Damage Mitigation and Healing Received Statistics

General Discussion
1

It is my opinion that damage mitigated shouldn’t be one of the stats on the scoreboard. It encourages incorrect play by rewarding a player with higher numbers even if all the player is doing is sitting at choke as rein until his shield breaks and then repeating.

Furthermore, this stat is incredibly inconsistent:

  • Ana gets some (because of damage resist)
  • Rein gets some (because of flat out blocking)
  • D.va gets some (because of eliminating projectiles on a resource)
  • Doom has a bit (because of damage resist AND extra health)
  • Brig has a bit (because of rally)
  • Orisa has some, but doesn’t distinguish between fortify and spear spin.
  • Armor is not included

My point here is that these stats are incredibly obtuse and don’t provide much useful information for everyone that can see it. As a stat displayed for the entirety of a lobby, it is useless to not only the other people on your team, but also to the player to which the stat refers to. It is also worth bringing up that most of the characters in overwatch do not have damage mitigation. That fact alone is rather distressing.

I argue that instead of damage mitigation the scoreboard should display healing received. This will greatly increase the clarity of personal performance, and is vastly more indicative of a teams survivability. With this information, personal impact becomes more generalizable from game to game and it also becomes easier to ascertain a player’s personal contribution from statistics alone for both support players and for tanks and dps.

Furthermore, this statistic would be invaluable in a team environment. One would be able to tell who is being targeted on your team with a simple glance at the numbers in concert with the knowledge of a character’s health pool and their mitigation abilities. In vod review, it would be extremely easy to determine where your resources are going and what can be done to further optimize a team’s performance.

While this may lead to an upturn of toxicity toward support players (non-support players whining about not getting healed), statistics do not exist to make us feel better. They exist to give us accurate information about the performance of both the individual and the team as a whole. Clarity should be of paramount importance in the numbers that represent us both because it will help us to improve over time and because it will allow us to make the best possible decisions mid game.

To summarize, damage mitigation as a statistic is not only useless to the majority of a team, it is also ineffective at communicating the state of the game to the owner of the damage mitigated stat. In fact, this particular statistic creates a misconception about personal performance and has a very high probability of rewarding poor play. Furthermore, all instances of damage mitigation from each character are very different from each other. This leads to further obfuscation of the truth and can even further misconceptions due to its rather unintuitive nature.
In contrast, healing received is a stat that applies to everyone, can be used by everyone, and increases the clarity of a game by magnitudes. The statistic also allows a player’s experiences in specific games to be generalized to their ability as a whole and would lead an increase in the rate of player development.

It is clear to me that this statistic would be a great boon to the Overwatch community, and going forward into Overwatch 2 the amazing development team at Blizzard has declared their intent to keep the community in the light and increase their clarity of information. It is my hope that they can take a step further in this direction and give us this much needed boost in informative throughput.

3 Likes
2

I don’t think it’s an insanely useful stat. However, if they ever add something like this then I want “damage taken” instead of “healing received”. The “damage taken” isn’t the same stat because it includes damage that leads to deaths (for example when you get one-shot by widow).

The report feature can keep that problem at bay (it already does). It’s the toxic bad players that are whinging about “zero heals” and they should receive the least amount of heals (along with their reports) anyway if the support players get the prioritisation right.

1 Like
3

Blocking damage is 1 thing, however resisting or mitigation damage is a pointless metric cause then are you gonna have category for armor damage reduction

4

While I don’t see damage mitigation as a particularly useful stat, neither is healing received and healing received would have a heck of a lot more of an actively detrimental impact on the game.

5

All of the stats can be misinterpreted and lead to poor play. Nothing we can do about it.

6

Wouldn’t that mean their other stats, like damage, would worsen?

Every stat by itself is limited, you could zero deaths and be playing horribly, a forkton of damage and dying too much…

The total is greater than the sum of its parts.

7

No matter what Blizzard does with the scoreboard, it’s #1 use is going to using it to shift blame. That said, they could still work on the damage mitigation stat to make it more clear what it covers and fix up all the things it currently ignores.

8

Do you refer to the stats of bastion in the picture? Because I think thats the new passive and not armor on its own.

9

healing received will help tell me if im getting healed or because enemy just better dealing damage

10

The problem with that idea, is that if you aren’t getting healing, it still won’t tell you why.

Usually, poor healing output comes down to no one peeling for the Supports and/or poor positioning.

1 Like
11

its to compare how much heal i got compared to other guy

if i was hanzo staying back with my healer and only getting like 1k heal

while my tank or my team genji having more than 4k healing…