Balance in Overwatch: A Critique 

It's been about 9 months since Overwatch (Blizzard's FPS-cum-MOBA) was released, and I feel like it's been a long enough time now that we can start to make serious critiques on the balance of the game, especially in a competitive setting. I'm not going to be talking especially about any particular "level" of competitive play, and though I did finally get to Grandmaster rank at the beginning of Season 3 I think the points I'll be making below are more or less universally applicable.

Quite frankly I feel that the game is a mess in terms of balance. In every other way it's extremely well polished (which is very much Blizzard's style); and that alone counts for a lot. After all, we couldn't really be talking about gameplay balance if there were bigger issues like chronic lagging, poor optimisation, or ugly/messy visuals (though the particle count can get distractingly high on occasion- but let's leave that for another post).

But in terms of pure balance the game is rather stale. I actually stopped playing competitive about 2 months ago and haven't looked back. I'm going to discuss the issues as I see them in no particular order below, and elucidate why I think they're problematic as well as what I think could be done to ameliorate them. Of course, with anything like this there's a fair amount of subjectivity, but I hope I'll at least make a cogent enough point to start some discussions if nothing more. So... Let's begin!

The Issues 

The Usable Hero Pool Is Woefully Small 

Currently Overwatch has 23 heroes. Now, it would be extraordinary if every single hero had equal playtime and usefulness; but ultimately in an ideal world each iteration on the gameplay should aim to get us closer to that ideal. In other words, perfection is impossible but getting a little better every time is not.

Season 1 certainly had some issues (first there was the Widow meta, then Pharmercy, and of course the awful 5xTracer+Lucio KOTH lineup). But I feel like the overall variety between those bits was much greater. Season 2 gave us the "Beyblade"; a meta characterised by overuse of an unbalanced support ult combined with a powerful attack ult. Season 3 has started with the "Triple Tank" meta, now evolving further in to tedium with the "Quad Tank"- sometimes seasoned with a little Soldier:76.

The problem with this progression is that each meta has become more bland and "gamified" than the one before it. The first balacing mistakes in Season 1 were characterised by damage values being too high or heals being too strong or abilities just needing a buff or nerf. There were some hugely broken balance errors but they could almost all be summed up by "people were better with this character than we anticipated" or perhaps "we made this character a bit too strong". Fast-forward to Season 3's "Quad Tank" and it's nothing to do with individual character tweaks. Instead the tank meta has exposed a fundamental flaw in the underlying design of an entire class of hero.

Let's look at the current hero pool and their viability in competitive play. A player by the name of "CaptainPlanet" has been compiling a "meta report" based on the usage of various heroes in PC tournaments since near Overwatch's release. Here's the latest graph detailing the overall usage of each hero from the most recent professional play (credit overbuff.com):


Something that strikes me is the huge imbalance here. Yes I know getting a perfectly even spread is impossible, but surely there's room for improvement here. In a game where every team must pick six different characters, only six of the twenty-three options are being picked more than 25% of the time. Or, to put it another way, this means most games are the same six heroes on each side fighting each other. That is not a healthy state for the game to be in, especially considering the whole selling point of a hero-based FPS is the draw of being able to make intelligent hero choices to outplay your enemy. That's completely gone out of the window! You could cull the bottom 17 heroes and the competitive scene wouldn't notice much.

But it gets worse...

The Most Viable Heroes are also the Blandest or Easiest to Use 

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but it seems that the more interesting and higher skill-ceiling heroes are tending towards the lower-end of the 'viability graph'; whereas the more generic or 'boring' characters see more frequent usage. It's not a perfect correlation- after all, Ana is a great character to play and sees practically mandatory use. But she's more the exception than the rule.

As an example, take the attack class heroes:


So why is the lowest-skill-ceiling, least interesting attack hero also the one with the highest average usage rate? That is a fundamental failure in making exciting gameplay. Even worse, the two other 'S-tier' mandatory picks for competitive play at the moment (other than Ana) are Reinhardt and Lucio: Both arguably the least interesting character to play in their class. It's a basic rule of competitive game design that the heroes with the highest skill ceiling should generally be the ones that you want people to gravitate to- because those are the heroes that are the most challenging and therefore most rewarding to play.

If Overwatch wants to make itself stand out from the generic AAA shooter crowd it needs to start getting its more esoteric, unique, and interesting characters (from a gameplay sense) some airtime! Season 3 started with the "Triple Tank" meta and things have only got worse as we move to "Quad Tank".

Quad Tank... 

Image credit Laeski
The tank class is presumably meant to serve the purpose of being on the front-line, soaking up damage, and creating a distraction to allow the attack or defence heroes to cause havok; as well as protecting weaker "healer"/support classes. They do serve this role, but they also have way, way too much offensive capability. Why take Reaper when you can instead pick Roadhog, who has over double the health and whose weapon deals more damage per shot- as well as having the ability to pull enemies out of formation instead of requiring you to flank them? Or, why take McCree when you can take D.Va who has more health and more mobility and a better ult and the ability to absorb enemy damage/ults? The only thing Tanks tend to lack in Overwatch at the moment is long-range damage. But that's not really a problem because firstly not all maps provide room for keeping distance, secondly all but two tanks have some way of dealing with long-range threats, and thirdly no one's playing long-range damage characters anyway right now.

What's worse is the problem compounds itself. Because tanks have so much health, ordinary attack characters (except soldier) can't deal enough damage to 'soak through' the healing. This wouldn't be a problem if those tanks had reduced offensive capability and/or mobility: Fights would be long and drawn out but ultimately the mobility of attack classes would come out on top. But that isn't the case, so instead the only counter to 3 or 4 tanks is... 3 or 4 tanks.

The problem in my opinion is that Blizzard (and many others) seem to think that "Tank" is synonymous with just "lots of survivability/HP and a big hitbox". But a big hitbox is nowhere near enough of a negative to the positive of otherwise greatly increased survivability. It wouldn't be an issue but when the tanks can do most of the damage-dealing as well, you end up with triple/quad tank metas. Ask any non-tank main whether they'd trade doubling their favourite character's hitbox in size for at least doubling the health and I expect most would answer "wow, yes please!". I know I would.

So then, what's the fix for all this?

The Fixes (Potentially) 

Work Out What Each Role is Meant to do, and Design for that 

This problem manifests on the 'class' lines (e.g. attack/defence/tank/support) and between heroes within those classes. Let's start with the classes:

The 'Classes' are Meaningless 

So far for example I didn't even speak about the dismal state of the 'Defence' class usage, but it's clear that no one's interested in those heroes on the comp scene. The problem there is that a lot of the defence classes don't actually do anything particularly 'defensive' except having less mobility (which obviously on its own is hardly a benefit). The few defensive abilities that the classes actually do possess, such as Junkrat's trap, are usually easily circumvented and are not worth the tradeoff of otherwise reduced mobilitiy and burst damage potential.

In the current state of things, this is how the classes feel:


Now I'm not the one who designed Overwatch so I can't really say "that's clearly wrong", but here's what I believe a much healthier design would look like. I split the defence class in to two subsets, because I feel that there genuinely is two different types of defending:


With those roles I honestly believe we'd see at the very least an instant dumping of the quad-tank meta; and hopefully even see a much more consistent spread across class types, opening the game back up again to interesting strategies and counterplays. With those class archetypes in mind, we can move on to thinking about the heroes that comprise them:

The Individual Heroes' Kits are not Designed with a Consistent and Unique Use Case 

Image credit Kotaku
A lot, but not all, of the heroes have a very strange mix of abilities that people are certainly used to but when looked at under the microscrope have very little self-consistency or clear driving gameplay design. Others have clear use-cases but are completely overshadowed by other characters with identical ones who do the job better.

Take for example McCree... He has a mid-to-long-range primary fire mode with a secondary mode that is all but useless and a short-range flashbang, topped off with a combat roll for some reason. What exactly is his purpose? One could argue that he's literally just meant to fill the "all-rounder" role but then Soldier does that a lot, lot better. The flashbang would suggest anti-flanker, but then the rest of his kit has nothing to do with that purpose and a single-shot hitscan weapon is probably the worst weapon for taking down a Genji bouncing around all over the place in proximity (unless you're an insanely good shot). It's either inconsistent or redundant, and neither is good design.

If you're particularly cynical you could say that Blizzard designed each character to design to a specific demographic first, and then tried to work out what exactly their kit was about as an after-thought. Whatever you believe, here's a rundown of the problems I see with some of the characters in the game at the moment:


Of course all of the changes above are just ideas, and very subjective, but I hope that I'm demonstrating my point with them: The current kits for a lot of characters are very scattered and with a little creativity and thought could be much more self-consistent. The benefit of this would be each character having a very specific use case: This makes them all more likely to be picked (as none does any job better than the other) and makes them easier to balance, because each character would exist in more of a vaccuum relative to the others.

Make the Most Interesting Heroes the Most Useful 

Image credit Backwallpapers
The final thing that I'd want to see before I'd ever go back to competitive play would be making the 'fun' characters the ones I can play without being shouted at by five team-mates before the game's even begun. Of the seven 'viable' picks (Soldier, Rein, Lucio, Zarya, Roadhog, Dva, Ana) I only really have any interest in playing two of them (Zarya and Ana): Four of the other five are very basic in FPS/shooter/strategy terms.

Soldier is obviously a generic "AAA CoD-style shooter", Reinhardt's shield is his most interesting feature and even that isn't as original as you might think, Lucio is literally playable braindead (yes I know people like DSPStanky put a lot of effort in being a great Lucio, but it's not required), and Roadhog is just point-and-click. D.Va I don't play often enough to give a qualified opinion.

Decent game design dictates that the characters with the blandest kits should be slightly underpowered to offset the fact that they're easier to play. Because heroes with higher-skill-ceilings demand more perfection, the rewards for playing them should be higher. But unfortunately the attack character with the best consistent DPS at the moment is also the blandest one.

It's not hard to make this mistake, after all: Of course Soldier will be the best DPS character if you buff him too far because he's also the easiest to play. There's a fundamental failure to understand somehow that 'generalist' characters need to be slightly underwhelming otherwise they're the only ones who will be picked. People will argue that you can technically get higher DPS out of McCree and it might be true, but it requires too much perfection- even the pros can't do it and that's why Soldier is the default pick.

I was playing some Pharah on quick play the other night and something occured to me after fighting a Soldier at medium range and losing. Although I fired two and hit two direct rockets he ended up killing me because he was stood in his own biotic field, and his assault rifle still deals 20 damage per bullet at that range. That means in the time that one of my rockets had travelled a fair distance (and I'd led his movement and hit him square in the face), he'd equalled my damage by hitting me with only 6 bullets from an automatic weapon. There's something wrong here: Hitting direct rockets is a universally harder skill than hitting someone with automatic weapon fire. You could argue that maybe someone with very good aim should be comparable here but only needing to land six bullets to stay EVEN in damage with a PERFECT Pharah player is frankly ridiculous: Why would you ever pick Pharah, or any other character that requires more skill?

Look at some of the characters with <= 10% usage rate in competitive at the moment: Hanzo, Reaper, McCree, Mei, Pharah, Genji. All much more interesting to play than Soldier, yet almost completely untenable from a competitive point of view. We can make the same case for the supports: Would you rather play one of Zenyatta, Mercy, or Symmetra instead of Lucio? I know I would.

The same discrepancy of input to output that we see with Soldier can be applied to Lucio: Lucio is just too invaluable for the amount of effort he requires. He's just too good at healing everyone without even trying. Personally I'd either keep the automatic line-of-sight heal but let it only heal one person at a time (prioritzing the weakest) or keep it as AoE but drastically reduce the range.

Until I'm not forced to try and quickly pick Ana or Zarya in competitive in order to have fun, I'm going to stick to quick play where it doesn't matter if I play a character that I know is not the optimal choice. Some may say that that's what quickplay is for but I disagree: I like competitive gaming, but I don't want to make a laborious 'job' out of it- the term, after all, is competitive gaming. :)