Watching the best solo laners is kind of amazing on a technical level because of the pure efficiency and timing they rotate while chipping in damage to force people to back. But… I also find it incredibly boring to watch half the time. It’s just not my cup of tea, but that tracks because I’m a healer main.
But like I said, an element of what separates the good ones from the bad ones is knowing when NOT to soak and actually be useful in a fight. Too often people will just soak, rarely join a fight, and when they do, they suck because only caring about being around minions when they die doesn’t necessarily make you a good fighter.
Thats the only thing you can do if your dmg dealers dont want to step up and take responsibility. Healers and tanks should never be the one who lanes and take camps but since your 3 dmg dealers dont want to do it you are forced to do it or lose that lane.
Then if one of your dmg dealers then spam ping you for not tanking/healing him while he is doing irellevant stuff himself then you wil be the one they all blame and report afk.
Thats the problem about people who play dmg dealers in this game. They think they are entilted to do what they want instead of doing what they are supposed to do and then blame everyone but himself for the lose or for him dying too far away from his frontline.
People should just stop blaming every tank or healer that are not baby-sitting him while he refuse to do his own job.
If a lane is getting destroyed or none of our merc camps are getting captured while I play healer or tank then I can safely blame the dmg dealers for not doing thier job.
The tanks job is to create a safe space for his team to be in and look after gankers. Healers stay behind and heal and dmg dealer kill the other team and take camps and soak lanes. But most of the time you see nothing of that cause one has to cover for someone els while the others rather want to throw himself midlane and feed and then spam ping the first they see.
It’s a reasonable way to think. To go further with what you brought up, players want to needlessly fight because they feel emotionally rather than think logically. Most people are ideologically stuck in a box because they can’t figure out alternatives to feeling like it’s time to fight.
The game is already frustrating enough to play without further discouragement. I have to agree with robert that while you’re padding in the middle you always end up losing a tower and a half in the outer lanes. Until someone decides to rotate and replace the healer, the best play is to stay planted away from everyone else, especially if uncontested, and if someone dies during this time it just shows you how lacking their game sense really is.
During the early levels one minion wave is worth more in experience than a hero kill and if you’re playing against anyone but AI your best call would be to recall the moment you kill a random enemy player who was dumb enough to get caught this early, so he doesn’t catch you with half missing health on the way back. It’s just not worth it. Sneaking in damage on the front gate is always good but forcing ANY kind of a fight is less than ideal.
If you’re unable to properly soak from the start no healer will have confidence in you achieving anything by forcing a team fight during objective downtime and you will receive no help. You’re just wasting everyone’s soaking uptime, especially when you’re not insisting on assistance via ping system, which would in rare cases demonstrate some capability to hurt your opponents at the most inconvenient moment.
Other time you just get mad for not receiving heals while I may have judged you as unable to keep fighting. You’re not being ignored instead being expected to recall while I am saving my cooldowns for someone who might need it more the moment other team notices you are gone.
Once again Queen showing how triggered they were from his own bad plays that made him quit. The “only” thing you can do other than, you know, not doing it lol. Lose the lane, are you so afraid of actually showing how good you are and winning your lane, that you’re willing to let your team die so they can lose their lane? Like where is the logic in that?
This is true, but even then, I wouldn’t really do it as a healer. Because if your team dies in mid without a healer, all that really accomplishes is now they can run down mid and chip at your towers. But early early game, it comes out to about a wash. The risk is if their team can hold undermanned without dying, and then you get a lot more behind.
I’ve had games where enemies rotated to soak, and then we just wipe mid, sure you might lose some soak, but usually someone rotates eventually to get leftover orbs. Sometimes people don’t and we sometimes just outright get the towers.
By the time you get to an objective like what the OP outlined, you’re pretty much always wrong to soak as a healer.
I think it’s just a poor choice of the word niche then. I too struggle with live Ana, and I used to have a 70% win rate with her. I don’t on Morales even though you could make a similar argument with her that she can’t take camps and solo lane well.
The problem with Ana is she struggles in the actual healing part of her kit. Ana’s redesign really has taken a back seat since and the rampant power creep that has left her wanting. Her kit also LOWERS your skill ceiling, so you’re actively punished for being better.
Words and meaning aren’t shaped by just the verbatim use of a direct sequence, but the whole of their composition. As an essayist, much of what I write ties together from start to finish.
The forums tend to view heroes as “niche” rather than the role, so even outside of the lines I wrote, the common usage as seen on the forums is usually used on a hero-by-hero basis, and not something more vital as a role for healing or tanking.
But you just used examples of kits not hero by hero. I think using hero by hero is sort of less useful in terms of discussion, because using that framework, heroes just inevitably become “niche” when they are less powerful. Niche tends to denote their specialized nature, which healing can be seen as, but because healing is such a universal role, that sort of cancels that out.
Like I always argued that support Tassadar was never really niche because of how flexible he could be on a team. But support Tyrande was. But a healer will almost never be “niche” so long as that hero doesn’t suck, because of how important healing is. Even though they might have deficiencies at things like wave clear, that’s not where they most meaningfully contribute to the success of a team.
In my experience against Hammer, Greymane, Valla or Raynor but maybe even Zagara all of which can deal significant damage supported by a single minion wave it is not very smart to fight mid at all.
This is something which no one seems to understand that some heroes aren’t a real threat, even when there may be three of them against a single player. Not only do I want to stay mounted to reach an opposite end of the map fast I also really can’t afford a dismount to heal my teammate, who shouldn’t have taken any damage at all by that point. Every single fing game so by the time they free up their schedule to scare away the strongest sieger, they’re not in a position to fight because they got distracted a moment earlier.
Everyone that has ever played a healer can understand the frustration behind others not soaking because you end up losing half a minute over something a different hero could have handled in 5 seconds.
Yeah, some heroes are more annoying at start than others. It’s just volunteering to deal with it as the healer comes with some real consequences of their own. You can make that choice, and I wouldn’t even say it’s wrong, as it’s probably okay at the beginning because of that early game xp bonus, and deaths don’t mean as much (honestly, anyone who freaks out at the middle fight like it’s some big life shattering game event regardless of how it goes is pretty shallow). But there’s a real chance your team will die and the enemy will make their own push too. And every minute the game goes on, that rationale makes less and less sense.
I understand the frustration, I used to have it myself. But it’s honestly just easier for your mental health and better for your game, if you just stop making it a big deal. Ping, soak a wave if someone is getting camps, but any more than that, just tell yourself it’s not your problem, and really, it shouldn’t be. If you can’t trust in your team, trust in yourself that you can make a bigger impact by being with your team.
Reading the whole soak debate and I could not agree more to it.
Soaking advice is pretty garbage, anyone can soak the 4 man rotating can do that too, no seriously you have the tools to maintain the lanes to be properly soaked, the only time this advice comes is either new players or because you went 3 level gap which is ironic that you reach such to go and soak more to fix it (they can just at this point map control everything it won’t really do much unless they throw hard), either way nothing wrong in learning to soak the problem becomes from doing it excessively.
You need to know that there’s time to soak and not to, and when it’s the latter you are attempt in turning the tide in your favor which results in better control of the map which results in you have better game experience.
In general soaking advice is there because there’s always someone else doing the same offlaner shenanigans but the power is tied more or less on how many heroes are alive to decide the fate of the map more than the soaker, sure early game is forgiving but late game by 13 you can snipe forts by literally getting 3 kills prior.
It’s a lot of strategies involved other than just one singular one that is soaking, it’s one strategy of many to play of many general and extremely important advices.
That’s a pretty disingenuous comment. I think it’s pretty obvious I care if people are sabotaging their teams, but I don’t care about soaking if I’m playing healer. Conflating the two is a choice.
Everyone had entirely missed the part where I mentioned how healers are in a unique position to track events events in multiple lanes at once to a much higher degree than any other role mainly because they’re relegated to standing in the back for a larger part of the early game. I am not implying passive gameplay but playing safe and participating when your cooldowns become available.
If they ask you to do or quit doing something you should probably conform to their request since your duel mode tunnel vision is making you oblivious to anything else.
Another reason why we lose games is because noobs get baited into fighting a group with a much more efficient healer instead of splitting up and diverting their attention to multiple fronts or deciding by to trade lanes entirely.
Saying to ignore soak is so asanine my head hurts. While we still had HGC and competitive teams, do you remember ever seeing someone leak a single minion? Maybe you’re just too used to playing in a premade and stomping weaker opponents but this approach isn’t something a well coordinated team would do against other well prepared opponents. Games would last just as long and end with a very low number of hero deaths because everyone knew how much a single mistake would cost you. Surprisingly, this didn’t make matches feel any more boring to observer.
LoL, I don’t play in premades. I solo queue almost predominantly and I play healers the most. And when I don’t I also watch bad healers with good intentions hurt their teams by leaving a fight to soak.
Saying to ignore soak as a healer is absolutely good advice. When in HGC have you seen a healer take on that mantle? Not to mention you will see HGC and competitive teams miss soak all the time. They’re just better able to eke out as much XP they can while optimizing rotations intelligently, and going to fights when useful, which most players aren’t able to do. Most players just see minions and go there without actually thinking. And like Sami said, the group can rotate and catch soak anyways. Bad players just like fixating on soaking because it’s easy.
That solo lanning on healer as your team wipes the enemy gets the advantage and puts your team on the back foot for the rest of the game doesn’t seem worth a healer solo lanning. I let my team know when I notice the enemy healer by them self in lane cause that gives my team the o.k. to be super aggressive in TFs and or push hard in other lanes. Granted my team doesn’t always respond to the news but when it happens it devastating to enemy. It’s hard getting off your back feet once your team is on them cause everyone is on tilt and are super skittish scared to feed.
The match becomes a waiting game at that point for the enemy team to throw their advantage. At least for me I’ve lost way more games waiting around for mistakes to be made by the enemy then I have where our team is encourage to force mistakes to happen by the enemy to turn the game around for us.
Being in a group of randoes that’s really hard to do to make them force a comeback because my teammates default into that tilted scared state of mind once the snowball starts rolling.
I find the best way to keep the dominos from falling like that is to not be in lane by myself as the healer in the first place.
Sure ppl are quick to point fingers when something goes wrong but there is an equal amount of non-accountability from players as well like from the OP here.
A “niche” is also the environment that something thrives. The context of my post was eatablished by quoting another player, so particular to that context I am referencing a difference between rehgar and ana — one is a hero that can be played at any level and any mode, and the other is a specialist that has tools that have less success in “generalist” situations compares to specific ones.
It smells like you don’t know either what “niche” means, or that the author can use multiple applications of a word.
Reghar’s “niche” is his “generalist” kit.
My point is addressing a concern expressed by an OP and I’d like to think people know heroes here well-enough I could leave certain details out so people are more likely to read what is there.
This is all sort of a semantic argument I’ve no interest in delving into. I don’t think you’re using the word niche in ways that are meaningful for discussion. You can disagree.