When are double healer comps strong?

General Discussion
1

On low macro maps like alterac pass? On maps like tomb of spider queen where you really only need 1-2 waveclear heroes to rotate the lanes?

Or never? I feel like healers are actually more valuable in fights than assassins. Double healer should be pretty strong so long as macro (merc and waveclear) is well taken care of (which it never is in lower leagues but that’s beside the point)

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You almost lost me there. Makro is important on every map! Espacally there, where the objective can take forever, and the ones that maybe get 95% of the “channel” trough, but then loose the objective, will get absolutely nothing out of it. Imagine if you just stayed at the prison cages and completly ignored to soak lanes or apply camp/boss preshure - then you lost even more.

But back to topic - doublehealer is more or less dead since the big healer nerf, and ever since then I have only seen it in combination with Valla and even less often Cassia as hypercarry. Yes, small maps (Toomb) or those with two lanes are usally the maps where it get’s played.
More often viable is the healer + support (Tass / Medivh / Zarya / Aba) combination, because a support brings way more to the table to enhance your hypercarry than a second full healer.

Either way, double healer or healer + support makes your team very dependant from the hypercarry and espacially in random UR/SL where you aren’t queueing as 5 man, I wound’t recommend to play such a comp - if the hypercarry isn’t very good, you lost.

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Double support is only good when your team is coordinated enough that your average damage can go down, but you can still secure kills with CC

4

It’s definitely good when I’m Uther with @hellobg’s WM :smiley:

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5

Utilising Double Healers can sometimes be good if those Healers covers the team’s weakness, as Karabars said, my Whitemane pairs well with his Uther.

We cover each other’s weaknesses, sustain healing and burst healing and mitigation.

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How much healing does a team need?
There are teams that can win without any healing-support at all because every individual has strong self-healing.
There are enemy teams with bad sustained healing and damage but strong burst/cc/all in potential --> you only need to survive long and your team will eventually out-trade them so you might want to have 2 supports to survive longer.

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Double healer is good when you know you will have longer fights and you know you can out sustain the enemy team. Make sure you have both healers covering each other weaknesses.

Also make sure they don’t have Deckard or Ana. Or even Malthael. Healing reduction against double healer is just ez wins.

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i have seen double heals work only really when the enemy team doesnt have enough damage to effectively deal with the amount of healing you push out.
related: kind of like the ‘shielder’ (having zarya, medivh, tyreal…) comp as well.

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I have had some succes playing HotL Uther with friend playing full dmg Khara. This is mostly good against heavy melee teams.

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the typical double-healer tends to be lumped with a ‘hyper carry’ team, but there are a couple other variations:

a seven-sided kharazim could be used for a blow-up combo, so another healer could be taken for cc to either ensure a pick or zone out the rest of the enemy team while kara is playing for damage. Isolating and focus-killing a key target can force the other team to lose strong objectives (like vehicles) that then compensate for having a 2nd healer for pushing.

maintank xul: double-healer helps keep him alive, clump targets, and enable his aoe leech. Since he triggers his own cdr, he brings plenty of waveclear to offset another healer. It could be seen as a hyper-carry theme, but since xul is cast as the frontline ‘tank’, I think its a bit different than something used to enable valla/tracer/cassia and so on.

ancient flame alex: I’ve personally only done this in aram, but I could see it work on 2-lane maps. E talents apply to alex’s basic attacks come lvl 20, so its like a support-version of tank Xul where her attacks empowers itself and helps the team to overwhelm the enemy. Plus side is alex’s E isn’t as bad for waveclear and she has some poke (compared to other healers) but since it relies on dragon cdr, hard disengage (like gust) can wreck havoc on it.

bloodlust comps: reghar has waveclear and can help with mercs, so he offsets some weakensses of running a second support. Bloodlust can be used to hard-contest objectives (esp for racing) or could be used with cheese strats to push structures akin to juice-pirate builds, but ya know, try to survive it instead of wiping on every attempt.

a lot of double support comps need to be intentional combinations of heroes to bring enough role variety or focused effects to overwhelm an enemy team not prepared for non-meta compositions.

Some healers have enough talent variety to function essentially as an alternative role and pair well with other heroes to compensate for certain weaknesses (burst + sustain, or frontline + backline)
but in many cases, a key element to double-healer comps being strong tends to rely on specific maps to compliment the specific hero picks.

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Pretty much Towers of Doom and Volskaja, no other map

You either have to have a strong objective to make up for the lack of waveclear via obj victory/teamfight OR the map should have no pushing to core what-so-ever so that when you fight (assumingly your healer picks were the right kind) you outsurvive and outperform your opponent

Sooo yes, it’s like losing rotational/map value in order to gain extra strength (more like, durability) during teamfights

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Doube healer doesn’t sacrifice damage though does it? I feel like that’s a misconception. Meta comp is tank bruiser 2 assassins healer.

With double healer,you sacrifice the bruiser generally. Many healers can output bruiser levels of damage.

So all those comments above about how you need hypercarry etc, is tha really true?

@varoski, towers of doom macro is one of the most important, double healer would be weak I feel

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no I would really say it just depends more on if your team + more sustain works better into their team. I’ve honestly won ~5ish games within the past 3 months just locking a 2nd support out of the blue because of this gut feeling, I only lost once doing it. I would say it is not good on maps like Dragon Shire and Braxis as much because of the 1-4 split dynamic, but it’s not a hard rule, as sometimes you can counter the 4man with more heals, the only caveat being you are running a hypercarry comp (except for rehgar/khara filling damage pretty well… And you can run those two together as long as you aren’t running hypercarry-style).

Some heroes work better with doublesupport than others, basically anyone who has increased damage uptime per health. Sonya, AA heroes, etc. I would say not Tracer at this point, but I can be wrong. You can easily win some drafts by just countering their team’s attempt to counter your support if the rest of your draft fits with the draft/map.

Games I’ve won recently with 2support were Stu/Alex with Sonya into a CL Thrall, Auriel/Morales with squishies into Azmodan, Ana/Auriel, Ana/Morales, and x_Khara, I lost a game where I picked Uther with another healer though (Auriel maybe?)… it was close, we made mistakes but also I could have gone another way with draft, I forget exactly. It’s important to note that it’s not these specific combinations that are The Best but that they were what appeared to work best in the draft, did successfully (it’s also fun hearing your team flaming the 2nd support pick but then turning 180 and saying “doublesupport is back!” as we stomp)

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When you draft a double healer comp, you are committing more to teamfighting and less to macro. So you want to choose a double healer comp on maps where the objective cannot be ignored and is guarenteed to drive a teamfight - the ideal maps would be Infernal shrines, Volskaya, and BoE.

Yes, double healer sacrifices damage for sustain. You are counting on a prolonged fight on an objective where the enemy team cannot hard engage on you. As long as your team can continue to poke and walk away as-needed, you will win the objective.

I don’t know of a single healer that can deal bruiser levels of damage.

Yes I would say a hypercarry is an important part of the double support team. You want to be sure to include specific heroes in this comp - like a Greymane, Tracer, Valla, Hanzo, Zuljin - as these heroes can apply constant sustained pressure to the enemy team, and their power-level magnifies with additional support.

Overall I would say a double support comp isn’t that viable anymore, because after supportacalpyse most healers lack too much waveclear and damage to make the additional support worth the compensation. Additionally this comp requires a lot more coordination and is less flexible than a 2 ranged / bruiser / healer / tank comp.

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Playing damage lili when they take 2 ranged aa and you already have a healer is generally a good pick. Won many a game like that

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Double Support is generally only a real thing when you are going with 2 frontliners and a solid AA carry (Valla already mentioned as an example, but Cassia, Raynor, and various other high-AA damage heroes are pretty solid.)

Now, Supports who can also deal damage (Kharazim) can fit into a few more comps, but otherwise, it’s kinda iffy.

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I don’t see any reason why you would favour a second healer over say an Abby who can enable much better.

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Double support / healer is easier to cover.

In this case, the 2x sup/heal is best when you have 1 strong “hyper carry”, and/or when one healer is making up for the weakness of another healer.

Examples of hyper carries are: Valla, Illidan, Butcher, Zul’jin, Tracer, Tychus, Malthael, Raynor.

Essentially, if these heroes are allowed to attack without fear of dying, they can win team fights by their damage alone.

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I would say aba is not always better. Sometimes the rotation dynamic isn’t favorable to the kind of aid hat provides, sometimes the team is prone to getting kited/isolated or Aba can’t get any W value. If they can’t engage you to finish kills but can reliably poke you down in some way that keeps you from wanting to pick the bruiser that you need (Lunara or Stitches being examples of this sometimes) and vice-versa, then sometimes you can just… out-do them in that. Aba isn’t as good at poke. He’s better on a genji/sam/etc. or at least on a ranged AA with some enemy frontline hovering closeby. He’s good, but not 100% of the time thankfully (except on Dragon Shire)

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NOPE, if there is a map to do double heal on that is the one… Just need to know which 2 heals you can combine, it usually goes like Tyrande or Alex + Melee heal most of the time but sometimes 2 melees can be combined (if the right ones are getting picked)… SURE there are towers on each lane but they’re somewhat close to one another and another reason is you don’t have to depush, you just need kill a tower and fight a teamfight at obj

No catapults either so that makes it THAT MUCH more viable