That’s nearly half of the player base. Not only that, but it’s the same amount of players as the damage role. Really think about that for a moment.
Now think about what you’ve promised supports so far. You’re removing their crowd control, you’re reducing their healing, and… that’s it? It’s been just one month under two years since the announcement of Overwatch 2 and that’s all we know about the role that we so desperately need to gain players for the success of the game.
If you have something up your sleeve for support players to get excited about, now is the time to show it. Hell, the time to show it was probably last week during the exhibition match or when announced 5v5, but now is the next best thing.
Are supports getting more damage? Are their utilities going to be improved? Is there a new support hero to look forward to playing? Does Ana own a cute porcupine named Puddles? It doesn’t even have to be something you’ve done, it could just be a concept or design philosophy moving forward.
At this rate, when and if you finally do reveal what’s supposed to make supports engaging in OW2, a good portion of them will have moved on. It’s time to stop assuming OW2 automatically will share the success of the first one and start taking the steps to make it one.
Like,
Ana can headshot.
Mercy can instant pistol swap, and the projectile speed is faster.
Lucio projectiles are faster.
Zen projectiles are faster and more damage.
Moira can headshot.
Brig smacks things harder and more mobile/durable
Sounds terrible and would ensure a majority of support players would leave. Might as well just remove tank and supports altogether if everything is going to be mostly damaged focused.
See I don’t really see the removal of CC or reduction in healing that bad, on launch we had only Zen, Lucio and Mercy - the only form of CC was Lucio’s boop and Mercy did the most healing
To people these days that would seem crazy because if you get any combo of the three people usually end up begging for an Ana
The thing for me will be if Supports lose what makes them fun, in the last couple of seasons in the end of open queue era I used to basically two-trick Sombra and Lucio because I had so much fun on these two heroes, wall riding and knocking people into their deaths? Hell yeah. So would I be bothered if Lucio healed less? Not really, but would I be bothered greatly if I could no longer wall ride and boop people? Then absolutely
I’m really skeptical about just adding more damage to supports. I still think damage-oriented players are going to prefer the damage role, but it would likely alienate a good portion of existing support players. But hey, at least it would be something.
I’m game for that - especially if you throw in unscoped Ana hitscan instead of projectile - but it’s all for naught if the act of healing feels terrible. I, personally, was okay with 50 HPS Mercy before the 55 HPS buff, but I reckon I was in the minority and a lot of people felt weak with it. I can’t deny that 55 HPS Mercy feels a lot better to use, too. And now they’re considering less than 50 HPS? Blimey. No. They need to find another way. Changing how Mercy’s healing works so that it’s no longer a channel, nixxing the in-combat healing penalty, making healing on the weaker side but giving tanks a +healing % recieved passive, whatever.
It’s a similar case for Ana, too. No-one is going to want to have to unload a full magazine of darts into an ally to merely tread water. Don’t reduce the healing per dart, consider working with the HoT component instead.
Honestly I still don’t see reducing heals an issue because one less tank means less overall team damage as well as your own team taking less damage, high healing can be redundant if people end up dying
Mobility is the main issue though, with such an increase to CC there doesn’t seem to be much decrease to mobility and the Sombra rework concerns me greatly, and I say that as a Sombra main
Also high healing won’t help much against flankers (flankers actually have some of the lowest damage outputs per 10 minutes), it really all comes back down to mobility being a concern no matter how you look at it
Though if they reduce mobility through reworks then the need for CC won’t be required, but I don’t see them doing that
People sadly forget that the second tank also provided damage reduction and absorb.
The second tank most of time peeled for the main tank or the supports.
And help to prevent one shoots and created space for the team to work.
He help to keep the enemy dps in check especial high mobility or sniper.
Hrm…I think if you are going to reduce the healing–which maybe is needed with the 5v5 changes and you’re baking in the self healing maybe they should go full baked in and make it mostly passive like Brig.
Rename Tank to Brawler and Support to Utility.
Mercy - Instead of choosing between damage and healing she does “Boost” which does the current +30%damage but does 40HPS. Remove her glock and let her shoot projectiles from her staff with right click–similar to Sym right click orbs(she can fire these while still holding left click on her target).
Lucio - Remove crossfade and he just does 20hps static in addition to his normal +25% speed increase. Amp only effect speed boost. Increase his damage to 22/projectile. To replace crossfade, maybe a debuff that muffles sound for 2-3 seconds or a cleanse?
Moira - She’s pretty weak as it is so keep her values the same and combine her Biotic Orbs into a single Biotic Orb that has 300 charge-healing or damage and drains as it passes teammates/enemies accordingly–this would increase her 1v1 potential+survivability.
Ana - In a pretty good spot, especially with passive regen. Reduce the healing bonus/reduction of bio-nade to 35% healing buff and 75% healing debuff. Also, let her nano herself already.
Bap - He’s just WAY overtuned, he doesn’t need 2 ultimates. I think Amp Matrix leaves and move Immortality Field to ultimate give it a touch more health(250) and raise HP min to 25%. To replace his E give him a stim field that increases fire rate by 25% for 5 seconds on a 15 second CD, 4.5m radius(Similar to 76 Biotic Field). Tune down his regenerative burst self healing to the regular 15hps 75overall and reduce the CD to 11 seconds. Reduce secondary fire healing to 50/35.
Brig - If you’re keeping Ana sleep dart I think you can keep Brig stun. Reduce her Repair Packs to 2 from 3 and their healing throughput 95 over 2 seconds.
Zen - Just a 10hps reduction in his Harmony Orb to bring it in line with other healing reductions. Also, discord gets a nerf just by having less players on the field so I don’t see any reason to touch it. Natural regen + shield regen should be enough survivability for him.
A tank can also provide a significant amount of damage. Look at Zarya, Orisa or Sigma.
From my time playing the OW2 mod, which was before we learnt about the specific healing nerfs, I can’t say healing felt grossly out of whack. I’m not qualified to say it was the best support duo, but Mercy+Zen seemed like it was well up there. I’m fine with toning down the higher burst healing (if it’s done in a way that doesn’t make healing feel like garbage) but slamming everyone seems like a mistake.
There’s somewhat of a tipping point where increasing all of a supports damage but reducing their heals makes it so that healing is no longer worth their time, with the exception of out of combat scenarios. For example if Ana did 100 damage per shot but only healed 50, healing would fail to counteract incoming damage but dealing with the threat would quickly resolve the fight in your favour and the enemy would die in seconds.
Even without increasing support damage, we’re rapidly approaching that point. Reducing heals even a little bit makes it so that the gap between how much you can heal and how much damage someone can deal grows significantly. For example if Tracer deals 110 damage to someone per clip (2 seconds), but Mercy heals 55 HPS, that target will never die. If we reduce her heals to 37.5, as in the exhibition stats, that target will start taking 35 damage per second.
The trouble is that Mercy will be spending all her available actions to provide that level of healing. As a Bap, this change isn’t the end of the world for me, as I don’t only belt out grenades - I weave in rifle bursts. Zen, too, can stick a Harmony on that allied Tracer and merrily go about his business. But Mercy has to either heal or boost, and part of her gameplay is juggling when to boost and when to heal. At the moment, it looks like in OW2, that choice will be largely made for you: blue beam as standard, because healing in combat won’t cut it.
Most of these changes make the characters less interesting, though. For example, Mercy and Lucio no longer suffer an opportunity cost for providing utility, and in fact can’t even make that choice. I’m also going to guess that Lucio isn’t going to get double his current value for his yellow song. We can’t even get the ~+4 HPS from the OWL Exp, so I wouldn’t be too hopeful about a +15 HPS jump in a game that’s looking to cut down on healing.
I used that value because I’m assuming he won’t be able to amp his heals, just his speed so no more burst healing. 30hps probably a bit high, maybe 20hps.
Yeah, but like Zekki said…the choice is already being taken away by reducing the healing to a point where choosing that means your better off using utility. I think renaming it to Utility and adding a couple new heroes that don’t necessarily HEAL but provide utility.
With Mercy as is doing 37.5hps in combat…do you just pull your blaster and not bother? I feel like the current setup we heard about is past that tipping point and Mercy might as well be a dps for all the help her healing will do.
The nerf to discord is inherent in having one less player to do damage to your discord target so there is no direct nerf for him. The HPS nerf is to keep him in line with other supports losing healing throughput. Remember, he’s gaining a passive regen in addition to shield regen.
