My main problem with Roadie is that his core design is not a solo tank. His job is to walk around and pick off squishies while being difficult to kill, and now with only 1 tank, if he goes and does that, the team is left alone without their massive bulletsponge spacemaker.
@@Rocketwestrock double shield existed because Orisa had a shield similar to Sigma's (deployable at distance, durable and large enough to take a lot of space from enemies) AND the main issue was the protect the Bastion game because he had unlimited turret form, if you return 6v6 now a double shield meta just won't work as good as it did before. Saw a video somewhere about testing 6v6 in Custom games to see if its viable and as I remember, Ramattra isn't good for double shield because of his shield uptime
@@Rocketwestrockif only they didn’t release massively overkitted tanks and then released 2 absolutely broken supports. But no the issue was definitely 6v6
Hog’s playing style is completely different from junker queen’s. Hog flank and get picks, while queen brawl in the front line to trade resource and cd’s. Junker queen simply doesnt have the dmg and tool to make flank meaningful. If anything, junker queen’s playing style is much closer to orisa/sigma than hog’s.
@@yunli8281hog flanks? Sure that might work occasionally, but if they don’t hear your fat ass first, your team is dead before you even kill one person. If anything hog is a “shoot and break barrier or bait defensive cooldown to hook” on the front line. His trap also supports this. It makes a loud noise when you place it, so flanking is honestly not that consistently viable against people in a decent rank.
Hold down the hook to swing it around and increase its range, release to throw it. The swinging hook would be a warning that its about to go off, needing to wind it up would also mean roadhogs need to preempt it. The warning of the hook also lets you generate space with the threat of doing something imminently. At least for lower ranks. And, the general lower power of the hook now lets you make it more consistent, and opens up more design space for roadhog changes
But if you compromise his lethality, people just won't play him again, and the change would be reverted again. There may be no winning here if his primary players are pub-stompers.
@@fightingleaf You need to give him design space and fantasy outside of the lethality Stuff like, having the hook throw people behind the roadhog, or windups. RN, hes defined by the hook, which is fine, its a cool fantasy, but there needs to be more there to draw people in who dont just wanna pubstomp.
@@ijones36 I think this idea is genius to charge the hook for range, what if it was slowed down a bit and you could swing it midflight to potentially get around the edge of cover?
i never knew how much i'd want to have overwatch gameplay at really cinematic angles of things just happening naturally in a teamfight in the background, this was such an awesome touch and people should invest in this style of video......
@@realth8572 i would honestly pay to have hours of overwatch gameplay at cool angles while im studying or working, having something like that in the background is just so mesmerizing and cool!
@@realth8572 you should upload hours of content like the background of this video, i would 100% have it in the background and glance at it while studying/working/doing menial tasks
But the problem is when you have 2 Roadhog-like Tanks in 2-2-2, then you can have both of that style of Tank on the same team and it'd be miserable. Like OW1 "Hog + Ball torture."
Hog just needs removing. Lame ass low skill hero. Tank is fun because you control where the fight happens and how it happens. It's the risk and reward / u get a dopamine hit from picking the right thing to do (at least in ow2). All Hog does is stand main demand suzu and ruin everyone else's time.
Crazy how his rework literally changed nothing about him as a tank, he's still just an 750 hp tank who is about one shotting squishy heroes. His pig pen exists just to add an extra step to his one shot. An actual rework would require them fundamentally changing what his hook does and allows him to do for a follow up. Until then he will only ever be oppressive or trash depending on the state of his one shot.
You mean his pigpen exist to remove the extra steps and skillceiling his oneshot combo initially had. Honestly now you only need to working thumbs and a pulls to perform it. His original oneshot tech gatekeeped noobs like me to oneshot anyone on hog due to how precise you had to be with your inputs when performing, now its not needed at all anymore. Just throw the pen, use hook, shoot, meele, thats it. I could train a monkey to do it.
@@LightingCatxD I don't want to sound elitist, but the only characters overwatch 1 hog had struggles consistently one shotting were mei and doom. Any other character it was so braindead and easy to one shot characters, it only required a bit more skill than Mcree flash+fan the hammer.
@@elnietodelmichoacano5153 Im talking about the fact that you had to be able to pull of the combo. Like old superjunp; You had to hook, press w at the right moment, use one of his shots (i always mix up primary and secondary 💀) use melee and dead. Also u got to hold your crosshair more between head and chest area cuz of hitboxes...so its not as easy as it is now. You could mess up by easily messing up the crosshair position, or the distance you got to close in in the small little timewindow. This required some kind of skill to pull off even if it wasn't as hard as some other techs, it still gatekeeped certain noobs like me. Now u genuinely only have to perform the hook, the shot (also keep in mind the shot got simplified so you would be able to hit the oneshot but still shoot long range) pigpen (for extra damage) and melee. No special timing or tech of hitbox manipulation or anything, no it even makes it easier for you to correct your mistake if you somehow whiffed it thanks to pigpen, which gives you overtimedamage while triggered and slows u down. In ow1 if you whiffed it your victim would be able to escape you with like 1 hp. Had thos closedeath encounters a couple of times because, like mercy superjump its not hard in theory to perform but tricky to execute it perfectly consistently just by whiffing the distance or the crosshair position. The same happened with superjump, not a hard thing to learn back in the day but tricky to execute it consistently. There was some skill required to make it work, now it's a simple feature and ability. The skillceiling between a good and bad mercy got completely blurred by it.
@@LightingCatxD you very clearly don't play alot of hog, hog one shot was SIGNIFICANTLY easier in ow1, it was litterally just hook shoot mellee and it was almost 100% an Insta kill, it still is mostly the same thing now you just need to make sure they hit the pig pen when they get hooked otherwise they won't die, alot of the squishy heroes have more health now so half the time that doesn't even work unless they've been damaged previously
@@calus_bath_water absolute dont agree because i can one shot people now when I used to struggle to perform the ow1 tech. Its about the tech itself u have to pull which was again not easier when u keep in mind you had to time everything which you don't have to do after rework. Saying it was easier back then sounds like you don't play hog atm at all? All you basically do is throw pen down, wait for extra damage, hook shoot meele dead. The fact that I once stomped a comp lobby by running hog (only had 12 mins on him in comp in ow2 atleast) when he was meta just to proof my point that you need no skill to play the new hog is still nuts to me. I hit oneshots I was never ever able to pulloff. The fact that even the devs in their blog stated that thes attempted on making his oneshot more condensed and easier for newcomers to perform just proves my point again xd
i feel like hook would feel a lot better to fight if it had a short wind up animation before it came out(like two twirls around the wrist, how you usualy throw roped weapons) cuz then theres a window to shut it down if you pay attention
Never liked hog for his carry potential. I liked his hero design more than anything, his kit was just kinda an added bonus. Always thought hog was easily fixable by just making him play around the team more. Like I know the devs refuse to give him AOE healing but what about and AOE buff like Ana’s healing amp? Hogs skill has been absolutely abolished because of 5v5 and I don’t even enjoy playing him. He just sits around and heals through all damage with no risk to himself who also has high burst damage but anti nade and Mauga just makes him not exist. Hog should be a glass cannon tank but should also be a recourse tank like Zarya and Dva.
I like hog more in 5v5. He has to hook more and find better value in his hooks. Which means the hook goes on cooldown more and I forget which pro player said but a quote that always stuck with me was "you can tell how good a hog is when he doesn't have hook". And the higher you go, the more important hook techs and matchup knowledge become, otherwise you simply aren't getting certain 1 shots. So Ive always enjoyed hog because he was a unique no-shield tank but at the same time. His skill ceiling has always been verrry strange and I kinda enjoy that. But if they do change him, They definitely can keep "dps tank hog". Lower his damage so he needs to use pig pen for the 1 shot, keep the hook techs so the really good hogs can still destroy people with solid technique, good aim, and good cover usage. Put a deflect or a parry on hook. So that the hog has to decide whether or not he's gonna actually hook someone or parry a nade, sleep, or spear. This way he can only 1 shot you if he gets a clean hook. A full combo, and you get 0 healing. But going for this isnt necessary for him to win fights and it might even be a little sub-optimal for him to do.
@@ducasse8473 He's worse in 5v5. He cant be punished. He can heal and hook while ulting. You can't interrupt his ult. You can't interrupt his breather. His hook cooldown is at six seconds. His TTK is higher. The increase in health pools was meant to get rid of the one shot concept yet they gave him an ability to confirm his one shot combo.
@@ducasse8473 Added with Kiriko, the fat fuck runs around. You can't interrupt anything he does. You could when his breather was on a cooldown. His hook was at 8 seconds. You could interrupt his ult with a stun and stop it.
@@Vastspartan I know all of the information I'm about to give you just because I actually play roadhog. but I decided to humor you and check his winrate and pick rate stats just now just to be sure. Across all ranks this past season he has a below 46% winrate. And typically he has a pick rate at around 1%, with his highest pick rate and winrate being 45% winrate at a 2.10% pick rate in diamond. So knowone picks him at all ranks and the people that do are typically not doing too great on him. For obvious reasons. Meanwhile dva has an above 50% winrate and above 2% pickrate right now at all ranks above gold. So even people who aren't normally playing dva. Pick dva and win.
My fix? Make hook chargeable. If you just press the hook button, it behaves like it does now, but the range is half or less of what it currently is. This means hook can still be used in a pinch for when an enemy has dived Hog and isn't respecting his space so he can deny their escape. If you hold the hook button, Hog begins swinging the hook around in a very visible fashion. After a second or two of charging, the charge maxes out and the hook is thrown, now to the full distance we currently see in game. This gives the incredibly strong displacement tool (and likely imminent kill combo) an appropriate telegraph, which is a big one. Probably also reduce his walk speed while charging to prevent him chasing people down with it.
@@lukeaustin4465 yeah, but that's the point, hook needs to have better counter play than just wait for it to be on cooldown when it's so lethal. We need to see that roadhog is about to to use his hook right now. It's the same reason why the characters shout loudly when they use Ults, it's to let the enemy team know that they're using an extremely lethal ability right now.
I view hog’s design as blizzard’s answer to the dilemma of tank design in a fps game. The majority of player base (not only dps players, but fps players in general) will never be interested in playing characters with low kill potential; but on the other hand, overwatch need tank to feel like overwatch, and tank normally dont have high lethality due to high hp. Personally I consider hog to be a very successful design, at least from a perspective of attracting more players try tank role and balance role distribution. Without hog, 2-2-2 wouldnt last 3 years, queue time would probably kill ow1 a lot sooner. He is the only tank whose playing style is close to more traditional fps experience, and offer one of the most satisfying gameloop among all heroes, you immediately feels your impact when you get a pick with hook combo.
I think roadhog had the opposite effect on role distribution than you say. My next video will be on priority pass and the effect of forcing dps players into the tank role. From every available metric, the priority pass and therefore the incentive for players to lock hog temporarily to gain the passes, failed entirely on producing long term change to the queue distribution numbers. You can cite the extra players in the role because roadhog exists, but that has to be balanced against the people leaving the role due to the inconsistency provided by hog being in their lobbies as a tank partner. The short term effect was a slight uptick, the long term total effect was a massive downward trend, which can only be attributed to the tank experience.
@@realth8572 Really looking forward to your opinion and analysis on priority pass. There has been discussion through out the years regards of hog’s effect on tank player base(bring more dps player and flex players, some main tank players not happy playing with hog, etc), but unfortunately blizzard haven’t shown any data that supports or disapprove those arguments.
totally disagree, nothing killed the tank experience more in OW1 than your other tank insta locking hog. You had 2 options, either play sigma and get every CD in the game thrown at you or play ball and play a 1 v 11 deathmatch. Really disincentivised playing any main tank/off tank.
@@realth8572looking forward to your video on the priority pass as well, realistically we would had not needed that system if they simply updated the game, i.e. new heroes, maps, balance updates as often as ow2 and maybe not abandoning the game to design the PvE that we didn’t get..
Mauga isn't super poorly designed, he's just not balanced enough yet. Roadhog is just a fundamentally bad creation and they can do very little to ever fix him without making him completely terrible
@@Mrs.Magix58 his design is literally hold both buttons at the enemy tank, ensuring that they have the least amount of fun possible. How is that not poor design?
@@shard3606 He didn't mean Mauga didn't have any part of his overall design poorly made but Roadhogs design has always been highly problamatic. Back in the foreign trenches of overwatch 1 in 2016 I saw first hand how pretty fucked roadhog was, he could tear apart squishies and drag them through map geometry and absorb damage like an all you can eat buffet and anytime he was really good the whole game stopped around him. When Mauga's overly good he's incredibly annoying that's no lie but when Roadhog is good you can barely fight back
I mean they also made a video about mauga. At least with mauga though hes at least kind of predictable in his absurd stupidity. He doesnt force you out of position and cant literally one shot you like he's some sort of weird jank sniper with 700 health. Mauga's issues are at least are more "grounded" in the kind of pressures and such other tanks have where as roadhog is fundimentally a bad idea. Other similar characters to mauga in other games like Raum, heavy, or heavy arms from gunevo are much less unhealthy for their respective games. mauga's fundimental design could be fixed with how he distributes health, burning people, what his overdrive and damage do, and such and such. Roadhog really cant be healthy unless you fundimentally change him to the extent queen sorta does. Even characters similar to roadhog like Makoa from paladins on some level still have some of his core problematic issues even when they're like half winston half roadhog and characters like marasai from gun evo are just as awful to fight due to his similaries too.
Overwatch 1 Tanks were never really meant to be "Tanks", the devs and players just got so lost in the word "Tank" that they forgot what they had made and played.
it isn't dead but it definitely isn't growing. it's just stagnant with older players being replaced by new players who haven't experienced the good ole team 4 treatment yet.
@@eagerinspiritIt's practically a revolving door of players. If they keep this up, that player base will go from stagnant and start to shrink as more people become aware of team 4 shenanigans.
@@absolute-xero7502I hope so, its crazy how many old players went from loving this game so much to the point of playing it for ages without updates to wishing the game would die.
I was mostly with you until you started ranting about arbitrary definitions of fair and unfair, without really thinking about why changes were made. Instead apparently being able to count to 2 and basic team coordination and communication are tasks too tall for the Overwatch playerbase, and then you try to shift blame towards people playing an FPS wanting to kill things on all roles. I have to applaud you for slowly introducing concepts in great detail that didn't add much to the whole discussion about Roadhog only so you could later shift it towards other tanks once you successfully planted the seed on the viewers head that said thing was bad. Of course, the claim doesn't hold much water under scrutiny, but for an essay pushing a point like this it was rather well done.
It's not that it's hard to count bubbles when zarya is afk or you personally burn through 2 of them. It's the factor that she can use one, tank some damage, use 2nd one and you won't be exactly sure when will the 3rd come out. This is disregarding the fact the she could have only 1 bubble but you can't tell because the bubble was either broken or given out of your LoS. Realth is right on all of these points. Unfortunately this is how OW2 plays. If she couldn't give herself\teammate 2 bubble, or rein could cancel his charge, or orisa being better poke than half of poke dpses they would just not work. This is what switching to a format that the game wasn't initially designed for does to the game. ESPECIALLY after the game was in 6v6 for this long
I really enjoyed this video and there's a lot of great analysis of tank design but as a person who played Roadhog a lot until a couple seasons into Overwatch 2, you completely lost me at the point where you stated that the reason people enjoy Roadhog is because they like ruining peoples' games... like that's some kind of objective fact? Just kinda jarring on a video that's been pretty factual at that point to then curveball with a really stinging assumption. Yikes. I think there's a difference between people who play Roadhog as a competitive standpoint and a necessity to gain SR/rank ups, and people who enjoy Roadhog. People who fall onto Roadhog because he's easy and makes it so you don't have to bother with learning the game and tank design... yeah I hate those players too. I personally think that the issue with Roadhog is that his character design is TOO good. As in, from and art perspective (not game design). Roadhog IS a fat bastard. He IS a bully, the one-man-apocalypse, and everything from his visuals, his voice acting heck even the way he walks and breathes completely sells that this guy is a menace. When I first played Overwatch I played Zenyatta and Roadhog before In knew anything about the game because they were freaking cool, and people stick with their mains because of how cool they are, just like Genji players who stick by him through thick and thin because they liked that Dragons cinematic. Blizzard effectively wrote themselves into a corner with Roadhog, because he's fundamentally impossible to rework without absolutely scrapping him and rebuilding him (or having a weight loss arc where he becomes a shredded DPS). You even said it yourself. Blizzard didn't really know what they're doing with tanks. So how did anyone else when they picked up Roadhog for the first time and loved him, unbeknownst of how problematic he'd be? We're seeing a similar thing play out in modern OW with Mauga, where Blizzard has absolutely nailed an AMAZING character design, but have totally written themselves into a corner. Who is Mauga without his twin miniguns? Who is Roadhog when he's not the one-man-apocalypse? I don't have the magic cure for tank design either, and sorry that this comment is a nothing-burger, but I just wanted to make it crystal clear that the stereotype of people who play 'x problematic character' aren't sweats who want to abuse broken mechanics for easy wins. I, and most the people I know who like extremely terrible or unhealthy characters like Roadhog is because they just like the funny pig.
It's honestly kind of sad as a hog lover because I felt one of the unique points of prework roadhog was that he was the only tank that had an interesting range game against other tanks. 90% of the time as a tank you either want to be at max effective damage (without falloff) but as the hog you had to choose between fighting in a slight falloff range or challenging him in his deadzone between right where M1 was less useful and M2 isn't bursting yet. It also gave roadhog a unique position of choosing when to switch when hard countered opposed being completely forced off. Now he's just in a state where his only true job is to 1 shot and I guess mass trap for ult charge? At the end of the day I'm not even sure adding a windup animation like some are saying would help that much because OW isn't a soulslike or a 1v1 fighter, there's a lot of chaos in the game and even a strategy as simple as jumping and doing the hook mid jump would completely nullify it. Equally if it were some sort of root in place to do cast it out, there's no point in playing him unless it practically guarantees a kill. Personally i felt the 1 shot was a little less valuable in 1 given there was an extra body but at the end of the day in OW2 even a single pick can make the enemy lose a team fight. Obviously being 1 shot doesn't feel good so a solution was needed then too but it's really difficult with him being the way he is fundamentally to change him.
I liked the video. Biggest falsehood that stood out was the claim hole hog is a guaranteed tank kill. With the recent damage nerf and the armor change, hole hog feels suboptimal against tanks with armor. Small amounts of healing can counter it unless you are point blank, and even then, you have to worry about getting annihilated with focus fire. It is only good if you can get enemies alone in a room with no help.
12:14 so does that mean I'm right about the fact Roadhog should be having a wind up animation before throwing the hook, actually spinning the hook before having it be thrown?
"Yeah we know everybody wants to have fun but a few one-tricks will freak out if their hero doesn't get to ruin the fun, sorry we hope you will all understand." - Overwatch Balance Team
Besides the hook being buggy and janky in the beginning, I never found the hook to be unfair. I have always found it weird that his hook-one-shot combo was so complained about, because I don't see it. (again, besides the early jank and bugs). And I am someone who hate one-shot and knockback mechanics in all games, yet I never really felt that with the hook (besides the yada yada I already said twice before).
I find it unfair because (with the exception of a few counters) hog is so disproportionately unpunished compared to other tanks. It’s not that a character has a one shot, it’s that it’s the character that can scoff at most incoming damage in a way most other heroes don’t have the luxury. Just my personal opinion based on the heroes I play
I don't remember if it was patched, I haven't played past the early days, but my problem with the hook was that it clipped through walls and cover. That was where I thought it was unfair
I loved the analysis of the design of Roadhog contrasting with how the tanks in Overwatch were supposed to fundamentally work, but the whole “Roadhog mains are selfish pubstompers” part of the video felt more vitriolic then informative.
Quite an interesting take that eventually just transitioned straight into a tank rant. There have been quite a few characters that have run amok in Overwatch during its 8 year lifespan. Been a tank player since day 1 of the OW1 beta and I have certainly felt at times Roadhog has been oppressive in his own a niche way. Sometimes stemming from the bugs around his hook. Other times being shutdown on a flanker character diving their backline. 1000's of hours later I can't say I feel like he is that dominating of a character, but in OW2 it is for sure harder to avoid being hooked in 5v5 format and the way maps are designed now. Fun fact, OW1 Roadhog's right-click instakilling dps (Tracer) was a bug that did end up getting patched out. Something about the goofy shrapnel ball at max range before it spread out doing more damage than intended. One character I feel like has always been more of a problem since his inception in OW1 was Doomfist. To start with, his punch instakill hitbox was capable of killing you through map geometry like cars/trees/etc as it was literally larger than Reinhardt. He saw use in pro play as a pseudo-tank since he had high base hp, generated shields for himself, was super mobile, and could use his ultimate as a get out of jail free card all while still doing massive damage. At certain points there have been many other characters that have disrupted the game for better or for worse.
I wonder if hog hook would feel better to play against if it only slightly moved the victim (like lucio boop or venture boop type distance at most), and instead did damage as hog pulls it back and scrapes it on the character. Something closer to an odd firestrike. Or maybe the hook chains it to the victim, and hog begins to crank the hook back, slowing both players and starting a tug of war. This puts the hog in a more vulnerable place to be punished as well as giving a window to save the hooked player. I dunno, just spitballing
Another idea, hog has to begin spinning the hook around to charge up the throw distance. Theres this animation of him swinging the hook in a circle, maybe he starts laughing or saying 'cmere!' And maybe it even slows him. I dunno. I feel like theres ways to fix this that just take a little extra work for blizzard which doesnt just entail shifting numbers
I hate Roadhog because his entire character is the hook, one of the most iconic abilities in mobas, but he's not actually based on the hook. There's no theme, no gravitas, he just has a hook because mobas have hook characters. Its just there.
@@skeletor4436 The issue is lack of themeing around the hook. Outside of using it how notable is the hook in everything else? He has more attention towards his healing, something not thought about at all as much.
I don't think most people play Hog because they want to ruin the game for everyone else or stomp every lobby. I think most people play Hog because they like hook as an ability (although his carry potential does play a factor). Also, Hog is terrible without the hook combo and great with it. I think that his playrates around his balancing reflect that. Personally, Hog is my favorite character to play because hook is the most satisfying ability to land out of anything else the game has to offer, and I think Hog's design as a character truly fits what his play style is. However, he clearly is fundamentally broken as a design and needs a PROPER rework and I don't think the one we got is the one we need. As long as hook remains and he's not complete and utter garbage, Hog players (including me) will probably play him.
The issue is that you can’t rework already beloved heroes. Hog has shown to be able to exist where he’s off meta (like scatter arrow Hanzo). That obviously can’t happen in 5v5 but you get what I mean.
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738 Yes, you definitely can. Sombra is already a clear example where she's significantly different from her previous design and is healthier as a character compared to her old kit while still keeping the same general hero fantasy. Same thing with now Tank Doom. There's no reason to believe that isn't possible.
@@eagerinspirit “beloved”. Sombras for the longest time have barely had a stable identity because of how tactical the hero is. You can’t compare characters like Hanzo and Roadhog (simple but hard to master characters) to a complex character like Sombra. I’d say she kept the same identity for the most part. It’s not like she has a one shot or specific part of her kit that makes her ENTIRE kit. Does that make sense?
Something I thought of, is change the hook completely. Im thinking instead of throwing it forward he just spins it around him and the more you spam the hook button the more he spins. I don't know im not an expert.
Junker Queen and Rien Also I would like to say this, there is a bug in overwatch that cancels out audio of abilities that you can't hear it at all, even if you are near them within 1 feet. I had died to that a lot of times before seeing it. Last night a Soldier visor came up and it wasn't yelled unless I looked into the direction of the soldier and only then did I find out it was behind me as the audio came from the opposite direction of the soldier. The Junk tire came out from behind and above me, only to find out that it was from around the corner when I nearby. I know it isn't just myself, I have seen my teammates do the same and look for the ult when they came online or even players when they got hit. This even happened a bit on PC. This bug also allows me to get away with a lot of bs kills that shouldn't be the case. It's been there since the launch of Overwatch 2.
just make it so you can cancel his breather again and he's fixed. lots of characters need changes like this however. sustain abilities shouldn't be "press button, obtain value" buttons
Rein being able to cancel charge is possibly one of the best changes ever made to a hero in this game. You not liking that change makes this video 50% less credible.
@@waltercunningham494 I can’t devote more time in this video to explain my stance. Especially because the stance is explained for 30 mins laboriously so as to not be misunderstood. Pin cancel has a completely chilling effect on all interesting positioning in the game. I know you think it’s fun, we all think it makes Reinhardt more fun. It does make Reinhardt more fun. But it’s bad for the game.
@@realth8572 "Charge cancel is objectively bad for the game" is just not a correct take. your opinion can be that you don't like it. That's fine. Not everyone has to like it. Charge is just so much more interesting now. And it has so much counterplay, that I don't see how anyone could ever complain about it being broken. Rein has to sacrifice so much just to use charge. His position, his health, his teammates LOS. All just to get closer to people to do damage and make them move. If you think it's broken, just sit on high ground.
In ow1 most of the time he was almost a glass cannon off tank (and ult charge sponge) depending on the patch but in 5v5 he's just ungodly strong which is unfortunate. I love his hook, it is so much fun to use, but I almost feel dirty for playing him in a 5v5 environment cuz like EVERY OTHER OFF TANK (such as zarya mentioned in this video) he feels so awful to fight. Hopefully the 6v6 patch in like 6-8 months reverts the 5v5-related stupid changes they made (especially pigpen and zar bubbles, or at least removes the slowing effect from it) because of the format and the game can go back to being unbalanced stupid fun like it used to be.
I’d argue that mobas had a decent idea of how to make a good pvp tank. After all hog seems to take inspiration from Dota’s pudge who is one of the most popular characters in his game. Edit: I don’t quite understand your conception of mobas as a genre. The objective points in a moba, whether that be towers, high ground, the jungle, etc are literally all about space control. Having bad positioning is a death sentence just like it is in overwatch. Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding your point but I don’t get where you’re coming from.
to me, the biggest blasphemy is that i can not 1 shot a tracer with mei's right click, or 1 shot an ulting reaper with hanzo or any other character now
Not really. Sombra is in the same category as phara. A cheese character that if you make the required adjustments, becomes a throw pick. Sombra also takes understanding of the game to get an assassination, because of how much heal and mitigation there is in the game. Hog just walks up to your team, hooks someone and vapes when you shoot him. Arguably much less ability to counterplay.
Definitely not. Sombra can be annoying, but she's in no way harmful to the game. In her current implementation it is dead easy to counter her and she usually doesn't cause many problems, besides being really good at taking advantage of differences in skill. I'd argue either kiri or bap are significantly worse for the game, and I'd genuinely be okay if they were removed tomorrow.
I like your analysis Realth, but they are unique ideas. What experiences have you this insight? Game design, game theory, working in pvp games previously? It would be interesting not just to see your resume, but where your ideas spawned from.
Blitz is balanced around not being able to oneshot you himself outside of some edge cases and ap blitz, that either oneshots you, or dies tryiong, and totally useless outside of his oneshot combo. Hog just oneshots by himself. And also he is tanky af at the same time.
I continue to be amazed by your videos. So many little fundamentals woven together into a coherent topic with interesting direction, I don't know how to explain it better. Your videos just seem "full" and are a joy to watch. I feel like I become an Overwatch expert by the time I'm done with the video.
Thank you, this one took a month of on off rewrites and edits to the script to get the flow working properly, talking about overwatch is a bit of a balancing act and I’m glad the end product is worth the work for you
I’ve been watching a few of your videos and notice how you focus a lot on “healthy” and “balance” more than fun. You talk about hero balance and design the same way a health nut talks about Quinoa and Kale. While I know you might be correct, you fail to take into consideration that sometimes people want a fuckin Big Mac. Sometimes I wanna play Big Health McOneShot
Really good video. Good script, good cuts, good background. Good talking. You deserve more views. Subscribed and hope a big youtuber reacts to you to boost your viewers that you deserve. Very well done
i think one of the fundamentals of tanks is that they are the thing you play around. they dont kill yuo because they thenmselfe made a good play but by forcing you into making a bad play. if a tank can kill you by simply"doing the right thing" they aren a tank, theyy are a dps or bruiser or whatever.
Rein's pin being cancelable is by no means unfair, the only time you can actually do what you've just described 37:38 without taking on massive risk is when a significant proportion of the enemy's team is already dead, and even then so many heroes can just leave via movement or even punish you by themselves ( ana). I would go as to say pinning to get close to someone is only effective as a way to clean up the enemy team after winning in a team fight and otherwise wastes a large ammount of health and or resources.
What pin cancelling allows is for him to relatively easily throw out pin without as much risk because you can stop it if you miss, someone gets out of the way early on, or the game state suddently changes. Older pin sort of forced you to think more about where you'd be going by the end and in turn rewarded better positional understanding and in turn was much more of a risk reward because you could not stop yourself from blatently telegraphing that you were going into a bad spot. Pin also is a pretty high spike in posible lethality vs what rein otherwise has. It makes him much harder to call out for using it while still keeping the same level of lethality its had because he can just decided to stop the one shot and pull out or can more accurately get onto someone when it took a lot more skill to aim charge in a way that let you get directly ontop of someone. It feels great to use, but it makes him far harder to judge because now he has any number of places he can go after a quick wind up. Its far easier to position with vs these very telegraphed and deliberate forms of movement it used to have. it also lets him make far more positional adjustments to his movement that he didnt have before since he can just move it where ever as opposed to having to aim it somewhere close to slam into something. Its a much stronger pealing tool as a result too. It also lets you decide to shield when ever you want too, if something like a bastion suddenly goes danger mode soon after or some other sudden spike of danger happens. You can just stop charging, back up, and go back to the cover you were at instead of going half way into the enemy backline because there isnt a good wall to run into otherwise. Charge honestly isnt much of a risk to use anymore other than just the fact you wont have it for a little while. Its lost most of its risk because what made it a risk was how telegraphed it was and commital it was.
@@isaacargesmith8217charge is definitely still a high risk high reward move, the cancelling is just a quick rebalance for a game where rein is the only tank in his team. you still lose good position, team LOS and shield for the possibility of one shotting a squishy (or if luck blesses you throwing off the map the enemy tank, and also maybe surviving yourself) cancelling is not immediate so if you misjudge your situation you will still get punished, and being the only tank, you're 9 times out of 10 getting focused hard enough to have to retreat. cancelling even adds a different decision to the move, how much do you want to commit? i cant tell you how many times it happens that you pin, see the move barely hit anything, only for the enemy to still get pinned just before you cancel the move because i thought it was too risky to keep going.
After more thought I think it should be cancelable but there should be a delay before you can move or swing so that it can't as easily be used just to close distance but is still cancelable given the original charge was a risk
To be honest, I've played maybe... five whole games of Overwatch? So I have no idea what's going on in the specifics, but that idea you brought up about lethality and doing big damage is something that is all too applicable to a game I have played entirely too much of: League of Legends. There's such a stark mismatch between watching pro play and being in a low Silver match because everyone on your team just wants to be the hero and carry the game, so almost no one brings any cc or picks a hero that might actually work for the team comp. Very frustrating, so I totally get where this video is coming from. Great presentation, too.
I am actually astounded that in 8 years, with all the headaches and balance troubles it's caused, nobody ever thought "hmm, maybe the hook ISNT a good ability to have in the game"
I loved roadhog, I thought he was fun. However, I never played him for the one shot, I played him for the self-reliance. I played him after the season 2 nerfs. I played him when he was the worst character in the game in ow1. I just loved how cool the hook felt. But his rework killed him for me. Everything is so slow and clunky without his right-click. His breather feels unpunishable and also useless at the exact same time. I hate playing him in 5v5 and wish they would just revert the rework and give him something else than pig pen (which is awful).
I love roadhog, his character design is absolute peak and i quite enjoy his gameplay, but granted im just a filthy casual who enjoys turning my brain off and just hook and shoot in quckplay
The current state of tanks feels like every tank is broken due to the devs wanting there to be only one tank which leads to buff after buff for each tank.
33:24 Cool, thanks for generalizing all hog players into, "we just want to curb stomp a lobby" I'm sure hog mains wont just completely throw away every point you've made in this video. I used to be a hog main until queen came out. And i genuinely only played the character for the hook. Max range hooking some and swinging your mouse around like a rabid dog is the only thing i cared about. Not survivability, not because its easy or whatever else. I understand your point you are trying to make. The character by design and especially with blizzards actions compounding that type of player. But you're shooting yourself in the foot for that type of mindset. If you want actual constructive change and awareness on a fundamental issues with a character, maybe don't alienate the ones that are most likely to listen to you. And i get that this is a game. But maybe just dont do that in general? It makes you a shit stain of a person irl, why does a game make it okay? You might as well be just as toxic as the players you're thinking about when you wrote that.
The problem with Roadhog is that he fundamentally borrows from MOBA design with characters like Pudge (DOTA 2) and Blitzcrank (League of Legends.) Pudge is balanced because he needs a lot of resources to be strong, but in a first-person shooter like Overwatch there's no killing minions for gold so you can't lock power level behind power spikes. And Blitzcrank... well there's a reason he's a support, and a reason why he becomes toxic whenever he's able to be played in a damage role.
Blitzcrank's design is quite old and it shows, despite having extensively played these characters before uninstalling the game, I believe Pyke is the worst hook champion design by a mile but it's immediately followed by Blitzcrank. Thresh on the other hand, is one of the strongest hero designs LoL came up with so far, the only smear I can possibly point out is that sometimes Riot craps out of the bowl and gives him unreasonable damage on Q and E's auto.
Well Pudge also doesn't instantly kill you and his slow which is one way to lock you down also damages him and everyone can hear when Dismember is being used.
I cannot get over all the little guys in the attic, absolutely brilliant edit Roadhog was a big part of why I quit OW however many years ago, I'm glad to see I wasn't just a scrub after all
Huh, the point you make about tank design in pvp failing is interesting. In almost every game to date with a tank class, people infamously do not want to play it. They simply do not care, they would do anything apart from actually tanking. I cant you how often it is and fun for people to build damage on tanks in mobas and such. Smite being an example of a MOBA where building damage on tanks isnt just fine, it works out sometimes. They typically having high base damage and low scaling so their damage exists around procing item effects and such. Many of my friends just do not care to play tank, they would rather play anything else. This has caused me to be the permanent tank player in my friend group. But another thing, I think you are slightly off about pve games. People are still not as open to playing tank, again they want to do damage. Everyone likes to kill stuff. Tanks, from simply existing as a concept, do not appeal to people. MMOs do it a little better, historically have always had kill pressure in video games. In fact, a pure tank is actually fairly rare in games as a whole. Even in something as simple as a turn based RPG, giga tanky enemies are usually still a threat but in other ways. But they always have kill potential. Personally, this just tells me that people in general just do not like tanking. You can give them kill pressure, you can make them revolve around simply tanking, mitigating, and disruption. But no matter what you do, tanks are unappealing to many gamers and nothing rn will change that.
I think that tanks in PvP games do have one large reference point before Overwatch, MOBAs. There tanks are fully fleshed out characters who have synergistic kits that give them plenty of agency, both in team fights and 1v1s.
as a MT player I kinda hate that pin can be canceled. I miss pinning after someone who missed, but now they just stop and start swinging. although I love the techs you can do with pin cancel.
overwatch is just two teams sitting in a choke point sending different colored orbs at each other until someone kills the other team with one button press
and then you have people like me who don't give a shit about ranked, and like roadhog because he's a fat biker with a shotgun and a sweet hook. I don't care about roles, I don't care about ranking, or even winning the game I just wanna have fun.
they need to increase hook cd for several seconds or make hog more vulnerable when he hooks or make the animation longer and maybe try playing around hooks projectile speed
I guess this video explains why Roadhog is my "Turn My Brain Off" character, because I play like a DPS with a bigass health pool. I should say that I cannot stand the DPS role, and almost all my time is on tank, but Roadhog is first in my playtime followed closely by Winston. I think when Heavy from TF2 is considered the quintessential tank, I realize that Heavy is the ONLY class in Tf2 without major burst damage. (And medic) That design philosophy makes Heavy boring, but he becomes consistent in a game where the telegraphing of dying instantly comes from men screaming "Screaming Eagle!" and the sound of 3 rockets. You're 1000% correct when saying that Roadhog is the reason tanks are becoming the way they are, Overwatch has gone from taking examples from other games to taking examples from itself. What an incredible video about a character I unfortunately like. (Also I DO care about him being fat, I find it really hot)
Maybe if you had to wind it up like a lasso or something before throwing, being able to hold it reved like a heavy minigun, to make it more of a commitment. I think that's a way better solution than what Paladins did which is to just make the cooldown massive
True, makoa is way harder to play compared to hog. With koa you have to aim your aim crosshair a little to the right of an enemy for it to land. I don't know if that was an intentional design choice that the devs over in paladins made though.
Your analysis is well informed and always a pleasure to listen to, but as a DPS main I completely disagree with the idea that 5v5 positioning is more restrictive than 6v6. Yes, there are times in OW2 where it feels like tanks squash you just because you or your supports were a picosecond late to react, but having an extra enemy roaming the map always felt way more threatening and limiting to me. I find I can take aggressive angles more confidently now because it's far easier to intuit 5 enemy positions and exploit the cracks between them. In 5v5 there's also a proportionally larger opportunity cost when a tank steers their attention and resources to confirming kills on DPS, giving the rest of the team a chance to press an advantage elsewhere in the fight. Honestly, rope-a-doping tanks who think they have a free pick is a ton of fun and one of my favorite ways to express movement/cover usage skills. And even with increased lethality, it's not like the non-Roadhog tanks kill you instantaneously, so there's always room for counterplay. I do think we can agree on one thing, though... JQ is awesome.
Good vid, i don't really agree on the point of zarya bubbles (as a zarya main) I was beyond happy when in ow2 beta i got to use both bubbles on either myself or my team. It gave me a lot more options to stragetize, to quickly absorb charge in the first part and then protect my teammates when they ult with both bubbles. It is somewhat balanced by having a little cooldown on using the bubble on the same teammate, i wonder if implementing something of a 1 sec cooldown to zarya herself would do a fairer job in balancing her
I have a lot of experience in both league of legends and overwatch, and while there were times hook characters were broken in league, it was never to the same ability as roadhog. Blitzcrank is a character in league known for one thing. Hooks. If he hooks you, you will likely die. But HE HIMSELF does not do the damage. He has further CC (knock up, and a silence) to keep you there. But he has no inate tankiness, he does not do THAT much damage, he is there to pull, and that is it. It makes picking him a gamble, because you are giving up either hard engage/tons of healing or peeling/ or alot of damage. All for the CHANCE to pull people. And people do take that risk, but it does not always pay off. Roadhog on the other hand. He does too much. He can tank, does alot of damage, and can hook on a LOW cool down. But because of role lock, you cannot nerf one of these aspects, because if you do, the threat of a hook is not enough compared to an actual character. So he is in an awkward spot where he cannot be an effective solo tank as he does not do enough, so he has to one shot as that is all he brings. They need to rework him to have more CC. Add an ability. Knock up, grab maybe. Remove his heal and replace with another CC ability. Maybe a gut shove to get enemies off of him. Give him innate higher damage reduction than other characters. Than make him passively apply previous wounds with shots. Than NERF HIS DAMAGE HARD. He would be alot more supportive, being able to CC enemies, apply healing reduction, and just generally be a big beefy fighter. But he won't one shot, and he won't heal himself. So he has to play with the team, set up hooks and play with the healer.
I think Roadhog would do better to play against and still be fun if you give him his old scrap gun spread back along with the alternate fire, on top of changing his trap into something more active like an electric net maybe (basically the trap but you huck it at enemy gamers) or give him something with that big olé gun on his back. That way he can still murder people but it's not just hook and shoot. Also had the idea that Hog could choose to crush his healing canister in his hand to create something like soldiers heal that heals up to like 300hp spread amongst your team. He needs more things to do that get value other than "hehe I hook enemy team and go bang" before removing that will feel "good"
League has a decent few of these characters, who's kit is way too imbalanced to be in the game at a normal power level. What they have done is pretty much give up on them and keep them at a low power level, until they can do a massive rework for them, that fundamentally shifts the fantasy or just forget them forever. Shaco has been bad for almost a decade at this point, but he still has a dedicated player base, who are willing to work through the strangeness of his kit and get the necessary outplays to make him decent. I know OW can't do this as well, cause they have much fewer characters, but I think at this point sacrificing Roadhog might be the correct choice. Just let him be the fun hook character, that if you're really good at can compete, but otherwise is lacking the punch to be a consistently good pick.
Feel like his ult should be the hook and he should acquire scrap from kills to gradually upgrade scrapgun into something that does momentary whole hog bursts and his health chug should only be usable on point / payload. Having his gun's lethality slowly go up while he's doing damage and taking up space and his ult being the thing that deletes one person makes him seem ominous and dangerous. Restricting his chug makes him way more lethal around the objective.
Can someone explain to me how I’m supposed to beat him as a tank? He simply hooks me into his team and kills me? I can’t push through open space without getting 1 shotted.
Play on corners where you can bait hook out or it breaks on the wall. Then you have several seconds to reposition or attack in the open. To be honest though it’s not an easy ability to hit on people moving erratically whilst the whole enemy team is shooting him. Lot of the time unless it’s a flank, Hog loses 300 HP when he stuns himself to hook.
You can block it... Sig shield, Rein shield, Orisa gold. (but you gotta hold your cooldowns for that occasion which is stale-matey) You can evade it... JQ being small, Ram having a janky hitbox when crouch spamming (which is inconsistent) You can escape it... DVa boosters, Winton rocket jump, Doom cooldowns (but you gotta hold your cooldowns for that occasion which is stale-matey) You keep screaming at your supports to pick Ana and just remove him from the game (good luck on having anyone counter swap that doesn't feel the pain of tank)
what are you smoking man, the whole point of tanks in moba is taking space because if you go in at wrong time or overextend you blow up so the only way to be threatening is disrupt enemy correctly since you can't kill anyone alone usually, sure you can burst 50-70% enemy dps hero hp but that is your cap
It's interesting to note that much of Symmetra's problems are mirror images of much of what you talk about here (ironic that they were my two best characters.) With no movement abilities, slowly ramping damage and vulnerable turrets with limited viable positions, she was remarkably soft damage even if she did have the potential to sweep. Her ultimate was, and still is, about assisting her team. I think tahts why she was always in the support category. I think that's honestly what made her interesting, and the game having such unorthodox characters is what drew me to the experience. In my opnion, Symm 3.0 sacrifices a lot of that interesting potential, taking away those big rewards for covering your telegraphs and approaching situations in unexpected ways, without the help of any abilities. Instead, she's still soft, teleghraphed, and has a high skill barrier in the way of being any real threat. Perhaps that's a fundamental flaw in Overwatch and maybe the genre as a whole. All these different gameplay styles clashing and creating unsolvable probelms.
They should make the hook reel in the target at a slow/slower pace, so its more of a control ability not an instakill, because you can't really balance around an instakill like that. and give him a 1second shield upon using heal so he has a counter play against ana nade. that should put him in a healthy place and do the numbers balancing after. obviously now, that his heal is resource based, it wouldn't make sense to deploy the shield every time he heals, might be a bit overpowered, but im sure that this would overall improve hog so that he is actually balancable
I think that part of the reason why all the other tanks have become roadhog is because with only 1 tank, you fundamentally don't have another tank there to cover your weaknesses. Solo tanks either have to be giant nigh unkillable raid bosses that make the game unfun for everyone with less than 300hp or they have to be boring walls that don't do anything except soak up damage until they inevitably explode. Either the solo tank is so lethal that you cannot chose to ignore them, or the best choice is to completely ignore the tank and kill the squishies.
As a person from WoW. RoadHog is an amalgamation of a deathnight and paladin. And I totally believe that is where his base design came from. Especially the hook part. Blizzard likes stealing from their games. And there is alot of other heroes take inspirations from their other games. Lifeweaver pull = priest leap of faith Zarya bubble = paladin bubble Mercy MassRez/Rez = priest mass rez/rez Junker queen shout/bleed = warrior last stand shout/bleed Zen Tranquillity = preist dome of light Hanzo scatter arrow/storm arrow = hunter scatter shot/rapid fire Rienhardt Shatter = warrior Shockwave And the wonderfull thing about hook unlike deathknight Death grip, is its very easy to counter if you are looking for it. As person who plays hog I have recently became real good at countering hook with Sigmas shield/zarya bubble because it became very easy to predict due to you having the same mind set as a hog. Hook is only deadly when you are not paying attention. I personally think hog felt great at the beginning of his rework. Because it became a mini game of wit and paying attention with the trap as a hog player. Couldnt kill a full health hero with hook trap shoot combo. But at half health you could. And if you did hook a full health target you ping in hopes for you dps to follow up on the hook. As for his hook only pulling his victim 4 meters instead of 3 meters, lessened his one shot combo but created an incentive for more terrain based kills. Roadhog has been the red headed step child of overwatch and only recently and thankfully mauga has become the new red headed step child. I forgot where I was going with all of this.
Roadhog actually used to be fun to play and skillful to play against, you used to be able to stun him out of his heal, you used to be able to hit skillful rightclicks. Now Hog is just a boring annoying unkillable oneshot bot with a new stupid trap that deletes any tank with his ult
The problem is like many OW hero's he's a feast or famine type of hero. He's either OP or useless with little between. His basic kit is that he is a slow big target. The only semi threat he poses is his one shot, when ever they remove that fact he's useless. When he has the one shot pull combo he's insanely hard to play against and generally unfun to deal with. Something with 600+ hp, several means of staying alive with short CD and can kill you instantly from about 20m away with the generous hit box of his hook is not great design. That he has to land that combo and kill you or he's pointless doesn't help either. It's honestly the same problem Doomfist had in OW1. He either killed people instantly with his punches or was Trash. It took a pretty hefty rework and the massive buffs of solo tanks in OW2 to give him a chance to shine without instant kill mechanics.
A thought I had as the vid was going along for an actual rework popped into my head. Remove Whole Hog as his Ultimate and then make the hook into it. He begins to spin his hook as a meter constantly decreases denoting the duration of the ability. He can then throw the hook with the same properties that it normally has, meaning it can't go through shields and stuff. If the hook connects with someone, he can then carry them around allowing the enemy to be shot at by his teammates but not himself. Roadhog would also have the option of throwing the hooked enemy while he is carrying them, dealing more damage to the thrown character and knocking up any other enemies hit. As for what to replace the hook ability with, probably just something like bringing back his old primary spreadshot with some extra bells and whistles. Like make it so that it would enhance Roadhog's next primary fire into being able to knock back any unshielded enemies it hits while dealing more damage to shields, still keeping somewhat of a tankbuster role in that regard, but also still allowing for displacement. Again, not fully thought out ideas, but still fun ideas nonetheless I think. Great video!
It is genuinely so bewildering to me that ever since overwatch 2, and the removal of the off-tank, roadhog suddenly gets viewed as broken even in OW1, which I guess is in part due to the majority of people just parroting what they hear someone else say, or just never having actually played overwatch 1, but like... Did everyone just forget that positioning was meant to be important? Roadhog's hook punished overextension. If you're dying to it, and it's not some coordinated focus fire like any other CC ability in the game, you're spacing wrong, and you need to stick with your tank. The main-tank pushes the line forward, the off-tank holds the line and prevents the enemy from pushing their line past yours. It's really easy when you think instead of raging out when you die lol
don't even play this game anymore but i can sympathize with the playerbase that wants early OW1 balance/dynamics back. also very based david wise enjoyer. looking forward to more
Watching through your telegraphing abilities and damage section, and realized that, yeah, it is weird roadhog could instakill you from such a wild range. I didn't realize how different an outcome that was compared to the other OG tanks where winning a duel just meant the opponents had to reposition. I wonder if adding a charge to his hook swing to increase the range would help at all. Also I kind of like don't care if the onboarding process for new players is hard lol. all games these days suck for the first 1000 hours its just a fact of life But to wrap up, your conclusion was solid. Roadhog is a character that is just who DPS players play when they have to play tank. maybe thats ok oh jesus you are so right. they turned every tank into hog. no tank ability is clearly is telegraphed anymore and they can survive through everything :( how naive I was going into this comment.... Started typing at 12 minutes and stopped typing at the end of the video. good stuff :)
My main problem with Roadie is that his core design is not a solo tank. His job is to walk around and pick off squishies while being difficult to kill, and now with only 1 tank, if he goes and does that, the team is left alone without their massive bulletsponge spacemaker.
Sure makes you wish for the days of double tank huh?
@@BlazenR3d Yeah, but double shield sucked.
@@Rocketwestrock double shield existed because Orisa had a shield similar to Sigma's (deployable at distance, durable and large enough to take a lot of space from enemies) AND the main issue was the protect the Bastion game because he had unlimited turret form, if you return 6v6 now a double shield meta just won't work as good as it did before.
Saw a video somewhere about testing 6v6 in Custom games to see if its viable and as I remember, Ramattra isn't good for double shield because of his shield uptime
@@Rocketwestrock tru
@@Rocketwestrockif only they didn’t release massively overkitted tanks and then released 2 absolutely broken supports. But no the issue was definitely 6v6
They can’t rework Roadhog into a well designed character because the well designed Roadhog is Junker Queen.
Fax my brother! Spit your shit indeed!
This is so damn true
Hog’s playing style is completely different from junker queen’s. Hog flank and get picks, while queen brawl in the front line to trade resource and cd’s. Junker queen simply doesnt have the dmg and tool to make flank meaningful. If anything, junker queen’s playing style is much closer to orisa/sigma than hog’s.
Cringe ass comment bro is tryna sound smart but is so wrong it's crazy
@@yunli8281hog flanks? Sure that might work occasionally, but if they don’t hear your fat ass first, your team is dead before you even kill one person. If anything hog is a “shoot and break barrier or bait defensive cooldown to hook” on the front line. His trap also supports this. It makes a loud noise when you place it, so flanking is honestly not that consistently viable against people in a decent rank.
You know what? Why didn’t they just keep the instakill and give the hook a windup animation?
I’m glad I’m not the only one thinking that a windup would help solve a lot of issues
Hold down the hook to swing it around and increase its range, release to throw it. The swinging hook would be a warning that its about to go off, needing to wind it up would also mean roadhogs need to preempt it.
The warning of the hook also lets you generate space with the threat of doing something imminently. At least for lower ranks.
And, the general lower power of the hook now lets you make it more consistent, and opens up more design space for roadhog changes
But if you compromise his lethality, people just won't play him again, and the change would be reverted again. There may be no winning here if his primary players are pub-stompers.
@@fightingleaf You need to give him design space and fantasy outside of the lethality
Stuff like, having the hook throw people behind the roadhog, or windups. RN, hes defined by the hook, which is fine, its a cool fantasy, but there needs to be more there to draw people in who dont just wanna pubstomp.
@@ijones36 I think this idea is genius to charge the hook for range, what if it was slowed down a bit and you could swing it midflight to potentially get around the edge of cover?
i never knew how much i'd want to have overwatch gameplay at really cinematic angles of things just happening naturally in a teamfight in the background, this was such an awesome touch and people should invest in this style of video......
@@AlexuTheOwl it’s a beautiful game, just needs the room to breathe
@@realth8572 i would honestly pay to have hours of overwatch gameplay at cool angles while im studying or working, having something like that in the background is just so mesmerizing and cool!
@@realth8572 you should upload hours of content like the background of this video, i would 100% have it in the background and glance at it while studying/working/doing menial tasks
Roadhog was meant to be the 2nd tank. The problem is that there is no 2nd tank anymore!
He was aids to play against in overwatch 1 too
But the problem is when you have 2 Roadhog-like Tanks in 2-2-2, then you can have both of that style of Tank on the same team and it'd be miserable. Like OW1 "Hog + Ball torture."
@@michaelc7418ball was always a main tank and hog an off tank? The ball would make space and the hog would off angle/flank
I disagree he lacked lots of synergy in 2 tank. Honestly It feels like he was intended to be a 3rd tank back when open queue was the norm.
Hog just needs removing. Lame ass low skill hero. Tank is fun because you control where the fight happens and how it happens. It's the risk and reward / u get a dopamine hit from picking the right thing to do (at least in ow2). All Hog does is stand main demand suzu and ruin everyone else's time.
At this point, Hog feels more like The Illios Well Hero
hm thought Lucio is Illios well hero.
@@Longder09 Not to the same extent in my experience.
so call free thinkers when next map is illios well
Cmon honey, you're getting your 180 degree pit hooks again
My tank friend only has hours on hog from Ilios Well and 10 Hooks 1 Hole
Crazy how his rework literally changed nothing about him as a tank, he's still just an 750 hp tank who is about one shotting squishy heroes. His pig pen exists just to add an extra step to his one shot.
An actual rework would require them fundamentally changing what his hook does and allows him to do for a follow up. Until then he will only ever be oppressive or trash depending on the state of his one shot.
You mean his pigpen exist to remove the extra steps and skillceiling his oneshot combo initially had.
Honestly now you only need to working thumbs and a pulls to perform it. His original oneshot tech gatekeeped noobs like me to oneshot anyone on hog due to how precise you had to be with your inputs when performing, now its not needed at all anymore.
Just throw the pen, use hook, shoot, meele, thats it.
I could train a monkey to do it.
@@LightingCatxD I don't want to sound elitist, but the only characters overwatch 1 hog had struggles consistently one shotting were mei and doom. Any other character it was so braindead and easy to one shot characters, it only required a bit more skill than Mcree flash+fan the hammer.
@@elnietodelmichoacano5153 Im talking about the fact that you had to be able to pull of the combo. Like old superjunp;
You had to hook, press w at the right moment, use one of his shots (i always mix up primary and secondary 💀) use melee and dead. Also u got to hold your crosshair more between head and chest area cuz of hitboxes...so its not as easy as it is now. You could mess up by easily messing up the crosshair position, or the distance you got to close in in the small little timewindow. This required some kind of skill to pull off even if it wasn't as hard as some other techs, it still gatekeeped certain noobs like me. Now u genuinely only have to perform the hook, the shot (also keep in mind the shot got simplified so you would be able to hit the oneshot but still shoot long range) pigpen (for extra damage) and melee.
No special timing or tech of hitbox manipulation or anything, no it even makes it easier for you to correct your mistake if you somehow whiffed it thanks to pigpen, which gives you overtimedamage while triggered and slows u down. In ow1 if you whiffed it your victim would be able to escape you with like 1 hp. Had thos closedeath encounters a couple of times because, like mercy superjump its not hard in theory to perform but tricky to execute it perfectly consistently just by whiffing the distance or the crosshair position.
The same happened with superjump, not a hard thing to learn back in the day but tricky to execute it consistently. There was some skill required to make it work, now it's a simple feature and ability. The skillceiling between a good and bad mercy got completely blurred by it.
@@LightingCatxD you very clearly don't play alot of hog, hog one shot was SIGNIFICANTLY easier in ow1, it was litterally just hook shoot mellee and it was almost 100% an Insta kill, it still is mostly the same thing now you just need to make sure they hit the pig pen when they get hooked otherwise they won't die, alot of the squishy heroes have more health now so half the time that doesn't even work unless they've been damaged previously
@@calus_bath_water absolute dont agree because i can one shot people now when I used to struggle to perform the ow1 tech.
Its about the tech itself u have to pull which was again not easier when u keep in mind you had to time everything which you don't have to do after rework.
Saying it was easier back then sounds like you don't play hog atm at all?
All you basically do is throw pen down, wait for extra damage, hook shoot meele dead.
The fact that I once stomped a comp lobby by running hog (only had 12 mins on him in comp in ow2 atleast) when he was meta just to proof my point that you need no skill to play the new hog is still nuts to me.
I hit oneshots I was never ever able to pulloff.
The fact that even the devs in their blog stated that thes attempted on making his oneshot more condensed and easier for newcomers to perform just proves my point again xd
Solution. Hog goes to the gym, get abs and lose weight so now he’s a dps in overwatch 3
Can’t wait for the PVE content
@@realth8572 can't wait for 4v4
Hell, they already turned a damage hero into a tank. Why not the other way around?
i feel like hook would feel a lot better to fight if it had a short wind up animation before it came out(like two twirls around the wrist, how you usualy throw roped weapons) cuz then theres a window to shut it down if you pay attention
I wish it was like that
Never liked hog for his carry potential. I liked his hero design more than anything, his kit was just kinda an added bonus. Always thought hog was easily fixable by just making him play around the team more. Like I know the devs refuse to give him AOE healing but what about and AOE buff like Ana’s healing amp? Hogs skill has been absolutely abolished because of 5v5 and I don’t even enjoy playing him. He just sits around and heals through all damage with no risk to himself who also has high burst damage but anti nade and Mauga just makes him not exist. Hog should be a glass cannon tank but should also be a recourse tank like Zarya and Dva.
I like hog more in 5v5. He has to hook more and find better value in his hooks. Which means the hook goes on cooldown more and I forget which pro player said but a quote that always stuck with me was "you can tell how good a hog is when he doesn't have hook". And the higher you go, the more important hook techs and matchup knowledge become, otherwise you simply aren't getting certain 1 shots. So Ive always enjoyed hog because he was a unique no-shield tank but at the same time. His skill ceiling has always been verrry strange and I kinda enjoy that.
But if they do change him, They definitely can keep "dps tank hog". Lower his damage so he needs to use pig pen for the 1 shot, keep the hook techs so the really good hogs can still destroy people with solid technique, good aim, and good cover usage. Put a deflect or a parry on hook. So that the hog has to decide whether or not he's gonna actually hook someone or parry a nade, sleep, or spear.
This way he can only 1 shot you if he gets a clean hook. A full combo, and you get 0 healing. But going for this isnt necessary for him to win fights and it might even be a little sub-optimal for him to do.
@@ducasse8473 He's worse in 5v5. He cant be punished. He can heal and hook while ulting. You can't interrupt his ult. You can't interrupt his breather. His hook cooldown is at six seconds. His TTK is higher. The increase in health pools was meant to get rid of the one shot concept yet they gave him an ability to confirm his one shot combo.
@@Vastspartan
"he can't be punished"
.................
I don't even know what to say.
@@ducasse8473 Added with Kiriko, the fat fuck runs around. You can't interrupt anything he does. You could when his breather was on a cooldown. His hook was at 8 seconds. You could interrupt his ult with a stun and stop it.
@@Vastspartan I know all of the information I'm about to give you just because I actually play roadhog. but I decided to humor you and check his winrate and pick rate stats just now just to be sure. Across all ranks this past season he has a below 46% winrate. And typically he has a pick rate at around 1%, with his highest pick rate and winrate being 45% winrate at a 2.10% pick rate in diamond. So knowone picks him at all ranks and the people that do are typically not doing too great on him. For obvious reasons.
Meanwhile dva has an above 50% winrate and above 2% pickrate right now at all ranks above gold. So even people who aren't normally playing dva. Pick dva and win.
My fix? Make hook chargeable.
If you just press the hook button, it behaves like it does now, but the range is half or less of what it currently is. This means hook can still be used in a pinch for when an enemy has dived Hog and isn't respecting his space so he can deny their escape.
If you hold the hook button, Hog begins swinging the hook around in a very visible fashion. After a second or two of charging, the charge maxes out and the hook is thrown, now to the full distance we currently see in game. This gives the incredibly strong displacement tool (and likely imminent kill combo) an appropriate telegraph, which is a big one. Probably also reduce his walk speed while charging to prevent him chasing people down with it.
I agree with the range change on hook but I don't agree with the wind up proposition. It just makes it too easy to juke.
@@lukeaustin4465 yeah, but that's the point, hook needs to have better counter play than just wait for it to be on cooldown when it's so lethal. We need to see that roadhog is about to to use his hook right now. It's the same reason why the characters shout loudly when they use Ults, it's to let the enemy team know that they're using an extremely lethal ability right now.
@damon2820 no one would play hog if his hook had a wind up animation. Just reduce the range and call it a day.
Im still waiting for then to release the other street hog characters so we can collect them all, namely hedgehog, ditchhog and of course stormdrainhog
I view hog’s design as blizzard’s answer to the dilemma of tank design in a fps game. The majority of player base (not only dps players, but fps players in general) will never be interested in playing characters with low kill potential; but on the other hand, overwatch need tank to feel like overwatch, and tank normally dont have high lethality due to high hp.
Personally I consider hog to be a very successful design, at least from a perspective of attracting more players try tank role and balance role distribution. Without hog, 2-2-2 wouldnt last 3 years, queue time would probably kill ow1 a lot sooner. He is the only tank whose playing style is close to more traditional fps experience, and offer one of the most satisfying gameloop among all heroes, you immediately feels your impact when you get a pick with hook combo.
I think roadhog had the opposite effect on role distribution than you say. My next video will be on priority pass and the effect of forcing dps players into the tank role. From every available metric, the priority pass and therefore the incentive for players to lock hog temporarily to gain the passes, failed entirely on producing long term change to the queue distribution numbers.
You can cite the extra players in the role because roadhog exists, but that has to be balanced against the people leaving the role due to the inconsistency provided by hog being in their lobbies as a tank partner.
The short term effect was a slight uptick, the long term total effect was a massive downward trend, which can only be attributed to the tank experience.
@@realth8572 Really looking forward to your opinion and analysis on priority pass. There has been discussion through out the years regards of hog’s effect on tank player base(bring more dps player and flex players, some main tank players not happy playing with hog, etc), but unfortunately blizzard haven’t shown any data that supports or disapprove those arguments.
@@yunli8281 true, we’re all at the end of the day hand waving at a black box and making implications off community sentiment
totally disagree, nothing killed the tank experience more in OW1 than your other tank insta locking hog. You had 2 options, either play sigma and get every CD in the game thrown at you or play ball and play a 1 v 11 deathmatch. Really disincentivised playing any main tank/off tank.
@@realth8572looking forward to your video on the priority pass as well, realistically we would had not needed that system if they simply updated the game, i.e. new heroes, maps, balance updates as often as ow2 and maybe not abandoning the game to design the PvE that we didn’t get..
Relf content? That's weird having 2 videos in a short period of time
A rare treat!
“Roadhog is the worst designed tank”. Someone hasn’t seen mauga…
Mauga isn't super poorly designed, he's just not balanced enough yet. Roadhog is just a fundamentally bad creation and they can do very little to ever fix him without making him completely terrible
@@Mrs.Magix58 his design is literally hold both buttons at the enemy tank, ensuring that they have the least amount of fun possible. How is that not poor design?
@@shard3606 He didn't mean Mauga didn't have any part of his overall design poorly made but Roadhogs design has always been highly problamatic. Back in the foreign trenches of overwatch 1 in 2016 I saw first hand how pretty fucked roadhog was, he could tear apart squishies and drag them through map geometry and absorb damage like an all you can eat buffet and anytime he was really good the whole game stopped around him. When Mauga's overly good he's incredibly annoying that's no lie but when Roadhog is good you can barely fight back
I mean they also made a video about mauga. At least with mauga though hes at least kind of predictable in his absurd stupidity. He doesnt force you out of position and cant literally one shot you like he's some sort of weird jank sniper with 700 health. Mauga's issues are at least are more "grounded" in the kind of pressures and such other tanks have where as roadhog is fundimentally a bad idea. Other similar characters to mauga in other games like Raum, heavy, or heavy arms from gunevo are much less unhealthy for their respective games. mauga's fundimental design could be fixed with how he distributes health, burning people, what his overdrive and damage do, and such and such. Roadhog really cant be healthy unless you fundimentally change him to the extent queen sorta does. Even characters similar to roadhog like Makoa from paladins on some level still have some of his core problematic issues even when they're like half winston half roadhog and characters like marasai from gun evo are just as awful to fight due to his similaries too.
@@shard3606So feeling like scorpion from mortal kombat isn't fun? Since when should the enemy team feelings matter when in a game lmao
Overwatch 1 Tanks were never really meant to be "Tanks", the devs and players just got so lost in the word "Tank" that they forgot what they had made and played.
Overwatch IS NOT DEAD.
But it's abundantly clear that the developers want it to be.
it isn't dead but it definitely isn't growing. it's just stagnant with older players being replaced by new players who haven't experienced the good ole team 4 treatment yet.
@@eagerinspiritIt's practically a revolving door of players. If they keep this up, that player base will go from stagnant and start to shrink as more people become aware of team 4 shenanigans.
@@absolute-xero7502I hope so, its crazy how many old players went from loving this game so much to the point of playing it for ages without updates to wishing the game would die.
It needs to financially implode for anything meaningful to happen
@@huyphan7825 It has to implode financially for anything to happen
I often disagree with “the most broken character ever” argument from overwatch players SMITE has had far worse characters than brig lmao
I was mostly with you until you started ranting about arbitrary definitions of fair and unfair, without really thinking about why changes were made. Instead apparently being able to count to 2 and basic team coordination and communication are tasks too tall for the Overwatch playerbase, and then you try to shift blame towards people playing an FPS wanting to kill things on all roles.
I have to applaud you for slowly introducing concepts in great detail that didn't add much to the whole discussion about Roadhog only so you could later shift it towards other tanks once you successfully planted the seed on the viewers head that said thing was bad. Of course, the claim doesn't hold much water under scrutiny, but for an essay pushing a point like this it was rather well done.
It's not that it's hard to count bubbles when zarya is afk or you personally burn through 2 of them. It's the factor that she can use one, tank some damage, use 2nd one and you won't be exactly sure when will the 3rd come out. This is disregarding the fact the she could have only 1 bubble but you can't tell because the bubble was either broken or given out of your LoS.
Realth is right on all of these points. Unfortunately this is how OW2 plays. If she couldn't give herself\teammate 2 bubble, or rein could cancel his charge, or orisa being better poke than half of poke dpses they would just not work. This is what switching to a format that the game wasn't initially designed for does to the game. ESPECIALLY after the game was in 6v6 for this long
I really enjoyed this video and there's a lot of great analysis of tank design but as a person who played Roadhog a lot until a couple seasons into Overwatch 2, you completely lost me at the point where you stated that the reason people enjoy Roadhog is because they like ruining peoples' games... like that's some kind of objective fact? Just kinda jarring on a video that's been pretty factual at that point to then curveball with a really stinging assumption. Yikes.
I think there's a difference between people who play Roadhog as a competitive standpoint and a necessity to gain SR/rank ups, and people who enjoy Roadhog. People who fall onto Roadhog because he's easy and makes it so you don't have to bother with learning the game and tank design... yeah I hate those players too. I personally think that the issue with Roadhog is that his character design is TOO good. As in, from and art perspective (not game design). Roadhog IS a fat bastard. He IS a bully, the one-man-apocalypse, and everything from his visuals, his voice acting heck even the way he walks and breathes completely sells that this guy is a menace. When I first played Overwatch I played Zenyatta and Roadhog before In knew anything about the game because they were freaking cool, and people stick with their mains because of how cool they are, just like Genji players who stick by him through thick and thin because they liked that Dragons cinematic. Blizzard effectively wrote themselves into a corner with Roadhog, because he's fundamentally impossible to rework without absolutely scrapping him and rebuilding him (or having a weight loss arc where he becomes a shredded DPS).
You even said it yourself. Blizzard didn't really know what they're doing with tanks. So how did anyone else when they picked up Roadhog for the first time and loved him, unbeknownst of how problematic he'd be?
We're seeing a similar thing play out in modern OW with Mauga, where Blizzard has absolutely nailed an AMAZING character design, but have totally written themselves into a corner. Who is Mauga without his twin miniguns? Who is Roadhog when he's not the one-man-apocalypse?
I don't have the magic cure for tank design either, and sorry that this comment is a nothing-burger, but I just wanted to make it crystal clear that the stereotype of people who play 'x problematic character' aren't sweats who want to abuse broken mechanics for easy wins. I, and most the people I know who like extremely terrible or unhealthy characters like Roadhog is because they just like the funny pig.
It's honestly kind of sad as a hog lover because I felt one of the unique points of prework roadhog was that he was the only tank that had an interesting range game against other tanks. 90% of the time as a tank you either want to be at max effective damage (without falloff) but as the hog you had to choose between fighting in a slight falloff range or challenging him in his deadzone between right where M1 was less useful and M2 isn't bursting yet. It also gave roadhog a unique position of choosing when to switch when hard countered opposed being completely forced off.
Now he's just in a state where his only true job is to 1 shot and I guess mass trap for ult charge? At the end of the day I'm not even sure adding a windup animation like some are saying would help that much because OW isn't a soulslike or a 1v1 fighter, there's a lot of chaos in the game and even a strategy as simple as jumping and doing the hook mid jump would completely nullify it. Equally if it were some sort of root in place to do cast it out, there's no point in playing him unless it practically guarantees a kill.
Personally i felt the 1 shot was a little less valuable in 1 given there was an extra body but at the end of the day in OW2 even a single pick can make the enemy lose a team fight. Obviously being 1 shot doesn't feel good so a solution was needed then too but it's really difficult with him being the way he is fundamentally to change him.
I liked the video. Biggest falsehood that stood out was the claim hole hog is a guaranteed tank kill. With the recent damage nerf and the armor change, hole hog feels suboptimal against tanks with armor. Small amounts of healing can counter it unless you are point blank, and even then, you have to worry about getting annihilated with focus fire. It is only good if you can get enemies alone in a room with no help.
12:14 so does that mean I'm right about the fact Roadhog should be having a wind up animation before throwing the hook, actually spinning the hook before having it be thrown?
That gives it a tell, but then it would need to be much less volatile, a.k.a. not a skill shot, a.k.a. never miss.
You can have both. Maybe you can wind up to charge, and then release on command
"Yeah we know everybody wants to have fun but a few one-tricks will freak out if their hero doesn't get to ruin the fun, sorry we hope you will all understand."
- Overwatch Balance Team
Besides the hook being buggy and janky in the beginning, I never found the hook to be unfair. I have always found it weird that his hook-one-shot combo was so complained about, because I don't see it. (again, besides the early jank and bugs). And I am someone who hate one-shot and knockback mechanics in all games, yet I never really felt that with the hook (besides the yada yada I already said twice before).
Yeah and as the hog it's fair as it stun locks you for max 3.4 seconds if not animaton bugs that stun you too.
I find it unfair because (with the exception of a few counters) hog is so disproportionately unpunished compared to other tanks. It’s not that a character has a one shot, it’s that it’s the character that can scoff at most incoming damage in a way most other heroes don’t have the luxury. Just my personal opinion based on the heroes I play
I don't remember if it was patched, I haven't played past the early days, but my problem with the hook was that it clipped through walls and cover. That was where I thought it was unfair
@@DragonologyStudent that was one of the first things they fixed with hook haven't been pulled through a wall in forever
I loved the analysis of the design of Roadhog contrasting with how the tanks in Overwatch were supposed to fundamentally work, but the whole “Roadhog mains are selfish pubstompers” part of the video felt more vitriolic then informative.
Quite an interesting take that eventually just transitioned straight into a tank rant. There have been quite a few characters that have run amok in Overwatch during its 8 year lifespan. Been a tank player since day 1 of the OW1 beta and I have certainly felt at times Roadhog has been oppressive in his own a niche way. Sometimes stemming from the bugs around his hook. Other times being shutdown on a flanker character diving their backline. 1000's of hours later I can't say I feel like he is that dominating of a character, but in OW2 it is for sure harder to avoid being hooked in 5v5 format and the way maps are designed now. Fun fact, OW1 Roadhog's right-click instakilling dps (Tracer) was a bug that did end up getting patched out. Something about the goofy shrapnel ball at max range before it spread out doing more damage than intended.
One character I feel like has always been more of a problem since his inception in OW1 was Doomfist. To start with, his punch instakill hitbox was capable of killing you through map geometry like cars/trees/etc as it was literally larger than Reinhardt. He saw use in pro play as a pseudo-tank since he had high base hp, generated shields for himself, was super mobile, and could use his ultimate as a get out of jail free card all while still doing massive damage. At certain points there have been many other characters that have disrupted the game for better or for worse.
I wonder if hog hook would feel better to play against if it only slightly moved the victim (like lucio boop or venture boop type distance at most), and instead did damage as hog pulls it back and scrapes it on the character. Something closer to an odd firestrike.
Or maybe the hook chains it to the victim, and hog begins to crank the hook back, slowing both players and starting a tug of war. This puts the hog in a more vulnerable place to be punished as well as giving a window to save the hooked player.
I dunno, just spitballing
Another idea, hog has to begin spinning the hook around to charge up the throw distance. Theres this animation of him swinging the hook in a circle, maybe he starts laughing or saying 'cmere!' And maybe it even slows him. I dunno. I feel like theres ways to fix this that just take a little extra work for blizzard which doesnt just entail shifting numbers
@@Tyler-nr6kl Y'know what's crazy? Me and my friends talked about similar ideas a year ago and even now I think they'd be good ones
I hate Roadhog because his entire character is the hook, one of the most iconic abilities in mobas, but he's not actually based on the hook. There's no theme, no gravitas, he just has a hook because mobas have hook characters. Its just there.
replace him w nautilus lol
@@elfpi55-bigB0O85 I mean Blitzcrank is the hook character in League. Nautilus is more about getting in there and fully locking that character down
He does have a theme though
@@skeletor4436 The issue is lack of themeing around the hook.
Outside of using it how notable is the hook in everything else?
He has more attention towards his healing, something not thought about at all as much.
I don't think most people play Hog because they want to ruin the game for everyone else or stomp every lobby. I think most people play Hog because they like hook as an ability (although his carry potential does play a factor). Also, Hog is terrible without the hook combo and great with it. I think that his playrates around his balancing reflect that. Personally, Hog is my favorite character to play because hook is the most satisfying ability to land out of anything else the game has to offer, and I think Hog's design as a character truly fits what his play style is. However, he clearly is fundamentally broken as a design and needs a PROPER rework and I don't think the one we got is the one we need. As long as hook remains and he's not complete and utter garbage, Hog players (including me) will probably play him.
I think low elo player should just get fucked and uninstall or learn the counter play to hog, reaper
100% agree he's hated for the wrong thing as many people bearly know struggle it has playing hog as a main too.
The issue is that you can’t rework already beloved heroes. Hog has shown to be able to exist where he’s off meta (like scatter arrow Hanzo).
That obviously can’t happen in 5v5 but you get what I mean.
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738 Yes, you definitely can. Sombra is already a clear example where she's significantly different from her previous design and is healthier as a character compared to her old kit while still keeping the same general hero fantasy. Same thing with now Tank Doom. There's no reason to believe that isn't possible.
@@eagerinspirit “beloved”. Sombras for the longest time have barely had a stable identity because of how tactical the hero is. You can’t compare characters like Hanzo and Roadhog (simple but hard to master characters) to a complex character like Sombra.
I’d say she kept the same identity for the most part. It’s not like she has a one shot or specific part of her kit that makes her ENTIRE kit. Does that make sense?
Something I thought of, is change the hook completely. Im thinking instead of throwing it forward he just spins it around him and the more you spam the hook button the more he spins. I don't know im not an expert.
Forgot how much I liked your style of editing. Very unique! :)
Junker Queen and Rien
Also I would like to say this, there is a bug in overwatch that cancels out audio of abilities that you can't hear it at all, even if you are near them within 1 feet. I had died to that a lot of times before seeing it.
Last night a Soldier visor came up and it wasn't yelled unless I looked into the direction of the soldier and only then did I find out it was behind me as the audio came from the opposite direction of the soldier. The Junk tire came out from behind and above me, only to find out that it was from around the corner when I nearby. I know it isn't just myself, I have seen my teammates do the same and look for the ult when they came online or even players when they got hit.
This even happened a bit on PC.
This bug also allows me to get away with a lot of bs kills that shouldn't be the case. It's been there since the launch of Overwatch 2.
Seems simple to me tbh, just don’t ever buff hog so he’s a good pick or ya know…. Playable
just make it so you can cancel his breather again and he's fixed. lots of characters need changes like this however. sustain abilities shouldn't be "press button, obtain value" buttons
Okay but give him oneshot back then if they do that and rework Suzu in kiris kit (for obvious reasons, don't want a hog meta again).
Rein being able to cancel charge is possibly one of the best changes ever made to a hero in this game. You not liking that change makes this video 50% less credible.
@@waltercunningham494 I can’t devote more time in this video to explain my stance. Especially because the stance is explained for 30 mins laboriously so as to not be misunderstood. Pin cancel has a completely chilling effect on all interesting positioning in the game. I know you think it’s fun, we all think it makes Reinhardt more fun. It does make Reinhardt more fun. But it’s bad for the game.
@@realth8572 "Charge cancel is objectively bad for the game" is just not a correct take. your opinion can be that you don't like it. That's fine. Not everyone has to like it.
Charge is just so much more interesting now. And it has so much counterplay, that I don't see how anyone could ever complain about it being broken. Rein has to sacrifice so much just to use charge. His position, his health, his teammates LOS. All just to get closer to people to do damage and make them move.
If you think it's broken, just sit on high ground.
@@waltercunningham494exactly you are correct
Yeah let's encourage boring positioning. Have you ever considered why players don't like king's row anymore?
@@Chorismos for starters because 6v6 is not in the game yet
In ow1 most of the time he was almost a glass cannon off tank (and ult charge sponge) depending on the patch but in 5v5 he's just ungodly strong which is unfortunate. I love his hook, it is so much fun to use, but I almost feel dirty for playing him in a 5v5 environment cuz like EVERY OTHER OFF TANK (such as zarya mentioned in this video) he feels so awful to fight. Hopefully the 6v6 patch in like 6-8 months reverts the 5v5-related stupid changes they made (especially pigpen and zar bubbles, or at least removes the slowing effect from it) because of the format and the game can go back to being unbalanced stupid fun like it used to be.
I’d argue that mobas had a decent idea of how to make a good pvp tank. After all hog seems to take inspiration from Dota’s pudge who is one of the most popular characters in his game.
Edit:
I don’t quite understand your conception of mobas as a genre. The objective points in a moba, whether that be towers, high ground, the jungle, etc are literally all about space control. Having bad positioning is a death sentence just like it is in overwatch. Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding your point but I don’t get where you’re coming from.
to me, the biggest blasphemy is that i can not 1 shot a tracer with mei's right click, or 1 shot an ulting reaper with hanzo or any other character now
0:06 That goes to sombra, hands down
Honestly, not really. Sombra is problematic, but not to this extent.
Not really. Sombra is in the same category as phara. A cheese character that if you make the required adjustments, becomes a throw pick. Sombra also takes understanding of the game to get an assassination, because of how much heal and mitigation there is in the game. Hog just walks up to your team, hooks someone and vapes when you shoot him. Arguably much less ability to counterplay.
@@nihili4196 nah
Definitely not. Sombra can be annoying, but she's in no way harmful to the game. In her current implementation it is dead easy to counter her and she usually doesn't cause many problems, besides being really good at taking advantage of differences in skill. I'd argue either kiri or bap are significantly worse for the game, and I'd genuinely be okay if they were removed tomorrow.
@@purple8515 You're 100% right. I always forget Hog is invisible with an escape...
I like your analysis Realth, but they are unique ideas. What experiences have you this insight? Game design, game theory, working in pvp games previously? It would be interesting not just to see your resume, but where your ideas spawned from.
Brig is so loud that her ult was the only slither of sound that came from the game
It's literally the same issue with Blitzcrank. Grabbing someone is pulling them to you is a very cheesy mechanic that has very little drawbacks.
Blitzcrank was never an issue on his own because his counterplay is very obvious and he relies on his team to follow up on the hook
Blitz is balanced around not being able to oneshot you himself outside of some edge cases and ap blitz, that either oneshots you, or dies tryiong, and totally useless outside of his oneshot combo. Hog just oneshots by himself. And also he is tanky af at the same time.
I continue to be amazed by your videos. So many little fundamentals woven together into a coherent topic with interesting direction, I don't know how to explain it better. Your videos just seem "full" and are a joy to watch. I feel like I become an Overwatch expert by the time I'm done with the video.
Thank you, this one took a month of on off rewrites and edits to the script to get the flow working properly, talking about overwatch is a bit of a balancing act and I’m glad the end product is worth the work for you
I’ve been watching a few of your videos and notice how you focus a lot on “healthy” and “balance” more than fun. You talk about hero balance and design the same way a health nut talks about Quinoa and Kale. While I know you might be correct, you fail to take into consideration that sometimes people want a fuckin Big Mac. Sometimes I wanna play Big Health McOneShot
Really good video. Good script, good cuts, good background. Good talking. You deserve more views. Subscribed and hope a big youtuber reacts to you to boost your viewers that you deserve. Very well done
Does no one remember that before ow2 got released they delibrately said that they aim to make tanks more like roadhog
@@halimalnami1560 They said they wanted Bruisers and Not Tanks moving to Overwatch 2.
@@Chorismos I remember them exactly saying they wanted to make the tanks bruisers similar to roadhog
i think one of the fundamentals of tanks is that they are the thing you play around. they dont kill yuo because they thenmselfe made a good play but by forcing you into making a bad play. if a tank can kill you by simply"doing the right thing" they aren a tank, theyy are a dps or bruiser or whatever.
Rein's pin being cancelable is by no means unfair, the only time you can actually do what you've just described 37:38 without taking on massive risk is when a significant proportion of the enemy's team is already dead, and even then so many heroes can just leave via movement or even punish you by themselves ( ana).
I would go as to say pinning to get close to someone is only effective as a way to clean up the enemy team after winning in a team fight and otherwise wastes a large ammount of health and or resources.
What pin cancelling allows is for him to relatively easily throw out pin without as much risk because you can stop it if you miss, someone gets out of the way early on, or the game state suddently changes. Older pin sort of forced you to think more about where you'd be going by the end and in turn rewarded better positional understanding and in turn was much more of a risk reward because you could not stop yourself from blatently telegraphing that you were going into a bad spot. Pin also is a pretty high spike in posible lethality vs what rein otherwise has. It makes him much harder to call out for using it while still keeping the same level of lethality its had because he can just decided to stop the one shot and pull out or can more accurately get onto someone when it took a lot more skill to aim charge in a way that let you get directly ontop of someone. It feels great to use, but it makes him far harder to judge because now he has any number of places he can go after a quick wind up. Its far easier to position with vs these very telegraphed and deliberate forms of movement it used to have. it also lets him make far more positional adjustments to his movement that he didnt have before since he can just move it where ever as opposed to having to aim it somewhere close to slam into something. Its a much stronger pealing tool as a result too. It also lets you decide to shield when ever you want too, if something like a bastion suddenly goes danger mode soon after or some other sudden spike of danger happens. You can just stop charging, back up, and go back to the cover you were at instead of going half way into the enemy backline because there isnt a good wall to run into otherwise.
Charge honestly isnt much of a risk to use anymore other than just the fact you wont have it for a little while. Its lost most of its risk because what made it a risk was how telegraphed it was and commital it was.
@@isaacargesmith8217charge is definitely still a high risk high reward move, the cancelling is just a quick rebalance for a game where rein is the only tank in his team.
you still lose good position, team LOS and shield for the possibility of one shotting a squishy (or if luck blesses you throwing off the map the enemy tank, and also maybe surviving yourself)
cancelling is not immediate so if you misjudge your situation you will still get punished, and being the only tank, you're 9 times out of 10 getting focused hard enough to have to retreat.
cancelling even adds a different decision to the move, how much do you want to commit?
i cant tell you how many times it happens that you pin, see the move barely hit anything, only for the enemy to still get pinned just before you cancel the move because i thought it was too risky to keep going.
After more thought I think it should be cancelable but there should be a delay before you can move or swing so that it can't as easily be used just to close distance but is still cancelable given the original charge was a risk
I locked in when I heard the Rain World music start playing.
So your telling me all of overwatch 2s problems come from DPS players...
To be honest, I've played maybe... five whole games of Overwatch? So I have no idea what's going on in the specifics, but that idea you brought up about lethality and doing big damage is something that is all too applicable to a game I have played entirely too much of: League of Legends. There's such a stark mismatch between watching pro play and being in a low Silver match because everyone on your team just wants to be the hero and carry the game, so almost no one brings any cc or picks a hero that might actually work for the team comp. Very frustrating, so I totally get where this video is coming from. Great presentation, too.
Woah you just jumped up like 3000 subscribers. Your videos are really good so far, keep up the great work! Cant wait to see what else you put out
I am actually astounded that in 8 years, with all the headaches and balance troubles it's caused, nobody ever thought "hmm, maybe the hook ISNT a good ability to have in the game"
I mainly Play paladins I wonder what you could take from makoa which is our tank with a hook.
I loved roadhog, I thought he was fun. However, I never played him for the one shot, I played him for the self-reliance. I played him after the season 2 nerfs. I played him when he was the worst character in the game in ow1. I just loved how cool the hook felt. But his rework killed him for me. Everything is so slow and clunky without his right-click. His breather feels unpunishable and also useless at the exact same time. I hate playing him in 5v5 and wish they would just revert the rework and give him something else than pig pen (which is awful).
Why did I misread Roadhog as Reloading?
I love roadhog, his character design is absolute peak and i quite enjoy his gameplay, but granted im just a filthy casual who enjoys turning my brain off and just hook and shoot in quckplay
The current state of tanks feels like every tank is broken due to the devs wanting there to be only one tank which leads to buff after buff for each tank.
Love the video! What’s the name of the background song during the “reveal”?
33:24
Cool, thanks for generalizing all hog players into, "we just want to curb stomp a lobby"
I'm sure hog mains wont just completely throw away every point you've made in this video.
I used to be a hog main until queen came out. And i genuinely only played the character for the hook. Max range hooking some and swinging your mouse around like a rabid dog is the only thing i cared about. Not survivability, not because its easy or whatever else. I understand your point you are trying to make. The character by design and especially with blizzards actions compounding that type of player. But you're shooting yourself in the foot for that type of mindset.
If you want actual constructive change and awareness on a fundamental issues with a character, maybe don't alienate the ones that are most likely to listen to you.
And i get that this is a game. But maybe just dont do that in general? It makes you a shit stain of a person irl, why does a game make it okay? You might as well be just as toxic as the players you're thinking about when you wrote that.
Rain world OST spotted, opinion instantly valid
The problem with Roadhog is that he fundamentally borrows from MOBA design with characters like Pudge (DOTA 2) and Blitzcrank (League of Legends.) Pudge is balanced because he needs a lot of resources to be strong, but in a first-person shooter like Overwatch there's no killing minions for gold so you can't lock power level behind power spikes. And Blitzcrank... well there's a reason he's a support, and a reason why he becomes toxic whenever he's able to be played in a damage role.
Blitzcrank's design is quite old and it shows, despite having extensively played these characters before uninstalling the game, I believe Pyke is the worst hook champion design by a mile but it's immediately followed by Blitzcrank.
Thresh on the other hand, is one of the strongest hero designs LoL came up with so far, the only smear I can possibly point out is that sometimes Riot craps out of the bowl and gives him unreasonable damage on Q and E's auto.
Well Pudge also doesn't instantly kill you and his slow which is one way to lock you down also damages him and everyone can hear when Dismember is being used.
I cannot get over all the little guys in the attic, absolutely brilliant edit
Roadhog was a big part of why I quit OW however many years ago, I'm glad to see I wasn't just a scrub after all
Huh, the point you make about tank design in pvp failing is interesting. In almost every game to date with a tank class, people infamously do not want to play it. They simply do not care, they would do anything apart from actually tanking. I cant you how often it is and fun for people to build damage on tanks in mobas and such. Smite being an example of a MOBA where building damage on tanks isnt just fine, it works out sometimes. They typically having high base damage and low scaling so their damage exists around procing item effects and such.
Many of my friends just do not care to play tank, they would rather play anything else. This has caused me to be the permanent tank player in my friend group. But another thing, I think you are slightly off about pve games. People are still not as open to playing tank, again they want to do damage. Everyone likes to kill stuff. Tanks, from simply existing as a concept, do not appeal to people. MMOs do it a little better, historically have always had kill pressure in video games. In fact, a pure tank is actually fairly rare in games as a whole. Even in something as simple as a turn based RPG, giga tanky enemies are usually still a threat but in other ways. But they always have kill potential.
Personally, this just tells me that people in general just do not like tanking. You can give them kill pressure, you can make them revolve around simply tanking, mitigating, and disruption. But no matter what you do, tanks are unappealing to many gamers and nothing rn will change that.
I think that tanks in PvP games do have one large reference point before Overwatch, MOBAs. There tanks are fully fleshed out characters who have synergistic kits that give them plenty of agency, both in team fights and 1v1s.
Coming back a day after my first comment having binged your channel,
as a MT player I kinda hate that pin can be canceled. I miss pinning after someone who missed, but now they just stop and start swinging. although I love the techs you can do with pin cancel.
overwatch is just two teams sitting in a choke point sending different colored orbs at each other until someone kills the other team with one button press
and then you have people like me who don't give a shit about ranked, and like roadhog because he's a fat biker with a shotgun and a sweet hook. I don't care about roles, I don't care about ranking, or even winning the game I just wanna have fun.
they need to increase hook cd for several seconds or make hog more vulnerable when he hooks or make the animation longer and maybe try playing around hooks projectile speed
I guess this video explains why Roadhog is my "Turn My Brain Off" character, because I play like a DPS with a bigass health pool. I should say that I cannot stand the DPS role, and almost all my time is on tank, but Roadhog is first in my playtime followed closely by Winston. I think when Heavy from TF2 is considered the quintessential tank, I realize that Heavy is the ONLY class in Tf2 without major burst damage. (And medic) That design philosophy makes Heavy boring, but he becomes consistent in a game where the telegraphing of dying instantly comes from men screaming "Screaming Eagle!" and the sound of 3 rockets. You're 1000% correct when saying that Roadhog is the reason tanks are becoming the way they are, Overwatch has gone from taking examples from other games to taking examples from itself. What an incredible video about a character I unfortunately like.
(Also I DO care about him being fat, I find it really hot)
Maybe if you had to wind it up like a lasso or something before throwing, being able to hold it reved like a heavy minigun, to make it more of a commitment. I think that's a way better solution than what Paladins did which is to just make the cooldown massive
A game that does hooks and tanks really well, is Paladins, becausethe hook is not central to the character, it's an add-on
True, makoa is way harder to play compared to hog. With koa you have to aim your aim crosshair a little to the right of an enemy for it to land. I don't know if that was an intentional design choice that the devs over in paladins made though.
I played 5 hours on tank today. Close to 700 hours over the last 6 years. Really needed this video. I think I'm ready to stop now. Tank you.
I swear there was talk not too long ago that the hook was going to be converted to some kind of melee attack…
Your analysis is well informed and always a pleasure to listen to, but as a DPS main I completely disagree with the idea that 5v5 positioning is more restrictive than 6v6.
Yes, there are times in OW2 where it feels like tanks squash you just because you or your supports were a picosecond late to react, but having an extra enemy roaming the map always felt way more threatening and limiting to me. I find I can take aggressive angles more confidently now because it's far easier to intuit 5 enemy positions and exploit the cracks between them.
In 5v5 there's also a proportionally larger opportunity cost when a tank steers their attention and resources to confirming kills on DPS, giving the rest of the team a chance to press an advantage elsewhere in the fight. Honestly, rope-a-doping tanks who think they have a free pick is a ton of fun and one of my favorite ways to express movement/cover usage skills. And even with increased lethality, it's not like the non-Roadhog tanks kill you instantaneously, so there's always room for counterplay.
I do think we can agree on one thing, though... JQ is awesome.
Good vid, i don't really agree on the point of zarya bubbles (as a zarya main)
I was beyond happy when in ow2 beta i got to use both bubbles on either myself or my team. It gave me a lot more options to stragetize, to quickly absorb charge in the first part and then protect my teammates when they ult with both bubbles. It is somewhat balanced by having a little cooldown on using the bubble on the same teammate, i wonder if implementing something of a 1 sec cooldown to zarya herself would do a fairer job in balancing her
I have a lot of experience in both league of legends and overwatch, and while there were times hook characters were broken in league, it was never to the same ability as roadhog. Blitzcrank is a character in league known for one thing. Hooks. If he hooks you, you will likely die. But HE HIMSELF does not do the damage. He has further CC (knock up, and a silence) to keep you there. But he has no inate tankiness, he does not do THAT much damage, he is there to pull, and that is it. It makes picking him a gamble, because you are giving up either hard engage/tons of healing or peeling/ or alot of damage. All for the CHANCE to pull people. And people do take that risk, but it does not always pay off.
Roadhog on the other hand. He does too much. He can tank, does alot of damage, and can hook on a LOW cool down. But because of role lock, you cannot nerf one of these aspects, because if you do, the threat of a hook is not enough compared to an actual character. So he is in an awkward spot where he cannot be an effective solo tank as he does not do enough, so he has to one shot as that is all he brings.
They need to rework him to have more CC. Add an ability. Knock up, grab maybe. Remove his heal and replace with another CC ability. Maybe a gut shove to get enemies off of him. Give him innate higher damage reduction than other characters. Than make him passively apply previous wounds with shots. Than NERF HIS DAMAGE HARD. He would be alot more supportive, being able to CC enemies, apply healing reduction, and just generally be a big beefy fighter. But he won't one shot, and he won't heal himself. So he has to play with the team, set up hooks and play with the healer.
Roadhog just needs to be redefined as Counter-flanking DPS, who sacrifices mobility for self-healing / staying power.
I think Roadhog would do better to play against and still be fun if you give him his old scrap gun spread back along with the alternate fire, on top of changing his trap into something more active like an electric net maybe (basically the trap but you huck it at enemy gamers) or give him something with that big olé gun on his back. That way he can still murder people but it's not just hook and shoot. Also had the idea that Hog could choose to crush his healing canister in his hand to create something like soldiers heal that heals up to like 300hp spread amongst your team. He needs more things to do that get value other than "hehe I hook enemy team and go bang" before removing that will feel "good"
That first second claim is crazy when theres release brig, release mauga, D.Va at any point in the game's life
What's the name of the song that plays at 2:50? been looking for it for a LONG time!
Undertale - It's raining somewhere else
League has a decent few of these characters, who's kit is way too imbalanced to be in the game at a normal power level. What they have done is pretty much give up on them and keep them at a low power level, until they can do a massive rework for them, that fundamentally shifts the fantasy or just forget them forever. Shaco has been bad for almost a decade at this point, but he still has a dedicated player base, who are willing to work through the strangeness of his kit and get the necessary outplays to make him decent. I know OW can't do this as well, cause they have much fewer characters, but I think at this point sacrificing Roadhog might be the correct choice. Just let him be the fun hook character, that if you're really good at can compete, but otherwise is lacking the punch to be a consistently good pick.
At the point he's just gonna be nerfed to below average and left on a shelf I'd rsther they just figure something else out.
what is the song at 21:40?
@@shrimp9618 rain world downpour ost, pretty sure it’s track 3/4 but I’m not home for a day or two to check 🫡
Feel like his ult should be the hook and he should acquire scrap from kills to gradually upgrade scrapgun into something that does momentary whole hog bursts and his health chug should only be usable on point / payload. Having his gun's lethality slowly go up while he's doing damage and taking up space and his ult being the thing that deletes one person makes him seem ominous and dangerous. Restricting his chug makes him way more lethal around the objective.
Can someone explain to me how I’m supposed to beat him as a tank? He simply hooks me into his team and kills me? I can’t push through open space without getting 1 shotted.
Usually, once you’ve been hooked it is up to your team to save you.
Play on corners where you can bait hook out or it breaks on the wall. Then you have several seconds to reposition or attack in the open. To be honest though it’s not an easy ability to hit on people moving erratically whilst the whole enemy team is shooting him. Lot of the time unless it’s a flank, Hog loses 300 HP when he stuns himself to hook.
You can block it... Sig shield, Rein shield, Orisa gold. (but you gotta hold your cooldowns for that occasion which is stale-matey)
You can evade it... JQ being small, Ram having a janky hitbox when crouch spamming (which is inconsistent)
You can escape it... DVa boosters, Winton rocket jump, Doom cooldowns (but you gotta hold your cooldowns for that occasion which is stale-matey)
You keep screaming at your supports to pick Ana and just remove him from the game (good luck on having anyone counter swap that doesn't feel the pain of tank)
What tank you play?
what are you smoking man, the whole point of tanks in moba is taking space because if you go in at wrong time or overextend you blow up so the only way to be threatening is disrupt enemy correctly since you can't kill anyone alone usually, sure you can burst 50-70% enemy dps hero hp but that is your cap
Taking space is the responsibility of the whole team, the tank is just slightly more responsible for that due to their higher hp pool.
It's interesting to note that much of Symmetra's problems are mirror images of much of what you talk about here (ironic that they were my two best characters.)
With no movement abilities, slowly ramping damage and vulnerable turrets with limited viable positions, she was remarkably soft damage even if she did have the potential to sweep. Her ultimate was, and still is, about assisting her team. I think tahts why she was always in the support category.
I think that's honestly what made her interesting, and the game having such unorthodox characters is what drew me to the experience. In my opnion, Symm 3.0 sacrifices a lot of that interesting potential, taking away those big rewards for covering your telegraphs and approaching situations in unexpected ways, without the help of any abilities. Instead, she's still soft, teleghraphed, and has a high skill barrier in the way of being any real threat.
Perhaps that's a fundamental flaw in Overwatch and maybe the genre as a whole. All these different gameplay styles clashing and creating unsolvable probelms.
They should make the hook reel in the target at a slow/slower pace, so its more of a control ability not an instakill, because you can't really balance around an instakill like that. and give him a 1second shield upon using heal so he has a counter play against ana nade. that should put him in a healthy place and do the numbers balancing after. obviously now, that his heal is resource based, it wouldn't make sense to deploy the shield every time he heals, might be a bit overpowered, but im sure that this would overall improve hog so that he is actually balancable
I think that part of the reason why all the other tanks have become roadhog is because with only 1 tank, you fundamentally don't have another tank there to cover your weaknesses. Solo tanks either have to be giant nigh unkillable raid bosses that make the game unfun for everyone with less than 300hp or they have to be boring walls that don't do anything except soak up damage until they inevitably explode. Either the solo tank is so lethal that you cannot chose to ignore them, or the best choice is to completely ignore the tank and kill the squishies.
As a person from WoW. RoadHog is an amalgamation of a deathnight and paladin.
And I totally believe that is where his base design came from. Especially the hook part.
Blizzard likes stealing from their games. And there is alot of other heroes take inspirations from their other games.
Lifeweaver pull = priest leap of faith
Zarya bubble = paladin bubble
Mercy MassRez/Rez = priest mass rez/rez
Junker queen shout/bleed = warrior last stand shout/bleed
Zen Tranquillity = preist dome of light
Hanzo scatter arrow/storm arrow = hunter scatter shot/rapid fire
Rienhardt Shatter = warrior Shockwave
And the wonderfull thing about hook unlike deathknight Death grip, is its very easy to counter if you are looking for it.
As person who plays hog I have recently became real good at countering hook with Sigmas shield/zarya bubble because it became very easy to predict due to you having the same mind set as a hog.
Hook is only deadly when you are not paying attention.
I personally think hog felt great at the beginning of his rework. Because it became a mini game of wit and paying attention with the trap as a hog player. Couldnt kill a full health hero with hook trap shoot combo. But at half health you could. And if you did hook a full health target you ping in hopes for you dps to follow up on the hook.
As for his hook only pulling his victim 4 meters instead of 3 meters, lessened his one shot combo but created an incentive for more terrain based kills.
Roadhog has been the red headed step child of overwatch and only recently and thankfully mauga has become the new red headed step child.
I forgot where I was going with all of this.
What's the name of the music that plays at 2:50? Been looking for it forever!
Its raining somewhere else - Toby Fox
Roadhog actually used to be fun to play and skillful to play against, you used to be able to stun him out of his heal, you used to be able to hit skillful rightclicks. Now Hog is just a boring annoying unkillable oneshot bot with a new stupid trap that deletes any tank with his ult
The problem is like many OW hero's he's a feast or famine type of hero. He's either OP or useless with little between. His basic kit is that he is a slow big target. The only semi threat he poses is his one shot, when ever they remove that fact he's useless. When he has the one shot pull combo he's insanely hard to play against and generally unfun to deal with. Something with 600+ hp, several means of staying alive with short CD and can kill you instantly from about 20m away with the generous hit box of his hook is not great design.
That he has to land that combo and kill you or he's pointless doesn't help either. It's honestly the same problem Doomfist had in OW1. He either killed people instantly with his punches or was Trash. It took a pretty hefty rework and the massive buffs of solo tanks in OW2 to give him a chance to shine without instant kill mechanics.
5:58 love the Catherine music , great video ❤️
A thought I had as the vid was going along for an actual rework popped into my head. Remove Whole Hog as his Ultimate and then make the hook into it. He begins to spin his hook as a meter constantly decreases denoting the duration of the ability. He can then throw the hook with the same properties that it normally has, meaning it can't go through shields and stuff. If the hook connects with someone, he can then carry them around allowing the enemy to be shot at by his teammates but not himself. Roadhog would also have the option of throwing the hooked enemy while he is carrying them, dealing more damage to the thrown character and knocking up any other enemies hit.
As for what to replace the hook ability with, probably just something like bringing back his old primary spreadshot with some extra bells and whistles. Like make it so that it would enhance Roadhog's next primary fire into being able to knock back any unshielded enemies it hits while dealing more damage to shields, still keeping somewhat of a tankbuster role in that regard, but also still allowing for displacement.
Again, not fully thought out ideas, but still fun ideas nonetheless I think. Great video!
It is genuinely so bewildering to me that ever since overwatch 2, and the removal of the off-tank, roadhog suddenly gets viewed as broken even in OW1, which I guess is in part due to the majority of people just parroting what they hear someone else say, or just never having actually played overwatch 1, but like... Did everyone just forget that positioning was meant to be important? Roadhog's hook punished overextension. If you're dying to it, and it's not some coordinated focus fire like any other CC ability in the game, you're spacing wrong, and you need to stick with your tank. The main-tank pushes the line forward, the off-tank holds the line and prevents the enemy from pushing their line past yours. It's really easy when you think instead of raging out when you die lol
don't even play this game anymore but i can sympathize with the playerbase that wants early OW1 balance/dynamics back. also very based david wise enjoyer. looking forward to more
Watching through your telegraphing abilities and damage section, and realized that, yeah, it is weird roadhog could instakill you from such a wild range. I didn't realize how different an outcome that was compared to the other OG tanks where winning a duel just meant the opponents had to reposition. I wonder if adding a charge to his hook swing to increase the range would help at all.
Also I kind of like don't care if the onboarding process for new players is hard lol. all games these days suck for the first 1000 hours its just a fact of life
But to wrap up, your conclusion was solid. Roadhog is a character that is just who DPS players play when they have to play tank. maybe thats ok
oh jesus you are so right. they turned every tank into hog. no tank ability is clearly is telegraphed anymore and they can survive through everything :(
how naive I was going into this comment.... Started typing at 12 minutes and stopped typing at the end of the video. good stuff :)