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  1. - Top - End - #511
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    I agree with basically all of this. Difficult to play heroes should translate into a higher ceiling, assuming they're used to their potential.

    My personal philosophy is that, rather than nerf a strong but mechanically complex hero, they should buff or point players to their simpler-to-play counter. That will help the middle end of skill, while the top end will then have a minigame of avoiding or countering that counter with the help of their team. Genji is easily countered by Winston for example, but he's also somewhat more mobile and has much better range than Winston, so he can still get picks on the enemy team if they aren't under that Winston's watchful eye. And while Genji is difficult, Winston is fairly easy to pick up and play.
    Well, I'm kind of skeptical of the merit of putting an easy counter for a difficult Hero. This isn't to say that Winston actually meets that definition, since a good Genji can juke Winston if played well. It's an uphill fight, to be sure, but with a bit of teamwork and synergy, a Genji can win out. But I think the Brig vs. Tracer matchup was a really good example of a 'you may as well go home' counter. Not only can Tracer not kill Brig, she also can't kill anyone else in Brig's line of sight, courtesy of armor pack. Also, FWIW, I also think Winston's mechanical complexity tends to be a bit underrated. Winston is a projectile, and most of his value comes from landing hits of your jumps. If your game plan is going to be just jump near your enemies and start zapping them, you're not going to be very effective.

  2. - Top - End - #512
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by The_Jackal View Post
    Well, I'm kind of skeptical of the merit of putting an easy counter for a difficult Hero. This isn't to say that Winston actually meets that definition, since a good Genji can juke Winston if played well. It's an uphill fight, to be sure, but with a bit of teamwork and synergy, a Genji can win out. But I think the Brig vs. Tracer matchup was a really good example of a 'you may as well go home' counter. Not only can Tracer not kill Brig, she also can't kill anyone else in Brig's line of sight, courtesy of armor pack. Also, FWIW, I also think Winston's mechanical complexity tends to be a bit underrated. Winston is a projectile, and most of his value comes from landing hits of your jumps. If your game plan is going to be just jump near your enemies and start zapping them, you're not going to be very effective.
    To a point, any counter is going to be easy compared to who theyre countering. That's kind of the point. Youre never going to have a Winston work harder to kill a Genji than the Genji is working to kill the Winston.

    Unrelated, I think the Tank/DPS divide is a bit ill conceived. Tanks need to be able to bring damage, especially ones like Winston, and DPS cant just immediately disintegrate when theyre attacked or flankers would be the only relevant characters. I think if they re-examined the whole pool and split it into an offense and a defense category, with support being the third, it would help inform picks and design goals in the future.
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  3. - Top - End - #513
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Keltest View Post
    To a point, any counter is going to be easy compared to who theyre countering. That's kind of the point. Youre never going to have a Winston work harder to kill a Genji than the Genji is working to kill the Winston.
    Sure, but that leaves you in a position where everyone's in this revolving door counter-picks. I want to be clear, I don't have a problem with some asymmetry in matchups, but hard counters are a design flaw. Learning to play a Hero well should mean getting some tricks to either neutralize or avoid Heroes who are strong against you, and I do think the Genji/Winston matchup has that. For one thing, Winston is a big boy, and he's going to get some punishment from other people on the floor. For another, Genji has more range and a lot of burst.

    Unrelated, I think the Tank/DPS divide is a bit ill conceived. Tanks need to be able to bring damage, especially ones like Winston, and DPS cant just immediately disintegrate when theyre attacked or flankers would be the only relevant characters. I think if they re-examined the whole pool and split it into an offense and a defense category, with support being the third, it would help inform picks and design goals in the future.
    I completely agree with this. Lots of people seem to bandwagon on role queue as a band-aid, and it seems like it may be coming, but honestly, the game would be far better off if the whole concept of roles was called into question.

  4. - Top - End - #514
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by The_Jackal View Post
    Sure, but that leaves you in a position where everyone's in this revolving door counter-picks.
    I don't see the problem - there's an inherent downside to revolving counterpicks, namely that you're sacrificing all your ult charge if you do it too often, whereas if you take too long to do it you're feeding the enemy. The goal is that countering a counter may require teamwork.

    Quote Originally Posted by The_Jackal View Post
    I completely agree with this. Lots of people seem to bandwagon on role queue as a band-aid, and it seems like it may be coming, but honestly, the game would be far better off if the whole concept of roles was called into question.
    I feel that eliminating the "tank" role would just be rebranding; you still won't get far without at least one Reinhardt, Winston or Orisa in an objective map.
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  5. - Top - End - #515
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    I feel that eliminating the "tank" role would just be rebranding; you still won't get far without at least one Reinhardt, Winston or Orisa in an objective map.
    Sure its rebranding, but I think from a design and intuition standpoint, offense/defense is a better divide to have than tank/DPS. With a good team, I can fairly consistently get gold damage with wrecking ball or Reinhardt. Are they DPS characters because of that? Well, Wrecking Ball maybe, but people should be picking characters because of what theyre good at, not because theyre classified under a certain role.
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  6. - Top - End - #516
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Why would you remove it? Sure, Reinhardt might bring some DPS, but Soldier 76, Pharah or Ashe will never be able to act as tanks. The divide is clearly there, why not name it?

    Maybe a few tanks are miscategorised, like Winston, but I feel like the tank role is still viable.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by GolemsVoice View Post
    Why would you remove it? Sure, Reinhardt might bring some DPS, but Soldier 76, Pharah or Ashe will never be able to act as tanks. The divide is clearly there, why not name it?

    Maybe a few tanks are miscategorised, like Winston, but I feel like the tank role is still viable.
    Because the role is either self evident in the design of the character, like rein or orisa, or its only loosely related to how the character actually plays, like Hammond or Winston. Especially if the rumors im hearing about forced 2/2/2 matchmaking are true, how characters are identified is going to matter.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Hmm. What would "offense" and "defense" mean, specifically? Would a team of squishy DPS be considered "offense"?
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    I don't play Overwatch anymore, and I think what's been said on the past couple of pages might be why. But I must say I agree about the Tank role not working properly. If a new player sees that the team is missing a tank and picks Winston... they won't be able to actually do the main job of a tank, because Winston can't protect his team like Reinhardt and Orisa. Roadhog even less so.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Morty View Post
    I don't play Overwatch anymore, and I think what's been said on the past couple of pages might be why. But I must say I agree about the Tank role not working properly. If a new player sees that the team is missing a tank and picks Winston... they won't be able to actually do the main job of a tank, because Winston can't protect his team like Reinhardt and Orisa. Roadhog even less so.
    At a level I finished playing at, that hardly matters - Winston primarily tanks by causing massive disarray and chaos and if I'm going to deal with my DPS barely able to hit Bronze damage, then I might as well assume that their DPS isn't so great either, hulk out in a good spot, take out their supports / DPS, and once the dust settles, planting the fresh-off-cooldown shield on my own remaining squishies.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Winthur View Post
    At a level I finished playing at, that hardly matters - Winston primarily tanks by causing massive disarray and chaos and if I'm going to deal with my DPS barely able to hit Bronze damage, then I might as well assume that their DPS isn't so great either, hulk out in a good spot, take out their supports / DPS, and once the dust settles, planting the fresh-off-cooldown shield on my own remaining squishies.
    And that's all well and good, but its not really "tanking" any more than 76 popping his ult and going ham on the enemy team is tanking. Youre just killing them better than theyre killing you, which is a perfectly legitimate way to play and win, but not really anything close to what is assumed with the tank descriptor.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Winthur View Post
    At a level I finished playing at, that hardly matters - Winston primarily tanks by causing massive disarray and chaos and if I'm going to deal with my DPS barely able to hit Bronze damage, then I might as well assume that their DPS isn't so great either, hulk out in a good spot, take out their supports / DPS, and once the dust settles, planting the fresh-off-cooldown shield on my own remaining squishies.
    Whereas I made the mistake of picking Winston when my team didn't have any other tanks and we got massacred.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    I don't see the problem - there's an inherent downside to revolving counterpicks, namely that you're sacrificing all your ult charge if you do it too often, whereas if you take too long to do it you're feeding the enemy. The goal is that countering a counter may require teamwork.
    The problem is the fact that there's 29 (soon to be 30) Heroes, all with their own tempo, timings, playstyle, and mechanics which a player will need to spend a great deal of time becoming familiar with at a high level. That may be feasible for a full-time streamer or professional gamer, but it's absurdly beyond the reach of any ordinary player, and, again, this is the best-case scenario. The reality is that there's a race-to-the-bottom equilibrium where the meta is defined by the composition which boasts the minimum amount of risk with the maximum amount of payoff, all other factors being equal. When the risks are disparate and the payoff equal, players will necessarily gravitate away from risk, which is why we have GOATS.

    I feel that eliminating the "tank" role would just be rebranding; you still won't get far without at least one Reinhardt, Winston or Orisa in an objective map.
    Why not? The tanks just prolong the exercise of getting picks, mostly to the point of being impossible, hence the game hinging almost exclusively on ultimate economy. Take away most of the stall, and entry picks become possible, and the game might actually reward qualities such as unpredictability, flanking, and aim. At day's end, I don't think the game of Overwatch as conceived has a rosy future, unless the developers are prepared to completely overhaul their role-based philosophy. Maybe there's enough Mercy and Brig mains to keep FPS bumper-cars in business, but I doubt it.

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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Baptiste came out this week. I have gotten a chance to play him a bit, and while I'm not good with him right now I think he has promise.

    One issue I'm noticing though is that, at least in lower tiers (I'm in high gold/low platinum) many people aren't using his healing grenades, only the AoE heal that affects him. I've had several matches where the tanks gave up and switched characters because none of our Baptistes would heal them. I don't know if it's because people are trying to play him like a burst-firing Soldier 76 or what, but I hope this is just a temporary thing. This is a level of stupid usually reserved for bronze.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    As a support main who can play all the supports competently he's okay...

    Not bad, not great juist...meh... Immortality field is an ult on a cooldown.

    He's ult charges extremely quickly just slightly slower than moiras so spam it...It can be very hard to get value out of it.

    I think he's best used at chokes with a bunker comp. Baptise, mercy/ana/zen, orissa, hog, mcree/ash, junkrat(/bastion) gives you ridiculous and I mean ridiculous damage between all the amps. Of course a single grav/blade deletes your team if the immortality field is not at play...and you probably can't recover quickly enough.

    He's very vulnerable to dive.

    Other that that I don't think he does not do much to change the meta himself.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Two of my friends that I play with regularly have both proven to be better with Baptiste than I am thus far. I will say that his immortality field is great against some ults (Doomfist, D.va, and Hanzo spring to mind, but I'm sure it applies to many others). I find that Baptiste's own ult seems very easy to waste, and not many people are using it well yet. The one time I did see it put to good use, he set it up in front of a Bastion that was also being boosted by Mercy. It melted my teammates before we could even register that it was there.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    And this came out to celebrate the new hero.

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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    That's pretty funny, except in my experience Death Blossom shreds the doodad that provides the invulnerability field.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    I like the new skins for this event. I think my favorite is Mei's "Honeydew" skin. However, I don't understand it. Is it a reference to something?

    Winston's gargoyle skin is quite good looking as well.

    On the new arcade modes: I've never been good at FFA, so I'm not thrilled with these variants. I'm not great at precision-aim characters, so the Mirrored Deathmatch mode was a real chore to get a top 4 finish in once. I think the least aim-dependent hero I saw was Soldier. Each time I played it, that mode also had at least one or two hitscan experts who'd get 25+ KBs while the rest of us were lucky to make it out of single digits.

    Hero Gauntlet wasn't as bad, since I got to use some of my better heroes along the way. I got a top three finish in that on the first try, even got PotG for a nice chain of four KBs.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    I thought both of the new modes were interesting and a nice change of pace... but at the same time I'm not a big deathmatch fan so I just did them once each. Fortunately, I scored 4th place in each pretty quickly, and then went back to other modes.

    I like a lot of the skins this time around, in particular Winston's, Brigitte's, and Mei's. I also love Hammond's dance emote, which I bought immediately.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Well, whattayaknow. The biggest fundamental balance change since the end of character stacking. I think the biggest effects this will have on me personally is shorter queue times, more total Competitive points, and less frustration at my teammates.

    Though I'm not at all certain about that last one.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    I was in a 2/2/2 match on the PTR where chat turned pretty toxic. We had an Ana who barely healed and the tank players never chose barrier tanks, so the supports both died constantly. The map was Gibraltar on competitive rules, so at least one barrier tank would have been a big help.

    What I'm worried about is the possibility that if DPS queue times are long, we might have a lot of matches where at least one DPS starts the match AFK.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by gomipile View Post
    I was in a 2/2/2 match on the PTR where chat turned pretty toxic. We had an Ana who barely healed and the tank players never chose barrier tanks, so the supports both died constantly. The map was Gibraltar on competitive rules, so at least one barrier tank would have been a big help.

    What I'm worried about is the possibility that if DPS queue times are long, we might have a lot of matches where at least one DPS starts the match AFK.
    Yup. What the role queue will do is flood the queue with a bunch of Ball, Roadhog, and D.va mains, all of whom aren't there to do the role, they just want to queue quickly. It won't make the game any less toxic, because even forcing a 2/2/2 can't reliably deliver teamwork and synergy. Basically, without 6 on 6 arranged teams, the game is a dumpster fire, and all anonymous queued content should roll with that assumption. Accept that there's two games: The league game and farting around in quick play, and design the reward system to promote those two types of play.

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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    In competitive, when I sometimes have to play the same map four times in one match only to draw feels like such a waste of time. Especially when there are stats on screen that could be used to break the tie, like how much time was remaining after the first and second round.

    I was planning on playing three comp matches tonight, but that first match made me need to quit for the night.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by gomipile View Post
    In competitive, when I sometimes have to play the same map four times in one match only to draw feels like such a waste of time. Especially when there are stats on screen that could be used to break the tie, like how much time was remaining after the first and second round.

    I was planning on playing three comp matches tonight, but that first match made me need to quit for the night.
    Well, the SR system is designed to reach equilibrium, so an argument can be made that once you've reached the Skill Ranking which reflects your actual proficiency with the game, a draw is the perfect expression of that outcome. Ultimately, however, ELO-like systems like SR are designed for, and only work in, one on one games. Chess is the classic ELO ranked game, and it's informed by a single razor to determine whether your rank rises or falls: Victory. SR, until you reach the top 15% of players, is fed by a large number of other statistics, the exact nature of which are secret, because they can be (and have been) gamed to skew SR gain. In the end, SR is so riddled with fundamental flaws and externalities, that I think it would be better if they removed the mechanic altogether, and came up with some other reward system to encourage regular play. Sadly, I don't think this is very likely, though I believe if you asked the Overwatch Team if they could go back in time and remove competitive from the game, would they, the answer would be an immediate "Yes".

    Fortnite, for example, has no real ranking system, just a wins counter, which means you're really just encouraging people to play more, period. It also doesn't use MMR, it just dumps 100 players into a lobby and gets on with the game. This hasn't stopped Fortnite from being a successful PVP title, rather the reverse. By rewarding players for playing more, and nothing else, the negative stimulus of losses is considerably less harsh, and people queue more.

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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Fortnite is also a deeply unique game structure. In essence, the "100 people roughly sort out their skill rankings in an hour" gameplay is a microcosm of your ladder experience in a game with Elo ranking. It's just over and done with faster, and it only works because you're literally playing a game with 99 other people. It also, of course, makes any win feel like an achievement, which means you can have 30 people who are terrible but still feel like they did something, because they're in the middle of the pack.

    I could maybe see team-based games using "tournament" or "league" formats to emulate that, letting you achieve a ranking without having to continually slog through repetitive play. Indeed, third-party leagues have been the best way I've enjoyed team play in MOBAs.
    Last edited by CarpeGuitarrem; 2019-08-12 at 12:44 PM.
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by CarpeGuitarrem View Post
    Fortnite is also a deeply unique game structure. In essence, the "100 people roughly sort out their skill rankings in an hour" gameplay is a microcosm of your ladder experience in a game with Elo ranking.
    Eh, disagree. While it's certainly true that having better aim will help you win a Fortnite Match, just like in Overwatch, the delta in mechanical skill between the average player and the best of the best is not very great. In point of fact, dumb luck is King in Fortnite, just like it is in most FPS games. Arguably it's even greater in the BR genre, where what loot you find has a big impact on your power and survivability. But even if somehow a perfectly balanced start could be obtained, that still won't account for the effects of luck. Even a chess tournament affords players multiple rounds to declare a winner, and chess is as close to a deterministic game as you can find.

    It's just over and done with faster, and it only works because you're literally playing a game with 99 other people. It also, of course, makes any win feel like an achievement, which means you can have 30 people who are terrible but still feel like they did something, because they're in the middle of the pack.
    Whereas people who are terrible in Overwatch can just main Mercy or Brig and coast to Diamond with little to no mechanical skill. My point is it shouldn't matter whether you're terrible, what matters is whether you're having enough fun to keep queueing.

    I could maybe see team-based games using "tournament" or "league" formats to emulate that, letting you achieve a ranking without having to continually slog through repetitive play. Indeed, third-party leagues have been the best way I've enjoyed team play in MOBAs.
    I put it to you that the existence of an extrinsic ranking system is a big part of what makes playing a slog. It's not the only thing, Blizzard's insistence on hinging the gameplay on dogsbody support roles and profligate barriers also causes the gameplay to bog down into inconsequential poke stalemates, only to get broken by whoever earns their ultimate first.

    I've played a ton of PVP shooters, from the earliest days of Doom and Quake, through Unreal, Soldier of Fortune 2, Call of Duty, the list goes on and on. But none of these games felt as futile and frustrating to play as Overwatch, in spite of the fact that earlier games had no kind of ranking system, which should arguably result in more mismatched lobbies and curbstompings. And I've definitely had some of those. And yet, I've consistently enjoyed far more Team Deathmatch in Modern Warfare 2 than I've ever enjoyed any Overwatch quick play, and mostly because of two things: 1) The progression model in MW2 is driven by cumulative personal accomplishments, rather than a zero-sum ranking scheme. 2) The core gameplay in Overwatch is simply less fun, by virtue of the effect of numerous hard counter matchups. Pharah versus Reaper? Just waddle back to the spawn room, Edgelord. Tracer versus Brig? Go back in time to the selection screen. Any tank versus Sombra? Well, you wanted to absorb damage, didn't you?

  28. - Top - End - #538
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    There's more to games than being good at head-clicking, you know.
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    Unless everyone's been lying to me and the next bunch of episodes are The Great Divide II, The Great Divide III, Return to the Great Divide, and Bride of the Great Divide, in which case I hate you all and I'm never touching Avatar again.

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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by CarpeGuitarrem View Post
    There's more to games than being good at head-clicking, you know.
    While true, ignoring that "head clicking" is a valuable skill is pretty specious.

    My game of choice right now is Rainbow Six: Siege. Siege is a very tactical; its core elements are map knowledge, situational awareness, positioning, and control of information (you and your team need to know where the enemy is while stopping them from knowing where you are).

    But the "head clicking" is an equally important factor to any of those. Getting the drop on your opponent means jack if you miss enough shots to let them react and return fire. Using your map knowledge to try an get a quick spawn peek kill on Defense is a good tactic, unless you miss (and trying to counter spawn peekers on Attack is likewise a great idea...unless you miss and expose yourself).

    The game is a shooter. Shooting things is the core way a player interacts with the game, and should be a major focus in ANY shooter.

    Overwatch fails in a lot of ways as a shooter by having the shooting be stiff, largely limited to close range, often dead easy because of how ****ing huge the character models are, and largely meaningless on the whole because most characters can soak up their entire weight in bullets, heal up, and charge back into the fray.

  30. - Top - End - #540
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    Default Re: Overwatch: Thread of the Game

    Quote Originally Posted by CarpeGuitarrem View Post
    There's more to games than being good at head-clicking, you know.
    I do. But I'm not ready to take a lesson on engaging gameplay from eggbeater-lady. I play lots of different types of games, all with different control schemes. I play MMOs, turn-based games, goofy mobile-caliber games like 'Craft the World', and I like them all. But what bugs me about Overwatch is when you've got one person playing 'click on heads' and someone else is playing 'dodge my beachball', and yet we're supposed to pretend it's a fair contest.

    Quote Originally Posted by Rynjin View Post
    Overwatch fails in a lot of ways as a shooter by having the shooting be stiff, largely limited to close range, often dead easy because of how ****ing huge the character models are, and largely meaningless on the whole because most characters can soak up their entire weight in bullets, heal up, and charge back into the fray.
    I think Overwatch was in pretty decent shape at, and shortly after launch, actually, and the existence of huge but tough tanks didn't break the game. I blame the game's breakdown on the proliferation of easy, powerful barriers, and untouchable or unkillable healers. When the game's (true) tanks were limited to Reinhardt and Winston, you couldn't just absorb long and medium-ranged fire indefinitely. The Winston shield buff, the change to D.va's defense matrix from a cooldown to a resource bar, and the addition of Orisa all made long-ranged poke more or less irrelevant. Breaking shields became a waste of time, in comparison to crashing through them and deleting the enemy team's healer. Ana was summarily forced from the meta, and we were treated with 'Find the Mercy'. After that got boring as hell, the reworked Mercy to neuter Rez, and Dive achieved apotheosis, until Blizzard added enough untouchable healers to castrate Dive, and now we've got a kind of rock/paper/scissors of spam comp, Dive, and GOATS (though I stopped paying close attention to the OW meta when Baptiste doubled down on the 'way too many barriers' problem).

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