The primary objective of an offense hero in Overwatch is to scout the area, press the objective and harass the enemy team. Despite this, questions have been raised as to whether there is any real point in playing as an offense character, if they can’t compete with the power of tank heroes.
Heroes in the class in question include the likes of Reaper, McCree, Genji, Pharah, Soldier 76, Sombra and Tracer. These characters tend to wield high damage weapons and abilities, but have lower health compared to defense and tank heroes. Regardless of these traits and their objectives in the team, a thread on the official Overwatch forums has raised the topic that simply playing as a tank could prove far more effective than playing as any offensive character.
The original post by user TheUprising states: “The main objective of the offense role is to scout the area, harass the opposing team, and press the objective. Heroes classified as offense generally have high damage weapons and abilities and lower health pools than tanks and some defense heroes. They are usually excellent duelists with high mobility and good burst or sustained damage.”
“Why wouldn’t you just play Roadhog, he can do nearly as much damage as reaper and has like 10x the health. The tanks in this game do way too much damage for how long lasting they are, all offense characters are redundant, their main purpose I guess is to assassinate the supports for the tanks, but DVA can do that just fine as well.”
“This game feels more like a MOBA than an FPS because all you can play are tanks who don’t really need to aim, and all the enemies have huge health bars. Like League of Legends without item buying.”
This prompted responses from fellow community members, with a balanced discussion unfolding as more replies came in. Particularly with the mention of Roadhog as an example, some disagreed, with user Rox replying, “wtf are you talking about, McCree shreds Hog, if he is not hooked at least.” User RaynT also spoke up for another fellow offense hero in Soldier 76, who commented, “Any halfway decent Soldier can destroy Roadhog as long as they stay out of hook range and keep the pressure on.”
Its an interesting topic to be raised, especially with using the one-man apocalypse as a prime example. I personally find Reaper to be effective against tanks, having high DPS and teleportation abilities to get out of dodge. A key to Roadhog is of course to avoid his hook, but its completely subjective, based on how each player approaches the game.