Yeah, It’s Gonna Suck: Overwatch 2
This one ain’t coming back from the dead.
If any of you were harboring any hopes that Microsoft Blizzard was going to be any better than Blizzard Classic, let me sink them now.
One of the things that killed Overwatch 1, was the ham-handed decision to inflict Role Que on the players. For those that never played Overwatch but are for some reason still reading this post, Role Que forced the players into filling available character slots, 2 tank slots, 2 damage slots and 2 support slots. The players more or less agreed before this restriction was inflicted on them, that 2-2-2 was usually the best way to start a match but that adjustments could be warranted depending on the situation. Maybe swapping out a second tank for a third healer, or temporarily swapping out a second healer player for third and more specialized damage.
But when Role Que came down like a hammer a big chunk of the original player base finally said, this it, we’ve had enough, and went off to learn how to play League of Legends. I should have joined them. I have no idea why I thought that Kaplan would fix this mess, because Soy-Drenched-Jeff never walked back a mistake. He just fiddled with the character stats afterward until the players could be distracted by his next fuck up.
Sometime before Kaplan quit, I had started playing the game less and less until I discovered that I hadn’t played it for months.
When Overwatch 2 went into open Beta, I gritted my teeth and powered my way through a brush up period on Overwatch 1 before playing OW2 Beta.
The new version is really just half the game. What is in Beta right now is Player vs Player, what is coming is Player vs Environment mode. But I’ll be frank with you, if PVE is no better than PVP than Overwatch 2 is stillborn.
The new PVP game retains the godawful Role Que. Except now it’s worse. The new and unimproved Role Que is now 5 slots; 1 tank, 2 damage and 2 healers. The tanks are now buffed up quite a bit.
The good: There has been rework on some of the other player characters but nothing major beyond nerfing shields and stun mechanics. Both of those had become the bane of the players existence. The stun mechanics had gotten so bad that there was a clip running around of Reinhart being bounced around like a ping pong ball. So getting rid of them was probably a good thing.
The bad: Strategy and tactics. Since there is now just one super-tank everything revolves around that one tank. If the tank doesn’t know what he’s doing, you are going to lose the game. Whenever your team’s tank gets eliminated, the only thing you can do is try to hold your position or just head back to spawn to protect your tank long enough to get him back to the sharp edge. Damage characters now have it a lot rougher because they have two priories they have to follow, first, kill the healers and only after they are dead go for the tank. And they are never getting healed themselves.
Support has it the worst. It’s lousy to play a healer in Overwatch 2. Blizzard really screwed this part up all to hell. The only thing you can do as a healer is pocket the tank.
That. Is. it.
If you do anything else, the tank dies, and you lose the game. What little fire power the supports had has been nerfed to hell so when you aren’t healing the tank the only thing you can do is run away. And the supports are constantly being chased down by the DPS players all the time. The Damage characters don’t bother shooting at each other anymore. The ones that do that learn quickly that that is how your team loses. If you play as a healer, you are only ever keeping the tank juiced up, you get eliminated every five seconds and you have no defensive capability. The wait time for a healer slot is usually under a minute because NOBODY will play healer in Overwatch 2.
At the end of the day, Overwatch 2 plays and feels like a really bad balance and rework patch.
League of Legends has nothing to worry about.
