I play flex quite a lot, which means I often get put into tank role. I think I’m decent (nothing super special), but I occasionally get a game where I wonder if I’m just misunderstanding the balance of gaining/holding space versus peeling for my squishies.
Last night, there was an example where I was on Ramattra, and I felt I was doing great on the front line: good stats, holding space/objective well, relatively low usage of support resources, and often requiring the attention of 3 to 4 enemies at a time.
However, many times during the fights, a solo enemy Reaper would work his way into the backline and draw focus of the entire team. Everyone but me was focusing the Reaper, and I’m holding front line with much less supporting pressure and heals, but still making it work. Then, the reaper would consistently still manage to take out 3-4 of the squishies despite it being a 1v4 (no ults used).
So I know that part of the duty of tank also means helping peel for your backline, so I would try to help the backline when I felt I could, but then the other four enemies would mow us over because I’m no longer holding the front line. In 5v5, there’s obviously only one tank per team, so we can’t have a tank in the frontline and backline at the same time. I know there’s better tanks for dealing with stuff like that, such as Roadhog and D.Va, but this was Quickplay, and I felt like playing Ramattra and didn’t want to swap (plus, I felt like I was doing well).
We ended up losing the game narrowly, which isn’t what I’m annoyed with, I’m annoyed that the backline was consistently dropping like flies to one character, and every time I turned around to help, the rest of the enemy would smoke us because I was the only thing keeping us from being ran over.
Basically my post is, if you’re in a game like this as a 5v5 tank, is there anything I could have done better, or do I kind of just have to deal with my team losing 4v1s?