on tanking

I really miss playing D.Va in Overwatch.

Overwatch doesn’t really exist anymore. They nuked it to make everyone move over to Overwatch 2, and I haven’t really kept up with Overwatch 2 so I have no clue if it’s good or not. I probably won’t play it regardless, since shooters kind of suck without a controller and my controller cord is currently not working (or maybe my controller isn’t working? I’m not sure but point is I don’t have a working controller). They gave D.Va a ponytail, which I think is really cute. Looking at the lineup now, I might go for Junker Queen, but I’ll be honest, I just kind of think she’s hot. I gave her mechanics a once-over and they seem cool, but who knows how they actually feel to play. Again, I’ll probably never know.

Anyways.

I considered myself a D.Va main, when I did play Overwatch, because she was my favorite character to play, but I didn’t actually play her that often. I really liked Symmetra too, before they completely changed her abilities and made me feel like I was floundering, but really I mostly played healers. This is because nobody else wants to play healers. Healers aren’t glamorous. You don’t normally get kills with them and you definitely won’t get Play of the Game. They’re just meant to support the other characters, really let them shine, contribute to the noble cause of Not Dying. It’s a thankless job. Someone will run headfirst into insurmountable danger, get killed immediately, and curse out the team healer the entire time for not… giving them immortality, I guess. So the main reason I usually played healers is I would look at my team, see the abundance of tanks and dps and snipers, and sigh and move my cursor over to Lucio. That’s fine, I really like Lucio, even if after eight consecutive rounds as him I start wondering if it would be worth it to just say fuck the team comp and play D.Va.

Lucio is my go to healer, since I don’t have to be precise with him, but I also just like him aesthetically. He’s a DJ, he’s got a bottom-heavy design which I always like, he’s just a fun, chill character. When I play Lucio, I use my healing like a little treat for the rest of my team. The way he works, instead of shooting Healing Bullets or whatever the other characters do, is that you can switch his speakers to healing mode, and all his teammates within a certain radius get healed. Sometimes I would follow whoever our tank is, especially if everyone else seemed to be doing okay, so damage to our tank hurt less. Usually, I would stay by the objective - a lot of missions are about escorting a vehicle from point a to point b, for example - and good teammates who stay by the objective with me get rewarded by Not Dying. As a healer in these games, you kind of start feeling like a domme. If you’re good and do what I say, you get rewards (healing). If you charge into battle like an idiot, you get punished (dead). I want my team to stay on the fucking point, so I hang out by the fucking point, and if they act the way I want them to, they get healed.

Anyways.

The days of domming people into playing Overwatch right are far behind me. I don’t really play Fortnite or Apex Legends or any of the other similar games, though I am tempted sometimes. A lot of them are free, but none of them have D.Va in them, so it won’t be the same.

What did I like about D.Va? I mean, I like mechs conceptually, though in terms of media I’ve really only seen Neon Genesis Evangelion, listened to a few seasons of Friends at the Table, and thought really, really hard about watching the lesbian season of Gundam. I kind of always hoped Overwatch would give her a skin with orange hair and a red jumpsuit, just as a little Asuka shoutout. I never really cared about Overwatch lore, but the concept of a streamer who is also a soldier is fucked up in a cool way. Gigi DG did an incredible comic about her potential relationships with her teammates, which is kind of a D.Va lore bible for me more than anything Blizzard actually released. But I liked D.Va before I read that comic.

What do I like about D.Va? I mean, most of the tanks are big burly dudes, which just isn’t my aesthetic, and I don’t like Zarya’s mechanics very much, and I would rather die than play as that stupid hamster, so it’s fun to have a cute girl to play as. I like her pose where she lays back on her mech and lazily throws a peace sign at the camera, or the one where she takes a selfie in the middle of battle. A lot of her sprays are really fun too. I like charging forward, I like how her guns feel, I like…

i mean, i like her ult.

I like that D.Va has basically two health bars. When her ult is charged up, she leaps out of her mech, which transforms itself into a bomb. I think in the early days of Overwatch the bomb would kill her too, but throughout most of my time playing her she’s immune to the bomb damage. Her mech explodes, dealing a ton of damage, and if you wait long enough for her ult to recharge, she gets a new mech. I say “wait”, but it’s really “survive”. D.Va outside her mech is tiny, has no armor, and only wields a handgun. If I’m lucky, I find a good place to hide until her mech is back, and if I’m *really* lucky I can get some good shots in while I wait, maybe even a kill. But normally, I get a few minutes outside the mech before someone kills me.

When D.Va launches her mech, I usually just accept I’m about to die. I usually do it for my teammates - I launch her mech at a point where a ton of enemies have converged, and whoever survives chases me down so my teammates have a chance to steal the point. It only works like, 60% of the time, but whatever. Death is cheap. All I gotta do is wait a minute for reincarnation.

The point of the tank class is to absorb damage meant for your teammates. Be a big flashy fuckoff dude that deals a lot of damage and takes a lot of damage so the rest of your team can actually secure the objective. A lot of them have big shields that protect both themselves and others. In some games, they have taunts that draw the enemies’ attention so the rest of the party isn’t targeted. You don’t have to play that way, you can just run around as a big dude that deals and takes a lot of damage and have fun and not worry about your team. But being a good tank feels like a duty to me.

When I play RPGs, I put a lot of my points in whatever gives me more health and whatever helps me hit harder, no matter what class I’m playing. I don’t have to be good at the game if they can’t kill me. I don’t have to dodge, or parry, or block, if they can’t kill me. If I have enough points in constitution I can become immortal. And if it hurts me, who cares? If it didn’t kill me it doesn’t count. If it didn’t kill me I don’t have to restart the boss battle or wait a minute to respawn. Eventually the red vignette around the edges of the screen fades, and my character’s breathing becomes less labored. Maybe I gotta chug a few health potions. Maybe the second this battle’s over I regain all my health. It doesn’t matter. If I put enough health points in my bar, nothing will ever kill me, no matter how good or bad I am. If I hide long enough, my mech comes back, and I’m at full health, like nothing ever touched me at all.