If I were going to single out one thing that I've never seen anyone mention it is that shields are 1 way only. It makes tanks too powerful and stable, thus support is needed, thus dps is third tier.
Of course Blizzard had a challenge designing supports - if they were too weak they were unfun to play but if they are too strong then your entire dedicated player base complains for months.
Ultimately I think the problem was the lack of diversity among the other supports/tanks. The relatively few amount of tanks/supports ultimately meant that the community would quickly coealesce on an optimal tank setup (Rein/zarya, Winston/dva, etc), and as a tank/support player it became boring to play because picking an off-meta tank would be seen as a throw. There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.
*Healing teammates*
Team mate: I need healing
Me: Im already healing teammate
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
*hasn’t stopped healing*
*Team mate dies*
LITERALLY NO HEALS. FFS HEAL!
End of Match
FFS HEALS UNINSTALL THE GAME.
Cards land.
Top healer of the match, 40% of damage recovered.
Me: What more do you fucking want???
For me, that’s I enjoy the least as being healer. I would rather have 0 comms than that. And the thing is, there is fuck all bliss can do to fix it. Dicks are gonna be dicks, idiots are always gonna be idiots.
EDIT: The other “fun” one is this.
Healers: “We have tracer and or doom fist fucking up out back line”
*tumbleweeds*
Healers: “hey, we are seriously getting are arses handed to us in the back line, can we get a bit of help just so they lay off our back line for a bit?”
*tumbleweeds*
Rest of the team: WHERE THE FUCK ARE RHE HEALERS?
Healers: “Dead, we are both dead. We can’t heal if we are dead or having to attack in order to keep ourselves alive because we have not backup. They have a Rein camping the spawn so I had to switch JUST to get out of the spawn room alive”
Rest of the team: FFS LITERALLY 0 HEALS.
ALSO GROUP THE FUCK UP. And don't spam "I need healing" and then go the opposite way to your healers (If we can't get to you or have LOS on you, we can not heal you), or spam it when you don't need healing (it takes our attenstion off those who do).
Oh and my personal fav(s).. Ask for heals, get a small heal then run away 2 sec's later and than complain you are not at full health, Or be a widowmaker way back away from the team snipping, spamming heals when you are standing 5 meters away from a large medipack. Or be a high mobility char getting healed, take 25% of damage thing "Fuck this PEACE", Leave by a means your healer can't only for your healer to then been stomped on (bonus points if you then complain about healing 0.5 seconds after leaving your healer).
And you wonder why we flip the fuck out, say fuck it and turn into a DPS Moria or a well booping Lucio?
[citation needed]
> Well more than the majority prefers dps.
Well more than the majority of characters are DPS characters. If Blizzard provided the same variety in tank and support characters that they do in DPS, there'd be more of a draw to play those roles.
The problem with DPS is that you can either pick a fun one with a ton of weaknesses that loses your team the game, or you can play hitscan. Pro players and people with a background in other games really love the hitscans, and Blizzard obliges them, to the point where it's kind of throwing to not pick one. (Have you ever been upset to have a McCree on your team? Stun the dive. Cancel ults. Two tap someone across the map. Flank around and McRightclick a support. The dude does everything!) That's not to say you can't win games with the off-DPS -- there is someone out there streaming how you can pick Symmetra or Bastion every game and win 60% of them against the pros.
Support is a fun role. I've always said that Ana is the sniper for people that think Widowmaker is too easy. There's a character where if you play perfectly, you win the game. You make a mistake, or your mechanics falter, you lose the game. (Does anyone ever watch ML7 play and not want to play Ana immediately afterwards? You can do so much... if you're good.)
I'm pretty happy about the current state of tanks. It wasn't always this way, but you can pretty much pair any two of them and not instantly lose. Both players can pick "a fun one". Shields were once pretty much mandatory, but people got better at the game (and they shields got nerfed into the ground), and they have less effectiveness than they once did.So you can get away with the weird combinations. Ball/Hog was meta for quite a while. Winston/D.va has always been good with the right players and coordination. Rein/Zarya is of course a lot of fun for the Zarya player. I've even lost some games to Hog/D.va, though I'm not sure I'd personally pick one of those if the other was already locked in ;)
Anyway, I keep reading that nobody wants to play tanks, and I don't get it. You can spend 15 minutes in DPS queue, pick Widowmaker, get one sick kill for your montage, and then spend the remaining 8 minutes of the game being chased around by some Wrecking Ball spamming "Ho ho ho!" with a D.va in tow that shows up from time to time to remind you that it's the perfect weather for a hotteok. I'd personally rather spend 30 seconds in the queue and be able to switch between 8 dramatically different heroes depending on the situation that unfolds.
Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports combined, so there are more to choose from.
If they made the experience of playing tank/support more consistent, or if they actually expanded the pool of tanks/supports by having more than 8 tanks and 7 supports, there would be more interest in playing those roles.