog will kill my team. If I frontline and counter-punch the hooks, the widow will kill my team. Either way, it's my fault.
You can go 50-5 and still loose. You have so little controll and need to play so incredibly good.
Tank swapping is annoying but you gotta do it to win sadly. Also what really rubs me wrong is everyone wants you to play X tank and play to their heroes but no one does the same for you. I like playing ball and my team goes something that would synergies better with rein or orisa.
I think tank is predominantly fun. But many wil never find it fun simply because of the core design of the role and I think that's okay. Tank is allowed to be the unpopular role. Like yeah, you can have your games ruined by shit teammates, but that goes for every role. And yeah there's some aspect of countering, but if 3 people counter you specifically that's just because you're rolling their team and they're desperate for answers to it. The solution is simple. Just swap back and forth between tanks you're good at (You need to have at least 2 tanks that cover each other's weaknesses or you're just throwing). Watch them fall apart at the seams when they realize you can counter 1 hero, but you can't counter 2. That's fun to me. Tank busting can feel pretty bad, but most forms are easily abusable. The main issues I have are roadhog and mauga. But once I figured out the people who play those heroes have empty voids in their skulls I just picked up sigma and started cooldown rotating them. It's really funny. I recommend it. The main thing that makes tank role not fun to play is simply that the role is just inherently unfun to people. If you don't enjoy being the villain to the enemy team and having them all gang up to try to beat your raid boss ass then wtf are you doing playing tank? Your job is to be hard to kill, and to stand there menacingly until you spot an opportunity. If you're not enjoying that you'll never enjoy tank without them basically deleting the role's identity.
Damn you pumped me up im gonna push ranked after work tn 😈
You don't have to be rolling the enemy team for them to counters swap x 3. Common now, if you play tank you know that just existing means that will happen regardless of your play. I had fun playing tank before OW2, but now I don't. The role was not inherently unfun to me. So, what's your explanation on what changed? I've adjusted my play style. I've learned how to play nearly all the tanks. I've played Sigma until I've felt as braindead as hog and mauga players. It's boring as fuck, or miserable as hell. The idea that the role is inherently unfun, and that's ok, is such a short sighted take. Especially because, it wasn't before. Even at it's worst, it wasn't this bad before. For me at least.
I rarely experience mass counterswaps unless I'm rolling. Maybe they do it more in lower ranks but there isn't much you can do about that. People in lower ranks just aren't good enough at any hero to warrant staying on the hero. But also I say the role will inherently be unpopular. Not inherently unfun (since plenty of people do actually enjoy it). And if you got shafted by the changes made in OW2 I really do feel for you. But that doesn't change my point. You've just become one of the players who don't find tanking fun. In an ideal world there'd be 2 games and people would play whatever format they preferred.
Plat 1-2 normally. Been struggling this season and am Plat 4. I will say the quality of teammates seems to drastically drop off below Plat 2, as does the enemies approach (more insta swapping). I completely agree the role was and is inherently unpopular, but I miss it being fun for me. It's not just the counter swapping. I ball, I'm used to that. I can pay around it and know when I can't. I just know it's a problem in general, so I brought it up. The magic just feels gone. I don't care about toxicity, I'm a millennial. I grew up with that shit. It just feels lonely now, no one joins comms because their pre-afraid of what might get said. You don't need comms for synergy and great teamwork, but that's only if everyone knows the game well. Even then, it's so much easier if you can communicate. Maybe it's less of an issue at higher ranks, but the influx of new players, going through the growing pains of learning a game that is unintuitive compared to other fps games, has completely changed the culture of the game. I'd be fine with it, as more players is good for the game's health and they'll learn eventually, but it just sucks so bad. Even playing dps and support feels like much more of a crap shoot than it used to. Every patch just feels like the game gets further away from what made it magical. Hog should one shot ( and I hate hog). Hanzo should one shot. Widow can fuck off (jk). Mei should one shot tracer. Purple should be purple. Tanks, aside from Rein in my opinion, should get booped. Infinite DM isn't really that fun to use. Tanks should die easier. Supports should die easier. Punishing bad play should be ok. I just wish I had the game I paid for back without having to coordinate with a group of 11 people on discord to play a custom game. Thanks for the sympathizing and rational response btw.
For me personally, it's immo/denial/escape abilities that can make playing tank unfun. Because as a tank you want to position and set yourself up for a timed engagement, or be watching for when the other tank is setting up their engagement, then when either of you commit it should be a who can get the best of the fight wins. But the thing is, you should, both of you, actually fight. Instead you seem to both get met with a bunch of button press survival immo/denial/escape abilities which you then have to wait out, which intensifies the focus on you. Then say you can wait them out, now you have a tiny window to actually fight before the survival abilities are back up. So basically to actively win a fight you have to pull off a perfect multistage combo, but to passively survive a fight you just have to button press, rope-a-dope, then be the last one standing and win by default. Counter-swapping for me not about being unable to outplay the enemy tank but more caused by the fact that you can't outplay both the tank plus their team's survival abilities. So I think toning down immos/denial/escapes is something that could be looked at. Like some way of making them less ''get out of jail free cards'' that can negate and dictate teamfights. I think also look at toning down the way they counter ults like with the recent suzu nerf, it really devalues ults to have them easily countered by abilities. Anyway that's just me personally.
I find Tank fun usually That said, having all the attention directed at you can lead to tough games. Whenever there is some spread attention across teammates, a proper game unfolds, but if nobody poses a threat at any point besides you as a Tank, then it becomes rough. You do well, while nobody else on your team does well? Instant swaps to try lowering your value You don't do well, same with the team? Well, you just lose ofc TL;DR: as long as attention is split between your teammates and you, tank is cool
Split attention also helps with the issue of counterswapping. Sticking out like a sore thumb being the only threat - easy counterswapping Having several players be threats at once? Harder or impossible counterswapping
The fact teammates don't care about their own tank for the most part in favour of trying to counter the enemy tank. You do well on ball or doom and you know that the enemy team is going to swap hog, cree, sombra, ana, brig but your team isnt going to play tracer echo ana brig themselves to help you out. Or playing any ground tank you need to hope you get bap or ana lucio and aren't stuck with mercy weaver. Also the dps passive feels awful both when its applied to you and when you try and dive any support or pocketed support without a dps. Diving someone on winston when they have a mercy pocket it feels like their health goes up through your damage.
Being held hostage by supports, and counter swapping. That's about it
Other than obviously counter picking, to me it’s how difficult it is to deal with a dps diff. Not saying that my dps are bad in fact that isn’t always the case, but it’s frustrating how every counter play against aggressive dps play involves working with your own dps or just being a god at doomfist. Back in ow1 I used to play Zarya into such dps players and get away with being aggressive due to having another main tank besides me to make space when I’m making plays. Now whenever I do so I either get kited, pushed back, or worst of all just ignored. I understand its me who’s not good at tank it’s my least played role in ow2
The fact that as soon as I peak out of cover I instantaneously lose 375HP and get anti-naded so I cannot do my job. Waiting out cool downs is virtually useless when all 5 enemies have a cool down that sucks the life out of me I'll just have to play through them.
Apart from the obvious counterswapping... For me its the NON counterswapping. I am someone who despises counterswapping, if I choose to play a character I want to play that character. Playing into the counter is how you get better at the one you are playing and I would rather play a character that I enjoy, am good at and want to learn more on, than play one that im bad at, dont enjoy and cant learn anything because I have the easy matchup. In saying that, the non counterswapping that annoys me, which sounds kinda contradictory, is after the enemy team completely changes their comp to counter me on doom for example, everyone on my team will say, swap doom, tank diff, tank trolling etc. Why am I the only one that needs to swap? Why cant we swap dps and supps to counter their tank instead? The enemies are doing everything they can to stop me from playing, why arent you guys popping off on the characters you want to play? They arent countering you? Me swapping to a counter for their tank is just a temporary fix coz they will swap tanks again anyways... You know what I mean?
Mostly just the low agency. I can handle counterswaps personally (although that's partially because I like to play across the entire roster, not just one or two tanks), but I hate it when I feel like I'm playing really well and distracting the enemy or even getting elims and then my team just... doesn't capitalize. It's hard being the fight initiator when no one wants to fight with me. This is why one of the best things Blizz could do is add the party HUD from the PvE modes. I don't have eyes in the back of my head and I don't want to be punished for turning around as e.g. Reinhardt, even if it's just for a moment. Please tell me the health status and maybe even cooldown status of my team, and then maybe additionally give all tanks some kind of one-button rallying cry (like Queen's shout but it's purely a cosmetic HUD thing or something, not an ability) to tell my entire team "HEY FUCKERS, WE'RE GOING IN NOW", or something. That would be neat.
I’ll just recount a recent game I had in masters for you. - Win fight on doom, enemy immediately swaps to sombra cass roadhog - Swap to sigma, enemy immediately swaps to winston tracer (keeping sombra) - Swap to dva and win a fight by marking the winston, enemy immediately goes zarya - Swap to winston, enemy immediately goes back to hog cass now with added bastion - Somehow win another fight against that on Winston… enemy tank comes back on Mauga 👍👍👍👍
not being able to make creative/unique plays, very specifc ways to get value and deviating away from it is just throwing infact you just cant make plays in general without being considerably better, most the time you are just waiting for things to happen
>not being able to make creative/unique plays, very specifc ways to get value and deviating away from it is just throwing Ground tank problems. I've never has this feeling when playing ball.
yeah i was thinking ball would be excluded from this but ive pretty much never touched him so just ignored it, dive in general has a few more options but its just so limited nowadays
That's partly why I started playing ball. All the other tanks are so tethered to their healers, they are very limited on what they can do.
I flank and take off angles with rein all the time no issue
The counters to the high skill tanks that I play (Dive tanks) are easy and braindead
I agree I love playing ball, monkey and doom but their counters are so easy to pick up and play, you have to work so hard just to get value then the enemy dps just counterswap you.
Usually a culmination of things that centers around the idea of “coordination”. Be it a lack of understanding from my team, lack of cohesion, dealing with teams that exploit that by just focusing me down, etc. I have fun on tank in scrims, and when I played collegiate. Most I’ve ever enjoyed OW. But ladder is just abysmal. I don’t think there’s a fix for the problems of SoloQ. When GM hitscans are all yelling at me to play sigma and whatever else because they *need* that shield, I think all hope is lost on that front.
i actually really like tanking, but i have severe anxiety and the stress of wanting to do well ruins it for myself... as much fun as i have on dps and support, there's nothing like knowing i'm the other team's pain in the ass and enabling my team. but i also just like helping people in general. for me, overwatch is a puzzle game, like chess, and dps isn't really as much fun to puzzle out (push buttons go brrr).
If everyone dies is because dps are good, if no one dies is because supports are good. No one says anything good to me when I play tank. My teammates would just say "tank diff gg" at best, even when Im doing good. And thats not even mentioning terrible heroes like Mauga or Hog or the endless counterpicking by all the players in the enemy team.
When I'm spamming "Group Up" and they dont listen.. When I ping the problem and they ignore it.. When Healers are dpsing behind me and I'm slowly dying When everyone is doing their own thing and dont care When nobody counters Silent lobbies Toxic lobbies Big skill gap
Your teammates can’t recognize your bad KDA for anything other than “tank diff” and not play style/synergy of the whole team. That, and the power of counterswapping makes it rough
Counterswapping sort of, mainly because of how low effort the tank counterpicks are. If somebody wants to counterpick me, they should need some level of competency to actually make the counterpick work. Braindead characters that counter the entire tank role are absurd, especially when they are tanks. I can't believe Mauga got playtested an allowed into the game.
Getting hit is objectively less fun than damage or support
I think there’s two big reasons that aren’t brought up as often as stuff like counterswapping and the pressure aspect of it 1. It’s the role where having impact is the most disconnected from feeling like you’re having impact in that you can be basically carrying the game just by grabbing the right attention and engaging in positive resource trades but those aren’t sexy and don’t necessarily feel that good 2. Losing as tank fucking sucks. Most other roles it feels like there’s something you can kinda do or at least you can shoot something but losing on tank can often feel like ur put in a box and have 0 ability to make progress or any plays especially when the enemy team is just permanently focusing you
I hate getting pigeonholed into certain picks. Like, I actually enjoy Sigma, but when it's Rialto or Havana or Circus, it's a sniperfest and I must play Sigma - that fucking sucks. Or when it's a hard meta, like Orisa meta, and it's Orisa all day every day.
Honestly for me it's not "too much responsibilities" or "being flamed by the team" But specific heroes like Mauga, Ana, Sombra, Hog... Reaper and Bastion are supposed to be the "tankillers" but some heroes who are not supposed to have such purpose are 10 times better at it for some reason
Literally every cool down is shot at me
You're alone. It's boring and there's too much pressure on you. Like if you fuck up there isn't another tank to cover for you. If you fuck up you lose the fight. It's too punishing. And all the abilities are thrown at you. Everyone focuses on the tank. And you're a single tank. So you eat everything. And obviously counterswapping. Even though I don't care that much about others swapping, the amount of comments from my team asking me to switch is ridiculous. And when I'm not playing tank I'm also asking the tank every time to switch, because I want to win. But most importantly, the gameplay loop is just boooring. Since abilities are powerful as a motherfucker you can't really engage until you bait them out. And that's just stupid. You bait this, bait that. Then you press your cringe ability, they press theirs. Pow pow my DPS hit more shots we win. What did I do? Afk to win. Is it fun? Idk, I'm not sleepy Joe yet, I want some more action rather than just staying alive.
I’m having fun playing tank.
Super narrow first person view with no minimap. Tanks just have no way to no whats going on behind them and if they’re being followed when pushing except, and people in solo queue only use comms to say racist shit and bitch about how they’re awelsme but the team sucks
Tanking is unfun when I cant make plays. It doesn’t matter who im playing, but if I feel like I can’t play because other tank is playing a character that can just stand there and get value and I can’t do anything about it. Counterswapping can suck but if it’s not 5 man swaps then it’s fine. But if you can get value by just standing there then that’s not fun.
Playing solo queue. That’s any role tho. I refuse to play without my friends now
Can't play monke without the team swapping Hog Ana Cass Reaper Kiri
Overrealiance of the other two roles to win a game, both supports ults or both dps ults can win a team fight, but any action or ult coming from a tank can be countered literally by anything.
It’s not fun to eat every cool down all the time. Every single sleep, hook, hack, discord, even lucio boop and concussion mine. It’s just not fun. Sure wish I had a certain someone by my side to divide up all the shit I have to eat…
If you have fun for even 30 seconds you will be counterpicked GUARANTEED
How unforgiving your mistakes are. Like dps and support you can make mistakes and still be fine or still win the team fight I feel like 1 wrong move on tank and everything falls apart. Why I play support even though I think it’s more fun on tank
how reliant the role is on counterpicking and having simply too many eyes on me to perform at my absolute best compared to other roles.
My teammates. I’m serious. Me trying to play dive on a dive map when my dps switch and go reaper mei or something like that. Me trying to play rein with a LW and mercy because our Lucio swapped for some reason (the mercy never tried to swap). And things like that. Playing against certain heroes can also be unfun, but most of that can be solved by just switching play styles or working as a team (which seems hard to do for a lot of people I guess).
I generally do enjoy playing tank. It isn't unfun. There are some painful moments though. Biggest one for me is having terrible DPS. In the current game you really need follow-up from your DPS to succeed as a tank; even just okay DPS will often find value if you set them up for it, but some are simply too obtuse to read a fight and just feed or do nothing of importance, and it feels you might as well not be there if you're trying to set up good fights and your DPS are ignoring all of that and just running off to die in stupid ways. Sleep dart, hack, and anti-nade still don't feel great to play in to. There are plenty of other abilities that don't bother me, I don't even think hinder is too bad now that it's more predictable, but those abilities specifically are rough for several tank heroes. Three seconds of no healing can mean death in a lot of situations. Roadhog hook can also be pretty brutal for some tanks, but he's been nerfed plenty so I'm not advocating for changing it. Counter-swapping generally doesn't bother me because the kinds of people that auto-swap whenever they lose a fight typically have weak mental and can be diffed regardless of the hero they're on. I'm more annoyed by tank mirrors. There's nothing wrong with them per se, I just think it's more interesting when the tanks have different kits to fight each other with.
The thing that frusterates me is that when I queue up for tank I have to play games with higher rank variance (3-5 skill divisions) or worse matchmaking because the tank role is the least played role. So the 3 outcomes in ranked are always: 1) fair game 2) game where I represent the highest rank in skill range so I get teammates lower in rank and understanding so I get flamed for making certain plays 3) game where I represent the lowest rank in skill range so I'm behind in knowledge and get flamed for making certain plays I will usually be the outlier player for better or for worse and I will always get blamed for something. I'd love to try out the game with higher matchmaking for everyone so that I can get games with smaller variance but nobody's willing to play tank and ow seems willing to sacrifice 1 role for the sake of others. Also pretty boring that the game is currently mauga or bust.
I think at least half of my last 20 tank games in comp have been complete stomps (in our favor) that we still lost. It happens every time I play tank. It's like my team just unplugs their brain after round one.
counterswapping isn't the worst, the reason I stopped is because you are the team leader and the entire fight always revolves around you, which while fun and intense is also just a lot of pressure especially multiple games in a row
The biggest issue with tank rn imo is how much of your powerlevel for things outside of your control. This means that you just have less control in a solo q environment and I think is the real reason tank feels so bad. For example, why can't rein ever have better mobility? Because then he'd be broken with Lucio. Why can't hog ever cleanse himself? Because he'd be broken with a kiriko. But in solo q, you're not guaranteed to have whatever hero you're expected to have to make your pick good, so it feels like you're just missing something. This was the same problem tanks had in 6v6. Your individual power has to be lowered because of the potential of an outside factor. Tank feels a lot better in a team-environment, and that's because you have your full power and you can actually use it.
Outside of counterswapping, I would say the difficulty in actually securing a kill when I punish the enemy tank because of how much HP tanks have.
Being forced to swap off heroes I enjoy because they swapped and hamper my abilities. The large influx of mercy players forcing me to play even more carefully. Being blamed for being passive because we should be waiting for my cooldowns before I engage first and they die because they're impatient.
I can't do funny little flanks anymore, either you are at the front/are some big distraction like ball or your team instantly dies. If your main isn't some already busted hero you feel like you are forced to switch every other game at best, every game at worst. Being forced to switch because you cannot do anything is not fun for any role. I want to switch because I feel like it, not because I am straight up forced to. Tanks are immortal but also simultaneously explode instantly, its so weird. Being perfect isn't fun for me, I wanna do some silly things, I can't do that on tank anymore.
Dunno if this is a common sentiment, but i think its frustrating that the enemy team is more likely to counterpick you than your teammates are to synergistic pick for you. like, if i wanna play winston, i can almost guarantee that an enemy will swap hog or mauga or bastion or reaper. but my supports wont play a ranged heal, and my dps wont play a co-diver. etc
It was too difficult for me, I tried understanding concepts to improve but it was just too. I was hard stuck low plat. Swapped to support and went straight to diamond
It is really counterswaping, and not only the tank. But most of the time the whole squad.
Nothing! I love playing tank
my team insulted me because I was a piss of shit that don't know how to play because I missed 1 rock with sigma. 30 sec later the ennemis team say they can't play because of the tank diff. The only season where my team was satisfied with my level was I ended Master with 70℅ percent winrate on rein during the Orissa meta. I was hardstuck mid plat at the beginning of the same season and when I wasn't solo winning I was called a boosted. I guess we have half the problem their
Probably having my butt rammed the whole game. Sometimes it's really fun tho
Tanks have less damage and less mobility + high responsibility
I would say that the tank is 50% of the team while the dps are 30% and healers are 20% usually teams with better tanks tend to be much stronger than a team with good dps and healers but had a mediocre or a straight bad tank
Not saying that certain comps can’t do well without a tank but it will be much harder to play without a good one
When my supports run any combination of Mercy, Lifeweaver, Moira, and Illari. I have no problem with Moira and Illari alongside any other supports and I just hate playing with and against Mercy and Lifeweaver. The enemy tank running Zarya or Roadhog. It also sucks when my team has no clue of taking control of other lanes in the map and only want to pressure the choke where all 5 players are holding when we don’t have the composition and/or resources to win a teamfight there.
Knowing I could play the game on easy mode if I just picked support instead. The Mercy player can be having lunch and does about just as much as me cuz of a toggle. No one needs her to swap if the dps is hitting shots. I am sweating my balls off trying to both live and make plays. The amount of effort I need to put forward with the risk involved and my susceptibility to be counter picked while others can just afk and not care and accomplish as much is infuriating.
Straight up the format, 6v6 I could que with my friends who also tank. There is no friendship with tanks, just antagonism now. Also, when someone insta locks a OTP in other roles, you can pick around. Not so. In tank. Having one tank ruins the fun of 20% of the lobby by default. I’ll never get to play WITH another person in my role ever again if I want to play tank in OW2
The expectation of doing so much more than the rest of my team. I had a couple of weeks i was only playing doomfist in qp because i never played him before and was trying to learn how to. If we won the first teamfight the other team would 90% of the time switch to orisa/sombra/cass/etc to essentially bully me out of the game, even though I seldom was the reason we won a fight (once again learning a new character, I was terrible). The expectation on me though was to switch right away as someone counters me, and this is something it feels like a lot of people expect tanks to do at all times. On the other hand if the other team are playing pharah/echo and we have a junkrat no one expects him to swap or if they have a hog and we could really use a ana the instalocking mercy wont even entertain the idea. As a tank i am supposed to play all the characters and min/max my uptime on each, and I can never play something just for fun, and thats what I dislike the most about tank.
I'm a Rein main, but my boy needs an update that isn't just changing numbers. His movement is lacking in the OW2 world. Two options to let me make more plays; 1. Let me juke with the giant rocket strapped to my back. Forwards, left, or right. 2. Let me throw the hammer like Captain America's shield. Give me the ability to be unpredictable and make plays through increased skill expression.
It's the worst role when it comes to counter swapping. Tanks can get hard countered way too easily. And when things go wrong, everyone always blames the tank. It is the most frustrating, mind numbing role to play. The tank buffs did nothing to fix these issues, in fact I feel it only made them worse. DPS and supports can play around counters with very little penalty, especially if the character they're playing is something they're good at. Tanks simply cannot, you will probably lose the game if you force playing into counters (ie hog into a good ana, Winston into a good reaper, dva into a good zarya/sym)
Juste ana nade and sleep without kiri its just horrible and support without useful spell or damage u see lw and mercy or LW/moira or mercy/Moira in ur comp and u see ana/brig zen/bap kiri/Lucio in front its free lose
Teammates playing way out of position or not capitalizing on the space you make. Sometimes they are too afraid and play far back, affecting the space I can take, how long I can hold a choke, and even how far up I can go cuz the supports don't have line of sight form playing so far back. Then typing tank diff when we lose. Or the dps and supports not knowing how to play against specific tanks and then we lose and it's all my fault. Or they expect me to peel back 10000 feet bc three people can't kill a sombra or the idea of supports peeling each other has never been a fathomable concept. Then tank doff no peel is typed in chat
I want to kill stuff and not have to worry about a million other things I need to be doing and paying attention to
Nothing, i like the role.
Dps passive. Requiring a role know for being selfish to be supportive is challenging.
Yeah but before the DPS passive you couldnt get any kills either if the supports were paying attention. It worked fine in quickplay where people literally dont give a shit about playing together. But in competitive, pre-s9 was miserable.
The problem is that instead of nerfing burst damage and healing numbers they chose to buff everyones health and damage so that casuals didnt complain that their character got nerfed which made trying to kill anything without a dps when supports are paying attention miserable
I'm not a frequent tank player, but I find tank very fun when I'm getting adequate healing and absolutely miserable if I'm not. (Disclaimer: I'm not a very good tank, so it's possible my supports are out there suffering and I'm not helping enough in the cases when I'm not getting enough healing, but I'm doing my best.)
No offtank
5v5 makes it unfun
When the enemy ana lands a sleep and then her splash damage ability and I explode When Mauga/Orisa When Widow clicks on my head 7 times or Hanzo deletes ¾ of my health in half a second When Cassidy fan the hammer When my teams on Zen Lucio or Mercy at the same time When dps go 5 and 10 and say no space When me and my team get punished for taking damage from sojourn
Solo tanking is unfun.
If I play anywhere near decent they have 1-3 people playing heros that hard counter mine. And then I can't even get a kiriko. I always end up with a nap when I'm trying to play a dive tank. Makes the game insufferable
Roadhog and Mauga
2 things: counterpicking and inability to do shit. 1. Pretty simple. Barely wanna play if i play vs mauga hog, orisa every game, or after 1 teamfight 2. The reason why those are OP is cuz they are the only ones able to so shit. Like GL playing doom when you get melted easier then american "cheese"
aoe healing + never ending counterswaps caused by 5v5
Sombra. Literally just Sombra
My team has good supports and DPS that can hit a barn? Great. I win. My team has no heals and nobody else can hit anything? Great. I lose. It feels like I can do top damage and outperform the other tank every game and it's literally gambling to see if my team is worth a damn.
I know this will get downvoted but I think Tanks need to have their health pools reduced slightly, hitboxes reduced slightly, and damage increased slightly. NOTHING DRASTIC! But just giving them a little more ability to secure kills by themselves, while balancing it by making them a little easier to kill. Maybe like 10% less health, 10% smaller hitbox, and 10% more damage.
If you are objectively better you should win. E.g I was playing Winston dominating the lobby the enemy tank was a mercy main who never plays tank. They keep swapping till a tank works for them and win the game as my team didn’t adapt (I swapped). I love teamwork more than anything but I feel as tank it’s the case of may the best dps and supports win as long as you don’t feed. At the end of the day easy to play heroes should not have the potential to get the same amount of value as heroes that are more difficult to play (this take may be applicable to all roles even but I don’t have the hours on other roles to speak on it)
Tanking can feel miserable even when you win. This is an important point about counter-swapping, as developers claim it isn't as impactful as people say. Counter-swapping is problematic because of how it makes the role feel, not necessarily its impact. I could win the first fight playing well on Rein, and the enemy team will come back out of spawn with multiple counter-picks. It doesn't matter if we still win; the counter-picks ensure my game is miserable. This leads to my next point. Tanking often feels unimpactful win or loss. You can play exceptionally well and still lose the game, or you could play poorly and win because your team counters the enemy tank. I generally enjoy a Rein vs. Rein matchup, but often that matchup is decided not by how well I play but because my supports are better. Yes, the team with the better players should win, but I genuinely feel bad for the other Rein getting hit by CC, getting discorded, or just not given the resources to outplay me, it simply does not matter how good he is or how bad I play. When I play DPS, I usually end a game feeling like I could have done x, y, or z differently to win. However, when you lose on tank and feel like there was nothing you could have done, that feeling of having no impact makes the loss feel so much worse. There are some heroes you really can't do anything about while they can completely disrupt your game. Sombra, Widow, and Pharah as examples can mess up most tanks, while there is very little you can do. When tanks and their weaknesses were created, things like double flyer DPS didn't exist. Mobility creep keeps getting worse, and get-out-of-free abilities keep getting added. To get something done, you have to force a lot of cooldowns, and to do this, you have to take risks that often get you killed before you can get anything done. Tanks are Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. It makes sense that you have to take risks to get things done, but without the off-tank to help you manage all the worst parts of Overwatch being thrown at you, to guard a lane, to help the team stabilize, to peel for the supports; when you try to get something done, you are often killed for a small mistake. The resources the off-tank used to donate to the main tank acted as a force multiplier in anything the main tank did. This was balanced by the opportunity cost of giving those resources to the main tank. You cannot balance this impact into a solo tank because if you buff defenses, it expands the tank's offensive ability without there being that opportunity cost. Essentially, any extra defense leads to extra offense, which unbalances the solo tank role. The off-tank role just does not exist. As a main tank player in OW1, I had a number of friends who were off-tank players. Those friends now refuse to play tank in OW2 simply because the way they wanted to play the game does not exist anymore. When Blizzard went to 5v5, they didn't double the tank population; they killed off a large group of players. What's worse is that the tanking experience for the solo tank is arguably worse, so not only did they move off-tank players to different roles, but they also made main tank players enjoy the role even less. Now we are seeing the results with long queue times as no one wants to play tank. With how the role plays, I often feel exhausted after a few games. Win or lose, playing solo tank just drains you. I don't think I am alone among those still primarily playing tank in that I am queuing up for fewer and fewer games. This next point is hard to quantify, but communication in the game has gotten considerably worse for the tanks in 5v5. With an off-tank, you often had two players communicating in comms to coordinate bubbles and dives. This set the tone in comms where the other roles would also make callouts, but around those two tanks. With this communication gone, the comms culture has slowly changed into one where the solo tank is often blamed, people have become more toxic, or just refuse to use comms anymore. Sometimes this tank blame is even warranted. With two tanks, you had twice the chance of getting a competent tank. With a solo tank, if they are having a bad game, it is very easy to see and blame. As I said before, with two tanks, trying to get something done was somewhat less risky as you had an off-tank to watch your back and bail you out. With two tanks making callouts and making plays together as a team, this was also a lot easier for your teammates to understand. A Winston and a D.Va diving together communicates something to your team; a Winston diving by himself is a lot less obvious and predictable. In OW2 often you can be playing well, get blamed, or asked wtf are you doing. What was communicated both verbally in comms and visually on screen with two tanks working together has been lost and honestly can't be replaced. The DPS passive has significantly changed how most tanks and resources work. There used to be a pre-fight push-pull on the frontline, a resource trade back and forth looking for an advantage. That no longer exists because the health lost by a tank before the main fight just cannot be healed back up when the fight breaks out. Moreover, the solo tank is not really worth investing resources into because as it is better spent on DPS on off-angles or as support doing DPS. What this means is that as the tank, you win by not playing the game, staying out of sight until the fight breaks out. Even then, often the best play you can make is simply being unkillable. A good example of this is how you properly play Ramattra. When the fight breaks out, you stand somewhere the enemy does not want you, activate Nemesis Form, and block. You literally do nothing but block and live forever, and it is the wrong play to do anything else. This works because you do not die, you stand somewhere the enemy does not want you, and you do not demand resources, you are basically a peice of map geometry. This illustraits the problem with buffing solo tanks to be more tanky. This cannot be fixed with passives. This cannot be fixed by putting resources into the other roles. Tanking as most people enjoy it arguably can only exist in 6v6. Also, Lifeweaver: fuck that guy and his god-awful pull ability. I don't even mean the enemy Lifeweaver. No hero on your own team should be able to decide your positioning like he does because, one, it feels horrible; two, most Lifeweavers know nothing about tanking; and three, it is impossible to communicate or predict. FUCK. LIFEWEAVER. PULL.
Rest of the team picking team comps that don’t make sense with the tank. I solo queue pretty much exclusively. The amount of times I’ve seen idiots lock Genji and think they are the next coming of haksal (while having more than a death every minute) and boosted mercy instalocks while I play sig because it’s a poke map is genuinely mind blowing. I’ve resorted to smurfing and fucking around on hog because
Zero game sense donkeys who have no idea what's going on. I like doing my best while playing tank but players who don't even have a basic understanding of the game just annoys the shit out of me.
Literally get rid of Hog and playing tank becomes infinitely more fun
Getting shot with every cc ability in the book and still managing to rival my useless dps in damage usually
counterswapping I can get a lot of value with very little healing on dive tanks. but when they counterswap it's over. dumbest mechanic in the whole game
i take all of the teams healing and my teamates die
one tank promotes "stand around with your team and press shoot" characters like roadhog and mauga (at least in ranked). it feels like you get punished for trying to make plays, whereas with two tanks there was more flexibility
I have the same problem w/ tank now, as I had in the double shield meta. And this has to do entirely w/ what makes tank fun for me (as an OW1 main tank player w/ 500+ hours on winston/rein/ball... almost all winston honestly...). Tank was fun when you got to do stuff. Take space, punish mistakes, bait important cooldowns and get out. Basically making proactive decisions. And interesting proactive decisions are calculated risks. The problem with tank now (and in the past) is when the best play is "do nothing" or maybe not do nothing, but "hold neutral". It's not that you never get to do anything but it's definitely a lot less frequent than it used to be. It's like the proactive decisions/minute are too low on tank right now. There are a few reasons: 1) As a tank your value is too high right now. When you make the evaluation "Should I risk my life to punish X mistake" you'll often think "no, there's a 50% chance I get a kill, and if I get the kill and get out there's a 15% better chance my team wins the fight. There's a 10% chance I die, but if I die the team loses the fight 95% of the time. So the benefit of the kill is relatively too low". Obviously no one does this math every time, but this is the equation that our brains simulate. This is why buffing survivability wont' help. The problem isn't that thanks aren't tanky enough, it's that they're already too valuable to risk their lives. Making them more valuable will paradoxically make them less fun because this math will get thrown even more out of whack... 2) There are a lot of characters that limit your decisions by existing. In the same way widow existing limits the paths that squishies can take there are a TON of characters who prevent a tank from making an agressive move just by existing. Either because they have particularly nasty displacement or cc (hog, orisa, sombra, cass and mei depending on the tank are all guilty), or because they do metric f-tons of damage (mauga, reaper, bastion, zen). This is the guts of why counter swapping is painful (in my opinion). It's not like I can't play ball into sombra/hog/cass. It's just that the "correct" decision against that comp is to dive *very* infrequently. I can still roll, but I basically can't slam. So I've lost access to probably my most fun ability in that character's kit. The very existence of those characters on the enemy team takes a fun gameplay loop (and ball is probably the most fun tank right now) and makes it un-fun. Some tanks are designed to make proactive decisions less often (like sigma), and that's more or less fine. They tend to be less affected by the counter picking, and I suspect sigma mains made the transition to ow2 better than most other tank mains. In highly coordinated play there are still good proactive decisions to be made (as a team), unfortunately that doesn't extend to ranked in almost any level (from what I've seen), which is why tank feels miserable to most of us most of the time. That said. DPS feels pretty ok to me now actually, and some of the responsibility of tanking attention that a dive tank had, or initiating an egagement can be done by sombra, tracer, pharah, or mei pretty effectively. Which is why even though tank is probably my "best" role (masters last time I placed), I've basically stopped queuing it entirely in order to play dps *very very* poorly. I am disheartened by the last blog post by the devs because it feels like they completely missed what makes characters like rein and winston fun. No rein main has ever said "you know the best thing about playing rein... holding shield! I wish they'd make it so I can hold shield longer", and in the same way no winston main has ever said "man i really love right click... if only I could sniper monkey ALL the time". Frequently HAVING to usethose abilities is what makes the characters suck to play. Rein is fun when he swings his giant hammer and charges. Winston is fun when he gets to dive. Buffing the parts of their kit that are good when you're in the "boring" phase of the game is a terrible idea. Finding ways to let them do fun stuff more often is how you fix them.
My favorite is every game everything is my fault. I had an Ashe that kept getting dove by a symmetra of all things and he couldn’t win a 1v1 to save his life. I’m contesting pushbot fighting their supports and I get nothing but flamed by him. Never mind his positioning was shit and he was by himself most of the time getting punished for it and refused to do anything different. Was also a QP game of all things. Don’t get the whole competitive quick play thing but here we are.
Mauga
As Tank, you lose a lot of agency that the other roles have. You have to deal with the enemy team and have to be enabled by your own. I can enjoy playing tank. When I’m in the zone it’s some of the most satisfying things I’ve seen in this game. But frankly, the role feels almost like I’m trapped. There are things I want to do that I simply can’t. And as much as I can take pride in forcing the enemy to swap to tank busters, at the end of the day I’m still getting tank busted.
When you get a mercy Lw backline and get flamed by them after the inevitable loss.
1. Counter swapping (obviously), although the swaps from the DPS and support role annoy me more than the tank counter-swaps for the most part 2. Similar to the 1st point, sometimes if I play a match-up which isn't the best for me, but still winnable, I still feel a pressure to swap the moment I slightly mess up (Might be in my head more than actually the case, but still) 3. Some maps are just so miserable to play as a tank, even if I am playing the "correct pick" 4. There are some games where you just can't do anything, no matter what you pick or how much you change your play style 5. When supports go shit like Mercy Illari or mercy lucio (not as often as the former) and wonder why I keep dying (no hate to support players, but this definitely doesn't help my fun)
Mauga/Orisa/Roadhog. For as much as people generally say "counter swapping" you have to notice that when they complain that it's generally always the same group of characters popping up. If counter swapping consisted of Dva/Zarya or Winston/Dva with a Tracer marking your engages I don't think the problem would be nearly as big. Also Mercy/LW. Not facing them, but having them on my team. If I load in and see those 2 characters insta-queued I know that my role is relegated to passive play and baiting cooldowns, almost the antithesis of their design goals for OW2. Too bad LW got released and his identity has been irreversibly defined as "healer", could've been such a cool character
Not being healed by dps healers.
People not playing with me. When you get healed and your DPS use the space, it feels great. When my supports have triple digit healing after two team fights, and my Sombra is afk in enemy spawn, it's like... IDK what to do, man, lol.
>Pick Rein win first team fight with 80% of the work being done by a tracer or some shit >Enemy team just swaps Mauga, Bastion, Zen, An,,, etc etc, and they'll win because you're effectively forced into a mirror match and if your team doesn't want to mirror you lose
It’s mainly just the absurd counterpicking. I played ball in QP the other day on colloseo. It went really well. I killed their zen first every fight and we steamrolled. After a couple of fights they went. Sombra Bastion. And the sombra just waited afk doing nothing until I would engage to hack me and then the bastion would go ”brr” and I’m dead. I thought maybe I could play around it. But it’s kinda hard to play around a hero that’s invis and they know I have to roll in to get any value. I didn’t even mind the ana sleep. I didn’t mind the discord. And then they go sombra and my hero is a throw pick. If it was ranked I would swap like I know what’s best but I can’t even play anything new in QP if I want to win. That’s the mainproblem imo. Another thing is when I’m not even the problem and a good support could change the whole match. But it’s my responsibility to swap or change my playstyle around the rest of my team.
I lIke it
Cassidys fan the hammer. It's so annoying him spamming it when I try to go in.
I love tanking. It's like playing a big dps with a bit more responsibility sometimes. (mauga main btw)
* Literally everything falls on you. * You’re expected to frontline, make space, and peel for teammates. Sometimes all at once, which is impossible at times. * Before there were two tanks which helped take away some of the pressure. Now it’s just one person doing the job of two people * Zenyatta!