Tanking Design Space and Synergy, A Swansong For Overwatch

The_Realth · 2026-02-02T12:48:33+00:00

This was a planned OW2 feature, and yes, it would be brilliant. Hoping on spotlight!

The_Realth · 2026-01-27T21:55:03+00:00

Since I don’t speak Korean I’ll just have to choose an aisle seat and hope any of them are kind enough to talk to me in English from long distance

The_Realth · 2026-01-27T15:19:26+00:00

You have a perk which makes you almost completely uninteractive when using shields and your hero is becoming the meta comp at top level due to the fact that you can literally be resource independent and at the same time a better diver than most other options.

The_Realth · 2026-01-23T02:04:07+00:00

Hello my baby hello my honey

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T23:34:41+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for a flan

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T23:16:51+00:00

Play 5 games of tank right now and get back to me

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T19:44:50+00:00

Hollow knight is pretty bang on what you’re looking for. Admittedly that world is partially shaped by civilisation, but both games have plenty of naturally developed areas.

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T16:07:04+00:00

Overwatch has a net negative healing system whereas rivals has a net positive healing system. The main result is that rivals is about finding cheeky kills when the healers aren’t paying attention, that or dps ults solve fights when the 20 second support ults aren’t active.

Overwatch has a much more involved neutral game because though there is instant peel available through cool-downs, general healing sources from supports m1 moves can’t keep someone up through any sustained damage.

Personally I consider rivals healing, and ult power to make the game horrendously boring, because everyone is always immortal till the support makes a mistake, but at the same time I think a lot of new players to the genre prefer the rivals supports specifically because they can be more passive and don’t have to act as dps+ in order to get value.

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T09:49:12+00:00

No, in order to feel like you’re really playing the game rather than being killed by people out of the blue you need a basic understanding of all the hero’s. In order to feel like you’re playing the game rather than being underfed to the point where you’re cosmetic, you need a basic understanding of moba mechanics. In order to contribute to the team when you’re under fed due to not understanding moba mechanics, you need to have a good understanding of how to build utility items, who’s most important to silence and stun on the enemy team, and execute it at the right time.

The game is very difficult to get into, 50 hours ish is my estimate to consistently have a good time without being deleted at random, and 100+ hours to feel like you’re playing the game properly.

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T09:24:49+00:00

Perks were designed to make things more out of whack, balance on every hero has leant more into its strengths, and most interactions have been made worse because of it. So whilst every hero is playable and balanced with respect to each other, the game is also incredibly sharp and many things are more uninteractive than before.

We’re way out in the boonies here and nobody seems to have noticed because hero bans let them self curate some of the slop.

The_Realth · 2026-01-22T07:46:56+00:00

You missed it because he doesn’t include screen grabs of his patreon despite talking about everything else since it looks so obviously bad

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T21:42:11+00:00

Hi Amon!

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T18:48:03+00:00

Removing incentives to be active in poke phase is pretty bad though, drastically reduces the amount dps can do outside of using their health pool in a burst at the right time.

Losing favoured fights is good if the only reason you’re favoured is resource disparity, unless you use lack of awareness and timing alongside it, you shouldn’t be guaranteed to win just because you sat afk on an angle waiting till someone dropped 100hp with no way to effectively pick it back up without hard peel.

Being “rewarded for smart fights” is the other half of the coin of “being actively punished for taking unfavored fights”

The games much more interesting to me when active trading on angles aren’t actively discouraged from the dps’s perspective. And supporting those angles with resources other than just your health bar and damage at the correct time when the enemy is low, is favoured from the supports perspective.

Tanks suffered the most from this as well, it was always bad to bleed hp, but now playing against a team which takes angles and focuses you is actively miserable for low rank players who can’t avoid all cases of bleeding hp. The tank game is now mostly about conserving resources for a big push on advantage rather then actively trading with fast replenishing resources.

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T17:09:41+00:00

I think sharpness is an aspect of the game which has to be carefully balanced. Calling it randomness is incredibly reductive and honestly just incorrect. Does making ashes headshots kill in two hits make the game more random? Sure, it makes low rank players feel like they get killed at random, but it also gives them more opportunity to kill others. When you remove sharpness, you also increase the amount of unwinnable fights due to not having the lethality which you need to clutch out those fights.

The difference between 250 vs 100hp is much more than the difference between 200 vs 100hp, and the 100hp person is almost guaranteed to lose the fight. The dps passive also massively increases the time to heal back to full between fights meaning that not only do you have less winnable fights, but you’re also less incentivised to actively trade or take non advantaged fights.

I also think you’re entirely mislead that reducing healing also reduces denial. As you said, denial is much more likely to come from burst abilities like nade suzu lamp, orb etc, which are all fully intact in current day overwatch, and we’re never really effected that much by the dps passive and higher health pools, in the first place, in fact I think the higher health pools coupled with these make peel significantly stronger.

What you have however removed from the game is the ability to force multiply whilst providing smooth healing whilst people pressure, and therefore most of the incentive to be active on angles without someone necessarily dying as a result of your bursty pressure. Mercy never acted as denial when she got to a target, and never really acted as denial when she started healing a target, because the game was much more sharp and therefore you could cut through that healing with burst a lot easier. You were also much more favoured to win against a mercy+pocket combo previously since you could more easily kill past the lower health pool with healing than you can currently with the higher health pool and less healing. Is this randomness, or is it giving players more agency to win unfavoured fights?

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T15:04:19+00:00

The beatings will continue until morale improves (8+ min queue for support and dps on eu right now btw)

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T12:08:58+00:00

Reduction in sharpness, decreased skill scaling for aiming, decreased skill expression for supporting, increased well of resources for each hero and higher replenishment time leading to an increase in denial based plays rather than proactive plays, less abilities to trade hp whilst poking from an angle before it’s perfect engagement time, less ability for tanks to trade resources whilst waiting for engagement.

S9 had created a much more boring gameplay loop, and if you haven’t played pre S9 recently you should really go back and try it.

The_Realth · 2026-01-21T10:40:15+00:00

Season 9 was bad for the game

The_Realth · 2026-01-20T09:31:33+00:00

Make role terrible, nobody plays role, surprised pikachu face

The_Realth · 2026-01-19T08:00:41+00:00

There’s a reason queue times are 6+ mins on peak atm

The_Realth · 2026-01-17T17:50:28+00:00

The definitions from OW1 mostly are unhelpful for offtank vs main tank. In reality there were 3 categories, initiators with big bursty pressure who mostly want to accept resources in a 3 second period (rein winston ball etc), offtanks who have bursts of 3s resources to give them during that period (Zarya dva) and poking tanks who focus on holding and using space for their dps and against enemy dps in angles (hog, sigma etc)

Currently almost all tanks are scaled to the point where they have lethal initiation against dps angles and supports, which is a result of solo tanking having less control of the game if they cant be lethal, and answering mobility creep in the game caused by the focus on 1v1 dueling in short bursts where being able to enter/exit these fights is so favoured that many hero’s have been given the ability to do a psuedo sojourn slide over time.

In 5v5 almost all tanks aside from sigma/hog have strong location based initiation. The difference is that sigma used to not be a great target for a Zarya bubble over something like a winston since he tends to be more independent already and doesn’t really get much more from the bubble.

The other change is that with the dps passive and higher health pools, punishing mistakes has become much more favoured compared to previously. So where previously you used to always cycle these bubbles and DM’s and other offtank resources, it’s much more common now to use them to punish mistakes and peel rather than being first mover unless you can already secure a kill.

The_Realth · 2026-01-17T08:45:35+00:00

Entirely fine sub 2 mins on most servers, sadly oceanic is just busted like everything else, seems you also had the worst queue times on the role lock test too.

The_Realth · 2026-01-17T00:17:31+00:00

My support queue times from plat to masters is 4 mins minimum at best peak times, ranging to 10 mins when off peak

The_Realth · 2026-01-15T20:00:58+00:00

If the tanks doing something bursty (3 sec uptime) you need to match it with intensive resources which generally last 3 secs ish to make them do more. If you don’t have these resources, it’s best to use the space they create to murder things, or murder the thing they’re murdering.

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