I feel like there was an overall negative reaction to the grand finals OW2 coverage.
Supports were significantly nerfed compared to the live game.
Can we get a dev, or a developer update to talk to us about what their general ideas for the role?
Watching the play test a couple weeks ago has left a sour taste in my month.
Good news is it seems unlikely that dumb healing debuff will go through
hoping for one as well
i bet they’re gonna have one when they have the healing numbers tuned for 5v5 and when more support rework(s) ready to show off, like the Moira changes they’ve been working on forever
I’m sure we’ll get an update when they actually start working on them.
I second this, I really wanna hear about supports. As someone who pretty much only queues support and happily flexes across all of the support roster, I’m hoping that my favourite role in the game is going to be fun and engaging in OW2, and not just feel like we’re “helping” our team, but actively having an impact on each game.
They want supports to be reduced into basic game mechanics. An out of combat regen like COD, and a diablo accessory that gives a buff to DPS
“Equip the ring of Mercy for 30% damage increase! Only lasts for 5 seconds! Enables regen after 4 seconds of no damage”
I’m really waiting for this as well.
The whole tank role plays completely differently. They’re all getting major reworks, new abilities, and a passive that helps with the most frustrating aspects of tanking. Like or dislike, the changes to the tank role are at least interesting. They’ve teased multiple tank changes. If you’re a tank player, you’re likely to at least want to try them out.
The dps role is being put front and center. The entire game is being rethought to better suit their preferences. There will be less damage mitigation. There will be less CC. There will be less peel for supports. They will be moving faster so it will be easier for them to take down their prey. The new maps are all being designed to make flanking and taking off angles easier, and to encourage a more deathmatch style of play. They’ve shown a couple of reworks and teased a new dps hero. If you’re a dps player, you’re likely to be excited about Overwatch 2.
If you’re a support player, the outlook is much more grim. The whole game is being shifted to a chaotic play style where you’re less effective and where you’re much easier to kill. The changes we’ve been shown (though not actually told about, since they seem reluctant to talk about supports) all seem to be heavy handed nerfs that show an underlying lack of understanding of how the role plays out. The new passive they’ve been given is nice for Ana, but useless for multiple other supports. They’ve shown nothing exciting. They’ve teased nothing exciting. The gameplay we have seen looks painful for the support players.
A lot of support players are commenting that they’ve lost their excitement for OW2. I’m definitely in that camp. The whole role seems like an afterthought, or like they haven’t figured out how to fit it into the new paradigm. I hope they talk about it soon, and I hope they have something to show that shines some positive light on OW2. I want to look forward to it, but right now I just can’t.
tTHANK THE HEAVENS!!!
The fact that they tried that out though and that they showed it in their exhibition match means that they’re likely to put in something similar. What they presented is a reflection of how they’re thinking about the support role. This dumb nerf may not go through, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some other dumb nerf take its place.
Given how much pro players expressed dislike in how much they’re nerfing supports, I think they’ll dial it back a notch. They probably thought supports were going to be more impactful then they were
I think they’re going to need to dial it back more than a notch.
I don’t mind a nerf to individual abilities. It’s likely that support cool downs, aoe, and burst abilities might need to be adjusted. A blanket nerf to everything never made sense.
There’s no world where Zenyatta’s healing needs to be nerfed. There are so many individual healing interactions in the game that don’t care at all whether the enemy team has 2 tanks or just one. It’s an ill conceived idea. It concerns me that they didn’t see this, and that they didn’t predict what would happen in the pro match.
I mean from the few things we have heard from the devs it seems like the nerf may go through, if just having the percentage lowered a bit. Personally I think if this change goes through the game will be dead in a year, making the class that makes up 40% of the team comp feel absolutely useless is not a good way to balance the game.
I think Ana and Bap need their healing toned down for the most part. They’re the entire reason healcreep exists, and they’re also the entire reason they’re looking to tone down healing for everyone…
The rest of the Supports shouldn’t pay for the sins of Ana/Bap.
That would basically make the issues we have with tank now be the issues we have with support in OW2. So nothing was learned.
I don’t think bap’s healing per se is broken (buffing it to 70 per direct was a little question however); it’s what all he can do while he has high healing which involves mobility, high poke damage, and the ability to make his team and himself immortal
I agree. This is a bad change, but some version of it is likely to go through, and it’s likely to make a whole role feel awful.
I understand that they felt that fights were taking too long (though from what we saw in the previous PvP show match that didn’t seem to be the case), but the way they chose to handle it make so little sense to me and shows so little thought.
When both teams collide in a all out brawl and both teams have an Ana and a Bap, I can see how that would lead to an overlong fight given that off tank’s damage is missing. This is a reasonable concern. Why nerf Zen’s healing though? It’s not a problem in this context. Why nerf Lucio’s healing or Mercy’s? They’re not the ones prolonging the fight indefinitely.
What’s more, there are a lot of situations where you apply healing that are not an all out brawl. If the enemy Genji, or the enemy Tracer, or the enemy Doomfist try to dive your Ana and you want to peel for her, then it doesn’t matter at all whether or not the other team is running Rein/Zarya or just Rein. It doesn’t figure into the situation. When you’re helping your Ashe take down the enemy Pharah, it doesn’t usually matter at all whether they have double shield or just Sigma. The game is made up of individual interactions. They couldn’t possibly have meant to change ALL of them.
There has to be some well thought out change that makes more sense. Bap and Moira both have incredible aoe healing throughput that can be increased even further through cooldowns. It’s possible to nerf this throughput and compensate them elsewhere without nerfing orb of harmony. It’s possible to nerf the added healing effects of Ana’s grenade without nerfing her healing darts (or Mercy’s healing, or Lucio’s healing). It’s possible to keep the healing portion of the support role from feeling ineffectual. It just requires more thought and work. I hope they put it in.
At the end of the day, I think the devs simply don’t know how to make sure that the game:
Overwatch has always tried to balance those four aspects. My feeling is that for Overwatch 2, the devs have decided to focus as much as possible on 1 and 2 at the expense of 3 and 4, and hope that the problems will sort themselves out eventually.
This is fine. It’s their game and their prerogative, but it does leave a lot of players feeling left out. My hope is that sometime soon, one of the devs will post some information that either has:
There was a lot of updates related to this subject posted by Community Manager AndyB here:
There was indeed some amount of discussion there, but there were three major problems.
The first is that the solutions they propose don’t seem to make much sense. They’re too ham fisted to actually work in the game. If fights are overly long in their current patch, nerfing all healing indiscriminately isn’t a reasonable way to solve the problem as it has far reaching consequences that go well beyond fight length and trickle down to almost every match up in the game. Honestly, I’m skeptical that the fights in OW2 were actually lasting that long. In OW1 4v4 modes and 5v5 fights where both teams have traded aren’t all that long, and in the previous show match we didn’t see overly long fights. I can understand that without an off tank, and with Moira/Bap/Ana on both teams, things could drag on, but I don’t understand the path from there to nerfing Zen’s healing.
The second is that they put a patch in the OWL finals in which supports were clearly too ineffective and the game was a chaotic brawl. They chose that patch for public viewing. It’s indicative of the direction in which they want the game to go.
The third is that without any positive news about the support role, without anything new to get excited about in that role, all we’re left with are the negatives, and it’s disheartening.
I love Overwatch. I’ve played it for thousands and thousands of hours. The idea that I may not love (much less not even like) Overwatch 2 was inconceivable to me a few months back, but I’m afraid that this is where we’re heading.
I love playing support. Mercy is my favorite in that role. When I watched the fame, none of the supports were doing all that well, and Mercy was one of the worst. What I saw was - a healing nerf to 50 hps (a number she’s never worked with), on top of that - a global healing nerf of 25% putting her near Zenyatta levels of healing, on top of that - faster moving dps in maps built to enable faster moving dps to create a state of constant small skirmishing, on top of that - a passive that Mercy doesn’t even benefit from, on top of that - an admission from the pros that the game felt more like a Deathmatch, that supports felt bad to play, and that Mercy was trash.
This was hardly heartening news, and there’s nothing to soften the blow. No new support heroes teased, no new support abilities teased, no reimagining of what the support role is. We were essentially told that it would be more of the same, but weaker. It’s just difficult to feel optimistic or excited.
An update with either something exciting or an acknowledgement that the role is currently not playing how it should be, but that they are working on it, would be much appreciated.
I think developers themselves are just testing how to properly nerf healing, so not sure what they would even say… The OWL version won’t make it to the release tho (likely)