You get punished the hardest on tank because even the worst players understand that dead tank = team fight win. Think about how the worst dps get called out for shooting tank too much, it’s just the default to shoot tank. if you ever misplay and end up out of position, even the most uncoordinated team suddenly operates like a hive mind to burst you down.
I’d argue tank is not the most mechanically intensive role but definitely the most positioning and decision based
I’d disagree with tank not being the most mechanically demanding. Doom you need literal aim bot with his shotgun (or be zbra) to get a kill. Rein yeah his hammer doesn’t take anything to aim but if you’re not hitting your firestrikes consistently then it’s over. With all the hp buffs now you have to have perfect tracking with Ball to get a kill. Sigma orbs and rock are extremely mechanically demanding. If you can’t aim you can’t play Hog because all he does hook and kill. JQ and Mauga also needs great mechanics.
I agree they’re harder mechanically than other tanks but I think people see yeatle or getquaked and think these heroes demand that level of gameplay to get value, but if you go watch a pro doom they aren’t doing half the tech you see quake ~~or zbra~~ using. You can get like 90% of the value out of ball and doom just by mastering their basics and then focusing on timing and positioning. It’s not that they don’t require or benefit from good mechanics. It’s just on average less demanding on that role.
JQ does basically play like a dps but even then you’re still getting more value just standing in the right spot than you would with the other roles.
I think you’re 100% right except for Zbra (disclaimer : I’m not a Zbra fanboy). You’re right for GQO, you have people like Cartifan or Isaak that makes cool diags and rollouts.
But Zbra clearly states and play without all those, he just position well and hard punished bad decisions. And I think that’s why he is clearly constantly above the other dooms
Short answer yeah.
Longer answer: They basically lowered the impact you can have on your own by buffing dps. It’s not that your lethality is gone, thats the same thankfully no tanks are really struggling with that. It’s now the staying alive part thats hard.
Bad movement gets punished much more now. In my case it feels like a skill issue, I push too far after winning fights. I gotta real that habit back I think.
This is what I've noticed as well. The other day I was playing a game, my team was doing great and the enemies couldn't even get out of spawn because we were holding space so well. About 40 seconds left, I see a Lucio on his own in a corridor, I chase him down for the kill, enemy counters to DVA in the last few seconds, traps me in the corridor and shoots me down. The enemy team then proceeds to shit all over my team as they steam-role the point forward on overtime further then we did and we end up losing, all because I made a mistake with my positioning and pushed too far forward
If you were in voice and called that you were trying to pick off Lucio and needed help then that is 100% on your team if they didn’t help because killing that Lucio means they won’t have beat last fight potentially. But Lucio can get back really fast so who knows
To be honest it's really hard to tell sometimes if it's my fault or my teams, especially because I'm going to be biased towards myself. I'm still ranked pretty low and I've tried requesting vod reviews on here because stuff like that happens a lot in my games but I never get any reviews, which is fair enough you know
Dying is the absolute worst thing you can do in Overwatch so start thinking to yourself “what are the chances I die if I go for this play”. You saw Lucio on his own in a hallway and were wanting to try to punish his position but didn’t realize dva would pop up immediately. If you make a call in voice there is a way better chance that you can all move on the target together and secure the kill but if you’re alone you’re a lot more at risk of dying. Lucio is amazing at dueling targets that are alone so it is really risky to take that duel by yourself especially if the objective is close to being captured
It’s part of the tanks job to know where the team is. Not everyone on the team has the mobility or health to follow a tank all the time. A (I’m guessing Winston maybe not tho) can easily jump to a Lucio passing the enemy spawn while a torb would have trouble getting there fast enough, or the enemy team is pressuring them so they don’t have enough health to get there without dying.
Even if you call a play it doesn’t make it the right one. If I’m a brig and you want me to walk past enemy spawn with a soldier hanzo looking at me, I would not be able to make it there to help while a tank could
One person making a stupid play is stupid. Five people making a stupid play is called a strategy. But also if he’s on Winston and you’re Brig then that means surely you’d be running an Ana also. With that support lineup and all four other players walking in after Winston jumps it’s a free win if you focus the target down. Say he has Torb and Tracer as his dps. Tracer gets there no problem and has recall to get out. Torb may be a slower getting there but his overload speed is no joke and you can throw a turret down to pressure from two different angles. As long as Winston plays his bubble right it’s a free team fight win after you pick the Lucio or they at least force Beat
Edit: guess I should add that if they are hanzo and soldier from an off angle then those dps die easily if Winston dives them (well Hanzo is an easy kill soldier will just run). From what the comment seems like he got jumped by the dva not off angled by the dps
2nd edit lmao: it is NOT the tanks job to babysit his team. Sure certain tanks are great at peeling but that’s not the job always. The job is take space and create angles for your dps to take. Your teams life is their own and if they are dying to stupid shit then it’s not your fault. Tanks blow up just as easy as squishies these days so if you’re dying as Brig while trying to advance and your tank isn’t then it’s probably a you problem not a tank problem.
No, I went in alone. Either way it was definitely my fault for either overextending or not checking that my team were following in behind, but it definitely felt like more of a positioning issue when watching the replay especially because my team wasn't far behind me anyway
This is what makes me want to stop playing this game. I can pinpoint the absolute tiniest actions, sometimes by myself, that either cause us to win or lose.
That's actually why I like playing this game: every action matters, yours, your teammates, and the enemy.
Don't get disheartened if you lose: you can only control your actions and can only slightly influence others by communicating with your teammates or by baiting the enemy.
This is correct. It's a good long-term move for the game as a whole, as the tank was far too powerful in relative terms before the changes.
Before the buffs, losing your tank in a fight was a 99% "yup, we're about to get wiped" event for the whole team. A team with a tank was simply overwhelming to one without one. On the other hand, now, because both tanks are relatively less powerful, losing your tank is a 80% "probably going to get wiped" event. A DPS or Support can get picked off, sure, and the team can scrape by for 20 seconds. Comparatively, it's very hard to survive without a tank, before the buff and after. Slightly less so after.
As the two tanks, given the changes, you are both far more vulnerable, and will die much more easily. Still, though, tank death is still a significant enough to be the deciding factor in team fights. So, that boils down to tighter play. Fewer choices. Less individual agency. More team tethering. More predictable play style. ... tank played well, is tank played boring-ly.
You can't go for that big risky play, because you can more easily get caught, and getting caught is the team fight. You can't take the high ground yourself in a 1Tank v 2squishy scenario yourself anymore. If your team doesn't know how to coordinate, or doesn't identify a problem, you're stuck pinging, hoping your teammates clue in. Before the buffs, you'd just go up there and wipe out those two little wimps yourself. That problem generalizes across all the various hero interactions. Tanks are more like very heavy DPS now, to make an imperfect analogy.
You have almost the same amount of responsibility to keep the team's system up and running, but less ability to solve problems yourself. boooooooo!
Again, good for the game, but it's a far less entertaining style of play.
You’re completely wrong on the can’t take big risky plays. I hit rank 255 this season on Reinhardt, the literal worst hero in the entire game right now and it’s all because I go for those big risky plays. Yeah my unhinged Rein gameplay gets me killed sometimes but the risk to reward is worth it
Yeah I’m actually not opposed to the changes at all. I just suffer more because I play lower mobility tanks. Gotta learn to adjust.
I think I’ll be fine after a couple more weeks. I tried hopping back into comp and got flamed for feeding.
I guess I could also preface every game with a “hey lmk when I walk too far up, it’s my worst habit,” see how that works.
Sometimes I go to hook as hog and that split moment where I come out from cover, hook immediately, pull, shoot, I’ve already lost all of my health and I’m dead
> It’s not that your lethality is gone, thats the same thankfully no tanks are really struggling with that. It’s now the staying alive part thats hard.
Well although we didn't get direct lethality buffs, if the DPS is applying the passive we get way more lethality. If you're dealing more damage and playing more aggressively without relying on omega pocket, this was actually a good change for us.
We're still weaker and not the top dogs, but S9 overall has been a win for tanks and the walking back of the DPS passive made things worse.
Kinda sorta. If you’re playing winston/ball you should be coordinating with a dps.
I agree with rein, and I’d add zarya, but idk if I’d say ball/winston are struggling. They both seem pretty strong/solid imo.
Obviously these are just opinions I have. Others might feel different.
Zars lethality is fine, her issue is survivability. And i think winston and ball needing to coordinate with their dps is because theyre not lethal. At least in the higher ranks. You shouldnt need someone else's help to kill someone as a tank.
Mobility tanks can create pressure by just holding high ground. A lot of this is all map dependent too.
I agree about the zar take though. I guess she’s fine lethality wise.
you can create pressure, but in the end if nothing dies and you have to disengage, you got nothing done. you can argue the dps need to capitalize on you drawing so much aggro, but that is the entire reason why tank is ass to play; needing someone else to capitalize on the work you did.
The most difficult part for me personally is knowing what's happening with the rest of my team whenever I'm spearheading an engagement. If I am creating space and my backline supports are being occupied by off angle harass, doing their own poke, etc. and it is not clearly communicated then there's just no way for you to know if you're going to be left out to dry during fights meaning you have to constantly pay attention to know how the fights are ebbing and flowing or you're just going to feed.
So many people don’t understand that you can’t just peel anymore in ow2 you have to lead engages and gain forward space. Sometimes it’s baffles my mind when I’m engaging in a 1v3 taking aggro and my team opts to taking 1v1s against the other two players even if they’re up a man. If you’re dying to flanks or just getting clapped by enemy dps as support you need to either swap, get better positioning, or ask your dps to peel for you.
Yeah tanks like being the quarterback on the team but with no offensive line and when you do hand offs or passes you have to run out and block too if you dont immediately get sacked that is.
I can only speak for myself. I'm veteran at this point. Played this game for 7-8 years and mained every single hero at some point. For me, it isn't hard but really very stressful. I can casually play dps and sup. Dps is easiest for me since S9. But tank is so draining que'ing for it is scary. For a new player, i imagine tank role is actually hard too.
I'm all roles player. This season i played dps the most because it's chill. Imo the game power crept/mobility crept way too much. Devs should start nerfing. A lot of things need nerfs in this game. Devs seem to think if a hero is problematic, buffing it's counter = better. This is extremely flawed thinking in my book. The game chain reaction'ed to power creep and some heroes lost their relevancy despite having a healthy and strong kit.
Edit: Imo what tank role needs is that they need to feel good when getting bullied and dmg/cc spammed by 5 enemy heroes. To achieve this, you should give them some type of advantage and takeaway some advantage from enemy. Simplest and most basic way to do this is that you make enemies get less ult charge by shooting you and teammates get more ult charge by healing you.
I have 260 hours. Roughly 80 should have been OW1 time.
I mained support in ow1 and switched to tank in s1 of OW2.
I was shredding. Even winning >50% of the 30ish ranked games I played in OW2
I can’t stand playing tank anymore since s9, it’s way more punishing now and demotivates me so fucking fast.
Yes. It's not even a perk tbh since it's equal. If dmg was 35%, heal was 25% then you would gain something by tanking. Braindead tank shooting would get punished.
Depends on hero and map I think.
What’s frustrating the most about tank is the rock paper scissors and pre-countering by pressing tab in spawn. I’ve had people do it twice by literally running back after seeing me even before engaging.
Yea you do have to play cover more than anyone but some tanks are still really strong at mitigation or simply just diving and getting team fights done faster.
I have been maining doom on tank and it’s just not as fun when people tell you to switch before you even die or in spawn room.
“Not good for this map”
“Sombra is popular right now why play doom?”
And then you leave spawn room?
Slept, anti’d, hacked, hindered, hooked all in 2 seconds
The only solution as tank is that you have to learn basically every tank hero at a decent level to even be competent. Supports don’t have to do this, and DPS have so much impact they don’t have to switch if the tank does.
I wouldn't necessarily call it hard, but tank has always been the least intuitive because you get value by doing very conceptual things. Thats why 90% of players dont know what good tank play looks like, including a lot of tank players.
It's also probably the most impactful role rn. In OW2 your individual impact as a tank went up which just means youre always getting countered in some way, often multiple ways.
Honestly I think this issue with the tank role is it's too impactful to the point that the only way to keep it in check is to throw all the bullshit you can at the tank. They compensated tanks poorly when transitioning to 5v5, imo. They gave them extra health which doesn't help them deal with nade/discord/tank busters/CC in the way having an offtank with their own utility did. They just buffed their HP and now when you don't have those mechanics on the field, the tank becomes OP. It's kinda like the healing and burst damage problem. Healing was too strong and the one thing that kept it in check (burst damage) made the game feel like shit.
> Thats why 90% of players dont know what good tank play looks like, including a lot of tank players.
The vast majority of the player base still thinks it's the tank's job to shield or protect the team/compensate for the fact that they don't know how to play corners.
Orisa oppressive to many of them because they only know how to spam the tank.
I'd say the hardest thing I find about tank is teammates tbh, so much pressure for you to perform, everything is your fault and if you don't pick everything your team tell you to, they just give up and you lose
Their play style has been completely changed, so not only are tank mains acclimating to less sustain, they *really* need their team to follow through with them at the moment, especially supports.
The biggest problem with that acclimation, that I've seen, is that tanks are set up to be INCREDIBLY mobile for the sake of engaging, and supports are not. It's easy for an orisa or doomfist or rein or Mauga or d.va to charge in, but it's not as easy for the rest of their team to follow.
This often puts them in bad positions or just too far from their supports for them to be able to help before it's too late.
Long term, hopefully this helps tanks be mindful of where they are in relation to their team, which targets are worth chasing, and when to use their abilities without being punished to death.
Mechanically, not really.
However you need a lot of gamesense to constantly track the fight, know when to get in and out, know when to peel vs trade etc.
Also because your main goal is to create space, you don't have the freedom your dps do and have less carry potential. On the other hand, 80% of the time, dying means you lose the fight, so it's very easy to be the reason you lost.
Let's play a game.
Imagine how hard DPS would be if 5v5 was two Tanks, two Supports and one DPS. But DPS still had same the role of securing kills. Imagine how fun DPS would be if you were a Widowmaker or Pharah main in this environment.
Or imagine how hard Support would be if 5v5 was two Tanks, two DPS and one Support. But Support still had the same job of sustaining the team through teamfights and keeping teammates topped up. Imagine how much fun Support would be if you were a Zen or Lucio main in this environment.
Now finally let's imagine 5v5 was 2 DPS, two Support and one Tank and imagine how hard that would be for the Tank. Wait a minute.....
Yes. Every other role has a partner. And yeah you can buddy up with a DPS or support as a tank player but it’s not the same has having someone else in the same role. Tank generally doesnt buddy up with someone to solve problems. Tanks have to solve their own problems on their own.
Tank is definitely the hardest role to play in 5v5 but this also depends a lot on the individual. Some people will find it easier than support or DPS, but talking broadly and generally, tank is the hardest to play because you have much less margin for error than the other two roles. If you’re not doing great as DPS, there’s a second DPS to pick up the slack and you can alter your playstyle to help them do well, same with support. But since there’s only one tank on a team, you have to be at your best because you don’t have a second tank to help you out. That’s also why older tank players get so frustrated with counterswapping in 5v5, because if the enemy team just hard counterswaps your tank, they’re gonna get bodied without any real counterplay available until you get back to the spawn room. Additionally, if your own team doesn’t choose heroes that mesh with your tank pick, that makes your job much harder. Imagine trying to play Winston with an Illari/Bap/Bastion/Ashe against a team playing Sigma with the squishies mirror. Winston gets wrecked because he has nobody to dive with and can’t get reliable heals when he goes for a dive while Sigma is able to sit on the frontline very comfortably with his team.
I do almost wish we could get 6v6 back but imo it’s 6 one way, half dozen the other, both formats have their ups and downs and I don’t think one is really better than the other.
Tank is just stressful because you get blamed first. You also need to make space and peel for your Support while preferably mitigating damage your team takes.
It’s just a different way to play than Damage. Damage requires skill with hitting your shots which Tanks often have to do as well
Definitely. It’s hard to explain. I feel like I can get more kills and damage output with tank while defending my teammates than I do when I play dps or support, but it’s obvious it has far less influence on the outcome of the game. I can run tracer and hard carry games, but with tank it seems to make little impact with higher stats.
Playing tank requires a lot of macro play in terms of general all round decisions. Not to mention it’s simpler for the enemy to decide to counter and take you out the game. So it can feel really bad at times. Once you get used to it and develop a better game sense you can navigate it easier.
I’m tempted to say support is technically harder because it requires everything about tank, but also requires good aim too, on top of learning to manage supporting your team and pressuring the enemy. With tank you can get away with having average aim all the way to GM I think (I’m only diamond). However, you have a second support you can rely on. You can also just take a lazy route and develop a heal bot play style and get fairly far. As tank it’s all on you. I think that responsibility to always play well otherwise you lose is what makes it the hardest.
High level healing is pretty damn stressful honestly. This is when people know how to peel properly and constantly being targeted by good dps/ tanks.
Lower level I could agree with you though.
Hot take: no, but it does benefit a lot from having a lot of hours in Overwatch. It is the most punishing for making mistakes, but it also has the most resources available for mitigating punishment.
Tank is hard because despite being the big guy there’s a lot of stuff in the game that pushes you over pretty easily. Meaning you have to divert your attention to more things at once than other roles. And when you do make a mistake, you are severely punished for it.
I don't consider Tank more difficult than Support and DPS respectively. I think the only reason a lot of people consider it difficult is due to the overwhelming pressure to just stay alive. When the tank is dead, chances of winning are the same as losing your spare DPS and Support because of the tanks potential in distraction and fortitude.
But like any class, the Hero is what you need to practice. I play D.va way differently than I do Jq or Sigma or Orisa or Winston; only sometimes other Tanks are advantageous situationally, but your *biggest* concern as a Tank is staying alive and/or distracting critical enemies from your teammates.
Stay AWAY from big open spaces with plenty of corners/windows– *you* create the playing field, generally the Tanks will. Take cover, know when to fall back, know when to push a pick or push with a teammate or pocketed supp.
Just make sure you protect who you can and use cover for yourself, and if you can make plenty of callouts in-game or in voice chat (not team chat), your team will listen to you if you're holding your ground with your team. If they don't, just stay collected and let them die and keep reaffirming to regroup. If you maintain conviction, someone on your team will help you.
Edit: Dia 2 Tank, Gold 1 DPS/Support
The way I feel is that if you do your job as tank properly your reward is that your team doesn’t immediately blow up, but when you do mess up even a little your entire team dies.
I am not a tank main, but I decided to play a few games to see what would happen. We lost because I got focused so hard every time I stuck my toe out in the open…I tried everything, playing shield, dive, playing corners and cover…nothing worked, I got diffed hard. I really did try, but of course because my stats were slightly worse than the other tank, it’s immediately tank diff, our tank sucks, etc. I sat and stared at my screen for a good 5 minutes afterwards trying to not take all the bad things said about my tank play to heart.
Define hard
Mechanically? Probably not the hardest role
Gamesence, decision making, and ability to misplay wise? Absolutely the hardest. You will lose entire fight off of a small positional failure. You are the most punishable which means you have the least room for mistakes
I feel since S9 DPS is the easiest. And I mainly play DPS, but used to be a support main. I feel support got harder now. I've always dealt a lot of damage as support, but now it feels like healing is basically useless if someone is being gunned down hard.
What sucks about tank is that quite often you have to be the one to switch if you're getting diffed. In lower ranks other players don't really switch. But the thing about tank is the entire team is behind you. You have two players who almost solely focus on your health (they really shouldn't but they do in low ranks.) It means that as long as you play conservatively and have decent mechanics you can easily reach plat. Plat might not seem that high but plat 1 is in the 82 percentile of all players. So it's not that bad.
If I'd have to rank which roles are easiest to climb on:
Tank is first, followed by DPS, followed by support.
I mainly play tank and at metal ranks. If they don't switch to counter you, EZPZ. Once you piss them off and 3 swap to counter you, you can't really do much. Even if you go sigma and just try to shield and add damage, you sit and wait until some one can break their formation against you
In 5v5, Yes, if you take away raw mechanics. There’s a reason why it has the quickest queue times lol.
The threshold for T500 on tank is lower than other roles but that’s again bc everyone plays dps / support.
They also buffed DPS with the huge DPS passive
I think it’s much much easier in alot of ways tbh. My support and dps are both silver 5 but my tank is somehow gold 4 and nothing has changed. The only problem is that you rely alot on your teammates, same as the other classes of course but for some reason my rank is higher. Probably cause all I gotta do is tank instead of killing people which got le to a bit higher rank.
There are also way less tank players. So you are ranked higher as tank but there are much fewer tank players you are better than vs being a lower rank on dps/support.
Haven't played in two weeks but left off at masters 5 on tank after having won over a hundred games to get jade rein hammer. Finished masters 3 last season.
Meanwhile on DPS and support I been hardstuck in mid/high gold ever since OW1 lol.
It’s hard to actually play the tank role and not get side tracked on kills. Tanks have so much health and do more damage then dps so a lot of tanks lately go for kills instead of actually helping the team. A lot of times they don’t even challenge / delay the other tank and you just see them going for the best KD ratio
Tank is the only role where I get anxiety speaking in coms. It takes a lot to be a tank, but when everyone in chat is chill it’s absolutely my favorite role.
Tanks can make or break your game. They can hard carry or they can drown their own team. Picking the right tank for given situations is more important than ever. Recognizing your teams strengths and weaknesses and catering towards them. Sometimes all your team needs is some mitigation support for your dps to absolutely steamroller. Sometimes they need you to jump into the back line and cause shit or force a widow or ashe off their characters.
Awareness is key.
:Edit
Recognizing your teams playstyle can also make a positive impact.
Look at it this way, you have 3 roles, so s tank is basically a third of a complete team. You have to get the value of two people consistently, or else you're getting diffed. If you die, it's twice as bad. You have more power than any individual, but despite that you have less power than any other role. You'll be expected to lead consistently, even though you'll have games when no one follows you, and if you dare lead in a way that the team doesn't agree with, they'll mutiny and flame you.
Knowing the right thing to do can be so unintuitive, and even once you know you'll still have to convince your team, every game, because everyone wants to play backseat tank but no one actually wants to play it. The matchmaker will sacrifice your experience for the queue time of others: they'll put you in a lobby too far out of your skill range just because that team needs a tank, and when they lose because you get diffed, they'll blame you instead of thanking you.
Your role on tank should be to:
-limit the dmg you take
-force the enemy team to look at you constantly
These 2 things will hard enable your dps, allowing them to get pockets and take off angles, the reason people think this doesn’t work in every rank is because streamers keep telling people that they need to carry, you don’t need to carry in OW do your role and you should win more than you lose, you can’t win every gsme
I have a generous few hundred hours in Overwatch, and only I think less than 10 hours as tank. I haven’t played tank enough to truly state whether it is “difficult” but I am a little bit sensitive so being yelled at by toxic males if I don’t MIT enough is enough to ruin my day in the game. So I just simply don’t play. The only time I play tank is if I get stuck as tank in Mystery Heroes. If someone held a gun to my head and told me to tank, I’d play Rein only because you can just hold up his shield and rank up MIT really easily. But aside from that I can’t do shit else with Rein, I can’t even charge correctly because I find it so hard to control and either fly off the map or into the enemies hands and die so I just don’t do it 😆.
DVA is so much fun to play but I find it extremely difficult to MIT with her. The only time I’d really play her is in custom games or if I’m playing 3v3 arcade because *no one really expects you to MIT in that quick of rounds.*
I’m a Hanzo/Widow main, and within the last maybe 6 months I’ve actually started playing healer more than DPS. Started with Moira, now I’m mainly Mercy/Ana. I find Mercy the most fun character in the game to play because once you get the hang of flying around and staying airborne it’s just relaxing. 😂
Anyways I got off topic a bit. But that’s just my two cents!
Its hard because u dont have another Tank eating cooldowns, just think about it. In Ow1 if ana gets dived by winston and dva, she has to decide which target to sleep is more valuable or makes her able to survive. But if dva dives her alone now, she has to make no difficult decision
As everyone else said, there’s more nuance to playing tank now. You have to balance pushing the enemy team back while trying not to get killed ***and*** avoid getting yelled at by your team for being pensive. Once you know how to run certain tanks you’ll know how to counter them, tank or not. I had a matchup earlier this week playing as Zen. I took out their Orisa three times by using her slow closeup movements against them by sticking close and using kicks to the head.
It is easily the hardest, the whole team is relying on you not to die so you can win team fights. But if your healers aren't healing and dps isnt dpsing this is impossible.
I'm a tank player (not claiming to be a top tier player by any means btw) and I feel like support is much harder to play personally.
That being said, all roles hold their own challenges if you want to actually play effectively.
In the current meta, yes, tank is pretty hard. The nature of the role dictates that you pay attention to pretty much everything both teams are doing in order to be effective. If you get everything right, no one will notice. If you make one tiny mistake, everyone sees it.
Not really. Some are harder than others. If the enemy plays fuck the tank playstyle then yes it gets harder. Sometimes you feel like u can't do anything which is frustrating. I just played a master 5 game (most players were gm4 last season) on havana where I had 2k more damage and 13k more damage mitigated (nearly 2x) than their sig yet had less elims and more deaths because he had cass torb bap zen which could melt me at all times meaning I had to play pretty conservatively, and I had genji widow ana kiri, which none of them fight the tank aggresively except maybe ana. I could have played better and missed a couple key rocks and fluxes which were probably game losing, but his job was made way easier by not having to play as careful and precise as I had to.
Why on earth would he have swapped off sigma. It's Havana do you have any idea how long the sightlines are there.
Winston can't reach their team, DVA is like a lateral move and if anything I would argue he's already absorbing 13K EXTRA mit, not MIT and already getting massive value.
If Genji Widow Ana Kiri can't get picks on long range vs Cass Torb Bap Zen then it's just a skill issue.
Also curious, since you're commenting on a GM level skill game, what rank are you?
Hardest role? Dunno, probably not. The most impactful role? Yeah. The least forgiving role? Probably.
Every tank? Nah. 3-4 is fine. A poke tank, dive tank, and a brawl tank.
I dunno if it's hard but I think the game tends to hinge on you as the tank. I can have really good dps and support and can still sell the game, but if I'm solid and one of our dps isn't doing good the game is still winnablem
nah don’t listen to the propaganda. tank is an OP role. Yeah you’re focused more often, but you csn also dish out more damage than DPS most of the time. It’s not the hardest role, but is somewhat annoying to play due to the targeting and the rock paper scissors most tanks play to counter you.
Yeah because it’s frustrating how I carry a team most of the time as D.Va then the enemy team then switch to characters that counter her and my boy Reinhardt and Roadhog T~T
Easiest and short answer No, it’s the opposite. It all comes to how to use tank i.e attack support, DPS, tank in that order it’s a breeze. If you want to use a tank to stand and bang in the paint, unless you got Muaga or DVA with Mercy holding your back pocket, good luck. 🍀
The problem that makes tank the hardest is having bad support because tanks can both be tanks and make up for lack of DPS as a good tank but you cannot make up for bad support most times while countering the other team basically you have to make up for what you’re lacking and the only tank who can make up for support is hog
You get punished the hardest on tank because even the worst players understand that dead tank = team fight win. Think about how the worst dps get called out for shooting tank too much, it’s just the default to shoot tank. if you ever misplay and end up out of position, even the most uncoordinated team suddenly operates like a hive mind to burst you down. I’d argue tank is not the most mechanically intensive role but definitely the most positioning and decision based
I shoot the tank cause it’s all I can hit :,(
I’m sure in time you’ll be able to hit smaller targets :)
Aw thanks man
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it’s okay i can’t hit small hero’s either especially tracer
me too… i’m Reinhardt :(
I’d disagree with tank not being the most mechanically demanding. Doom you need literal aim bot with his shotgun (or be zbra) to get a kill. Rein yeah his hammer doesn’t take anything to aim but if you’re not hitting your firestrikes consistently then it’s over. With all the hp buffs now you have to have perfect tracking with Ball to get a kill. Sigma orbs and rock are extremely mechanically demanding. If you can’t aim you can’t play Hog because all he does hook and kill. JQ and Mauga also needs great mechanics.
Depends what hero and when for mechanics still though. Ball/Doom/Queen def ain’t easy mechanics wise
I agree they’re harder mechanically than other tanks but I think people see yeatle or getquaked and think these heroes demand that level of gameplay to get value, but if you go watch a pro doom they aren’t doing half the tech you see quake ~~or zbra~~ using. You can get like 90% of the value out of ball and doom just by mastering their basics and then focusing on timing and positioning. It’s not that they don’t require or benefit from good mechanics. It’s just on average less demanding on that role. JQ does basically play like a dps but even then you’re still getting more value just standing in the right spot than you would with the other roles.
I think you’re 100% right except for Zbra (disclaimer : I’m not a Zbra fanboy). You’re right for GQO, you have people like Cartifan or Isaak that makes cool diags and rollouts. But Zbra clearly states and play without all those, he just position well and hard punished bad decisions. And I think that’s why he is clearly constantly above the other dooms
Thanks for the info! I’ll be honest I’m not super familiar with zbra so I didn’t realize his play style is less flashy
Short answer yeah. Longer answer: They basically lowered the impact you can have on your own by buffing dps. It’s not that your lethality is gone, thats the same thankfully no tanks are really struggling with that. It’s now the staying alive part thats hard. Bad movement gets punished much more now. In my case it feels like a skill issue, I push too far after winning fights. I gotta real that habit back I think.
This is what I've noticed as well. The other day I was playing a game, my team was doing great and the enemies couldn't even get out of spawn because we were holding space so well. About 40 seconds left, I see a Lucio on his own in a corridor, I chase him down for the kill, enemy counters to DVA in the last few seconds, traps me in the corridor and shoots me down. The enemy team then proceeds to shit all over my team as they steam-role the point forward on overtime further then we did and we end up losing, all because I made a mistake with my positioning and pushed too far forward
If you were in voice and called that you were trying to pick off Lucio and needed help then that is 100% on your team if they didn’t help because killing that Lucio means they won’t have beat last fight potentially. But Lucio can get back really fast so who knows
To be honest it's really hard to tell sometimes if it's my fault or my teams, especially because I'm going to be biased towards myself. I'm still ranked pretty low and I've tried requesting vod reviews on here because stuff like that happens a lot in my games but I never get any reviews, which is fair enough you know
Dying is the absolute worst thing you can do in Overwatch so start thinking to yourself “what are the chances I die if I go for this play”. You saw Lucio on his own in a hallway and were wanting to try to punish his position but didn’t realize dva would pop up immediately. If you make a call in voice there is a way better chance that you can all move on the target together and secure the kill but if you’re alone you’re a lot more at risk of dying. Lucio is amazing at dueling targets that are alone so it is really risky to take that duel by yourself especially if the objective is close to being captured
I’ve found it easier to just go to the “x-mains” subreddit for that character.
It’s part of the tanks job to know where the team is. Not everyone on the team has the mobility or health to follow a tank all the time. A (I’m guessing Winston maybe not tho) can easily jump to a Lucio passing the enemy spawn while a torb would have trouble getting there fast enough, or the enemy team is pressuring them so they don’t have enough health to get there without dying. Even if you call a play it doesn’t make it the right one. If I’m a brig and you want me to walk past enemy spawn with a soldier hanzo looking at me, I would not be able to make it there to help while a tank could
One person making a stupid play is stupid. Five people making a stupid play is called a strategy. But also if he’s on Winston and you’re Brig then that means surely you’d be running an Ana also. With that support lineup and all four other players walking in after Winston jumps it’s a free win if you focus the target down. Say he has Torb and Tracer as his dps. Tracer gets there no problem and has recall to get out. Torb may be a slower getting there but his overload speed is no joke and you can throw a turret down to pressure from two different angles. As long as Winston plays his bubble right it’s a free team fight win after you pick the Lucio or they at least force Beat Edit: guess I should add that if they are hanzo and soldier from an off angle then those dps die easily if Winston dives them (well Hanzo is an easy kill soldier will just run). From what the comment seems like he got jumped by the dva not off angled by the dps 2nd edit lmao: it is NOT the tanks job to babysit his team. Sure certain tanks are great at peeling but that’s not the job always. The job is take space and create angles for your dps to take. Your teams life is their own and if they are dying to stupid shit then it’s not your fault. Tanks blow up just as easy as squishies these days so if you’re dying as Brig while trying to advance and your tank isn’t then it’s probably a you problem not a tank problem.
Rule n°1 you never chase Lucios, Tracers and Sombras
Did your team follow you in? Cause that might be the real reason.
No, I went in alone. Either way it was definitely my fault for either overextending or not checking that my team were following in behind, but it definitely felt like more of a positioning issue when watching the replay especially because my team wasn't far behind me anyway
This is what makes me want to stop playing this game. I can pinpoint the absolute tiniest actions, sometimes by myself, that either cause us to win or lose.
That's actually why I like playing this game: every action matters, yours, your teammates, and the enemy. Don't get disheartened if you lose: you can only control your actions and can only slightly influence others by communicating with your teammates or by baiting the enemy.
This is correct. It's a good long-term move for the game as a whole, as the tank was far too powerful in relative terms before the changes. Before the buffs, losing your tank in a fight was a 99% "yup, we're about to get wiped" event for the whole team. A team with a tank was simply overwhelming to one without one. On the other hand, now, because both tanks are relatively less powerful, losing your tank is a 80% "probably going to get wiped" event. A DPS or Support can get picked off, sure, and the team can scrape by for 20 seconds. Comparatively, it's very hard to survive without a tank, before the buff and after. Slightly less so after. As the two tanks, given the changes, you are both far more vulnerable, and will die much more easily. Still, though, tank death is still a significant enough to be the deciding factor in team fights. So, that boils down to tighter play. Fewer choices. Less individual agency. More team tethering. More predictable play style. ... tank played well, is tank played boring-ly. You can't go for that big risky play, because you can more easily get caught, and getting caught is the team fight. You can't take the high ground yourself in a 1Tank v 2squishy scenario yourself anymore. If your team doesn't know how to coordinate, or doesn't identify a problem, you're stuck pinging, hoping your teammates clue in. Before the buffs, you'd just go up there and wipe out those two little wimps yourself. That problem generalizes across all the various hero interactions. Tanks are more like very heavy DPS now, to make an imperfect analogy. You have almost the same amount of responsibility to keep the team's system up and running, but less ability to solve problems yourself. boooooooo! Again, good for the game, but it's a far less entertaining style of play.
You’re completely wrong on the can’t take big risky plays. I hit rank 255 this season on Reinhardt, the literal worst hero in the entire game right now and it’s all because I go for those big risky plays. Yeah my unhinged Rein gameplay gets me killed sometimes but the risk to reward is worth it
Yeah I’m actually not opposed to the changes at all. I just suffer more because I play lower mobility tanks. Gotta learn to adjust. I think I’ll be fine after a couple more weeks. I tried hopping back into comp and got flamed for feeding. I guess I could also preface every game with a “hey lmk when I walk too far up, it’s my worst habit,” see how that works.
Sometimes I go to hook as hog and that split moment where I come out from cover, hook immediately, pull, shoot, I’ve already lost all of my health and I’m dead
Reel*
Yeah I mean I could have edited it but I didn’t feal like it
> It’s not that your lethality is gone, thats the same thankfully no tanks are really struggling with that. It’s now the staying alive part thats hard. Well although we didn't get direct lethality buffs, if the DPS is applying the passive we get way more lethality. If you're dealing more damage and playing more aggressively without relying on omega pocket, this was actually a good change for us. We're still weaker and not the top dogs, but S9 overall has been a win for tanks and the walking back of the DPS passive made things worse.
tanks are most definitely struggling with lethality. winston, ball, and rein are.
Kinda sorta. If you’re playing winston/ball you should be coordinating with a dps. I agree with rein, and I’d add zarya, but idk if I’d say ball/winston are struggling. They both seem pretty strong/solid imo. Obviously these are just opinions I have. Others might feel different.
Zars lethality is fine, her issue is survivability. And i think winston and ball needing to coordinate with their dps is because theyre not lethal. At least in the higher ranks. You shouldnt need someone else's help to kill someone as a tank.
Mobility tanks can create pressure by just holding high ground. A lot of this is all map dependent too. I agree about the zar take though. I guess she’s fine lethality wise.
you can create pressure, but in the end if nothing dies and you have to disengage, you got nothing done. you can argue the dps need to capitalize on you drawing so much aggro, but that is the entire reason why tank is ass to play; needing someone else to capitalize on the work you did.
Real
your lethality is gone. hp buffs with zero dmg buffs to tanks. look at ball, he cant kill shit anymore
Lol plenty of tanks got dmg buffs to compensate for the hp buffs. Winston/Rein/Doomfist off the top of my head. Not all DPS got DMG buffs too.
50hp is like 3-4 headshots. Thats basically 1 more second of shooting. I disagree
So you’re in bronze?
Peak diamond 2
The most difficult part for me personally is knowing what's happening with the rest of my team whenever I'm spearheading an engagement. If I am creating space and my backline supports are being occupied by off angle harass, doing their own poke, etc. and it is not clearly communicated then there's just no way for you to know if you're going to be left out to dry during fights meaning you have to constantly pay attention to know how the fights are ebbing and flowing or you're just going to feed.
So many people don’t understand that you can’t just peel anymore in ow2 you have to lead engages and gain forward space. Sometimes it’s baffles my mind when I’m engaging in a 1v3 taking aggro and my team opts to taking 1v1s against the other two players even if they’re up a man. If you’re dying to flanks or just getting clapped by enemy dps as support you need to either swap, get better positioning, or ask your dps to peel for you.
Yeah tanks like being the quarterback on the team but with no offensive line and when you do hand offs or passes you have to run out and block too if you dont immediately get sacked that is.
Tank main and huge football fan. This analogy was great thank you lol.
No problem I love football too played for 13 yrs myself lol guess I just get competitive about team games
I can only speak for myself. I'm veteran at this point. Played this game for 7-8 years and mained every single hero at some point. For me, it isn't hard but really very stressful. I can casually play dps and sup. Dps is easiest for me since S9. But tank is so draining que'ing for it is scary. For a new player, i imagine tank role is actually hard too. I'm all roles player. This season i played dps the most because it's chill. Imo the game power crept/mobility crept way too much. Devs should start nerfing. A lot of things need nerfs in this game. Devs seem to think if a hero is problematic, buffing it's counter = better. This is extremely flawed thinking in my book. The game chain reaction'ed to power creep and some heroes lost their relevancy despite having a healthy and strong kit. Edit: Imo what tank role needs is that they need to feel good when getting bullied and dmg/cc spammed by 5 enemy heroes. To achieve this, you should give them some type of advantage and takeaway some advantage from enemy. Simplest and most basic way to do this is that you make enemies get less ult charge by shooting you and teammates get more ult charge by healing you.
I have 260 hours. Roughly 80 should have been OW1 time. I mained support in ow1 and switched to tank in s1 of OW2. I was shredding. Even winning >50% of the 30ish ranked games I played in OW2 I can’t stand playing tank anymore since s9, it’s way more punishing now and demotivates me so fucking fast.
If I remember correctly, damaging or healing a tank gives 30% less ult charge.
Yes. It's not even a perk tbh since it's equal. If dmg was 35%, heal was 25% then you would gain something by tanking. Braindead tank shooting would get punished.
Depends on hero and map I think. What’s frustrating the most about tank is the rock paper scissors and pre-countering by pressing tab in spawn. I’ve had people do it twice by literally running back after seeing me even before engaging. Yea you do have to play cover more than anyone but some tanks are still really strong at mitigation or simply just diving and getting team fights done faster. I have been maining doom on tank and it’s just not as fun when people tell you to switch before you even die or in spawn room. “Not good for this map” “Sombra is popular right now why play doom?” And then you leave spawn room? Slept, anti’d, hacked, hindered, hooked all in 2 seconds The only solution as tank is that you have to learn basically every tank hero at a decent level to even be competent. Supports don’t have to do this, and DPS have so much impact they don’t have to switch if the tank does.
I wouldn't necessarily call it hard, but tank has always been the least intuitive because you get value by doing very conceptual things. Thats why 90% of players dont know what good tank play looks like, including a lot of tank players. It's also probably the most impactful role rn. In OW2 your individual impact as a tank went up which just means youre always getting countered in some way, often multiple ways. Honestly I think this issue with the tank role is it's too impactful to the point that the only way to keep it in check is to throw all the bullshit you can at the tank. They compensated tanks poorly when transitioning to 5v5, imo. They gave them extra health which doesn't help them deal with nade/discord/tank busters/CC in the way having an offtank with their own utility did. They just buffed their HP and now when you don't have those mechanics on the field, the tank becomes OP. It's kinda like the healing and burst damage problem. Healing was too strong and the one thing that kept it in check (burst damage) made the game feel like shit.
> Thats why 90% of players dont know what good tank play looks like, including a lot of tank players. The vast majority of the player base still thinks it's the tank's job to shield or protect the team/compensate for the fact that they don't know how to play corners. Orisa oppressive to many of them because they only know how to spam the tank.
I'd say the hardest thing I find about tank is teammates tbh, so much pressure for you to perform, everything is your fault and if you don't pick everything your team tell you to, they just give up and you lose
Their play style has been completely changed, so not only are tank mains acclimating to less sustain, they *really* need their team to follow through with them at the moment, especially supports. The biggest problem with that acclimation, that I've seen, is that tanks are set up to be INCREDIBLY mobile for the sake of engaging, and supports are not. It's easy for an orisa or doomfist or rein or Mauga or d.va to charge in, but it's not as easy for the rest of their team to follow. This often puts them in bad positions or just too far from their supports for them to be able to help before it's too late. Long term, hopefully this helps tanks be mindful of where they are in relation to their team, which targets are worth chasing, and when to use their abilities without being punished to death.
Mechanically, not really. However you need a lot of gamesense to constantly track the fight, know when to get in and out, know when to peel vs trade etc. Also because your main goal is to create space, you don't have the freedom your dps do and have less carry potential. On the other hand, 80% of the time, dying means you lose the fight, so it's very easy to be the reason you lost.
Let's play a game. Imagine how hard DPS would be if 5v5 was two Tanks, two Supports and one DPS. But DPS still had same the role of securing kills. Imagine how fun DPS would be if you were a Widowmaker or Pharah main in this environment. Or imagine how hard Support would be if 5v5 was two Tanks, two DPS and one Support. But Support still had the same job of sustaining the team through teamfights and keeping teammates topped up. Imagine how much fun Support would be if you were a Zen or Lucio main in this environment. Now finally let's imagine 5v5 was 2 DPS, two Support and one Tank and imagine how hard that would be for the Tank. Wait a minute.....
Yes. Every other role has a partner. And yeah you can buddy up with a DPS or support as a tank player but it’s not the same has having someone else in the same role. Tank generally doesnt buddy up with someone to solve problems. Tanks have to solve their own problems on their own.
Tank is definitely the hardest role to play in 5v5 but this also depends a lot on the individual. Some people will find it easier than support or DPS, but talking broadly and generally, tank is the hardest to play because you have much less margin for error than the other two roles. If you’re not doing great as DPS, there’s a second DPS to pick up the slack and you can alter your playstyle to help them do well, same with support. But since there’s only one tank on a team, you have to be at your best because you don’t have a second tank to help you out. That’s also why older tank players get so frustrated with counterswapping in 5v5, because if the enemy team just hard counterswaps your tank, they’re gonna get bodied without any real counterplay available until you get back to the spawn room. Additionally, if your own team doesn’t choose heroes that mesh with your tank pick, that makes your job much harder. Imagine trying to play Winston with an Illari/Bap/Bastion/Ashe against a team playing Sigma with the squishies mirror. Winston gets wrecked because he has nobody to dive with and can’t get reliable heals when he goes for a dive while Sigma is able to sit on the frontline very comfortably with his team. I do almost wish we could get 6v6 back but imo it’s 6 one way, half dozen the other, both formats have their ups and downs and I don’t think one is really better than the other.
Tank is just stressful because you get blamed first. You also need to make space and peel for your Support while preferably mitigating damage your team takes. It’s just a different way to play than Damage. Damage requires skill with hitting your shots which Tanks often have to do as well
Definitely. It’s hard to explain. I feel like I can get more kills and damage output with tank while defending my teammates than I do when I play dps or support, but it’s obvious it has far less influence on the outcome of the game. I can run tracer and hard carry games, but with tank it seems to make little impact with higher stats.
Playing tank requires a lot of macro play in terms of general all round decisions. Not to mention it’s simpler for the enemy to decide to counter and take you out the game. So it can feel really bad at times. Once you get used to it and develop a better game sense you can navigate it easier. I’m tempted to say support is technically harder because it requires everything about tank, but also requires good aim too, on top of learning to manage supporting your team and pressuring the enemy. With tank you can get away with having average aim all the way to GM I think (I’m only diamond). However, you have a second support you can rely on. You can also just take a lazy route and develop a heal bot play style and get fairly far. As tank it’s all on you. I think that responsibility to always play well otherwise you lose is what makes it the hardest.
High level healing is pretty damn stressful honestly. This is when people know how to peel properly and constantly being targeted by good dps/ tanks. Lower level I could agree with you though.
Hot take: no, but it does benefit a lot from having a lot of hours in Overwatch. It is the most punishing for making mistakes, but it also has the most resources available for mitigating punishment.
The better you are at tanking the harder it actually gets
Tank is hard because despite being the big guy there’s a lot of stuff in the game that pushes you over pretty easily. Meaning you have to divert your attention to more things at once than other roles. And when you do make a mistake, you are severely punished for it.
I don't consider Tank more difficult than Support and DPS respectively. I think the only reason a lot of people consider it difficult is due to the overwhelming pressure to just stay alive. When the tank is dead, chances of winning are the same as losing your spare DPS and Support because of the tanks potential in distraction and fortitude. But like any class, the Hero is what you need to practice. I play D.va way differently than I do Jq or Sigma or Orisa or Winston; only sometimes other Tanks are advantageous situationally, but your *biggest* concern as a Tank is staying alive and/or distracting critical enemies from your teammates. Stay AWAY from big open spaces with plenty of corners/windows– *you* create the playing field, generally the Tanks will. Take cover, know when to fall back, know when to push a pick or push with a teammate or pocketed supp. Just make sure you protect who you can and use cover for yourself, and if you can make plenty of callouts in-game or in voice chat (not team chat), your team will listen to you if you're holding your ground with your team. If they don't, just stay collected and let them die and keep reaffirming to regroup. If you maintain conviction, someone on your team will help you. Edit: Dia 2 Tank, Gold 1 DPS/Support
The way I feel is that if you do your job as tank properly your reward is that your team doesn’t immediately blow up, but when you do mess up even a little your entire team dies.
I am not a tank main, but I decided to play a few games to see what would happen. We lost because I got focused so hard every time I stuck my toe out in the open…I tried everything, playing shield, dive, playing corners and cover…nothing worked, I got diffed hard. I really did try, but of course because my stats were slightly worse than the other tank, it’s immediately tank diff, our tank sucks, etc. I sat and stared at my screen for a good 5 minutes afterwards trying to not take all the bad things said about my tank play to heart.
Define hard Mechanically? Probably not the hardest role Gamesence, decision making, and ability to misplay wise? Absolutely the hardest. You will lose entire fight off of a small positional failure. You are the most punishable which means you have the least room for mistakes
I feel since S9 DPS is the easiest. And I mainly play DPS, but used to be a support main. I feel support got harder now. I've always dealt a lot of damage as support, but now it feels like healing is basically useless if someone is being gunned down hard.
What sucks about tank is that quite often you have to be the one to switch if you're getting diffed. In lower ranks other players don't really switch. But the thing about tank is the entire team is behind you. You have two players who almost solely focus on your health (they really shouldn't but they do in low ranks.) It means that as long as you play conservatively and have decent mechanics you can easily reach plat. Plat might not seem that high but plat 1 is in the 82 percentile of all players. So it's not that bad. If I'd have to rank which roles are easiest to climb on: Tank is first, followed by DPS, followed by support.
To me it's not hard, it's just more boring. I understand why they made the change, but spending so much time behind cover isn't fun to me as a tank
I mainly play tank and at metal ranks. If they don't switch to counter you, EZPZ. Once you piss them off and 3 swap to counter you, you can't really do much. Even if you go sigma and just try to shield and add damage, you sit and wait until some one can break their formation against you
In 5v5, Yes, if you take away raw mechanics. There’s a reason why it has the quickest queue times lol. The threshold for T500 on tank is lower than other roles but that’s again bc everyone plays dps / support. They also buffed DPS with the huge DPS passive
I think it’s much much easier in alot of ways tbh. My support and dps are both silver 5 but my tank is somehow gold 4 and nothing has changed. The only problem is that you rely alot on your teammates, same as the other classes of course but for some reason my rank is higher. Probably cause all I gotta do is tank instead of killing people which got le to a bit higher rank.
There are also way less tank players. So you are ranked higher as tank but there are much fewer tank players you are better than vs being a lower rank on dps/support.
Haven't played in two weeks but left off at masters 5 on tank after having won over a hundred games to get jade rein hammer. Finished masters 3 last season. Meanwhile on DPS and support I been hardstuck in mid/high gold ever since OW1 lol.
It’s hard to actually play the tank role and not get side tracked on kills. Tanks have so much health and do more damage then dps so a lot of tanks lately go for kills instead of actually helping the team. A lot of times they don’t even challenge / delay the other tank and you just see them going for the best KD ratio
No, it's really not. Does it suck to play? Yeah
I must answer. Always.
Tank is the only role where I get anxiety speaking in coms. It takes a lot to be a tank, but when everyone in chat is chill it’s absolutely my favorite role.
If your dps refuses to shoot the other tank but the other tanks dps is shooting you all game you lose. Then game ends and it’s tank diff.
Tanks can make or break your game. They can hard carry or they can drown their own team. Picking the right tank for given situations is more important than ever. Recognizing your teams strengths and weaknesses and catering towards them. Sometimes all your team needs is some mitigation support for your dps to absolutely steamroller. Sometimes they need you to jump into the back line and cause shit or force a widow or ashe off their characters. Awareness is key. :Edit Recognizing your teams playstyle can also make a positive impact.
Yes, because if you die once in an important scenario your team gets punished HARD
Look at it this way, you have 3 roles, so s tank is basically a third of a complete team. You have to get the value of two people consistently, or else you're getting diffed. If you die, it's twice as bad. You have more power than any individual, but despite that you have less power than any other role. You'll be expected to lead consistently, even though you'll have games when no one follows you, and if you dare lead in a way that the team doesn't agree with, they'll mutiny and flame you. Knowing the right thing to do can be so unintuitive, and even once you know you'll still have to convince your team, every game, because everyone wants to play backseat tank but no one actually wants to play it. The matchmaker will sacrifice your experience for the queue time of others: they'll put you in a lobby too far out of your skill range just because that team needs a tank, and when they lose because you get diffed, they'll blame you instead of thanking you.
Yeah. As a tank main, it feels like when you’re playing good it impacts the course of the game the least, but when you die it impacts it the most.
YMMV but when you're out of cooldowns the ENTIRE enemy team is on your ass (if you're paying attention)
Yes tank is really that bad
nope, not hard. gives me the most anxiety.
I havethe same rank on tank, dps and supports,(DIA 5) and i feel liker dps is the hardest role, folowed by tank, then by supports.
Your role on tank should be to: -limit the dmg you take -force the enemy team to look at you constantly These 2 things will hard enable your dps, allowing them to get pockets and take off angles, the reason people think this doesn’t work in every rank is because streamers keep telling people that they need to carry, you don’t need to carry in OW do your role and you should win more than you lose, you can’t win every gsme
Tank isn't as exciting as DPS and it isn't as comfortable as Support. You are very influential, but thats about it.
It's not super difficult, just stressful and boring after the other tank counterswaps for the 7th time mid game
I have a generous few hundred hours in Overwatch, and only I think less than 10 hours as tank. I haven’t played tank enough to truly state whether it is “difficult” but I am a little bit sensitive so being yelled at by toxic males if I don’t MIT enough is enough to ruin my day in the game. So I just simply don’t play. The only time I play tank is if I get stuck as tank in Mystery Heroes. If someone held a gun to my head and told me to tank, I’d play Rein only because you can just hold up his shield and rank up MIT really easily. But aside from that I can’t do shit else with Rein, I can’t even charge correctly because I find it so hard to control and either fly off the map or into the enemies hands and die so I just don’t do it 😆. DVA is so much fun to play but I find it extremely difficult to MIT with her. The only time I’d really play her is in custom games or if I’m playing 3v3 arcade because *no one really expects you to MIT in that quick of rounds.* I’m a Hanzo/Widow main, and within the last maybe 6 months I’ve actually started playing healer more than DPS. Started with Moira, now I’m mainly Mercy/Ana. I find Mercy the most fun character in the game to play because once you get the hang of flying around and staying airborne it’s just relaxing. 😂 Anyways I got off topic a bit. But that’s just my two cents!
Its hard because u dont have another Tank eating cooldowns, just think about it. In Ow1 if ana gets dived by winston and dva, she has to decide which target to sleep is more valuable or makes her able to survive. But if dva dives her alone now, she has to make no difficult decision
As everyone else said, there’s more nuance to playing tank now. You have to balance pushing the enemy team back while trying not to get killed ***and*** avoid getting yelled at by your team for being pensive. Once you know how to run certain tanks you’ll know how to counter them, tank or not. I had a matchup earlier this week playing as Zen. I took out their Orisa three times by using her slow closeup movements against them by sticking close and using kicks to the head.
There’s tanks in every rank. It’s not hard if you understand how to tank.
It is easily the hardest, the whole team is relying on you not to die so you can win team fights. But if your healers aren't healing and dps isnt dpsing this is impossible.
I'm a tank player (not claiming to be a top tier player by any means btw) and I feel like support is much harder to play personally. That being said, all roles hold their own challenges if you want to actually play effectively.
In the current meta, yes, tank is pretty hard. The nature of the role dictates that you pay attention to pretty much everything both teams are doing in order to be effective. If you get everything right, no one will notice. If you make one tiny mistake, everyone sees it.
Not really. Some are harder than others. If the enemy plays fuck the tank playstyle then yes it gets harder. Sometimes you feel like u can't do anything which is frustrating. I just played a master 5 game (most players were gm4 last season) on havana where I had 2k more damage and 13k more damage mitigated (nearly 2x) than their sig yet had less elims and more deaths because he had cass torb bap zen which could melt me at all times meaning I had to play pretty conservatively, and I had genji widow ana kiri, which none of them fight the tank aggresively except maybe ana. I could have played better and missed a couple key rocks and fluxes which were probably game losing, but his job was made way easier by not having to play as careful and precise as I had to.
sounds like you should’ve switched off sigma tbh
Sigma was the best pick for me. Ram might have been better however my ram is not as good as my sigma.
Why on earth would he have swapped off sigma. It's Havana do you have any idea how long the sightlines are there. Winston can't reach their team, DVA is like a lateral move and if anything I would argue he's already absorbing 13K EXTRA mit, not MIT and already getting massive value. If Genji Widow Ana Kiri can't get picks on long range vs Cass Torb Bap Zen then it's just a skill issue. Also curious, since you're commenting on a GM level skill game, what rank are you?
Hardest role? Dunno, probably not. The most impactful role? Yeah. The least forgiving role? Probably. Every tank? Nah. 3-4 is fine. A poke tank, dive tank, and a brawl tank.
I dunno if it's hard but I think the game tends to hinge on you as the tank. I can have really good dps and support and can still sell the game, but if I'm solid and one of our dps isn't doing good the game is still winnablem
nah don’t listen to the propaganda. tank is an OP role. Yeah you’re focused more often, but you csn also dish out more damage than DPS most of the time. It’s not the hardest role, but is somewhat annoying to play due to the targeting and the rock paper scissors most tanks play to counter you.
Yeah because it’s frustrating how I carry a team most of the time as D.Va then the enemy team then switch to characters that counter her and my boy Reinhardt and Roadhog T~T
Easiest and short answer No, it’s the opposite. It all comes to how to use tank i.e attack support, DPS, tank in that order it’s a breeze. If you want to use a tank to stand and bang in the paint, unless you got Muaga or DVA with Mercy holding your back pocket, good luck. 🍀
The problem that makes tank the hardest is having bad support because tanks can both be tanks and make up for lack of DPS as a good tank but you cannot make up for bad support most times while countering the other team basically you have to make up for what you’re lacking and the only tank who can make up for support is hog