How to overcome my selfdestructive behavior as Reinhardt?

Question

Experience

I'm a Reinhardt main with an overall Reinhardt playtime of round about 150 hours.

I'm playing in a team where we play together 3 days a week.

All of us improved since we started, but there is one thing that we (I...) can't get under control.

The Problem

Every one knows these Reinhardts, charging on max range just into the enemy line for a single kill. This is not beneficial. I'm fully aware of this and have stopped this behavior already.

I'm constantly trying to just do short range charges on flankers or the enemy tank if he initiated in a bad situation on his own. But still I pretty often get displaced by some enemy abilities, making me miss my short range charges and getting totally out of position by doing this.

My team gets tilted by this and after the team died 1 or 2 times due to this I become the scapegoat for every fail for the remaining evening.

I have already tried a lot of things to solve this. I even tried some practice days to totally deny my charge for offensive reasons. When doing so, the team play was pretty consistent and everyone was able to rely on my shield.

But I felt as though I was under performing since I ignored some situations that would have secured a safe kill.

The Questions

Is there a way to get rid of the Reinhardt 'tunnel vision' charge behavior?

Is there a way to evaluate the risk of missing the target and deciding, depending on this evaluation, whether to charge or not?

Is there a way to strategically avoid the risk of being displaced and missing the target?

Answer 1

To hit more consistent charges you have to make quick evaluations of situations.

You need to be asking yourself:

Is the risk worth the reward?

If you are diving into an engagement you need to think about this:

What will effect our attack more? Me getting this kill, or my team having a reinhardt to protect us?

What hero am I charging?

If you are charging a mccree, it is very likely that he will have his flash ability available. If he does, all it takes is a simple press of a button and you are a sitting duck. This goes for any hero that may have this kind of ability, another example would be ana's sleep dart, which will leave you and your team exposed.

As well as this, you say you are charging flankers, but flankers in overwatch have great movement abilities as that is what makes them effective flankers. For example, tracers blink can easily dodge your charge, leaving you out of position, and your team exposed.

If you are having problems with flankers, use someone like mccree, who can easily use his flash ability to stop the fast moving flankers, and cleanly take them out. Either that, or you drop the slow moving characters such as rienhardt, and formulate a dive comp, including characters like genji, winston, tracer, pharah. These movement based characters will make it harder for the enemy flankers as there job is to disrupt the back line, but if you are diving in with winston, tracer, pharah, there won't be much of a back line to attack.

From a defensive perspective, charging in to a choke point is completely pointless. Even if you do manage to get a kill, the attackers can just delay there push until they have all 6 people back, then push.

As reinhardt you should always be with your team. If you are instigating the fight, or killing a flanker, your team needs to know, so they can support you, and dive on to an objective with you.

Just a last piece of advice, unless the strategy is to start the fight with a nano-boosted reinhardt or just a charge, you should try your best to avoid long range charges, as you are very vulnerable while charging.

Also, if you are going in for a charge, you better make sure you at least hit someone, if you don't hit your target, attempt to strafe to a different target as missing your charge will leave you completely exposed, surrounded by enemies. Especially as once you hit a wall after a charge, there is a short period afterwards in which you cannot move, this is enough time for the enemy to do substantial damage.

Some videos that may help you

If you are playing as a full team, I would recommend watching some more of their videos, they are really useful.

They bring out daily videos about changes to the game and the current overwatch meta. Could really help you out.