I was playing on my silver alt and I tried playing supports as a main. I am usually a Dva and rein main.
Oh boy not only I was able to play better but I was having fun and less stress.
Those 200+ hours on tanks have been totally wasted, I naturally shine more on supports.
Even in silver I can’t win on a tank, I’m just bad at it. I enjoy the game better when I know where teammates are since they are in front of my eyes if I play support.
When I polish my gameplay as Any and Zenyatta I will achieve much more than what I was able to do on tanks.
So is it possible that majority of people plays the “wrong mains”?
I think when people ‘main’ one particular role, for such a long time, and then immediately switch, it can be difficult to adapt to a completely different way of playing without even drilling further into the heroes themselves.
Typically DPS mains play tanks too aggressively and supports play tanks too passively.
I’d say tank mains are more about overall game skill and decision making than raw aim, and so can probably play some good supports but not DPS players.
I think its not about mains, but about different skills:
Maining dps will polish your mechanics and twitchiness. Carrying from dps role is mostly just killing people through better aim and mechanics.
Maining supports polish your game vision, since you have everything in front of you
I think in that sense its easier to progress as support if you have none of the basics, since game sense is easier to actively work on, compared to mechanics / aim (where time spent is king)
So if you start ‘fresh’, first you play support to learn game sense (seeing what is happening and reacting to it). You can actively train this and progress. After a point you will need mechanics , that comes with time (but once tou have it you can carry as dps).
Tanks i think are just harder, since you have to read the game without having evrryone in front of you , and you have to be proactive
I think in Silver, healing tends to be pretty weak. If you can have a half decent healer, you can really do a lot of work as main tank. I personally can do a lot of work on Dva below Diamond.
That said, as you start to level up, main tanks (especially Rein), played decently (not even really well), can carry gold and plat games.
Ultimately though, what has helped me the most in ranking up from gold to diamond is learning more than one hero really well. Then I spent time having vods reviewed on those weak heroes and even my main heroes.
I’ve actually gone through this myself multiple times. When I placed Bronze, I was mostly a Junkrat player, and that sort of continued up until Gold, about five days later (placed last like 4 days of comp). Once I was Silver I started to play Lucio more, but once I hit Gold I went from basically a DPS main to a Support main.
I liked Lucio a lot, and I guess I became a borderline one trick, seeing as though people rarely played Supports. When I got to Platinum, I ended up playing Tank way more, and I believe as of Season 8 I was almost a Tank main.
Now, I am a full blown Tank main, and because I’ve played all of the classes and have a lot of hours on everyone, I can safely say that even though I do flex, I do enjoy tanking the most. Playing Support sometimes felt like babysitting, but it was still enjoyable most of the time. Tanking is my favorite role in every genre of game, but doing it in Overwatch is awesome.
Making space is something most people in Plat do not understand very well, and either play their tank too aggressively, or way too passively. Controlling when and where fights happen, physically protecting my teammates, and making sure my DPS get more eliminations than the enemy DPS by keeping them safe make me feel like I’m doing my part.
Ensuring my team can do their jobs effectively and safely is just something I love to do, compared to getting eliminations and keeping everyone healed.
I don’t know about the “majority”, but I’d wager there are a great number of players who have ruled out a hero or class out of either boredom or for aesthetic reasons.
I always tell people who have fallen a long way, go back to square one and revisit the practice range with every hero. There may be one you’ve previously overlooked or a mechanic that all of a sudden clicks that didn’t before, and suddenly everything could start changing.
Generally when a new hero releases or a rework happens, I’ll one trick that hero for like 10-20 hours. I try to flex between the entire roster and learning all the heroes has allowed me to really focus on all there interactions, there weaknesses, what counters them, where they are strong, etc.
Then you start to become more aware of each heroes difficulties. Like if the enemy has a Reaper and you are on DPS, you might not think he’s being a problem, because you aren’t dying to him; for your tanks however, they are having an absolute nightmare of a time, so now I often swap to Hanzo or someone that’ll allow me to deal with him to help out the Tanks. It wasn’t until I picked up Tanks that those types of interactions became more apparent.
Learning Supports made me more aware of the need to peel people off of them. I wouldn’t pay attention to the Winston diving into the backline “well he’s not attacking me, so whatever” was kind of my mindset. But when you are the Ana or support player that’s constantly being dove over and over first hand, you realize how cancerous it is when nobody helps peel. So now I’m alot more aware of when the enemy isn’t directly targeting me, of what’s going on.
I don’t know how anyone could one trick a single hero, I’d get bored too quick and I feel you become much better by learning as many of the interactions as possible and experiencing them firsthand.