Director's Take: Talking tanks and upcoming hero balance changes

news.blizzard.com:

Hey everyone! It's been a bit since our last Director's Take. We’ve missed a few of these in recent months. Sorry for the gap, speaking to all of you will continue to be a priority for the team.

Let's talk about tanks. Let me rephrase that… a lot of you are talking about tanks, I'd like to contribute from a developer point of view.

We've heard from players that the tank role is in a tough spot right now and has been since Season 8 ended. We agree. That's not to say that tanks were in a perfect spot before Season 9, but the problem now is that most of them just don't feel as 'tanky' as they should. Many times, both Support heroes need to focus solely on the tank just to keep them alive. In this scenario both the Tank and Supports can feel like they have limited options in their gameplay, as they are essentially tied to each other.

Our internal stats show this as well. We've come up with a new metric since Season 9 that we simply call "tankiness." It's roughly the number of deaths a hero experiences compared to how many deaths they ought to experience. There are a lot of stats that go into determining what an expected death is, and I’m not able to go into that level of detail here. The point is that your experience and our data are aligned.

Since Season 9 almost all heroes in the game have become less tanky. This isn't all unintended. One of the issues we were addressing at the time was the sheer amount of burst damage and healing available. However, most tanks (excluding Ball, who is roughly the same) moved a lot further than heroes in other roles. Recent changes, like the headshot damage reduction on tanks, had some effect on this, but it’s still under where we'd like it to be.

We still like many of the game wide changes that were implemented over the last few seasons - the projectile size increase, the headshot damage and knockback reduction on tanks, and the passive health regeneration on all heroes. However, what we’re currently discussing is whether the path forward