A madman's rantings

I'm challenging myself to be more concise in this one, sorry if it ends up like it always does. I've discussed this point two years ago but would like to revisit it based on some new realizations. Let me briefly recap what I discussed before and add in what I've recently discovered from my last post about OW and it's mechanics, I want to specifically target OW's concept of simplicity causing most of these issues.  The other point I want to solidify is what I want from a balanced game.  In my mind a balanced game is where the each member of the cast can use their unique strength to have an impact on any map, point or composition.  While they won't be the most optimal picks they should never be useless or eclipsed so significantly by everyone else that there's no point in ever playing them. Why niche heroes don't work well in OW The first issue is that a niche hero can't be too strong in their niche.  This is because if they have a 100% chance to win ...

This discussion is going to require a bit of setup.  To talk about what I believe is wrong with Overwatch I will have to step all the way back to the fundamental ideas Blizzard based this game off of.  While Blizzard has not shown or talked about these values we can get a good guess based on their design and balance philosophy.  Once established we can discuss the current roles in Overwatch, how the fundamental ideas shaped them and how they compare to the popular roles across other game genres.  This will set us up to finally discuss the issues we're seeing in today's version of Overwatch.  Finally at that point we can properly discuss the direction we want Overwatch to go towards.  This will leave us in an open ended state on how to accomplish these changes.  Again, I'm not Blizzard so I don't know what their exact method is for design but the method I'm going to show here will be similar to the concept Jeff Kaplan talks about when he asks players to...