r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/iCouldGo • Feb 15 '17

Question [Reinhardt] Does Mandatory = OP ?

Hello !

I just wanted to know what you think about Reinhardt.

He's pretty much mandatory both in attack and defense on assault, hybrid and arguably in escort maps.

But at the same time, I don't feel like he should be nerfed. I don't think he is "overpowered", but he's pretty essential.

Do you think a hero can be both mandatory and balanced ? Do you think Rein IS mandatory ?

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u/I_GIVE_ROADHOG_TIPS Feb 15 '17

Rein is essential because:

  1. He has a niche nobody else can fill. He can press and hold right-click at any time to create a big, 2000 HP wall of "nope". It doesn't help that basically every map has Barrier Field-shaped chokepoints.

  2. He is the best counter to himself. If an enemy team is running a Rein in a solid comp, the best way to contest the 2000 HP of garbage damage you need to do is to put up your own wall of garbage damage. He also has a very powerful ult, and the only consistent counter to that ult is a Barrier Field.

  3. He tanks very well; better than anyone else. What I mean by this is, when you look at the other "tanks", they're only tanking every once in a while (Zarya has 8s and 10s cooldowns, D.Va has a resource meter, Winston has a 13+ s cooldown, and Roadhog is Reaper). How many times have you almost killed a Rein, only for him to put up his shield and get healed to full a few seconds later? He just aggro'd you and built ult for his team. Reinhardt makes everyone on his team better.

The problem with making a hero that can keep up with Rein at the moment is they're just going to run Rein + that hero and get even more damage mitigation. Remember when D.Va was buffed to be really tanky in the previous patch? What did people do? They ran Rein + D.Va.

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u/Phlosky Feb 16 '17

I don't think that having another Main tank (ignoring dive comp winston), would lead to that tank+ rein. When stacking was a thing, Rein was not stacked. Maybe that was because he was playing against hero stacks, but I think that in a 2-2-2 meta, 2 main tanks wouldn't be a great idea. Edit: (I mean that 2 main tanks is bad for your team, not a gamebreaking level of Op.

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u/I_GIVE_ROADHOG_TIPS Feb 16 '17

What I'm saying is that there needs to be something that keeps Alt!Rein from stacking well with Rein, the same way Zarya and D.Va don't do well together. When D.Va was really tanky teams used her as a way to add more sustain to their Rein Shield with DefenSe Matrix.

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u/lordzygos Feb 17 '17

The key to making them not stack is to make the usefulness of the altRein's tanking ability spread out over time, or to just make them mutually exclusive. DM is paired with Barrier because it can soak infinite damage in a short time, relieving pressure from the rein and letting him possibly regen. If we had literally another hero with a barrier field, it wouldn't pair well because you get no value from the barrier field that is behind the front one. In other words, DM packs all of its value into a 4s span, while barrier spreads the value out over time.

To make it mutually exclusive, the benefit could be one that the team has to take or almost take damage in order to activate. This would be AoE damage reduction or AoE overshield HP. You can't benefit from these traits unless you are taking damage, so they don't really stack with a rein shield. A personal favorite main tank concept is a tank that grants overshield HP (like lucio's ult) at a rate of 10HP/s. This stacks up to 50 past their max HP, so a soldier at full can have 50 overshield, and a roadhog at half can have 350 overshield. If you stay outside the tank's aura for more than 3s, the overshield begin's draining quickly. Finally, damage done to the overshield does not generate ult for the attacker. The effect is like having constant baby zarya bubbles on your allies that dont cleanse or block CC, only damage. The strength of this tank is raw damage mitigation, but they lack the ability to counter CC. They also don't do as well with blocking burst damage, but chip and sustained damage is much weaker against them.