Design discussion about tanks

Sticking with the current community topics let’s continue with our talk about tanks, my last post had a talk about what are some design points for a tank in overwatch.  A quick run down is that tanks need a good health pool to survive burst damage, a low but consistent DPS, conditional burst damage to feel fun and lastly a balance of shield and/or damage ability. The last common thread with tanks, and I’m sure will be a constant going forward in OW, is that tanks lack a significant range option.  With these general guidelines, what are we able to change on tanks to make them feel more balanced and/or fun? 

Healthpools seem to be balanced, adding more armor is a possibility but with the armor change it doesn’t make the largest difference in today's game. My personal take on armor is that it serves two purposes.  The first is to protect a hero from specific sources of burst damage, which adds variety to hero design that I believe isn’t used enough.  The second is to give a hero a larger HP pool without giving excessive ultimate charge.  Even with the increase of damage on all DPS heroes, with support a tank can survive through quite a bit.  The common complaint lies more with being able to damage a tank at all rather than the size of HP pools.

The next balance point is shields.  Shields are a tricky concept to balance.  The main issue is that if you weaken a shield so that a DPS hero can challenge them then the shields are simply too weak against a team.  Blizzard has done a good job balancing this by giving heroes a strong shield under specific conditions.  Rein loses the ability to attack and moves slower while Orisa must play around her shield once it’s used. All other tanks are heavily cooldown dependent. There is always something you can attempt to take advantage of when fighting these tanks.  This is one of the main reasons I believe Sigma is considered a bit over powered. He breaks this idea, he doesn’t lose the ability to damage when using a shield, he doesn’t have to play around it once it’s out nor does he lose any speed.  Simply put, Sigma has no weakness or counter play when using a shield. 

Next up is a tanks average DPS, aside from Sigma no tank really feels like they do as much damage as a DPS hero consistently.  Tanks need some damage to pose a threat if they’re ever attacked, normally their damage is around the amount a support heals for on average, 60ish.  This seems to be on purpose, most tanks have an easier mechanic to deal damage.  It gives a DPS hero the advantage if they can land their shots and if they cannot then the consistent damage of a tank will win in 4 seconds.

While tanks deal a low amount of DPS consistently they also have an ability to do massive damage at times.  This idea is what I call a tank’s conditional burst damage and is one of the primary points that make a tank fun to play in the standard FPS sense.  You’ll notice that tanks are defensive for a bit of time and while that sounds boring what they gain is an extremely high impact moment from time to time. Easy examples of this are hogs hook, Zarya’s charge mechanic, Rein and Winston’s cleave and Orisa’s halt.  All these abilities allow a tank to deal threatening damage to one or many heroes but not constantly.

This is where I think blizzard should make changes for a tank at first.

The main reason why I see this as the best opportunity for balance is because it doesn’t change the tank’s general usefulness or feel.  We avoid changing barriers and HP pools so their ability to survive and protect the team stays the same.  Since we don’t touch their consistent DPS the way the tank operates doesn’t change much either.  This point is important because as we go longer and longer into OW the more time people spend on a hero, we want to avoid changes that would drastically change a hero and have players feel like they wasted time getting good at it.  Of course this has its limits and if a rework is necessary then it happens.  What we do change is the tanks ability to instantly take down a 200hp hero. This seems to be our main point of complaint because the survivability of a tank paired with instant damage makes other heroes feel like they had no chance.

How do we change their burst damage?  Burst damage works in two ways, the amount of burst they do or the frequency of it. In most cases the amount doesn’t need to be nerfed, tanks rarely do more than 300 burst damage.  That leaves us with its frequency.  Frequency further breaks down into two categories.  In the case of Dva, Zarya and Roadhog the frequency of their burst damage is primarily tied to their cooldowns.  Once these abilities are used the enemy team has an opening they can take advantage of.  In the case of Winston, Reinhardt, Sigma and Orisa it’s mainly about range.  While all tanks lack range these heroes are more dependent on getting close to deal burst damage. How we change this per hero is up to blizzard but these are the parts that are malleable. 

When we start to consider the options on how to change a tank we start to notice that Sigma isn’t very reliant on cooldowns nor is he that limited on ranged options.  He lacks a good conditional burst damage like most other tanks but makes up for it by having a consistent ranged attack that reaches 20m. 

I’m not saying if any of these aspects of Sigma should be changed, just because they don’t follow the common rules for the other tanks doesn’t mean its bad or wrong.  It’s good to have diversity.  This is simply a method to help analyze and will allow us to see what separates one from the rest.

Where do we go from here?  I know some want me to give suggestions to the issue with tanks but I believe that’s a bigger discussion.  You can’t talk about the problem with 1/3^rd of the game without understanding that the other 2/3rds have something to do with it as well.  I will say that I believe a shield tank vs a DPS hero should be a draw or the tank loses after a significant amount of time.  Right now the tanks almost always win, barring Reinhardt.  The problem with meeting that goal is anchor tanks would then feel very weak and not fun to play but this is the primary issue.  Fun to play means dealing damage and killing the enemy team but a shield tank needs to defend for the entire team as well.  If nothing else forcing a tank to use its resources up should have more of an effect on the game.  It’s the futility of shooting Sigma and Orisa shields that lead to nothing that are really upsetting to players.

An idea I learned while watching hockey in Detroit, mainly during the playoffs, is to “let them play”.  It was a term the announcers used when the refs were calling every little penalty and no one could play the game with the constant stoppage of play.   It’s not like you want all penalties to go uncalled but to only call the ones that matter.  I feel like Overwatch is at this current pass.  Just let the players play, it’s not like we want all shields to go away or to make tanks useless, the community just wants the ability to play against a tank and have it feel like you’re accomplishing something.