They probably haven’t even looked at supports seriously yet. There’s a reason the game was rumored for a 2023 release. There’s a lot they still need to adjust for 5v5.
Having a functional version ready for OWL next year is going to be a herculean effort. I wouldn’t be surprised if OWL starts with a few heroes grayed out as they aren’t ready for 5v5.
That being said, simply nerfing all supports for 5v5 and calling it a day won’t work. It will just create the next queue time bottleneck.
Supports are supposed to be nerfed. The concept of Overwatch 2 is to promote individual gameplay, individual value, better headshot aiming, and much faster fights. Creating more heals would contradict that very core concept, so heals are obviously nerfed. It makes sense.
Many don’t like Overwatch 2, myself included. But we are not the target-audience of that shooter game.
i just don’t understand why not make the supports less heal-oriented, since the problem is that their abilities lengthen the fights?
and yes, some supports may not have heal abilities at all. you won’t convince me that it doesn’t work
Symmetra has never been a support, she didn’t do anything for the team directly, and was almost always busy doing damage
but I can demonstrate the proposed by the example of the most imo unloved supports - Zen and Lucio
Zen and Lucio seem to be the most unloved support combination among players. basically, because you can play Lucio in two ways - sit on the heal and dance behind the team, sometimes shooting shields, or be a reddit Lucio and not heal the team at all (but at the same time the damage from lucio is less than from the average dps, so he you don’t have 3 dps and at the same time you have only 1 support)
and it’s ridiculously easy to fix it imo
remove the heal from Lucio and do instead, for example, reduce the damage from the enemy team. so, all enemies who are in the range of his abilities will deal 15 percent less damage. this makes sense because lucio very rarely stands with his team, he is more likely to prefer to flank or help individual team members. and for a greater focus on personal experience, you can increase the damage depending on the speed. for example, at normal speed, the damage, as it is now, is 20, but with acceleration it increases to 25 or 30 (increase my boi’s damage, you cowards)
it always seemed so illogical to me to make the most mobile character more useful WHEN HE STANDS STILL. JUST WHY? WHAT WAS BEHIND THIS DESIGN DECISION, BLIZZARD?
and for ult, you can, for example, accelerate all team members in the range by 30 percent or so. and since it’s probably not as strong as the sound barrier, you can finally fix the cost of his ult. because the fact that solo team kill gives him only 55 percent of the ult is hilarious and humiliating at the same time
now Zen. if he is not very useful as a healer, you can buff his other abilities so that he can compare in usefulness with heal-oriented heroes. for example, add a second discord orb. and instead of healing, let the harmony sphere add damage to allies, since healing lengthens the fights too much
such a new harmony orb would be like Mercy’s increasing damage. but I personally think it’s high time this woman was given a glock, she deserved it
let there be a heal on the right click, and a blaster on the left, and she can heal and shoot at the same time. and let’s say, that she has very low damage (10, let’s say), but if she’s shooting the target that is under the fire of an ally, the damage increases (to 25 or 30, let’s say), it’s support-oriented and again, this will spice up the fight
Zen’s ult can still make him invulnerable, but instead of healing, he can increase damage, just like Orisa’s ult. and Orisa’s ult can be replaced with a shield generator, only to make it easier to find it. for example, draw lines about the outer face on which the shield runs to the generator so that it is easier to find it, but while they are going to destroy the generator, the team with the generator can cause damage, or enemies can wait until the generator disappears itself after, say, 6 seconds, how long does the Zenyatta ult lasts now. it will also help to give control over the pace of battle to tanks instead of healers or dps, as they wanted
and now imagine that we have two teams in which Ana (in her current state) and Mercy are against Lucio and Zen
yes, Ana and Mercy can heal, but at the same time, 40% of the their team (two players with discord orbs on them) receive more damage, their team deals less damage due to Lucio’s ability, while one Zen’s teammate deals more damage due to the harmony orb. Ana is likely to be more focused on healing, as her team is now taking more damage, while since Lucio’s abilities are passive, he can deal more damage. And Zen and Mercy will both be focused on dealing damage and looking for a suitable target for their ability
oh, and why don’t make 6v6, where 1 tank, 3 dps and 2 healers? it will also reduce the dps queue a little. sounds reasonable for me, but i never heard it discussed, only 5v5 with 1-2-2 or 6v6 with 2-2-2
just my thoughts tho, maybe i don’t understand some deep mechanics of the game
That makes the assumption that they have general ideas about the role in OW2.
My guess, they are working on Tanks, and problematic DPS. And Supports will be the focused on last.
Especially since Support players are notoriously touchy about gameplay changes.
Likely they trying rework some dps heroes into Tank and Support roles now.
For we know about Doomfist being reworked into a Tank and we never heard back on Sym as a Support.
Maybe we should request that last one.
We’ll have more to say about supports in the future.
A humble request of the forum community: all of the changes we’re discussing right now in various threads around the forum are in testing, meaning that they’re not final, and they’re almost certain to change before we go into beta (let alone launch). These conversations are, to some degree, an exercise in transparency and folks keeping an open (yet critical) mindset helps us keeps you better informed about the development process of OW2.
It’s completely understandable that you may be anxious when hearing about what we’re testing from folks like the OWL pros. You don’t have the full context and your only frame of reference is the current retail environment. I get it.
As a fan, I can tell you OW2 still fundamentally feels like Overwatch. Overwatch 2 is still (all together now) all about the Heroes, and the bright, inclusive, and optimistic future of the world we’ve built together.
I’m looking forward to the day you can all experience this for yourselves.
Pay attention to this line please before whining about someone criticizing the current OW2 build. It means we care.
Thank you AndyB.
something that shouldnt have to be said…but…welcome to the forums Andy 
Yeah the amount of people behaving as if these changes are final… it just hurts my brain.
It ain’t even beta yet
I hope u’re (Mr AndyB) taking notes from our feedback in the Forums about OW2 .
And it is reaching our OW Team .
I really hope so .
Have a nice day .
ok … but if it’s not too much to ask, what were the most useful notes to the perplexities of pro players about support?
For example for the status of Mercy. or if for Brigitte it is really the case to act on the bash rather than on the multitasking of the passive (inspire). personally I don’t understand why Brigitte’s passive is not given some rhythm. it is extremely automatic in too little actions for too many effects. 
I don’t think they’ve begun testing anything for Sym. They haven’t mentioned her at all yet. Let’s keep manifesting Sym Support 
its not yet done so in the end it can feel not like overwatch then.
Game is about gameplay first, yet that is not on the list… so that means nothing about overwatch feeling like overwatch. 
Thank you for the response Andy. I too hope the forums can relax a bit knowing that OW2 is still very much a work in progress. Nothing seen is guaranteed or final, until it is. There’s a few too many here thinking that the things we’re hearing/seeing are guaranteed or finalized when they’re not. We need to wait and see what happens 
It’s hard to trust this when the people who play tested mention other games it feels like rather than OW, and the little bit we saw not feeling like Overwatch.
I am not saying you’re wrong about that, but it’s hard to tell such a thing with what little information we have. Are you guys being careful about stuff like TTK?
As someone who loves Overwatch and hates Call of Duty, it concerns me when a player who has gotten their hands on it says any part of it feels like that game.
I can’t speak for everyone but I play Overwatch for teamwork, for the extra strategy that the slightly lower ttk adds to the game, for hero picks mattering and always feeling like I have options to deal with enemy plans, etc. The inclusivity and brightness of the heroes doesn’t matter to me when it comes to gameplay, only to lore.
The game could certainly be faster, some of the overly sustained comps are a drag and I’m glad something is being done about it. I just hope it doesn’t go too far in the other direction and become a trinity game in name only. I want all the roles to feel impactful and I want team strategy to still be worth doing even outside of league.
People don’t criticize the ones who do it right.
The most crucial aspect of the discussion that people completely ignore is this
Most people I have seen fail to acknowledge this and most people don’t provide their criticism is a constructive way. It’s mostly knee jerk reactions with doom and gloom written all over it.
It’s gotten to the point where people are so sour that they’ll get their pitchforks out for anyone who has a shred of positivity left on this forum.
Also this part is important, we don’t have the full context but when people leave out the context we have it’s not longer a healthy discussion.
If you are referencing what I think you are, you are misquoting him to a degree that feels a tad dishonest. When saying that the closer spawns make the fights last longer and feel like CoD fights that does not mean the game does not play like OW. That is you extrapolating words not said onto what he said.
I actually feel really bad for him. He was trying to give a game that you could compare the long fights to and he did not realize he picked the most controversial game in the world that he could have picked and when you say CoD no one is going to honestly listen to anything you said before or after that.
Testing her as a support was on their list of experiments to do back in May.
I would expect something about her before the end of fall or early winter if it’s successful.
Thats just not true?
Its rather that you seem to not allow any form of criticism.
Just recently somebody postet “I am hyped for OW2” and nobody here insulted them for their opinion.