Any ideas for support balance Season 14?

General Discussion
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Heyo. Going into S14, I know a lot of people are really excited for Hazard -me too! But what I am tentatively more excited about might be some actual balance changes for the support role. I play GM support and coach down through gold (and have been playing since OW1’s launch), and I think I am actually hard pressed to think of a time when there has been such a boring ‘must pick or lose’ batch of heros in the support category as now. Juno+Brig or Ana truly feel like they are absolutely must pick right now. Their absolute dominance in what we have as kind of ‘soft numbers’ on Overbuff (as Overbuff can only be used as a general tool; the data is ‘similar’ to internal data, according to the devs, but obviously is not full data, and can not be used as gospel) almost can not be ignored. We obviously also can see professional matches, and any streamed scrims. On top of that, data we do have access to is the T500 leaderboard, which can be a surprisingly useful tool to track trends. I think it’s pretty hard to ignore that there is a fairly clear problem in the support role right now, lol.

For a point of reference, in the T500 leaderboard early on for this season, we had our top 3 PRs as; Juno 380 picks, Ana with 286 picks, and Brig at 235 picks. (this means our top PR hero in T500 had a higher PR than the bottom 7, nearly 8, supports combined). But Juno had only been out a few weeks (I waited a few weeks for her PR to settle before pulling data), so they hadn’t had a great opportunity to balance her. Surely the MSP patch would help, right?

Post MSP (which was Nov 12. I waited a bit again to pull data to allow the changes some time to breathe), Our top 3 performers in T500 were Juno with 400 picks, Brig with 306, and Ana with 282. This was the patch where they barely nerfed Juno, and (imo) pretty strongly buffed Ana (for some reason??). Juno’s PR went up by 20, Ana’s had dropped by 4, but Brig (who was unchanged balance-wise) went up by 71 picks.

After a recent pass through to check where we stand in regards to T500 PRs (which I always run against my own sentiments from playing/coaching several hours a day, forums/streamer noise, pro play, and some overbuff stats to form my judgements), we (as of 12/1) have Juno at 391, Brig at 320, and Ana at 312. Juno dropped by 3 picks (though still a net gain this season despite nerfs), Brig jumped by a further 14 picks (so she is up a total of 85 slots in T500), and Ana gained 30 after more adjustment time to her buffs (so she is up 26 slots).

Reading this, and if we use T500 as a guideline (along with the pro scene, where there is even less rigidity), the gulf between the ‘must pick’ supports, and the ‘throw picks’ is getting wider and wider. The team has had months to address this, and their only answer was buffing Ana and a slap on the wrist for Juno which, as we can see, did nearly nothing for her overall usefulness.

That being said, with the hope that the team can see the problem -since they surely have even more internal data they can draw from-, what would you do to try to level the playing field in the support role some? I’m in favor of nerfing the overperformers down; powercreep and healcreep is already starting to inch up from S9 again, and the Ana buff spiked both of those, to be honest. So I think buffing any of the support cast simply because they’re nowhere close to as good as these three heros would start a snowball effect. Better to nerf -perhaps even strongly- the top performers without any pairing buffs for the cast to see where the dust settles. From there, we can see who actually needs any upward adjustments (if any!) and tweak as needed. I’d rather a stronger approach to balance because at least the game will feel fresh or interesting for a little while, as opposed to their tedious doling out the tiniest sliver of nerfs at a time which is like prolonging torture.

So where would you all start with adjustments, do you think?

6 Likes
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A dps that can apply anti

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And take any uniqueness away from fan favorite Ana? Bite your tongue. Haha, but it would be interesting for sure, and I definitely agree that current anti is far too potent an ability right now all things considered. We have a hero (Kiriko) who exists almost entirely to counter Ana now; we went there before adjusting anti further. Yikes.

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Alright, Symmetra can anti now.

It wont matter because the DPS playerbase will never pick her up.

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Hard nerf Junos mobility so she stops being effectively invulnerable to everything not hitscan. Nothing in the support roster will change until we move away from Juno being S tier with (insert pocket support here) and that all comes back to her not dying enough.

The mobility while fun needs to be hard nerfed so that she dies more and there really isn’t more to it. Or just hard nerf all of her output so her survivability doesn’t matter as much…Either way, nerf her like she’s Sym.

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I agree. I think they should really look harder into these things while a hero is still new(ish), before the playerbase can get too attached to any one part of their kit that it becomes set in stone. Like Lifeweaver, for example (not that he is impeccably balanced), but they made fairly large changes to him early in his introductory period, so it didn’t feel like they ‘ruined’ a hero’s fantasy playstyle, as one had not been established yet.

To me, I would agree with nerfing Juno’s survivability in some way, likely through mobility, in conjunction with something else such as her healing output. But I worry that, even though I think she should be made less mobile, too many people associate that level of mobility as the most essential part of her kit by now, in a similar vein to Mercy, where a lot of her dedicated playerbase say touch anything about her kit besides her mobility. (Though with Juno, it’s a much clearer decision that her mobility does need to go down!).

If Juno were less of a master-of-all-trades, and were more risky to play, I think that would leave enough breathing room for other supports to feel viable again. She’s just too low risk, high reward right now, even after all her nerfs. And I think she does have an interesting kit with healthy skill expression, and does not offer anything that feels too terrible to play against/with (such as Kiri’s tele/suzu, or Mercy’s rez, or Bap’s lamp, etc)…but she just needs to be balanced, lol.

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Ana needs anti nerfed to a 50% reduction. We’ve been down this road before. She’s clearly a problem, and she’s always going to be a problem, until her kit is addressed. Just because she can occasionally go under the radar because some other support takes the spotlight for a month, doesn’t mean she isn’t still the elephant in the room.

Ana feels a lot better with 75 damage per shot, instead of 70, but her gimmicks definitely need to be nerfed into the ground. They’re just not fun or fair to play against, and actively ruin the experience for everyone else.

Bap and Brig are probably fine as they are. Though I will stand by that Brig needs a shield buff. That thing is made of paper. Characters like Hanzo and Junkrat keep getting damage buffs to help them in their DPS duels, but Brig’s shield remains the same. Just buff it to 300 or 350.

I know buffing Brig seems insane, given that she’s kinda meta atm, but it’s really more of a QoL buff that’s fixing a wrong.

Illari is probably fine.

Juno needs some kind of survivable or self-mobility nerf. Maybe give her a shorter duration on her hover, or a longer, more impactful, CD. She’s kind of badly designed, as she just can’t be interacted with by some heroes. She outruns most of the roster, while also floating in the air, nigh untouchable by anybody that isn’t hitscan.

LW and Mercy are probably just beyond saving at this point. They both need entire reworks. Mercy needs Valk moved to her E ability so that she can dive better, and her rez should be tied to Valk, as in during Valk, your E ability becomes rez. And her ult should just be something like either turbocharges her beam, or allow her to heal and damage boost at the same time.

I just don’t know what could fix LW. His entire design is flawed. I still support the idea that his needles work like the Needler from Halo, and if he lands a bunch on someone in a short window, they explode and do bonus damage. Beyond that, I just don’t know.

Lucio is fine.

Moira is probably fine enough, I really just don’t know how to improve her without ruining her feel or playstyle.

Zen is fine. But I did like the Mirrorwatch concept of when he lands damage, it pulses some healing for his team. I think this could be expanded on, but Zen is very dangerous to buff.

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I get that. If the mobility can’t be touched then it means she needs all of her output hard nerfed instead so that her being borderline impossible to kill for half the roster stops mattering so much. Personally I’d find such a large drop in value to be unfun but if people really do enjoy flying around that fun…

Instead of replying to everything I’ll just respond to this. Yes, I agree that support generally does too much too easily and with too little skill input/risk. Supports like Lucio and Zen are exceptions but Juno, Bap, Kiri etc are beyond outrageous when looked at vs the rest of the roster. Anas design is fine in that it’s punishable but it’s definitely anti fun.

But yeah. You’re talking to the right person if you think support as a role gets value with too little risk and Juno is a perfect example of it.

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TBH if she had like 200 or 175 Hp that could work with her advanced mobility. just like Tracer.

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I really don’t think it would change much of anything for the heroes that can’t deal with her. In theory all projectiles already 2 tap her but yet :man_shrugging:

The issue is hitting her at all never mind multiple times when she’s paying attention before the Brig glued to her packs her. It’s exhausting.

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ironically a sniper should counter her if her HP was lower or Cassidy / Soldier should within theory work well against her.

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Can we not enforce hitscans even more :neutral_face:

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within theory a bastion can punch through 200 HP or 175 HP quickly and he isn’t a full hitscan. Pharah and Echo could be mobile enough to deal with her as well with less HP. It’s hard trying to find a way to keep her as mobile as i like that as a gimmick but ther wouldn’t be as many fun options against her. Maybe Torb Turrets as well but thats really about it for the little pest.

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Yeah. It’s why I think hard output nerfs may be needed instead so her not dying stops mattering so much.

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for all Supports in my opinion id say…

Moira is fine.

Mercy is fine but can be redesigned

Lucio needs major work. Juno just provides better mobility and can heal constantly while lucio needs to stop healing to make his team move faster which at times can be detrimental.

Zen… who knows.

Bap is kinda ok but i wish he had slightly more healing with his regen skill for teammates so if he gets in close to his team it can matter more or hang back as a sniper… offering more variety in his gameplay.

Ana could do with a rework eventually but she is sorta and sorta not ok.

Lifeweaver can be either kept the same or reworked.

Brig needs slightly more Shield HP as just a small touch up. if she had 50 more Shield HP would be lovely for more teamwork potential.

Juno can be tweaked a bit. not hard nerfed but definitely tweaked.

Illari can be rebuilt. She isn’t exactly bad but she meshes a bit too much with other characters and i’d like to see her pylon be removed actually so we can get a dedicated Builder support who can make his own pylons and such.

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Nerf brig, nerf juno.

brig honestly needs another rework, again, how inspire works is just too broken. Why do they refuse to touch this ability. remove the proc from her flail so she actually has to get close to the enemies.

juno has too much mobility and her ult is too good. reduce her vertical mobility by a chunk, give her a 7 second cooldown for fly instead of 6 and make her ult move faster, dissappear faster and reduce it’s healing by a bit.

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biggest issue with support balance is that its always a question of, do we bring the bottom supports (weaver, mercy, illari) up to the top supports level? or bring the top supports down to the bottom supports level?

either way, the support category has been in dire need of value equalization across the role. theres too big of a consistent value gap between the top and bottom, which is especially strange since most all supports have fairly similar playstyles/target priority as one another

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Nah. Just make her shield more consistent. I swear half the time I die I put my shield up and it just isn’t even there anyway.

Maybe it’s brig shield delay, maybe it’s favor the shooter, maybe it’s both, idk. But it’s not great

So kill the character. I see. I guess if we want to make brig basically unplayable that’s one way to do it.

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Tank situation bad too. As a Ram main, i derank hard if i want to play my hero. Total amount of Ram players in T500 is 12 this season among 1500 spots (NA, EU, ASIA). His winrate and pickrate in overbuff is horrendous. He doesn’t even have niche like some other tanks (cc immune orisa, one shot hog, bubble etc). He is completely gutted and unplayable. He isn’t even harmful to gameplay flow of Overwatch like some other tanks Orisa/Doom/Mauga/Rein/Dva etc… Idk why devs have such a strong bias against Ramattra. He is consistently at the bottom. As a Ram main, last time i played him competitively was second half of S8. It feels like Rein players cried so much they deleted Ram from the game. Rein is in top3 territory since S10 btw. Which has a very goofy and flawed gameplay. You basically block damage and stall the whole game and try to one shot with ultimate and pin. The whole gameplan is harmful to the spirit of the game.

I don’t have any patience left honestly. Whatever role i play, some hero designs dictate a very bad game flow and makes the game unfun. At that point i refuse play the boring game just to win. We recently saw Doom, Orisa, Rein, Dva, Winston and JQ meta. Doom, Orisa, Dva, Rein shouldn’t even exist let alone be meta in this game. Only JQ and Winston meta was fair and square and rewarded the good player. Although Winston was a bit too much after armor changes.

Ana also need to be mentioned. If you are playing tank, Ana is torture. This nade vs suzu dynamic isn’t really deep. Devs need to give up on this idea. They want supports to have big impact and feeling of agency but this isn’t it. I play support as much as tank and Ana is just harmful all around. She is only fair against dps. I’m saying this as a player who has very high play time on Ana. These devs needs to sit and reconsider some things. I give up on tank and only played support (mostly ana) since they gigabuffed the Ana in mid season patch for no reason.

I will probably grind Marvel Rivals next season. The state of this game is just unacceptable to me. Let’s see how Marvel Rivals work. It will take time to grasp it but 8 years of OW experience will help.

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Her healing output is way too high and her ultimate is a very very strong win con. They need to tame those a little and then change ratio of Brig pack’s burst healing vs heal overtime. Lower burst heal from 25 to 20. Add heal over time to +10.

She can be hard to kill but she can also be easy to kill. There is a thin line there. She can’t deal much damage back and she has low hp. Players who mastered her movement and pay attention doesn’t die easily, keep that in the game. Reward those players. But her output is too brutal making things unkillable and brute force win teamfights with ult frequently.