Yesterday Blizzard announced that there will be some changes to the hero shooter with Overwatch 2. For the old format of 6vs6 will be canceled. Instead, both teams will be shrunk to 5 players. One of the two tanks will therefore no longer be needed. This presents professional players with existential fears. Because their job could simply be cancelled.

This is what happened:

With a more detailed presentation of PvP, Overwatch has dropped quite a bombshell. Instead of 2 tanks, 2 DPS characters and 2 supporters, the game will only be 1-2-2 in the future – that is, with one less tank.

While this pleases some fans because it should make the game more exciting, it poses a big threat to pro players who have a job as a tank in eSports teams: half of their positions will become redundant and most likely eliminated.

With this, he addresses two major issues at once for tanking pros in the Overwatch League. Because not only will the number of necessary tanks per team be halved. The task of the remaining tank players also changes significantly.

Tanks are drastically revised:

The developers have announced that tanks will no longer be an insurmountable wall in the future. Instead, tanks will be reworked to play much more aggressively and perform more hybrid functions. In other words, they will lose a bit of their tanking abilities, while becoming more deadly at the same time.

This is exactly what Gator criticized as well. If you’ve trained tirelessly for 5 years as tanks to protect your team from enemies and suddenly have to fulfill the role of a semi-DPS character, you’re going to have to make a major adjustment. A large part of the experience from the past is now obsolete. Learning a new role “just like that” and having access to a team that hasn’t filled the role well yet seems almost impossible.

It’s not yet clear what all the changes will be

What kind of changes are they?

Even though not all changes are known by far, Blizzard has already published a few details. However, this is all still in development, so should be taken with a grain of salt:

When are the changes coming?

The customizations will not go live until the release of Overwatch 2. Since Overwatch 2 is basically not a completely separate game, but the PvP modes use the same player pool as Overwatch 1, this also affects all players of Overwatch 1. There is no release date yet – fortunately for some pros. Nobody should expect the title before 2022 anyway.

What do you guys think of this change? Can you understand the displeasure of the professionals? Or is this just part of the fact that games change sometimes?