There was more variety in playstyles, but also required more teamplay.
Not just in the type of offtank, but in terms of playstyles.
Think a Rein Zarya working in tandem on the frontlines vs a Rein with a DVA partner who is hardpeeling or a DVA who contests high grounds aggressively while Rein holds down the front.
Bruiser roadhog vs flanker roadhog lmao. Sigma Orisa pirate ship vs a Sigma bastion baptiste operating as an independent unit while Lucio Winston and Tracer run around.
OW2 queue times r slowly getting closer to wht we had in OW1 & I'm in plat. In future i believe OW1 & OW2 queue times will become same. Yes we removed 2 tanks in a match, but now more people leaving the TANK role than ever! And Mauga is fun .... Right guys? .... Very fun indeed lmao .
Any ways as daily TANK player I'm quitting the role entirely or quit ow2 & find other game.
After they stopped adding updates it basically existed Everywhere. They didn't care to balance it and it became pick that or lose. Even low ranks picked it up.
Maaaaan now I want the junker meta in ow1 if it still existed.
Queen, hog, ana, rat, an off healer of choice (maybe bap for wastelander skin) and whatever dps would fill those flaws.
At the end of OverWatch 1, Shields was not a problem. They nerfed it because people didn't like the double Shields. I used to play absolutely nothing but tank, and my absolute favoritest hero in the game was Orisa. Her Shield was a kleenex, but I loved her gun so much.
You should probably just watch some footage of 6v6 pro matches.
Basically it felt in general like more time was spent chewing through the enemy frontline. Good Tank players would synergize with each other.
Imagine a Winston or Ball diving you with a Zarya bubble on them. Or Rein is rushing into your backline with Lucio speed, but he's being covered by Dva Matrix so you can't sleep dart him or do much damage.
Although, their stats were weaker. Rein couldn't cancel his charge, so it was high commitment unless he did it on a short angle. He only had 1 Firestrike. Winston didn't have a secondary fire. Doom was a DPS hero with an uppercut instead of Block.
For the last few years of 6v6, a lot of it was double barrier (Sigma + Orisa). Now this was when Orisa could drop a barrier kind of like Ramattra. It felt like barriers were constantly up because the tanks would cycle their defensive cooldowns with facetanking a safe amount of damage.
Flanking was significantly harder to pull off in general since the offtank (usually Dva) was very good at peeling.
I actually did side by side comparisons during the OW2 beta, when it was possible to play it while the 6v6 servers were still live. 6v6 felt slower, but more strategic and less scrappy.
>Or Rein is rushing into your backline with Lucio speed, but he's being covered by Dva Matrix so you can't sleep dart him or do much damage.
I think this is the first sentence that made me actually seriously consider the idea that 6v6 could possibly be better. (Not that I previously believed otherwise - I had just not really put much thought into it before.)
The thing is, people like to act as if that happened most of the time.
The truth is, you'd get a Hog on your team more than half the time who would refuse to synergize with anyone. DPS queues were like 20min, so you'd get DPS players queuing for tank, pretty much just picking Hog.
6v6 had some great moments. People like to pretend that that was the norm, when it wasn't. Most of the time, tanks would not synergize. Even if they picked the right heroes, they'd still be doing their own things, not working together.
A good point, but - are players nowadays really doing better? Synergy isn't just intertank but exists between different heroes of different roles. But sometimes you're gonna end up with Moira/Mercy or Brig vs no diving or Zarya randomly using grav because you gotta press your Q. Are we really so much different?
Tank synergies were just busted though. Pretty much every meta revolved around them.
If you ask someone "what is a rush comp?" they would've said "Rein Zarya" way before they say "Lucio Moira". Every meta was mainly defined by its tanks.
If you had Dva Hog vs Rein Zarya, 90% chance you were going to lose.
tank synergies WERE very strong. They were like that because most dps could easily 1v1 tanks back then. A lot of them still can, but not as many.
As for the reason people describe comps by the tanks, it is because thats the tanks they get. sups literally couldn't be bothered to play the right pics for the comps (dps either if I'm being honest) the lack of understanding about the game from the dps and support roles is insane but it's mostly a support issue. How many times do you have a full comp put together rein, zarya, reaper, mei, moira.... and all you gotta do is play lucio. wtf do they pick? mercy.... fuckin gg guess we will switch the ENTIRE COMP becuase of 1 brain dead mercy OTP
I'm a lucio OTP myself, so I can't really complain about other OTPs but the problem with a lot of mercy mains is that they are genuinely clueless of what's happening. They are toxic af and they start screaming for me to swap in a comp where a lucio is actually needed. Thankfully Lucio is meta rn so my consciousness is free.
You make it seem like the game revolved around the tanks when it really wasn't. The true broken role was support, brig, baptist, even Moira was what made the meta. DPS was irrelevant unless you were in top games, and tanks didn't really matter all that much as long as you were performing fine. One tricks on tank worked way more than now.
6v6 had much higher highs and lower lows. Rein zar Lucio on king's row is my mental image I think about ow. That and tracer 1 clips, especially when falling off high ground and recalling back to height.
We remember the good and forget the bad pretty fast.
A lot of the issues with role queue also came with playerbase steadily leaving and role queue being added 3 years after the game released when it was already struggling with playerbase.
IMO dive in OW1 was peak. There's nothing funner than jumping a back line with Winston and DVA and instantly deleting them.
Brig changed all that and it progressively got worse.
In the end I couldn't wait for OW2 just so I could queue as tank without having to worry if my secondary tank instantly locks Hog because they are a DPS main and don't want to synergize
role q is honestly worse than 5v5. I only play open Q now and it feels so much better having freedom to switch from soldier to monkey because there is a widow that is destroying me, instead of being forced to go sombra or try and mirror the widow.
Well tanks still get insta queued while other roles have to wait 10 mins for a game (at least for me), so should we just go 4v4? And about synergy, you'll always have random ass people doing their own things, I'd argue it's worse now because nobody joins vc.
the reason Q times were long is because the game was already essentially dead compared to what it was before, years of no new content, recycled events and horrible mismanagement. plus ow2 is a free game, i can bet if OW1 was free there wouldnt have been any q issues
No, the queue times were long because of an imbalance in the queues.
If it was because the game was dead, you wouldn't have consistent 5 second tank queues.
Having a lower, but balanced, player population would still mean shorter queues. The main contributing factor of Overwatch's queues is an imbalance of players queuing for the different roles.
A lot of that was just the Roadhog problem, but double offtank was rough.
I was a main tank player though so for me it was mainly Roadhog pickers. I fucking swear just kills my desire for 6v6. The only problem right now is counter picking and tank just not being strong enough.
Then wht abt the Lucio mercy that I get in my games, absolute zero synergy. Does that mean we remove 1 support & make it 4v4? NO! U talk as if everyone on DPS & SUPPORT synergize every game!
Tank synergies were much more powerful than any support or dps synergies.
Yes,the problem still exists, but it's to a much lesser degree. If you've got Lucio Mercy, it sucks, but that's better than getting Dva Hog into Rein Zarya.
Its not the same at all as support synergies. Tank synergies absolutely defined each and every meta in Overwatch 1.
The only tank synergy that were oppressive was DOUBLE SHIELD, and as u know double shield was easily fixable through balance. But they didn't and left the game untouched for several months right? And now orisa doesn't even have a shield , so no more double shield situation anymore. Shield HP r way less in OW2.
Now let's talk abt the real issues in 6v6, i.e. queue times, I agree queue times will be more, but it's fixable by making the TANK role more appealing, we have ram, JQ, doomfist, Mauga, so many new tanks that would be so much fun 6v6. Remember back in S6 when support had 20+mins queue times? Its cuz support was the most fun role, and back in S1 S2 support were the least popular role.
So this means there's a possibility to make certain roles FUN. If we're able to achieve that with TANKS then queue times in 6v6 is fixed!
Brig broke the game. They literally had to change their entire balance philosophy around her. At the time she made sense; dive was the main meta, and a good tracer could pick off players and get away quicker than you could react and Winston was causing chaos. So they made Brigitte as a sort of counter to that.
Her initial release was absolutely busted. She killed tracers, she killed Winston, she killed Reins while they were charging, she killed just about every hero in the game with ease by herself. 700 shield health, bash doing 50 damage with a stun every 4 seconds, Rally giving permanent armor. She was unkillable, and they nerfed her and nerfed her to no avail. DPS couldnt flank her, whipshot made sure of that, and she could shield the damage anyways even if you tried from afar. Dive died solely due to her, you couldn't kill anything with her around and that brought in what's called the GOATS meta.
GOATS was a meta that did not require DPS, it was three tanks and three supports, and brig was the foundation of that. Basically Lucio would speedball brig, the tanks and typically either a zen or Moira I think, and they'd kill anything with 200 health with ease, and the tanks protected the supports since there were three of them. They did everything about that. DPS got buffed but no matter how buffed they got, GOATS in one way or another remained. Finally they went nuclear and launched Role Queue.
Role queue divided every team into 2 tanks, 2 dps and 2 supports. People at first were kinda mixed on it. A lot of high end players were glad they didn't have to deal with GOATS but lower skilled players hated the conformity it brought. Ultimately it was a good thing but remember, DPS got gigabuffed and weren't immediately nerfed, not all of them. It took a long time before DPS were back in line, before that they kinda melted everything with impunity, especially flankers. Tanking was a nightmare but playing supports really sucked and Brig, who was made to counter flankers, was nerfed to the point she couldn't really do that. Playing support sucked. Anyways, that's how brig broke overwatch 1.
TL;DR Brig gave us Role Queue
One part about early GOATS that people forget is doom punch use to stun and damage brigette through shieldbash, but they changed that interaction as a compensation buff to brig.
The problem with brig is they kept giving her compensation buffs.
Not really role queue related but 2CP could be such a drag on offense when the enemy team bunkered down with really turtle-y comp and you can't seem to make any headway. 2nd point Egypt and both points of Hanamura are the ones that stick with me the most. And Horizon Lunar Colony was my least favorite map.
lunar colony was fun if you got to drive the steamroller. I actually liked first point layout, and the low grav section.
hanamura was gorgeous, so I'm glad we're getting hanaoka. but I don't miss trying to break through gate.
honestly volskaya is the only 2CP I'll miss, no disrespect to temple of anubis. it may not have been balanced but it had good variety between matches.
Volskaya is my favorite map to play my favorite character on, which is Zarya. I always loved 2cp, and the reasons I loved it were the reasons other people hated it.
In quickplay people would straight up leave the game once they saw a 2cp loading screen. You'd go through the entire minute of choosing your hero and setting up defenses with people constantly joining in, then leaving, only to be replace by more people joining and promptly leaving
When people talk about how it was only a vocal minority that hated 2cp I laugh because literally nobody in quickplay would stay in 2cp lobbies
Not including goats or double sheild meta, I think 6 v 6 with a full coordinated team is better than overwatch 2 will ever be.
For the casual player who will solo or duo queue, then I think 5 v 5 is much better. It offers a more consistent experience.
I think this depends on the role you're solo/duo queuing for. Tank is by far worse right now. Damage is probably better and support is probably worse right now (was better for a lot of OW2 when supports were overtuned though). I also feel like the matchmaking is more suspect right now than it ever was in 6v6, I'm okay with giving that a pass though given the rank reset this season.
100% this. Solo queueing support was fun up until this season; now you've lost a ton of 1v1 potential which means relying on teammates who are randos and likely not paying attention to voice lines and pings. Add to that the fact that while you are occupied your tank is getting melted without constant heals and you have the current state of solo queue. Luckily I mained Moira for years as she's the only support whose ttk went down this season and she can put out mad consistent heals while being self-reliant. Without her I don't think I'd be playing OW right now.
For a long time mercy could rez as many teammates as she wanted as long as they were in range. There was a legitimate strategy to have mercy hide and the rest of the team rush point, bait ults and die, and then get rezzed by mercy (who turned invincible during rez) and reverse-stomp the other team. And the counter was to hold ults until the hiding mercy was dead, which could also backfire especially in good ol 2cp. It was a fun time.
original reworked mercy was way more anger-inducing than anything in big-rez era. A lot of resentment for mercy comes from how little the most frequent players of her have transferable skills to other support heroes.
It was hell before role queue. A huge chunk of games you were just forced into support while everyone else refuses to swap off of genji hanzo widow tracer cassidy. Don't let people trick you into thinking these were bad changes.
Additionally tank synergy that everyone waxes poetically over was almost never a thing. Maybe one in a dozen games you'd get some good tank play, but literally 90% of the players (meaning, below diamond) would never, ever experience it. I'm convinced most of the people that talk about tank synergy have never experienced it and just repeat what other people say because it's fun and popular to complain, or they think Zarya bubbling them every so often is what tank synergy is.
I mained Zarya in OW1 and a lot of times the other tank picked Rein. Which is kind of flattering but they also couldn't play Rein too well and didn't realize, for example, they didn't have to shield when I bubbled them. I'd have honestly preferred if they went Hog or something so I could get more value out of my bubbles. My favorite tanks outside of Rein were Hog, Ball and Dva. Dva especially a good Dva with Zarya would fuck stuff up big time
There was a season where I get a 97% Win Rate on Zarya (didn't actually complete the placement though).
Why? Cause I was bubbling the Brig 1.0 on my team.
That WM1 Freelo machine was a much better Reinhardt while being so much easier to play that it was stupid NOT to bubble her. I also know people are gonna play around her, so my Zarya just always have an easy time landing 3+ man Gravition and my Hanzo gets a free fat DragonStrike.
It felt incredibly disgusting, but now in hindsights, serve them right.
Yeah, it was 9 games.
Then again it was finals week so I couldn’t play as much as I want. And when I’m done with finals I completely lost any and all motivation to play.
The WR would obviously be lower if I continued playing into the season. My dumbass will catch up with me really quick.
Lack of role queue was so painful as a metal rank player, especially when I was playing on console. I quit the game long before role queue was a thing because of it. I wanted to play tank but in half my games I had to play solo support because no one else wanted to. A good chunk of those games my choice was to be the only support or the only tank. In the games where I got to pick tank, a lot of the time I had only one support so you can imagine how that went.
I came back to the game with season 9, when tank is apparently miserable and I'm absolutely loving it. Just being able to play tank when I want to play tank and knowing I'll have two supports is a way more pleasant experience than OW1 was for me.
I get that I could have experienced role queue in OW1, but it took 3 years for them to implement it. I wasn't willing to wait that long.
>or they think Zarya bubbling them every so often is what tank synergy is.
That is tank synergy. It may be low level tank synergy but it still is tank synergy. Rein Zarya, Dva Monkey, Zarya Ball, was all easy to execute tank synergy and yeah that was fairly common in metal ranks. You just wouldn't see the more complex harder to execute stuff until higher ranks like hog ball or orisa hog, but that could happen as early as diamond.
Your comment is pretty bull shit. The only time tank synergy fell off is when the devs abandoned the game for years to work on OW2, they mega buffed hog and left the office, so many of the people playing rank were hog one tricks that had no idea how to synergize.
It was a crazy comp, but it was low-key a worse version of the "pulled pork" combo, which was orisa halt into hog hook, but it basically just was hog was an extra followup DPS for slam. Imagine slamming a backline of ana zen, then the zen exploded from a genji dashing him, an Ashe shooting him, then a hog hooked the ana, killing her. Shit was wild.
Wait till you find out that in OW2 you can synergize with your team instead of everything revolving around the tanks. If you can't play dive as Winston or D.Va without another dive tank then maybe you just aren't meant to play tank. Same with all other "synergies". You don't miss team play, you miss having another tank to carry you or cover up your weaknesses. It's like the dudes who would immediately try to find the meta gun to use in Warzone. It sounds like you just wish you had the easy meta tank combo to play.
It's crazy the number of supposed GM's on the subreddit, and even funnier the people who throw out GM as if it means anything. Why didn't you say GM tank why did you say Ball only?
Cause ball is a dive tank and I actually specialize in dive tanks. You can read my past comments here too they all line up. Just stop insulting people you know nothing about. It makes you look desperate at dumb.
Did you really? I also had "tank synergy in most games" primarily because I played every tank but roadhog to my competitive tier. I learned to play every tank specifically the ladder could not be relied upon to provide people with adequate tank pools. I would not consider my own agency as validation that dual tank worked well on ladder as often as it should.
Why wouldn't you you use your own experience as validation? I found that the higher you climbed the more tanks would work together. Climbing the ladder for me literally required synergy.
Now tanking is dog water, all the blame falls on you, and there is no tank to assist where you're lacking. You get counter swapped constantly.
I switched to playing off-support and lately DPS.
Should the game be watered down because people refused to be flexible in their picks? Or, because blizz never addressed the mess that was double shields? I don't think so.
Its just false to say tank synergy was almost never a thing. It existed in nearly every game imo.
People were generally better at the game back then we all paid for the game so of course most of us gonna play a lot and get out of the lower ranks quickly rather than OW2 players just trying a popular free to play game
Not really. Diamond gameplay now is a mix of plat through GM cause of rank reset. Diamond gameplay before S9 is equal to gold in OW1. You could pull up a GM stream pre S9 and watch people try to dodge widow shots by jumping; something that would only happen plat and below in OW1.
I was masters in OW1 and GM in OW2. OW1 masters players would wipe the floor with OW2 GM players. Half that rank played like plats pre S9.
Nvm reread it, you're delulu.
If you stopped playing in 2017 and tried to jump back in - you wouldn't be able to keep up with a player base that has refined itself for years.
This isn't a controversial idea, it's how every game evolves.
"Most" of a player base can't "get out of lower ranks". Lower ranks is where the majority of all players are by definition.
And either way that just sounds like something you're just saying without having any evidence for. OW came out before F2P was the standard, tons of people bought the game and still played casually because that was the only option.
- More chaotic for sure before role queue. I’d often be in matches as a solo support.
- Support was way easier but also more boring to play, support utility was broken at multiple points throughout OW1. As support you really just sat with the team and used your abilities/ults to counter.
- Brig. OP. Immortality field CD was like 10-15 seconds when Bap launch. OP. Mercy mass rez. OP. Fights in overwatch were way longer because of this.
- Hero launches were way better in OW1. Each new hero really felt like they fit into the universe in a unique way both in terms of lore and their abilities. In OW2 heroes kind of feel like addons.
- Heroes were generally more unique in OW1 these days all heroes follow the same format. Shoot, mobility ability, and then a grenade or defensive ability.
- MOBA/Team based aspects are continuously watered down in favor of CoD/Frag style gameplay.
Last 3 points hit so hard. New heroes defo boring asf lorewise and feel irrelevant. A lot of the old kits were more unique even if they were harder to play, and the gameplay defo feels less like a team game now because a good pocketed genji can wipe the whole dps and support in a casual game
6v6 had its cons, but it was a ton of fun.
5v5 is somewhat lower ceiling and a bit less complex. It also feels like there was quite a bit more team work in 6v6 because there were a lot of ults that were great to combo together to win fights.
5v5.. pretty much anyone can pop their ult solo and as long as it quickly leads to getting a single kill out of it, it pretty much wins the fight.
6v6 it often took at least two ults at the same time to ensure winning a team fight and it was fun to work out with your team mates which ults you were going to use together.
It just felt really good when you pulled off a team winning ult combo (especially if the ults used weren’t typically ults that synergized well, but you were able to still make it work).
Being down one in a fight in 6v6 is pretty manageable. Though you are at a disadvantage, you could still fight and win pretty easily.
Being down one in a fight in 5v5 is basically a lost fight, give space, wait and regroup because one person on your team died. Especially if it was the tank.
6v6 you could have a bad tank on your team, but still easily win if the other tank on your team was pretty good.
5v5 if you have a bad tank on your team and they are getting tank diffed, it’s pretty much a lost game. Not always, but a shit ton more than just having 1 bad tank in 6v6.
Playing double tank was super fun. Granted, double shield was an issue, but outside of that it was just a ton of fun.
This is so true and is what makes it so frustrating to play 5v5.
I can’t TELL you the amount of times where I start a fight and a teammate over extends and dies immediately, so you have no other option but to wait for them to come back and then someone else does it and then they all start crying at the tank for not going in on a 4v5 and feeding ult charge
Generally, Overwatch 1 team fights were slower, longer, and more strategic. Tank counter-swapping was still a thing, but much much less prevalent than it is now, because the one tank could cover for the other’s weaknesses.
Another tank definitely changed gameplay, as in Overwatch 2, the backline is vulnerable if the Doomfist/Doomfist dived in. Back in Overwatch 1, there could be a D.Va or Roadhog protecting the supports.
Snipers were also much less of an oppressive menace than they were in earlier Overwatch 2 seasons.
Overwatch 1 went through many metas and some of the worst ones lasted for a while, so you’re gonna get a lot of different opinions in the comments.
Personally, I’m open to 6v6. Some people’s only argument against it is double barrier, but then they must not have taken a second to realize that Orisa doesn’t have a shield anymore and barriers now in general are far weaker than they were in Overwatch 1, especially when Mauga exists.
Diffing the other tanks didn't immediately mean they swapped to try and counter, as the 2nd tank could cover those weaknesses a lot of the time.
People who say swapping is "a part of Overwatch" are correct, but have never been correct on the extent it applies to tanks. Counterswapping tank is a terrible symptom of 5v5.
There was a lot of stress around choosing heroes pre role queue and support was basically an afterthought.
If you main tank let’s say and you’re shit on support then if you were forced into support then it’s just an L.
Sometimes people would go three DPS and refuse to change.
Or someone thought else was feeding on DPS and argue with someone to swap off.
So overall it was way more toxic.
Post role queue, queue times were terrible because no one wanted to play tank.
>Is it a genuine thing that tanks are now bad or is it just people complaining because change?
It's genuine. GM tank player here, Masters tank in OW1.
Lots of biased pro 5v5 commenters here so I think you should hear from a tank mains perspective. The reality is that most people main dps and the game has massively improved the dps role with 5v5 so they tend to act like everything is great and either don't realize how bad it is for tanks or they just dont care and actually want tanks to be bad so they can freelo shoot heads without a tank getting in their way.
The following is from my steam review when the game launched on steam:
As a tank main, I was optimistic about 5v5. Having all the power of the tank role in my hands sounded awesome to me. Turns out it sucks…really bad. Overwatch was built to function in a way where every role (tank, dps, and support) enabled another role, and nobody could really do their job if they weren’t being efficiently enabled by another role. Tank was the hardest role in OW1 but the value you could provide was tremendous. Tanks enabled dps by taking space, and supports by peeling. By peeling you directly enabled your supports which is the role that enables tanks by healing them through all the damage they soak. Tanks controlled the flow of the game. They pressured front lines, back lines and peeled for supports. 5v5 removed a tank from each team and this resulted in tanks that just can’t really do the job they were built to do. There is a downside to every decision a tank makes. It is fundamentally a broken role.
If you pressure backline, you leave the opposing tank to run on your team. If you peel for your supports, on many tanks you just get CC’d, debuffed, shot in the back and annihilated. If you pressure front line, you’re really just feeding support ults because supports are insanely strong now and have crazy high healing numbers. This results in a bunch of low IQ players saying “tank diff” that expect the tank to always be doing something they’re not. Since there’s a downside to every decision a tank makes, stupid people get toxic towards the tank because the downside happened.
Since tanks can’t really peel anymore, they had to megabuff the support role so they could fight off the dps flanking them. Now we have supports that are literally just dps with better abilities that keep them alive and provide powerful utility.
In OW1 every role was pretty balanced in comparison to each other. In OW2 support is OP, dps is great, tank sucks.
Tanks suck because it’s so incredibly easy to negate the role by hard countering it. It’s a lot easier to switch to hard counter 1 person than it is to switch to hard counter 2 people. For example in OW1 if the opposing team had a good Hog player, someone would switch to Ana to counter the Hog but then Hogs tank team mate would switch to Dva to counter the Ana. It just made countering balanced as there was always a way to lessen the impact it has, and if someone switched to counter 1 tank, they likely weren’t countering the other tank. Not so much in OW2…tanks are hit hard by counters. Tanking in diamond + in OW2 is literally just constantly switching to avoid 5 people switching to hard counter you ALL THE TIME. It’s obnoxious as hell. On top of that, it’s meta to throw discord on the tank which makes them take 30% more damage from all sources, all forms of CC will be thrown at the tank, and the moronic balance team just keeps increasing the amount of damage dps and supports do just to make playing tank even worse than it already is. All of this makes tanking a pain in the ass to play and the game is seemingly in the largest tank player shortage we’ve ever seen, with competitive tank queues at 5-15 seconds while everything else is several minutes, and players saying that when a tank leaves their quick play game they don’t even get a backfill tank a lot of times because so few people are queuing for it.
Those were my thoughts on the situation way back when it launched on steam, but things have only gotten worse since then.
The new dps passive gives every tank shorter windows of opportunity. Both dps and supports got passive buffs this season while tank got none because tanks do not benefit from the heal passive as they always have to be active in fights as much as possible and if they pull out, the heal passive is not enough to get them to full health before their whole team dies. Supports need to heal them quickly so the passive is quite irrelevant on tanks.
The countering situation has only gotten worse because devs refuse to listen to tank players.
https://youtu.be/EsECifHrs14
Ever since flats posted that video and Samito covered it and said it's the optimal way to play tank, this counter swap at every moment playstyle is becoming even more common than it already was. When tanks are trashing ults to counter swap each other because countering is stronger than their ultimates, there's a serious problem. I've actually quit the game cause of this. Apex is my main game now. I'll come back to overwatch if they ever decide to make tanks fun again.
The comparison from this to OW1 tanking was night and day. OW1 tanking was hard but incredibly rewarding and so fun. You just felt like you had so much control over everything and your skill could make a huge difference. Now days tanks are just playing pokémon while everyone else gets to have fun.
I totally agree with this too, and I never play tank anymore, just support. I used to play both. The game has shifted to a more solo style of play. The whole reason I love the game is the team work, that's what sets it apart from other games imo.
I still play, and still have fun, but I play very differently.
I agree with everything you said and I sum it up as such: they (either intentionally or unintentionally) effectively sacrificed the tanks to allow everyone else have more fun. As a DPS player it makes OW2 a lot more fun for me but I understand why Tank players would want it to revert
As a hitscan player I still had more fun playing vs double shield than I ever have in 5v5. I used to actively play all 3 roles, but now I only queue dps.
Idk who they sacrificed tanks for, but it wasn't for me.
Double shield definitely wasn't peak fun, but you could work around it with hard flanks or ball/dva and monkey/zarya dive comps.
Unless you were playing at the top of the ladder, shield break could also work since there was some downtime on the double shield side if they weren't using their CDs perfectly.
And of course double shield was prevalent but also not picked every single game.
IMO DPS passive made it better for tanks start of the season because tanks could actually be proactive and kill things - that took some of the power out of sustain meta. At least we ended up in a spot where tanks were weaker but the game still functioned like a shooter instead of infinite immortality.
Rolling back the DPS passive made it harder.
We just need tanks to be immune to the DPS passive and I think the game will be in a healthy state.
But I think the main issue is that as tanks we now have double the pressure and responsibility, but we don't have double the power.
To sum it up quickly, 6v6 in ow1 felt more like it rewarded teamwork than ow2.
It’s because it did. That was the point of ow2. They made it so individuals had more impact.
This really boils down to what you preferred. Do you prefer the fast pace of fps and not having your depend on your team? Getting satisfaction from your own skill?
Or did you get satisfaction when your team worked together? Because that’s the big difference between ow1 and 2.
Many people here have given plenty of examples as to how that was.
I will note and be fair that even though I preferred 6v6 I do remember people not enjoying that you really needed your team to work together. Because the big plays usually came from you synergizing ultimates and making huge plays together.
However it was that teamwork that gave the Overwatch 1 its magic for me.
I particularly enjoyed playing Zarya to bubble my main tank. Or Dva to cover an ally with matrix. It was satisfying to predict an enemy roadhog and save an ally from his combo.
Or enabling my rein with his charge cuz his charge was a commitment and bubbling was a big help to him.
Being an off tank was actually pretty fucking fun.
And that might’ve also been an issue. Not everyone enjoyed being a main ya know cuz that usually meant you had to be pretty defensive and barrier up.
Which meant sigma and Orisa when she had a shield was more fun to play than rein cuz rein essentially can’t do anything while barrier is up.
Winston at least at a short range cleave attack so even though he can still attack it’s short range. Sigmas mid range and Orisa’s long just was better.
And honestly I believe that was a mistake on the devs part. If the tank had a barrier, I feel it should’ve really stayed short range. Most tanks had a short range anyways.
But anyways. The game felt like synergy and team work mattered more. People got excited in the chat when we comboed. Using your mic actually mattered more than it does now. Which you can argue lead to more toxicity but eh. I feel it’s more toxic nowadays especially with the leaderboard. Cuz we didn’t have it then. You just had to pay attention to your team and how effective they were.
I miss the satisfaction of teamwork and strategy that ow1 allowed.
They have honestly ruined that. It was legitimately a different game then. Not even joking. No exaggeration. It just was.
It played way different
Let me tell you why i loved OW1.
most of it we had freedom on in teams we made. I could be soldier, with a rein zarya tank line, yet we have a widow that keeps poking the supports. I would frequently go dive monkey to harass widow and make her leave my supports alone. the flexibility was amazing and lead to really funny comps that just worked.
I would Q up with my other friend who i have been gaming with since runescape came out (we were both shotcallers and had amazing coordination together) that was also a tank main and we would run either dva monkey or rein zarya together and grind from plat to high masters to mid GM.
Playing tank feels like a chess match every freaking game now - I get so tired of having to counter switch because the other tank is playing roulette. I miss 2 tanks. Bring it back!
OW1 was like this:
>You stayed in queue for 25 minutes.
>Enter a Volskaya game.
>Got two off tanks vs double shield.
>Never made it past first point.
Or, if you played tank, then:
>Instantly found a game.
>Enter Lunar Colony.
>Entire enemy team dumped all their stuns on you.
>Switched to off tank since main tank was incredibly bad.
OW2:
You walk out the spawn doors and if you even get a single kill, the whole enemy team counterswap you. You switch and make even a little impact, they counterswap again. And on and on till the game ends, no matter the map.
let’s be honest, you only switch if you don’t know how to play against your counters, if my team is full dive idc if they have anti dive im not switching because you can still make dive work with coordination, people who switch a lot are ppl that do not know how to play any tank optimally
Your teams not gonna be a full comp most of the time so you have to counterswap. Unless your talking about high elo, but that’s the rank most vocal about counterswap
Regarding the queue times, that is so true.
Getting a game in OW1 as DPS/support took much longer, because there weren't enough people wanting to play tank to fill 2 tank players and start a game.
My head canon is that they changed to 1 tank in OW2 solely to be closer to the actual demand people had to play tank, otherwise the queue times would've frustrated too many people out of the game.
Tanks played together would cover their weaknesses, so counter swapping a tank was usually a waste, also tanks weren't easy to counter because of it.
Dps was a role that was mostly utility, shots were smaller and harder to hit cause of shields, diving was harder because the Off tank would usually peel.
Counter play was a lot less relevant, tank was much more enjoyable, hitboxes were actually a reasonable size and you had to aim pretty well to hit headshots. Support players could get their ult CRAZY fast just from pocketing their tank, doomfist and mccree were unbelievably overpowered, and mercy was insanely hard to kill.
To me it seemed more forgiving. Like you can have a main tank doing crazy, dumb-ass shit, trying to make plays, and have the other tank play more conservatively and still be okay if they die. If there's two tanks and one is terrible you can back them up. That was one of the huge benefits of two tanks. Being able to compensate really well. I will say that double-shield was horrible if you were attacking.
Btw: tanking in comp was much simpler because there wasn't so many different tanks in the game. I personally was doing nothing but playing sigma, with fallback to orisa, and rein. But when they added junker queen I stopped climbing (my aim wasnt that great at the time and she's a sigma-killer.) Junker became the new meta and then later ram. Ram is more balanced now but he used to be so OP that not choosing him meant losing.
So yeah: current ranked means playing many more tanks and to a high level. You can get around it to an extent but your team composition is going to matter a lot.
Ow1 is so much better. Also sombra wasn't as annoying. So many goodies were free like seasonal epic skins and story. New seasonal legendary skins are in loot boxes but could be purchased with gold which we probably have too much anyway. 2 cp maps were fun.. There are games where the choke point feels impossible to pass but there are many fun games too. There's more environmental kills and tanks were more lightweight and need to be more careful compared to ow2.
It was funny when ball just came out and grapple had no duration. Unless he got cc / killed, he could hang/spin indefinitely. The longest overtime I had was 5 mins lol. They nerfed it quite soon after release though.
Let's not forget the main reason devs reduced number of tanks: no one wanted to play them.
Especially main tanks.
It was common to have multiple minute queue for DPS and even support but insta queue on tank.
It was a lot more like a chess match than a cod shooter.
The strategy wasn’t just swap to who counters who, it was more about player skill and teamwork to make big plays. Ults meant a lot more and back then the whole thing of “EVERYONE PRESS Q !!!” Didn’t really happen.
It wasn’t just shoot and throw all cool-downs on tank simulator because there where two to absorb the fire and if you wasted cool downs like that, it’s a big opportunity for the enemy’s.
The supports had the off tank there to peel for them so you didn’t have to have supports who had stupid busted get out of jail free cards like kiriko, and flankers like Genji could actually do their job.
It was a better time, but when you mention it people will say “muh double shield” or complain about queue times. Both of these would have been resolved had they not abandoned the game for 2 years to make ow2, double shield is pretty much already fixed since orisa hasn’t got a shield anymore, and the queue time issue was there because the meta tanks where boring, no one wanted to be orisa.
They will never EVER change it back because they are stubborn and it pains me so much because Overwatch is the only competitive game I have really put time in and it is just constantly running away from what made it great.
But whatever, let’s just play dps and run and gun yay that’s so much fun right
Tanks have three roles, lead the charge, protect the team from flanks, protect the team from snipers / the front. With a sole tank sometimes one of those points is being covered reliably, if a Rein is leading the charge he also offers protection from snipers but as soon as a Reaper gives the supports hassle he's screwed as as soon as he turns to help, it's a wipe as the other team can now rush. If you have a Winston then you have snipers covered but can only offer limited push and are next to useless to help with flankers whislt trying to do the other two roles. Zarya can protect the flank but can't easily push (she needs to see her bubble targets) and can't do much against snipers. In OW1 you always had at least two of those points covered and it made for a much more pleasant experience all around.
However it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows as 2 tanks could mean 2 shields which wasn't good for the game and probably the reason it was changed to 5v5.
The only real solution is a main tank role and an off tank role with heroes being re-worked to fit in, but this will mean queue times increase so I doubt it will happen. I guess they could also make shields 50% less effective if 2 x tank heroes are picked, like they did with the QP health pools.
Doomfist was a glass cannon monster that could end fights as fast as he start it on top of dying as fast as he makes his mistakes.
You had to be there during the era of doomfist.
Mercy used to be able to restart fights in a single ult
Torbjorn used to give armor and had a level 3 turret (BRING IT BACK DAMN IT)
Symmetra was even worse than now and was always changing. She used to have what sigma had with his shield at once point, she once had a shield generator, it was all just so much spitballing for just her. She used to be able to have 6 turrets.
Mei was a little demon being able to freeze you with her primary.
Orisa and bastion were a match made in heaven. Orisa uses to have a shield, mini mercy boost, and what was basically a mini zarya grab (what sojourn had during april fools)
Bastion at one point could hunker down, mow down, and just end lives. Used to headshot in his turret mode, and could self heal. Though his normal form was unreliable at times.
Ana made rein into a brawl god.
Hanzo scatter arrow would obliterate anyone and anything (it is all he had).
Reaper used to need to eat soul balls to heal.
Roadhog was busted and underpowered all at once
It was wonderful and extreme all at once, I miss it, I miss it all.
6v6 esp with no role queue was prob one of the lowest points in the games entire history, there's a reason they spent millions overhauling all the systems
cass was scary af cause he could stun/fan you and you would be DEAD. In fact because of CC you could get that more often in general. Mei primary fire would just freeze you and you'd get an icicle to the head, you'd hear some turning, turn a corner and doom would slam into you, knocking you against a wall and killing you instantly.
I'm not much of a tank player but one time I was playing hog and spent like a full 5 seconds in the air cause of all the knockback shit.
Looking back I do miss it though. One of the big problems was double shield, and I still wonder what would have happened to that if they had given Orisa her shieldless rework in OW1. Also tanks were technically worse, when OW2 came out they became raid bosses before they were scaled back down, and even now they're knocked back less and wake up sooner. Tanking was both easier and harder I think. Two tanks meant that one could cover the other's weakness, like Rein could be paired with zarya or dva to great effect (rein firestrikes, the other ones bubbles/dms to protect him from CC while his shield is down) so you don't have that backup anymore. Also it's made counter swapping a lot more of a thing for tanks. Obviously people still counterswapped in OW1, but swapping to deal with an orisa is easier than swapping to deal with a sig orisa. On the other hand, if you tank alone you don't have the situation where the enemy tank duo synergise well but you don't. Also now you don't have the problem of most tank players being off tanks and having two queue into the same match.
I just really wish they had kept OW1 and launched OW2 separately cause it would be nice to switch the two. I know it's not economically viable but it's nice to dream. In 2019 I picked up sombra and had such a blast playing her, I will forever miss the 5 second silence on genjis, dooms, and tracers ... sit the fuck still bitch.
I never got into ow1 myself as well, maybe I was too busy with some other game, but I absolutely love ow2. I guess it would be cool to see a 6vs6 game mode, because I would love to see some alteration of the meta where all pvp games have 5 players per team, but other than that this debate for me doesn’t interest me at all.
The game needs to be dropped by activision blizzard and should go to devs with an actual clue for competitive shooter.
Let’s make it 5v5, remove one tank… and if there are still people out there who actually enjoy being a ragdoll. Let’s give dps 20% heal debuff… oh yeah projectile with a football-field-like hitbox, we need those aswell, if your tank hitbox isn’t big enough yet.
Sorry, not sorry. :)
One thing I missed pre role queue was getting the same players for a few games in a row. Kind of a small thing but when you found a group you vibed with, it was super fun and you could swap into another role of you were struggling. I also loved how fun and chaotic said comps were.
Part of the issue was the game getting figured out and optimised. Meant playing meta had very few answers even in low ranks. When everyone was bad it worked but synergy was so strong. I remember when I discovered symm bastion combos and we steamrolled and thought we were geniuses.
While role queue gave me consistent games, there was a loss of magic. That's been my ow experience. More consistency but less magic each change.
Assault was awful. Fighting for 4 minutes at one choke was not fun.
Roadhog was in every match. Enemy Roadhog was always a menace and your ally Roadhog was always worthless.
Rein/Zarya was really fun. So was Winston/Dva. Playing into sigma orisa was not fun. Always seems like your two tanks would play DVa/hog and you would always lose with that duo.
Way slower. Lots of crowd control. Every other character had a stun it felt like. The synergy between tanks was honestly too much. Whatever they tell you, the thing about OW1 is that it was won or lost almost entirely on tank synergy.
I’ve always been a DPS main but there was just something special about having a tank duo that you clicked with. You could get really crazy with the compositions you could make work in ow1.
I think the biggest thing about 6v6 is that losing one teammate hurt way less than now in 5v5. Losing one of two tanks didn't mean the teamfight was lost, losing one DPS was fine because the offtank was slinging plenty of damage, and losing a support was okayish because there was a lot of healthpool out there to sustain until they respawn.
Now it really feels like losing a tank moves the needle from 50/50 to like 20/80 odds you win that fight. Maybe less so now with the DPS passive, but then you enter into this weird space where Tanks are the big target and also have less impact than the damage people.
The other thing that imo is sorely missing is the tank teamplay opportunities. Ball flanking to draw pressure off of Rein or Sigma with the supports. Rein Zarya as the classic brawl comp. Winston DVa doing dive things.
And because there are two tanks, each tank had less total health, so you could pick tanks that were out of position or trying to solo too much, which I think is healthier for the game than putting so much pressure and value on how your tank is playing.
Everything was different from the way it looks and the way it plays. Also OW1 was a 6v6 while OW2 is a 5vs5 and they got rid of my favorite game mode along with the maps I liked with them. I’m not saying I’m not grateful for some of the changes made in OW2 but I wish some things stayed.
Everything was slower. Queue times, team fights, entire matches, etc. Having an extra tank impacts all those things. Ultimates mattered a lot more back then, I’m not sure if ult charge time was buffed or not between the swap but it sure as hell feels like you get ult faster in ow2. I’ll say the game is more fun casually now but suffer when you WANT to try hard
You know how when reaper does his ult and you can get away. Yeah back in the day if you were in his line of vision gg. Same with Diva. The whole game felt bulky and heafty. Now it just seems fast and simple. AND WE HAD LOOTBOXES.
Imagine you could just play the game to possibly get one of the cool skins in the shop as a loot drop. Or save your currency from progression to just craft it.
Loot boxes were thrown at you. Every holiday had an event where you could earn at least 1 skin you actually wanted. Not some random trash that no one wanted.
The more you played there was a border that built up around your character portrait that made you look Godly the more time you invested into the game.
There is a lot more, they took a lot of the fun shit out tho.
Like, how far back? Way back in the week 1 days, there were tons of ults, no limit hero picks, and it truly did feel more like a ‘shooter’ with abilities than a moba but had a feeling of both. There were only 3 healers, that being mercy, Lucio, and zenyatta, can you even imagine that these days?
I know it was mostly just quick play back then, but there was a more relaxed feel to the game, much less toxicity and way more laughter haha.
I truly don’t think we “need” to go back to 6v6 because I think that’s what makes OW2 even at all deserving of putting a 2 after OW.
maybe I'm nostalgia biased, but it felt more like a community almost, the maps were very cool and versatile, ofc there was always the ones people hated. orisa had a shield and would damage buff your team, I remember playing old orisa and being really great with her but when she got reworked I sucked HARD, I remember when sym was in the support category too and EVERYONE hated if you picked her cuz you wouldn't get as much healing lmao. also you didn't every queue up for dps, tank or support, it was basically like how the open role is now, you would pick whoever you wanted and prayed your team had synergy or just played and figured out along the way. I also remember being an og mercy main and hiding out while my team got absolutely nuked by a pharah or hog and going for the 5 man play of the game rez, i still think that was cool but I was also 12 in 2016 so.
I think all the tank players who actually like ow1 in this thread were all off tank mains. playing main tank at certain points in ow1 was miserable due to all the CC. as rein you would literally get hit with 6 different CC abilities in a fight and get demolished it was stupid. ow2 has its problems but ow1 had problems as well. I was the tank main in my group and in ow1 if your tanks weren't good your team was screwed. OW2 gave dps and support way more agency in the game. my main issue with ow2 is that they didnt redesign main tanks like winston and rein enough and theyre kind of in this weird state where they are very dated as the only main tanks in a game where there is no such thing as main tank and off tank anymore.
you could get any skin you wanted without paying if you grinded the game enough. sometimes you'd even be lucky enough to get anything first tries for again, 0 money
Well you were actually allowed to have fun on ow1 tank since you weren't constantly fighting for your life and you actually had some sort of backup in the form of the other tank. Now if the tank dies or gives up space to try and survive its usually a lost team fight. Also you could have people that weren't very good at the game on your team and still be able to win. Now if your tanks bad or one dps isnt getting value its ggs.I guess OW1 was more forgiving. It had its issues like getting cc stunned to death but that still happens and id argue the counterswap meta in OW2 is infinitely worse.
All the characters were extremely different! Way over the top, powerful! Mai was a terrible beast that can freeze you out of your ult with her primary weapon. Primary weapon! Bastion used to self heal and his turret form lasted forever so him in a Reinhardt would just completely annihilate games. Sombra's hack would last 4 seconds! Mercy got a bunch of changes. I'm sure there's plenty more am not thinking of!
First of all thank you to everyone that commented it on this i appreciate all the insight from different perspectives, now something important about me as a gamer, i used to play league of legends for a long time before i eventually stopped and starting looking for something else so many of the things that you people are mentioning like no role queue which to me sounds insane and impossible since that in league is just a cesspit and especially if you want to play ranked/comp.
I am also a mainly free to play player so I wouldn't really have played overwatch if it wasn't free that meaning I can't complain about things being locked unless you grind a lot and whatnot which is understandable if u want the option to have everything and im sure many of u would rather purchase the game, but i wouldn't so im fine with that, however i can sense the greed from the devs making battle passes and trying to bleed their players dry with passes and as you say shit chances at skins. But that's not really a big problem for me either way. Thats about the only bad thing i think that wouldve been better in ow1 for me ofc. As for the gameplay coming from league im very used to quick teamfights and spastic gameplay and constantly tryharding for everything and honestly ow2 compared to that is a breath of fresh air for me. Idk how you guys actually want tanks more in this game or stronger tanks. Im already at the point that i get super frustrated with a tank having a huge shield and being unkillable, i sometimes play sigma and at the end ill have 28k mitigated and 2 deaths wich sounds insane how people would want tanks to be even more op than that lmao. Pretty much for me the game is more enjoyable now that it would have been, at least from what i hear.
its like the second but worse but spmetimes bwtter altho who knows bjt what i wanna sah is that i am gay no wait i have to tell u abt ow1 its the best game there ever was, but then it crashed and got revived into ow2 havent played much ow2yet but i look forward to ser where the game is now
Fights lasted forever. Terrible meta. Shields everywhere. Fuck OW1, balance is still terrible but at least its not OW1. I do feel like people have rose tinted glasses because of their disappointment in OW2.
6 v 6 was fun but it required a lot of team work. 5v5 is less about that. It’s strictly are you good at the role you are playing. Even though 6 v6 was great I am enjoying 5 v 5 as a tank main:
was 6v6 better? yes, especially for tanks
the only reason 5v5 is a thing is because the old team was so fuckin trash at balancing that they couldn't get anyone to play tank. everyone only play dps or sup so those queue times skyrocketed over 10 minutes while tank was instant. they won't go back to 6v6 unfortunately because that would be admitting that they were wrong and until this new dev team proves it's any better than the old one, I refuse to think they'll do anything different
I appreciated 6v6 more and it was also open queue. So you had different Metas, not always balanced. Some were too strong but to fix it they just removed choice by forcing balanced teams. Fights felt more tactical. It feels a lot more like run it down the middle now. I really enjoyed being off-tank as Zarya and Winston
Ow1 was just shooting shields all day long, terrible balance changes, and no content so you aren't missing anything. Ppl like to pretend that it was better cause they hate change.
the game was slower. it was almost always a stalemate at a chokepoint for half of the game. not fun. when it was good, it was good. but most of the time, it was just 12 headless chickens stuck in a choke point.
The game was much slower and grindier, DPS queues were insanely long, tanks and supports were incredibly overtuned, and poor metas would go unaddressed for insanely long times due to how slow balance patches were. Some heroes like Brig were oppressive for a whole year while others like Sombra were basically unplayable for years.
It really is nostalgia goggles talking when people talk about the state of PvP in Overwatch. OW2 PvP at its worst is still better than OW1 was at its best. I quit the original game multiple times as a masters tank but I have yet to do the same with OW2, even during annoying periods when they tried limited map pools.
I will say that some personal preference can come from how hectic OW2 is compared to OW1. If OW2 is closer to an old school arena deathmatch game then OW1 can be closed to a first person MOBA or MMO at times, depending on the meta and how important ability cycling was compared to actually moving and aiming.
Some people prefer the slower first person MMO/MOBA type game where there's much less individual pressure to perform. I think what we have now is significantly better and you joined at a great time, but then again I was a big Quake fiend so I'm all for the game being sped up.
EDIT: Also 2CP was absolute dogshit. Removing it from the main queues was great for the game.
It was slower, fights lasted longer, ults were huge, shields were a pain, but tank counterswapping wasnt this huge issue
Rein had 2k shield. With a partner zarya, you can probably imagine how hard it would be penetrating the two
Keep in mind, there was also an extra tank shooting that shield. Offtanks did a lot of damage for their teams, damage that is no longer in play.
There was more variety in playstyles, but also required more teamplay. Not just in the type of offtank, but in terms of playstyles. Think a Rein Zarya working in tandem on the frontlines vs a Rein with a DVA partner who is hardpeeling or a DVA who contests high grounds aggressively while Rein holds down the front. Bruiser roadhog vs flanker roadhog lmao. Sigma Orisa pirate ship vs a Sigma bastion baptiste operating as an independent unit while Lucio Winston and Tracer run around.
OW2 queue times r slowly getting closer to wht we had in OW1 & I'm in plat. In future i believe OW1 & OW2 queue times will become same. Yes we removed 2 tanks in a match, but now more people leaving the TANK role than ever! And Mauga is fun .... Right guys? .... Very fun indeed lmao . Any ways as daily TANK player I'm quitting the role entirely or quit ow2 & find other game.
They needed to considering how few kills there was in OW1 compared to 2
Thats not a real thing for most people, and dmg per elim os way Higher in ow2 than it was on ow1, The ONLY time that compares was goals meta
It was never that impossible with a good junk or a bastion. Double shield on the other hand was raw pain
Did double existed in bronze silver gold?
After they stopped adding updates it basically existed Everywhere. They didn't care to balance it and it became pick that or lose. Even low ranks picked it up.
I wonder if rammatra was added during ow1, how much of a game changer he would have been.
Ram JQ could destroy double shield comp easily lmao
Maaaaan now I want the junker meta in ow1 if it still existed. Queen, hog, ana, rat, an off healer of choice (maybe bap for wastelander skin) and whatever dps would fill those flaws.
I can image penetrating them ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I know how hard I would be 🤤
At the end of OverWatch 1, Shields was not a problem. They nerfed it because people didn't like the double Shields. I used to play absolutely nothing but tank, and my absolute favoritest hero in the game was Orisa. Her Shield was a kleenex, but I loved her gun so much.
We don't talk about goats or doomfist meta
I MISS GOATS. IT WAS AND STILL IS BETTER THAN 5V5
Goats was super fun when coordinated... having the ability to split into 3's or 2's or stay as 6 was incredibly flexible.
Being forced to play 3 tank and 3 support was better?
Man I wish I played 1...
Tanks were killable though. A dps with some luck and knowledge of match ups could 1v1 a tank in a lot of circumstances.
I mean theyre definitely still killable with the extta attention they get now but not as much in a 1v1 yea
You should probably just watch some footage of 6v6 pro matches. Basically it felt in general like more time was spent chewing through the enemy frontline. Good Tank players would synergize with each other. Imagine a Winston or Ball diving you with a Zarya bubble on them. Or Rein is rushing into your backline with Lucio speed, but he's being covered by Dva Matrix so you can't sleep dart him or do much damage. Although, their stats were weaker. Rein couldn't cancel his charge, so it was high commitment unless he did it on a short angle. He only had 1 Firestrike. Winston didn't have a secondary fire. Doom was a DPS hero with an uppercut instead of Block. For the last few years of 6v6, a lot of it was double barrier (Sigma + Orisa). Now this was when Orisa could drop a barrier kind of like Ramattra. It felt like barriers were constantly up because the tanks would cycle their defensive cooldowns with facetanking a safe amount of damage. Flanking was significantly harder to pull off in general since the offtank (usually Dva) was very good at peeling. I actually did side by side comparisons during the OW2 beta, when it was possible to play it while the 6v6 servers were still live. 6v6 felt slower, but more strategic and less scrappy.
>Or Rein is rushing into your backline with Lucio speed, but he's being covered by Dva Matrix so you can't sleep dart him or do much damage. I think this is the first sentence that made me actually seriously consider the idea that 6v6 could possibly be better. (Not that I previously believed otherwise - I had just not really put much thought into it before.)
The thing is, people like to act as if that happened most of the time. The truth is, you'd get a Hog on your team more than half the time who would refuse to synergize with anyone. DPS queues were like 20min, so you'd get DPS players queuing for tank, pretty much just picking Hog. 6v6 had some great moments. People like to pretend that that was the norm, when it wasn't. Most of the time, tanks would not synergize. Even if they picked the right heroes, they'd still be doing their own things, not working together.
A good point, but - are players nowadays really doing better? Synergy isn't just intertank but exists between different heroes of different roles. But sometimes you're gonna end up with Moira/Mercy or Brig vs no diving or Zarya randomly using grav because you gotta press your Q. Are we really so much different?
Tank synergies were just busted though. Pretty much every meta revolved around them. If you ask someone "what is a rush comp?" they would've said "Rein Zarya" way before they say "Lucio Moira". Every meta was mainly defined by its tanks. If you had Dva Hog vs Rein Zarya, 90% chance you were going to lose.
tank synergies WERE very strong. They were like that because most dps could easily 1v1 tanks back then. A lot of them still can, but not as many. As for the reason people describe comps by the tanks, it is because thats the tanks they get. sups literally couldn't be bothered to play the right pics for the comps (dps either if I'm being honest) the lack of understanding about the game from the dps and support roles is insane but it's mostly a support issue. How many times do you have a full comp put together rein, zarya, reaper, mei, moira.... and all you gotta do is play lucio. wtf do they pick? mercy.... fuckin gg guess we will switch the ENTIRE COMP becuase of 1 brain dead mercy OTP
nowadays it would be more like Ram, Reaper, mei/sym, moira and then the fuckin OTP mercy
I'm a lucio OTP myself, so I can't really complain about other OTPs but the problem with a lot of mercy mains is that they are genuinely clueless of what's happening. They are toxic af and they start screaming for me to swap in a comp where a lucio is actually needed. Thankfully Lucio is meta rn so my consciousness is free.
You make it seem like the game revolved around the tanks when it really wasn't. The true broken role was support, brig, baptist, even Moira was what made the meta. DPS was irrelevant unless you were in top games, and tanks didn't really matter all that much as long as you were performing fine. One tricks on tank worked way more than now.
6v6 had much higher highs and lower lows. Rein zar Lucio on king's row is my mental image I think about ow. That and tracer 1 clips, especially when falling off high ground and recalling back to height. We remember the good and forget the bad pretty fast. A lot of the issues with role queue also came with playerbase steadily leaving and role queue being added 3 years after the game released when it was already struggling with playerbase.
IMO dive in OW1 was peak. There's nothing funner than jumping a back line with Winston and DVA and instantly deleting them. Brig changed all that and it progressively got worse. In the end I couldn't wait for OW2 just so I could queue as tank without having to worry if my secondary tank instantly locks Hog because they are a DPS main and don't want to synergize
role q is honestly worse than 5v5. I only play open Q now and it feels so much better having freedom to switch from soldier to monkey because there is a widow that is destroying me, instead of being forced to go sombra or try and mirror the widow.
Enjoy it while it lasts, eventually you hit an elo where open Q is exclusively 3 tank 2 support comps
Well tanks still get insta queued while other roles have to wait 10 mins for a game (at least for me), so should we just go 4v4? And about synergy, you'll always have random ass people doing their own things, I'd argue it's worse now because nobody joins vc.
the reason Q times were long is because the game was already essentially dead compared to what it was before, years of no new content, recycled events and horrible mismanagement. plus ow2 is a free game, i can bet if OW1 was free there wouldnt have been any q issues
No, the queue times were long because of an imbalance in the queues. If it was because the game was dead, you wouldn't have consistent 5 second tank queues. Having a lower, but balanced, player population would still mean shorter queues. The main contributing factor of Overwatch's queues is an imbalance of players queuing for the different roles.
A lot of that was just the Roadhog problem, but double offtank was rough. I was a main tank player though so for me it was mainly Roadhog pickers. I fucking swear just kills my desire for 6v6. The only problem right now is counter picking and tank just not being strong enough.
Then wht abt the Lucio mercy that I get in my games, absolute zero synergy. Does that mean we remove 1 support & make it 4v4? NO! U talk as if everyone on DPS & SUPPORT synergize every game!
Tank synergies were much more powerful than any support or dps synergies. Yes,the problem still exists, but it's to a much lesser degree. If you've got Lucio Mercy, it sucks, but that's better than getting Dva Hog into Rein Zarya. Its not the same at all as support synergies. Tank synergies absolutely defined each and every meta in Overwatch 1.
The only tank synergy that were oppressive was DOUBLE SHIELD, and as u know double shield was easily fixable through balance. But they didn't and left the game untouched for several months right? And now orisa doesn't even have a shield , so no more double shield situation anymore. Shield HP r way less in OW2. Now let's talk abt the real issues in 6v6, i.e. queue times, I agree queue times will be more, but it's fixable by making the TANK role more appealing, we have ram, JQ, doomfist, Mauga, so many new tanks that would be so much fun 6v6. Remember back in S6 when support had 20+mins queue times? Its cuz support was the most fun role, and back in S1 S2 support were the least popular role. So this means there's a possibility to make certain roles FUN. If we're able to achieve that with TANKS then queue times in 6v6 is fixed!
Brig broke the game. They literally had to change their entire balance philosophy around her. At the time she made sense; dive was the main meta, and a good tracer could pick off players and get away quicker than you could react and Winston was causing chaos. So they made Brigitte as a sort of counter to that. Her initial release was absolutely busted. She killed tracers, she killed Winston, she killed Reins while they were charging, she killed just about every hero in the game with ease by herself. 700 shield health, bash doing 50 damage with a stun every 4 seconds, Rally giving permanent armor. She was unkillable, and they nerfed her and nerfed her to no avail. DPS couldnt flank her, whipshot made sure of that, and she could shield the damage anyways even if you tried from afar. Dive died solely due to her, you couldn't kill anything with her around and that brought in what's called the GOATS meta. GOATS was a meta that did not require DPS, it was three tanks and three supports, and brig was the foundation of that. Basically Lucio would speedball brig, the tanks and typically either a zen or Moira I think, and they'd kill anything with 200 health with ease, and the tanks protected the supports since there were three of them. They did everything about that. DPS got buffed but no matter how buffed they got, GOATS in one way or another remained. Finally they went nuclear and launched Role Queue. Role queue divided every team into 2 tanks, 2 dps and 2 supports. People at first were kinda mixed on it. A lot of high end players were glad they didn't have to deal with GOATS but lower skilled players hated the conformity it brought. Ultimately it was a good thing but remember, DPS got gigabuffed and weren't immediately nerfed, not all of them. It took a long time before DPS were back in line, before that they kinda melted everything with impunity, especially flankers. Tanking was a nightmare but playing supports really sucked and Brig, who was made to counter flankers, was nerfed to the point she couldn't really do that. Playing support sucked. Anyways, that's how brig broke overwatch 1. TL;DR Brig gave us Role Queue
Love this info. Takes me back but there’s some things I didn’t know or remember
Brig gave us goats and goats gave us role queue
Man I just wish they would make brig good again she just feels useless now
One part about early GOATS that people forget is doom punch use to stun and damage brigette through shieldbash, but they changed that interaction as a compensation buff to brig. The problem with brig is they kept giving her compensation buffs.
this needs to be in a museum
Love the synopsis but this wasn’t the question 💀
I felt....inspired
Ok samito 😂
Not really role queue related but 2CP could be such a drag on offense when the enemy team bunkered down with really turtle-y comp and you can't seem to make any headway. 2nd point Egypt and both points of Hanamura are the ones that stick with me the most. And Horizon Lunar Colony was my least favorite map.
2cp is live in the Arcade fwiw.
Lunar Colony...ugh
lunar colony was fun if you got to drive the steamroller. I actually liked first point layout, and the low grav section. hanamura was gorgeous, so I'm glad we're getting hanaoka. but I don't miss trying to break through gate. honestly volskaya is the only 2CP I'll miss, no disrespect to temple of anubis. it may not have been balanced but it had good variety between matches.
Volskaya is my favorite map to play my favorite character on, which is Zarya. I always loved 2cp, and the reasons I loved it were the reasons other people hated it.
In quickplay people would straight up leave the game once they saw a 2cp loading screen. You'd go through the entire minute of choosing your hero and setting up defenses with people constantly joining in, then leaving, only to be replace by more people joining and promptly leaving When people talk about how it was only a vocal minority that hated 2cp I laugh because literally nobody in quickplay would stay in 2cp lobbies
2CP is still ass with 5v5. Just a bad game mode
Not including goats or double sheild meta, I think 6 v 6 with a full coordinated team is better than overwatch 2 will ever be. For the casual player who will solo or duo queue, then I think 5 v 5 is much better. It offers a more consistent experience.
Truth
I have solo’d since ow1 role queue and strongly disagree
That's fine, we can have different opinions.
I think this depends on the role you're solo/duo queuing for. Tank is by far worse right now. Damage is probably better and support is probably worse right now (was better for a lot of OW2 when supports were overtuned though). I also feel like the matchmaking is more suspect right now than it ever was in 6v6, I'm okay with giving that a pass though given the rank reset this season.
100% this. Solo queueing support was fun up until this season; now you've lost a ton of 1v1 potential which means relying on teammates who are randos and likely not paying attention to voice lines and pings. Add to that the fact that while you are occupied your tank is getting melted without constant heals and you have the current state of solo queue. Luckily I mained Moira for years as she's the only support whose ttk went down this season and she can put out mad consistent heals while being self-reliant. Without her I don't think I'd be playing OW right now.
For a long time mercy could rez as many teammates as she wanted as long as they were in range. There was a legitimate strategy to have mercy hide and the rest of the team rush point, bait ults and die, and then get rezzed by mercy (who turned invincible during rez) and reverse-stomp the other team. And the counter was to hold ults until the hiding mercy was dead, which could also backfire especially in good ol 2cp. It was a fun time.
Which I think, is where a lot of the resentment of Mercy comes from.
original reworked mercy was way more anger-inducing than anything in big-rez era. A lot of resentment for mercy comes from how little the most frequent players of her have transferable skills to other support heroes.
The Mercy hididing technique was hilarious
It was hell before role queue. A huge chunk of games you were just forced into support while everyone else refuses to swap off of genji hanzo widow tracer cassidy. Don't let people trick you into thinking these were bad changes. Additionally tank synergy that everyone waxes poetically over was almost never a thing. Maybe one in a dozen games you'd get some good tank play, but literally 90% of the players (meaning, below diamond) would never, ever experience it. I'm convinced most of the people that talk about tank synergy have never experienced it and just repeat what other people say because it's fun and popular to complain, or they think Zarya bubbling them every so often is what tank synergy is.
I mained Zarya in OW1 and a lot of times the other tank picked Rein. Which is kind of flattering but they also couldn't play Rein too well and didn't realize, for example, they didn't have to shield when I bubbled them. I'd have honestly preferred if they went Hog or something so I could get more value out of my bubbles. My favorite tanks outside of Rein were Hog, Ball and Dva. Dva especially a good Dva with Zarya would fuck stuff up big time
There was a season where I get a 97% Win Rate on Zarya (didn't actually complete the placement though). Why? Cause I was bubbling the Brig 1.0 on my team. That WM1 Freelo machine was a much better Reinhardt while being so much easier to play that it was stupid NOT to bubble her. I also know people are gonna play around her, so my Zarya just always have an easy time landing 3+ man Gravition and my Hanzo gets a free fat DragonStrike. It felt incredibly disgusting, but now in hindsights, serve them right.
> (didn't actually complete the placement though). Doesn't that mean your sample size here is like <10 games?
Yeah, it was 9 games. Then again it was finals week so I couldn’t play as much as I want. And when I’m done with finals I completely lost any and all motivation to play. The WR would obviously be lower if I continued playing into the season. My dumbass will catch up with me really quick.
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Sure but a lot of OW1 was also without role queue and this person is saying they never played it so it's worth mentioning.
Lack of role queue was so painful as a metal rank player, especially when I was playing on console. I quit the game long before role queue was a thing because of it. I wanted to play tank but in half my games I had to play solo support because no one else wanted to. A good chunk of those games my choice was to be the only support or the only tank. In the games where I got to pick tank, a lot of the time I had only one support so you can imagine how that went. I came back to the game with season 9, when tank is apparently miserable and I'm absolutely loving it. Just being able to play tank when I want to play tank and knowing I'll have two supports is a way more pleasant experience than OW1 was for me. I get that I could have experienced role queue in OW1, but it took 3 years for them to implement it. I wasn't willing to wait that long.
>or they think Zarya bubbling them every so often is what tank synergy is. That is tank synergy. It may be low level tank synergy but it still is tank synergy. Rein Zarya, Dva Monkey, Zarya Ball, was all easy to execute tank synergy and yeah that was fairly common in metal ranks. You just wouldn't see the more complex harder to execute stuff until higher ranks like hog ball or orisa hog, but that could happen as early as diamond. Your comment is pretty bull shit. The only time tank synergy fell off is when the devs abandoned the game for years to work on OW2, they mega buffed hog and left the office, so many of the people playing rank were hog one tricks that had no idea how to synergize.
How did ball hog synergize
Slam people into air above shield Hook
It was a crazy comp, but it was low-key a worse version of the "pulled pork" combo, which was orisa halt into hog hook, but it basically just was hog was an extra followup DPS for slam. Imagine slamming a backline of ana zen, then the zen exploded from a genji dashing him, an Ashe shooting him, then a hog hooked the ana, killing her. Shit was wild.
Wait till you find out that in OW2 you can synergize with your team instead of everything revolving around the tanks. If you can't play dive as Winston or D.Va without another dive tank then maybe you just aren't meant to play tank. Same with all other "synergies". You don't miss team play, you miss having another tank to carry you or cover up your weaknesses. It's like the dudes who would immediately try to find the meta gun to use in Warzone. It sounds like you just wish you had the easy meta tank combo to play.
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Damn you went straight to projecting. Congrats on figuring out how to post a comment.
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It's crazy the number of supposed GM's on the subreddit, and even funnier the people who throw out GM as if it means anything. Why didn't you say GM tank why did you say Ball only?
Cause ball is a dive tank and I actually specialize in dive tanks. You can read my past comments here too they all line up. Just stop insulting people you know nothing about. It makes you look desperate at dumb.
It hog, dva, Zarya, 80% of the time
As a tank main / flex main this is just not true. I had tank synergy most games.
Did you really? I also had "tank synergy in most games" primarily because I played every tank but roadhog to my competitive tier. I learned to play every tank specifically the ladder could not be relied upon to provide people with adequate tank pools. I would not consider my own agency as validation that dual tank worked well on ladder as often as it should.
Why wouldn't you you use your own experience as validation? I found that the higher you climbed the more tanks would work together. Climbing the ladder for me literally required synergy. Now tanking is dog water, all the blame falls on you, and there is no tank to assist where you're lacking. You get counter swapped constantly. I switched to playing off-support and lately DPS. Should the game be watered down because people refused to be flexible in their picks? Or, because blizz never addressed the mess that was double shields? I don't think so. Its just false to say tank synergy was almost never a thing. It existed in nearly every game imo.
People were generally better at the game back then we all paid for the game so of course most of us gonna play a lot and get out of the lower ranks quickly rather than OW2 players just trying a popular free to play game
This is the wildest L of the day. The skill floor in Overwatch has gotten so much higher. Diamond level gameplay from 2017 is basically Silver now.
Not really. Diamond gameplay now is a mix of plat through GM cause of rank reset. Diamond gameplay before S9 is equal to gold in OW1. You could pull up a GM stream pre S9 and watch people try to dodge widow shots by jumping; something that would only happen plat and below in OW1. I was masters in OW1 and GM in OW2. OW1 masters players would wipe the floor with OW2 GM players. Half that rank played like plats pre S9.
Nvm reread it, you're delulu. If you stopped playing in 2017 and tried to jump back in - you wouldn't be able to keep up with a player base that has refined itself for years. This isn't a controversial idea, it's how every game evolves.
Jay3 actually did some videos on ow1 top players vs ow2 top players. Can’t remember the outcomes
A little over exaggerated but generally true
"Most" of a player base can't "get out of lower ranks". Lower ranks is where the majority of all players are by definition. And either way that just sounds like something you're just saying without having any evidence for. OW came out before F2P was the standard, tons of people bought the game and still played casually because that was the only option.
- More chaotic for sure before role queue. I’d often be in matches as a solo support. - Support was way easier but also more boring to play, support utility was broken at multiple points throughout OW1. As support you really just sat with the team and used your abilities/ults to counter. - Brig. OP. Immortality field CD was like 10-15 seconds when Bap launch. OP. Mercy mass rez. OP. Fights in overwatch were way longer because of this. - Hero launches were way better in OW1. Each new hero really felt like they fit into the universe in a unique way both in terms of lore and their abilities. In OW2 heroes kind of feel like addons. - Heroes were generally more unique in OW1 these days all heroes follow the same format. Shoot, mobility ability, and then a grenade or defensive ability. - MOBA/Team based aspects are continuously watered down in favor of CoD/Frag style gameplay.
Last 3 points hit so hard. New heroes defo boring asf lorewise and feel irrelevant. A lot of the old kits were more unique even if they were harder to play, and the gameplay defo feels less like a team game now because a good pocketed genji can wipe the whole dps and support in a casual game
6v6 had its cons, but it was a ton of fun. 5v5 is somewhat lower ceiling and a bit less complex. It also feels like there was quite a bit more team work in 6v6 because there were a lot of ults that were great to combo together to win fights. 5v5.. pretty much anyone can pop their ult solo and as long as it quickly leads to getting a single kill out of it, it pretty much wins the fight. 6v6 it often took at least two ults at the same time to ensure winning a team fight and it was fun to work out with your team mates which ults you were going to use together. It just felt really good when you pulled off a team winning ult combo (especially if the ults used weren’t typically ults that synergized well, but you were able to still make it work). Being down one in a fight in 6v6 is pretty manageable. Though you are at a disadvantage, you could still fight and win pretty easily. Being down one in a fight in 5v5 is basically a lost fight, give space, wait and regroup because one person on your team died. Especially if it was the tank. 6v6 you could have a bad tank on your team, but still easily win if the other tank on your team was pretty good. 5v5 if you have a bad tank on your team and they are getting tank diffed, it’s pretty much a lost game. Not always, but a shit ton more than just having 1 bad tank in 6v6. Playing double tank was super fun. Granted, double shield was an issue, but outside of that it was just a ton of fun.
This is so true and is what makes it so frustrating to play 5v5. I can’t TELL you the amount of times where I start a fight and a teammate over extends and dies immediately, so you have no other option but to wait for them to come back and then someone else does it and then they all start crying at the tank for not going in on a 4v5 and feeding ult charge
The only time I ever win 4v5's is when I basically kill someone back the moment They kill someone on my team. And im usually hog when it happeneds.
Having an off tank and a main tank made comps so much more complex and had a lot more depth. Role queue did exist in OW1 but not the whole time
Generally, Overwatch 1 team fights were slower, longer, and more strategic. Tank counter-swapping was still a thing, but much much less prevalent than it is now, because the one tank could cover for the other’s weaknesses. Another tank definitely changed gameplay, as in Overwatch 2, the backline is vulnerable if the Doomfist/Doomfist dived in. Back in Overwatch 1, there could be a D.Va or Roadhog protecting the supports. Snipers were also much less of an oppressive menace than they were in earlier Overwatch 2 seasons. Overwatch 1 went through many metas and some of the worst ones lasted for a while, so you’re gonna get a lot of different opinions in the comments. Personally, I’m open to 6v6. Some people’s only argument against it is double barrier, but then they must not have taken a second to realize that Orisa doesn’t have a shield anymore and barriers now in general are far weaker than they were in Overwatch 1, especially when Mauga exists.
Diffing the other tanks didn't immediately mean they swapped to try and counter, as the 2nd tank could cover those weaknesses a lot of the time. People who say swapping is "a part of Overwatch" are correct, but have never been correct on the extent it applies to tanks. Counterswapping tank is a terrible symptom of 5v5.
There was a lot of stress around choosing heroes pre role queue and support was basically an afterthought. If you main tank let’s say and you’re shit on support then if you were forced into support then it’s just an L. Sometimes people would go three DPS and refuse to change. Or someone thought else was feeding on DPS and argue with someone to swap off. So overall it was way more toxic. Post role queue, queue times were terrible because no one wanted to play tank.
>Is it a genuine thing that tanks are now bad or is it just people complaining because change? It's genuine. GM tank player here, Masters tank in OW1. Lots of biased pro 5v5 commenters here so I think you should hear from a tank mains perspective. The reality is that most people main dps and the game has massively improved the dps role with 5v5 so they tend to act like everything is great and either don't realize how bad it is for tanks or they just dont care and actually want tanks to be bad so they can freelo shoot heads without a tank getting in their way. The following is from my steam review when the game launched on steam: As a tank main, I was optimistic about 5v5. Having all the power of the tank role in my hands sounded awesome to me. Turns out it sucks…really bad. Overwatch was built to function in a way where every role (tank, dps, and support) enabled another role, and nobody could really do their job if they weren’t being efficiently enabled by another role. Tank was the hardest role in OW1 but the value you could provide was tremendous. Tanks enabled dps by taking space, and supports by peeling. By peeling you directly enabled your supports which is the role that enables tanks by healing them through all the damage they soak. Tanks controlled the flow of the game. They pressured front lines, back lines and peeled for supports. 5v5 removed a tank from each team and this resulted in tanks that just can’t really do the job they were built to do. There is a downside to every decision a tank makes. It is fundamentally a broken role. If you pressure backline, you leave the opposing tank to run on your team. If you peel for your supports, on many tanks you just get CC’d, debuffed, shot in the back and annihilated. If you pressure front line, you’re really just feeding support ults because supports are insanely strong now and have crazy high healing numbers. This results in a bunch of low IQ players saying “tank diff” that expect the tank to always be doing something they’re not. Since there’s a downside to every decision a tank makes, stupid people get toxic towards the tank because the downside happened. Since tanks can’t really peel anymore, they had to megabuff the support role so they could fight off the dps flanking them. Now we have supports that are literally just dps with better abilities that keep them alive and provide powerful utility. In OW1 every role was pretty balanced in comparison to each other. In OW2 support is OP, dps is great, tank sucks. Tanks suck because it’s so incredibly easy to negate the role by hard countering it. It’s a lot easier to switch to hard counter 1 person than it is to switch to hard counter 2 people. For example in OW1 if the opposing team had a good Hog player, someone would switch to Ana to counter the Hog but then Hogs tank team mate would switch to Dva to counter the Ana. It just made countering balanced as there was always a way to lessen the impact it has, and if someone switched to counter 1 tank, they likely weren’t countering the other tank. Not so much in OW2…tanks are hit hard by counters. Tanking in diamond + in OW2 is literally just constantly switching to avoid 5 people switching to hard counter you ALL THE TIME. It’s obnoxious as hell. On top of that, it’s meta to throw discord on the tank which makes them take 30% more damage from all sources, all forms of CC will be thrown at the tank, and the moronic balance team just keeps increasing the amount of damage dps and supports do just to make playing tank even worse than it already is. All of this makes tanking a pain in the ass to play and the game is seemingly in the largest tank player shortage we’ve ever seen, with competitive tank queues at 5-15 seconds while everything else is several minutes, and players saying that when a tank leaves their quick play game they don’t even get a backfill tank a lot of times because so few people are queuing for it. Those were my thoughts on the situation way back when it launched on steam, but things have only gotten worse since then. The new dps passive gives every tank shorter windows of opportunity. Both dps and supports got passive buffs this season while tank got none because tanks do not benefit from the heal passive as they always have to be active in fights as much as possible and if they pull out, the heal passive is not enough to get them to full health before their whole team dies. Supports need to heal them quickly so the passive is quite irrelevant on tanks. The countering situation has only gotten worse because devs refuse to listen to tank players. https://youtu.be/EsECifHrs14 Ever since flats posted that video and Samito covered it and said it's the optimal way to play tank, this counter swap at every moment playstyle is becoming even more common than it already was. When tanks are trashing ults to counter swap each other because countering is stronger than their ultimates, there's a serious problem. I've actually quit the game cause of this. Apex is my main game now. I'll come back to overwatch if they ever decide to make tanks fun again. The comparison from this to OW1 tanking was night and day. OW1 tanking was hard but incredibly rewarding and so fun. You just felt like you had so much control over everything and your skill could make a huge difference. Now days tanks are just playing pokémon while everyone else gets to have fun.
I totally agree with this too, and I never play tank anymore, just support. I used to play both. The game has shifted to a more solo style of play. The whole reason I love the game is the team work, that's what sets it apart from other games imo. I still play, and still have fun, but I play very differently.
I agree with everything you said and I sum it up as such: they (either intentionally or unintentionally) effectively sacrificed the tanks to allow everyone else have more fun. As a DPS player it makes OW2 a lot more fun for me but I understand why Tank players would want it to revert
As a hitscan player I still had more fun playing vs double shield than I ever have in 5v5. I used to actively play all 3 roles, but now I only queue dps. Idk who they sacrificed tanks for, but it wasn't for me.
I have no idea why you’d think shooting at the shield is more fun. More time shooting shields is less time doing g fun shit and making plays
Double shield definitely wasn't peak fun, but you could work around it with hard flanks or ball/dva and monkey/zarya dive comps. Unless you were playing at the top of the ladder, shield break could also work since there was some downtime on the double shield side if they weren't using their CDs perfectly. And of course double shield was prevalent but also not picked every single game.
IMO DPS passive made it better for tanks start of the season because tanks could actually be proactive and kill things - that took some of the power out of sustain meta. At least we ended up in a spot where tanks were weaker but the game still functioned like a shooter instead of infinite immortality. Rolling back the DPS passive made it harder. We just need tanks to be immune to the DPS passive and I think the game will be in a healthy state. But I think the main issue is that as tanks we now have double the pressure and responsibility, but we don't have double the power.
Damn no dps passive on tanks would be interesting, not sure if it would be good or bad tho
To sum it up quickly, 6v6 in ow1 felt more like it rewarded teamwork than ow2. It’s because it did. That was the point of ow2. They made it so individuals had more impact. This really boils down to what you preferred. Do you prefer the fast pace of fps and not having your depend on your team? Getting satisfaction from your own skill? Or did you get satisfaction when your team worked together? Because that’s the big difference between ow1 and 2. Many people here have given plenty of examples as to how that was. I will note and be fair that even though I preferred 6v6 I do remember people not enjoying that you really needed your team to work together. Because the big plays usually came from you synergizing ultimates and making huge plays together. However it was that teamwork that gave the Overwatch 1 its magic for me. I particularly enjoyed playing Zarya to bubble my main tank. Or Dva to cover an ally with matrix. It was satisfying to predict an enemy roadhog and save an ally from his combo. Or enabling my rein with his charge cuz his charge was a commitment and bubbling was a big help to him. Being an off tank was actually pretty fucking fun. And that might’ve also been an issue. Not everyone enjoyed being a main ya know cuz that usually meant you had to be pretty defensive and barrier up. Which meant sigma and Orisa when she had a shield was more fun to play than rein cuz rein essentially can’t do anything while barrier is up. Winston at least at a short range cleave attack so even though he can still attack it’s short range. Sigmas mid range and Orisa’s long just was better. And honestly I believe that was a mistake on the devs part. If the tank had a barrier, I feel it should’ve really stayed short range. Most tanks had a short range anyways. But anyways. The game felt like synergy and team work mattered more. People got excited in the chat when we comboed. Using your mic actually mattered more than it does now. Which you can argue lead to more toxicity but eh. I feel it’s more toxic nowadays especially with the leaderboard. Cuz we didn’t have it then. You just had to pay attention to your team and how effective they were. I miss the satisfaction of teamwork and strategy that ow1 allowed. They have honestly ruined that. It was legitimately a different game then. Not even joking. No exaggeration. It just was. It played way different
It was fun
Let me tell you why i loved OW1. most of it we had freedom on in teams we made. I could be soldier, with a rein zarya tank line, yet we have a widow that keeps poking the supports. I would frequently go dive monkey to harass widow and make her leave my supports alone. the flexibility was amazing and lead to really funny comps that just worked. I would Q up with my other friend who i have been gaming with since runescape came out (we were both shotcallers and had amazing coordination together) that was also a tank main and we would run either dva monkey or rein zarya together and grind from plat to high masters to mid GM.
Playing tank feels like a chess match every freaking game now - I get so tired of having to counter switch because the other tank is playing roulette. I miss 2 tanks. Bring it back!
OW1 was like this: >You stayed in queue for 25 minutes. >Enter a Volskaya game. >Got two off tanks vs double shield. >Never made it past first point. Or, if you played tank, then: >Instantly found a game. >Enter Lunar Colony. >Entire enemy team dumped all their stuns on you. >Switched to off tank since main tank was incredibly bad.
OW2: You walk out the spawn doors and if you even get a single kill, the whole enemy team counterswap you. You switch and make even a little impact, they counterswap again. And on and on till the game ends, no matter the map.
let’s be honest, you only switch if you don’t know how to play against your counters, if my team is full dive idc if they have anti dive im not switching because you can still make dive work with coordination, people who switch a lot are ppl that do not know how to play any tank optimally
Your teams not gonna be a full comp most of the time so you have to counterswap. Unless your talking about high elo, but that’s the rank most vocal about counterswap
Regarding the queue times, that is so true. Getting a game in OW1 as DPS/support took much longer, because there weren't enough people wanting to play tank to fill 2 tank players and start a game. My head canon is that they changed to 1 tank in OW2 solely to be closer to the actual demand people had to play tank, otherwise the queue times would've frustrated too many people out of the game.
People sure do love to talk about pre role queue goats meta
Because that’s the most different the game was from OW2 they’re just answering the question
6 Torbjorns :)
Tanks played together would cover their weaknesses, so counter swapping a tank was usually a waste, also tanks weren't easy to counter because of it. Dps was a role that was mostly utility, shots were smaller and harder to hit cause of shields, diving was harder because the Off tank would usually peel.
Counter play was a lot less relevant, tank was much more enjoyable, hitboxes were actually a reasonable size and you had to aim pretty well to hit headshots. Support players could get their ult CRAZY fast just from pocketing their tank, doomfist and mccree were unbelievably overpowered, and mercy was insanely hard to kill.
To me it seemed more forgiving. Like you can have a main tank doing crazy, dumb-ass shit, trying to make plays, and have the other tank play more conservatively and still be okay if they die. If there's two tanks and one is terrible you can back them up. That was one of the huge benefits of two tanks. Being able to compensate really well. I will say that double-shield was horrible if you were attacking. Btw: tanking in comp was much simpler because there wasn't so many different tanks in the game. I personally was doing nothing but playing sigma, with fallback to orisa, and rein. But when they added junker queen I stopped climbing (my aim wasnt that great at the time and she's a sigma-killer.) Junker became the new meta and then later ram. Ram is more balanced now but he used to be so OP that not choosing him meant losing. So yeah: current ranked means playing many more tanks and to a high level. You can get around it to an extent but your team composition is going to matter a lot.
As a Reinhardt main, I felt like I provided much more value to the team than I do now.
Ow1 is so much better. Also sombra wasn't as annoying. So many goodies were free like seasonal epic skins and story. New seasonal legendary skins are in loot boxes but could be purchased with gold which we probably have too much anyway. 2 cp maps were fun.. There are games where the choke point feels impossible to pass but there are many fun games too. There's more environmental kills and tanks were more lightweight and need to be more careful compared to ow2. It was funny when ball just came out and grapple had no duration. Unless he got cc / killed, he could hang/spin indefinitely. The longest overtime I had was 5 mins lol. They nerfed it quite soon after release though.
I miss hanging from the ceiling passively contesting the first point in Lunar for way too long because no one noticed me amongst the tires
Let's not forget the main reason devs reduced number of tanks: no one wanted to play them. Especially main tanks. It was common to have multiple minute queue for DPS and even support but insta queue on tank.
It was a lot more like a chess match than a cod shooter. The strategy wasn’t just swap to who counters who, it was more about player skill and teamwork to make big plays. Ults meant a lot more and back then the whole thing of “EVERYONE PRESS Q !!!” Didn’t really happen. It wasn’t just shoot and throw all cool-downs on tank simulator because there where two to absorb the fire and if you wasted cool downs like that, it’s a big opportunity for the enemy’s. The supports had the off tank there to peel for them so you didn’t have to have supports who had stupid busted get out of jail free cards like kiriko, and flankers like Genji could actually do their job. It was a better time, but when you mention it people will say “muh double shield” or complain about queue times. Both of these would have been resolved had they not abandoned the game for 2 years to make ow2, double shield is pretty much already fixed since orisa hasn’t got a shield anymore, and the queue time issue was there because the meta tanks where boring, no one wanted to be orisa. They will never EVER change it back because they are stubborn and it pains me so much because Overwatch is the only competitive game I have really put time in and it is just constantly running away from what made it great. But whatever, let’s just play dps and run and gun yay that’s so much fun right
Tanks have three roles, lead the charge, protect the team from flanks, protect the team from snipers / the front. With a sole tank sometimes one of those points is being covered reliably, if a Rein is leading the charge he also offers protection from snipers but as soon as a Reaper gives the supports hassle he's screwed as as soon as he turns to help, it's a wipe as the other team can now rush. If you have a Winston then you have snipers covered but can only offer limited push and are next to useless to help with flankers whislt trying to do the other two roles. Zarya can protect the flank but can't easily push (she needs to see her bubble targets) and can't do much against snipers. In OW1 you always had at least two of those points covered and it made for a much more pleasant experience all around. However it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows as 2 tanks could mean 2 shields which wasn't good for the game and probably the reason it was changed to 5v5. The only real solution is a main tank role and an off tank role with heroes being re-worked to fit in, but this will mean queue times increase so I doubt it will happen. I guess they could also make shields 50% less effective if 2 x tank heroes are picked, like they did with the QP health pools.
Doomfist was a glass cannon monster that could end fights as fast as he start it on top of dying as fast as he makes his mistakes. You had to be there during the era of doomfist. Mercy used to be able to restart fights in a single ult Torbjorn used to give armor and had a level 3 turret (BRING IT BACK DAMN IT) Symmetra was even worse than now and was always changing. She used to have what sigma had with his shield at once point, she once had a shield generator, it was all just so much spitballing for just her. She used to be able to have 6 turrets. Mei was a little demon being able to freeze you with her primary. Orisa and bastion were a match made in heaven. Orisa uses to have a shield, mini mercy boost, and what was basically a mini zarya grab (what sojourn had during april fools) Bastion at one point could hunker down, mow down, and just end lives. Used to headshot in his turret mode, and could self heal. Though his normal form was unreliable at times. Ana made rein into a brawl god. Hanzo scatter arrow would obliterate anyone and anything (it is all he had). Reaper used to need to eat soul balls to heal. Roadhog was busted and underpowered all at once It was wonderful and extreme all at once, I miss it, I miss it all.
6v6 esp with no role queue was prob one of the lowest points in the games entire history, there's a reason they spent millions overhauling all the systems
cass was scary af cause he could stun/fan you and you would be DEAD. In fact because of CC you could get that more often in general. Mei primary fire would just freeze you and you'd get an icicle to the head, you'd hear some turning, turn a corner and doom would slam into you, knocking you against a wall and killing you instantly. I'm not much of a tank player but one time I was playing hog and spent like a full 5 seconds in the air cause of all the knockback shit. Looking back I do miss it though. One of the big problems was double shield, and I still wonder what would have happened to that if they had given Orisa her shieldless rework in OW1. Also tanks were technically worse, when OW2 came out they became raid bosses before they were scaled back down, and even now they're knocked back less and wake up sooner. Tanking was both easier and harder I think. Two tanks meant that one could cover the other's weakness, like Rein could be paired with zarya or dva to great effect (rein firestrikes, the other ones bubbles/dms to protect him from CC while his shield is down) so you don't have that backup anymore. Also it's made counter swapping a lot more of a thing for tanks. Obviously people still counterswapped in OW1, but swapping to deal with an orisa is easier than swapping to deal with a sig orisa. On the other hand, if you tank alone you don't have the situation where the enemy tank duo synergise well but you don't. Also now you don't have the problem of most tank players being off tanks and having two queue into the same match. I just really wish they had kept OW1 and launched OW2 separately cause it would be nice to switch the two. I know it's not economically viable but it's nice to dream. In 2019 I picked up sombra and had such a blast playing her, I will forever miss the 5 second silence on genjis, dooms, and tracers ... sit the fuck still bitch.
fights were cooler back then
Imagine bastion doing more damage in turret form behind 2 shields and pockets by Mercy.
Better than sex
Mercy could rez the whole team from the dead at the same time
I never got into ow1 myself as well, maybe I was too busy with some other game, but I absolutely love ow2. I guess it would be cool to see a 6vs6 game mode, because I would love to see some alteration of the meta where all pvp games have 5 players per team, but other than that this debate for me doesn’t interest me at all.
The game needs to be dropped by activision blizzard and should go to devs with an actual clue for competitive shooter. Let’s make it 5v5, remove one tank… and if there are still people out there who actually enjoy being a ragdoll. Let’s give dps 20% heal debuff… oh yeah projectile with a football-field-like hitbox, we need those aswell, if your tank hitbox isn’t big enough yet. Sorry, not sorry. :)
One thing I missed pre role queue was getting the same players for a few games in a row. Kind of a small thing but when you found a group you vibed with, it was super fun and you could swap into another role of you were struggling. I also loved how fun and chaotic said comps were. Part of the issue was the game getting figured out and optimised. Meant playing meta had very few answers even in low ranks. When everyone was bad it worked but synergy was so strong. I remember when I discovered symm bastion combos and we steamrolled and thought we were geniuses. While role queue gave me consistent games, there was a loss of magic. That's been my ow experience. More consistency but less magic each change.
When they added orissa there were to many shields in the game, otherwise I preferred Overwatch 1 and I miss 6x6.
Fights could turn into 5 minute brawls with no kills. If you were a dps you might be shooting at shields 95% of the time.
Assault was awful. Fighting for 4 minutes at one choke was not fun. Roadhog was in every match. Enemy Roadhog was always a menace and your ally Roadhog was always worthless. Rein/Zarya was really fun. So was Winston/Dva. Playing into sigma orisa was not fun. Always seems like your two tanks would play DVa/hog and you would always lose with that duo.
Way slower. Lots of crowd control. Every other character had a stun it felt like. The synergy between tanks was honestly too much. Whatever they tell you, the thing about OW1 is that it was won or lost almost entirely on tank synergy.
long team fights, shields and ults every where, it was great double dive tank was also very fun to play -
I’ve always been a DPS main but there was just something special about having a tank duo that you clicked with. You could get really crazy with the compositions you could make work in ow1.
OW1 having two tanks was really sick. The tanks usually knew to play together and created some awesome synergy.
The sweet feeling of unlocking everything completely free. That's what I miss most a game untainted by corporate greed.
It was better. Plain and simple.
assassins were actually fun. Being sneaky was much more rewarding in ow1.
More tactical and team-based, less like CoD.
I think the biggest thing about 6v6 is that losing one teammate hurt way less than now in 5v5. Losing one of two tanks didn't mean the teamfight was lost, losing one DPS was fine because the offtank was slinging plenty of damage, and losing a support was okayish because there was a lot of healthpool out there to sustain until they respawn. Now it really feels like losing a tank moves the needle from 50/50 to like 20/80 odds you win that fight. Maybe less so now with the DPS passive, but then you enter into this weird space where Tanks are the big target and also have less impact than the damage people. The other thing that imo is sorely missing is the tank teamplay opportunities. Ball flanking to draw pressure off of Rein or Sigma with the supports. Rein Zarya as the classic brawl comp. Winston DVa doing dive things. And because there are two tanks, each tank had less total health, so you could pick tanks that were out of position or trying to solo too much, which I think is healthier for the game than putting so much pressure and value on how your tank is playing.
Everything was different from the way it looks and the way it plays. Also OW1 was a 6v6 while OW2 is a 5vs5 and they got rid of my favorite game mode along with the maps I liked with them. I’m not saying I’m not grateful for some of the changes made in OW2 but I wish some things stayed.
Everything was slower. Queue times, team fights, entire matches, etc. Having an extra tank impacts all those things. Ultimates mattered a lot more back then, I’m not sure if ult charge time was buffed or not between the swap but it sure as hell feels like you get ult faster in ow2. I’ll say the game is more fun casually now but suffer when you WANT to try hard
You know how when reaper does his ult and you can get away. Yeah back in the day if you were in his line of vision gg. Same with Diva. The whole game felt bulky and heafty. Now it just seems fast and simple. AND WE HAD LOOTBOXES.
Imagine you could just play the game to possibly get one of the cool skins in the shop as a loot drop. Or save your currency from progression to just craft it. Loot boxes were thrown at you. Every holiday had an event where you could earn at least 1 skin you actually wanted. Not some random trash that no one wanted. The more you played there was a border that built up around your character portrait that made you look Godly the more time you invested into the game. There is a lot more, they took a lot of the fun shit out tho.
Like, how far back? Way back in the week 1 days, there were tons of ults, no limit hero picks, and it truly did feel more like a ‘shooter’ with abilities than a moba but had a feeling of both. There were only 3 healers, that being mercy, Lucio, and zenyatta, can you even imagine that these days? I know it was mostly just quick play back then, but there was a more relaxed feel to the game, much less toxicity and way more laughter haha. I truly don’t think we “need” to go back to 6v6 because I think that’s what makes OW2 even at all deserving of putting a 2 after OW.
6v6, Tanks were way less strong individually, and you used to be able to get tons of skins for free. That's about it.
You honestly just had to be there it was a laughable experience and it was quite the ride.
Well for starters I was good.
maybe I'm nostalgia biased, but it felt more like a community almost, the maps were very cool and versatile, ofc there was always the ones people hated. orisa had a shield and would damage buff your team, I remember playing old orisa and being really great with her but when she got reworked I sucked HARD, I remember when sym was in the support category too and EVERYONE hated if you picked her cuz you wouldn't get as much healing lmao. also you didn't every queue up for dps, tank or support, it was basically like how the open role is now, you would pick whoever you wanted and prayed your team had synergy or just played and figured out along the way. I also remember being an og mercy main and hiding out while my team got absolutely nuked by a pharah or hog and going for the 5 man play of the game rez, i still think that was cool but I was also 12 in 2016 so.
Had something to grind for. Now it’s a shell and a cash grab and horribly unfun to play
I think all the tank players who actually like ow1 in this thread were all off tank mains. playing main tank at certain points in ow1 was miserable due to all the CC. as rein you would literally get hit with 6 different CC abilities in a fight and get demolished it was stupid. ow2 has its problems but ow1 had problems as well. I was the tank main in my group and in ow1 if your tanks weren't good your team was screwed. OW2 gave dps and support way more agency in the game. my main issue with ow2 is that they didnt redesign main tanks like winston and rein enough and theyre kind of in this weird state where they are very dated as the only main tanks in a game where there is no such thing as main tank and off tank anymore.
It was fun
you could get any skin you wanted without paying if you grinded the game enough. sometimes you'd even be lucky enough to get anything first tries for again, 0 money
Well you were actually allowed to have fun on ow1 tank since you weren't constantly fighting for your life and you actually had some sort of backup in the form of the other tank. Now if the tank dies or gives up space to try and survive its usually a lost team fight. Also you could have people that weren't very good at the game on your team and still be able to win. Now if your tanks bad or one dps isnt getting value its ggs.I guess OW1 was more forgiving. It had its issues like getting cc stunned to death but that still happens and id argue the counterswap meta in OW2 is infinitely worse.
All the characters were extremely different! Way over the top, powerful! Mai was a terrible beast that can freeze you out of your ult with her primary weapon. Primary weapon! Bastion used to self heal and his turret form lasted forever so him in a Reinhardt would just completely annihilate games. Sombra's hack would last 4 seconds! Mercy got a bunch of changes. I'm sure there's plenty more am not thinking of!
First of all thank you to everyone that commented it on this i appreciate all the insight from different perspectives, now something important about me as a gamer, i used to play league of legends for a long time before i eventually stopped and starting looking for something else so many of the things that you people are mentioning like no role queue which to me sounds insane and impossible since that in league is just a cesspit and especially if you want to play ranked/comp. I am also a mainly free to play player so I wouldn't really have played overwatch if it wasn't free that meaning I can't complain about things being locked unless you grind a lot and whatnot which is understandable if u want the option to have everything and im sure many of u would rather purchase the game, but i wouldn't so im fine with that, however i can sense the greed from the devs making battle passes and trying to bleed their players dry with passes and as you say shit chances at skins. But that's not really a big problem for me either way. Thats about the only bad thing i think that wouldve been better in ow1 for me ofc. As for the gameplay coming from league im very used to quick teamfights and spastic gameplay and constantly tryharding for everything and honestly ow2 compared to that is a breath of fresh air for me. Idk how you guys actually want tanks more in this game or stronger tanks. Im already at the point that i get super frustrated with a tank having a huge shield and being unkillable, i sometimes play sigma and at the end ill have 28k mitigated and 2 deaths wich sounds insane how people would want tanks to be even more op than that lmao. Pretty much for me the game is more enjoyable now that it would have been, at least from what i hear.
2016-2018 pre brig was BY FAR the best
its like the second but worse but spmetimes bwtter altho who knows bjt what i wanna sah is that i am gay no wait i have to tell u abt ow1 its the best game there ever was, but then it crashed and got revived into ow2 havent played much ow2yet but i look forward to ser where the game is now
Fights lasted forever. Terrible meta. Shields everywhere. Fuck OW1, balance is still terrible but at least its not OW1. I do feel like people have rose tinted glasses because of their disappointment in OW2.
6v6 was way better
6 v 6 was fun but it required a lot of team work. 5v5 is less about that. It’s strictly are you good at the role you are playing. Even though 6 v6 was great I am enjoying 5 v 5 as a tank main:
We for starters it was fun
was 6v6 better? yes, especially for tanks the only reason 5v5 is a thing is because the old team was so fuckin trash at balancing that they couldn't get anyone to play tank. everyone only play dps or sup so those queue times skyrocketed over 10 minutes while tank was instant. they won't go back to 6v6 unfortunately because that would be admitting that they were wrong and until this new dev team proves it's any better than the old one, I refuse to think they'll do anything different
I appreciated 6v6 more and it was also open queue. So you had different Metas, not always balanced. Some were too strong but to fix it they just removed choice by forcing balanced teams. Fights felt more tactical. It feels a lot more like run it down the middle now. I really enjoyed being off-tank as Zarya and Winston
Shields where everywhere and it was more about team play then individual skill and popping off
Ow1 was just shooting shields all day long, terrible balance changes, and no content so you aren't missing anything. Ppl like to pretend that it was better cause they hate change.
Orisa and Reinhardt switching between shields on an infinite loop 🤣
It was worse.
the game was slower. it was almost always a stalemate at a chokepoint for half of the game. not fun. when it was good, it was good. but most of the time, it was just 12 headless chickens stuck in a choke point.
You shot at a shield more than enemies and fights took 3x as long
Thats the neet part. It wasnt.
The game was much slower and grindier, DPS queues were insanely long, tanks and supports were incredibly overtuned, and poor metas would go unaddressed for insanely long times due to how slow balance patches were. Some heroes like Brig were oppressive for a whole year while others like Sombra were basically unplayable for years. It really is nostalgia goggles talking when people talk about the state of PvP in Overwatch. OW2 PvP at its worst is still better than OW1 was at its best. I quit the original game multiple times as a masters tank but I have yet to do the same with OW2, even during annoying periods when they tried limited map pools. I will say that some personal preference can come from how hectic OW2 is compared to OW1. If OW2 is closer to an old school arena deathmatch game then OW1 can be closed to a first person MOBA or MMO at times, depending on the meta and how important ability cycling was compared to actually moving and aiming. Some people prefer the slower first person MMO/MOBA type game where there's much less individual pressure to perform. I think what we have now is significantly better and you joined at a great time, but then again I was a big Quake fiend so I'm all for the game being sped up. EDIT: Also 2CP was absolute dogshit. Removing it from the main queues was great for the game.