The OverThinker: The Community's Thoughts on the Barrier-Killing Tank Changes

If you are someone who even mildly studies Overwatch, you know that every meta in the game is shaped primarily by its tanks. For example, Dive was really popular back in the day, since Winston's mobility and D.Va's high-range Defence Matrix were quite powerful. Right now, we've got Double Barrier, since Orisa and Sigma can fight together at midrange and provide multiple layers of protection to their teammates. Before this we had Bunker, since Orisa and Roadhog's Halt-Hook combos were easy to land and were also highly rewarding; I'm sure you get the gist.

Last week, I wrote an article about my thoughts on the latest PTR patch, which nerfs barriers to a significant extent. This week, I thought I should look deeper into the upcoming tank meta, and see what the Overwatch community thinks will happen to our tank pool when the PTR patch is moved to the live servers. For that purpose, I created and posted a survey on Reddit and a few Discords I'm part of, and have been able to gather some of your responses to get an idea of what the perception of the tank changes is among the general player base. In this post, I will go over the responses I've got from that survey as well as the general trends I've observed in them.

This article aims to present my findings exactly as they are, without any of my opinions involved in them. Of course, speculation does not count. If you have any of your own thoughts to share about this topic, please feel free to use the comments section to keep the conversation going.

Via this survey, I've only received 79 responses, which I normally would've considered null and void, but since I was able to observe some solid trends despite the miniscule sample size, I decided to go ahead with sharing the details. It's really not easy to get survey data in the Overwatch community, since many Subreddits and Discord channels have restrictions for this kind of stuff, and sometimes label it as 'self-promotion' before discarding it, which makes it painfully difficult to get my content across. Anyway, let's get on with discussing my findings.

1. It may seem like everyone thinks Double Barrier is OP, but my results tell a different story.

At least publicly, everyone seems to agree that Double Barrier is too strong to not run most of the time. In my results however, just about 60% of the players admit to thinking so. The rest believe that other tank comps can be viable too if they're run well enough, and it's not just low-ranked players saying that. I've had responses from a few Master and Grandmaster players who believe Orisa-Sigma isn't the "Be all, end all" of tank duos right now, and that's saying something. These players are those that strictly adhere to the meta maybe 90% of times, but here, they openly commented saying that you don't always need to run Double Barrier to get wins. On the flip side, I've got Plats saying this comp is OP, and that's the rank where almost anything can work with communication (I speak from experience). This leads me to wonder how many of us actually form our own opinions about the meta, and how many of us are heavily-influenced by the likes of content creators and pro players into thinking something that we're not sure we fully understand. Of course, it's human nature to publicly agree with a popular opinion, but when you're in a private setting like a survey, you can be yourself and share your thoughts without feeling insecure, and it's great to know that a good chunk of the player base believes Double Barrier is not as strong as everyone thinks. The game's stats do say otherwise, but I'm at least glad we're being honest.

2. On average, it seems like Reinhardt will be the best main tank on the next patch.

For those of you who read my previous post, you know that I believe Rein will be much stronger on the next patch due to his ability to engage/disengage better from fights, as well as to withstand a ton of CC, essentially having a mini-Fortify on him at all times. I was unsure about whether I was right, but it seems like most of you agree with me. Almost half the people who took my survey said that Rein would be the best main tank in the upcoming patch. What about the others though? Well, without boring you with the mathematics behind the whole thing, Rein seems to be the top pick by far, followed by Orisa, who is closely followed by Wrecking Ball and then Winston. Orisa's results seem a little extreme, since most people believe she's either the best, or the worst main tank; as for Winston and Hammond, the community is pretty convinced they won't be in the Top 2, possibly debunking the theories that Dive could be back in a major way, which I don't believe will happen either. I've also observed a trend where the higher you go up the ladder, the more people believe that Orisa will still be the best main tank to run on the next patch, whereas in the middle tiers, Reinhardt seems to be the anchor of choice. The lower tiers are all garbled (Bronze and Silver), so I can't really comment on them here.

3. Unsurprisingly, Zarya is being touted as the best off-tank on the next patch based on the average rankings I computed.

The contest for the title of 'Best Off-Tank on the Upcoming Patch' was hard-fought, even though Zarya seems to have won first place. Her synergy with Reinhardt is probably what helped her get slightly better rankings than our runner-up, Roadhog. As for the third and fourth places, well, it's literally a hair's width of difference between D.Va and Sigma, but if you must know, D.Va is in last place. Based off the data, Zarya seems to have won first place quite convincingly, since she's been ranked first by about a third of our voters, and has received decreasing amounts of rankings from 2nd to 4th. Roadhog has got most of his votes in 2nd and 3rd place, meaning the community thinks he'll be viable for the most part. With Sigma, it's similar to how it is with Orisa: most players either think he's really good, or utter trash, which makes sense because of his place in Double Barrier. As for poor old D.Va, she's received increasingly more votes from the first to the last place, signalling that she'll possibly have very niche uses. Similar to the results of the main tank rankings, it seems like the Gold-Plat crowd thinks Zarya is going to be the strongest and Sigma, the weakest, off-tank on the new patch. Diamond is where the trend of Sigma still being the best off-tank starts, and it goes all the way to Grandmaster. These Elos are also where D.Va starts biting the bullet, since a lot of players in the upper tiers believe she'll continue being mega weak despite her Matrix buff. Once again, Bronze and Silver data doesn't seem to be exhibiting any specific trend, so I can't comment on these tiers right now.

4. 60% of those who took the survey think that the armour value revert is a big deal.

And, most of these people are from Diamond and below, which makes sense, since tank-buster heroes like Reaper and Roadhog are quite popular in those ranks. If anyone's going to feel these pellet-based heroes doing less damage, it's probably going to be them. As for the Masters and Grandmasters on ladder, they, for the most part, believe that the burst damage options available to us are so powerful that the armour buff isn't going to do much to help our armour-wielding characters.

5. Tanks don't seem like they'll be more fun to play in the near future.

As game developers, your primary goal should be to make the game fun for all of your players. Since that isn't realistically possible, let's go for the word 'most' instead of 'all'. Right now, tanks aren't very fun to play in the traditional competitive environment, since there are so many meta heroes that can bully them, like Mei, Reaper and Doomfist. Even if you count that out, effective tank play often relies on communication, which isn't really a thing at most ranks on the ladder. This makes tank a very un-fun role to play, and that leads to increased queue times for the support and damage roles. For this reason, I was really hoping that the ensuing patch buffs tanks in such a way that make people want to play them again. For that same reason, I added a question to my survey, asking if the readers thought that the PTR patch would encourage more players to pick tank. The results were quite disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. It's just about a 50-50, which means things could go either way. What I observed from the stats is that the higher you go up the ladder, the lesser people believe that the PTR patch will cause an increase in tank players. As a tank main myself, this isn't very promising, but I guess we'll wait and watch what happens.

Alright, that concludes my list of findings from my survey on the PTR tank changes. I know the sample size was a little too small to matter, but hopefully I've been able to derive some meaningful information out of it. Even if this survey doesn't yield accurate results, it's still a good exercise in understanding the player base's thought processes, and to see how accurate we actually are at predicting future metas.

I'm hoping my blog becomes a good platform for players to freely express their thoughts and opinions, and hopefully, someone at Blizzard reads these posts and is able to do something productive with our inputs. Sure, platforms like Reddit and Twitter are great for expressing yourselves, but surveys are an excellent way of punching in your pure, unadulterated opinions about different aspects of the game, without the pressure of being under the public eye, so I urge you guys to participate in any more surveys I conduct in the future.

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My name is Proilios, and that was the latest part of 'The OverThinker'. Thank you so much for the read, and I hope you visit The Plat Player's Perspective again.