Dear DPS mains, give me your best shot

General Discussion
21

Most of the player base is Plat and below. There isn’t a risk that goes along with the flank. The is why everyone flanks all the time there.

It is why people are like “lets make the supports have equal chance vs a flanker” because it is the only way to balance the risk if there isn’t risk from other sources. In those ranks.

I’d hope for a better solution, where you push the difficulty of the flankers up, so, you have a match between how difficult it is to flank, and how much value you expect from a flank, to be more equal.

There is a mismatch going on there. In OW1, there was more risk in going on flanks, so the balance in the fight once you got there wasn’t as important.

22

players or OWL watchers?

someone’s bad at flanking…

try to figure out why, maybe I will give you a medal if you do…

Ana is relatively balanced (ignoring the granade buff), but the fact that dps can come and oneshot her removes the fun from the game

do you still not get it?

what gap and distribution?

you mean just adding Ram is going to change matchmaking? yeah sure…

you lower healing and their damage is low, so why should they play and enjoy support again?

Zenyatta with Moira dash 6sec cooldown, how’s that?

yep, when one tank could answer flank while the 2 enemy tanks that wanted to push still had to respect something like Bastion turret mode maybe

23

Or in a rank where flankers ARE punished. Flanking is more dangerous at higher ranks.

24

Nerfing blatantly OP abilities = remove meta supports?

stop being delusional.

25

I honestly feel like many healers want some type of security that isn’t ever going to be given from playing healer. You are the character who by design everyone wants dead first. You will always have a big target on your back. No matter what, you will need your teammates to cover for you becuase you will be focused. I play lucio for healer becuase he has speed and can boop people away. But i couldn’t expect to mess up a doomfist or tracer who really knows waht they are doing.

26

The only fix I can see for the supports is only revert back to 6v6 and maybe reduce the general damage. Because contrary to what devs think this game doesnt fit being fast paced.

27

Yes, and in OW1, the balance with that was it was difficult to get to them to kill them.

OW2, that has gone, so you become target #1 with far less risk to the attacker.

There is meant to be a value / risk tradeoff, but currently the higher value target, is also the least risky to go for.

That is the problem.

If you want targeting supports to be the “high risk, high reward” play, then it has to have the high risk part.

1 Like
28

If you’d prefer a more complex and thorough explaination.

For perfectly ideal matchmaking quality and matchmaking speed. You’d want:

  • 20% Tanks, 40% DPS, 40% Supports.
  • i.e. 1/5, 2/5, 2/5
  • i.e. 1-2-2

The further it gets away from that ideal, the worse either matchmaking quality or matchmaking speed gets. And it would appear that the devs are focusing on matchmaking speed, instead of matchmaking quality. To compensate for a lack of Support players.

Let’s say the season 1 ratio of Tank-DPS-Support was

  • 30%, 50% 20%
  • i.e. 1.5x, 1.5x, 0.5x compared to the ideal

Then what happens if you make it

  • 40%, 45%, 15%
  • i.e. 2.0x, 1.125x, 0.375x compared to the ideal

So moving from a Tank:Support ratio of: 1.5x vs 0.5x, which makes a 3x gap for matchmaking

And then next patch: 2.0x vs 0.375x, which makes a 5.33x gap for matchmaking.

Almost twice as bad.

Which means the matchmaker will be almost twice as bad pretty soon, in either matchmaker speed or matchmaker quality, probably a mix of both.

You might not like it, but hero usage variety doesn’t matter much if the matchmaker quality is horrible.

And if devs want to recruit people out of F2P FPS games which typically have 1-3 minute matchmakers, or from pre-RoleQueue Overwatch 1 players. Then the lower they can push down the matchmaker timer, the more players they can pull into the game. (And the larger the “opportunity cost” is, if they don’t).

And ultimately it becomes a very simple business decision for Blizzard on:

  1. Fix Matchmaking, lose some players
  2. Don’t fix Matchmaking, lose a ton of players, and don’t-gain a ton of players.

If the devs gotta choose between losing 2-5% of the current playerbase and losing 20-50% of the current&potential playerbase, then it’s kind of a no-brainer what’s the better business choice.

2 Likes
29

Supports still die by flanking and dives/rush because they did before when the TTK was higher. They have more uptime which means more healing and more chances and longer times to deal damage.

Isn’t the problem for them that they are too slow for the pace of the game? Wouldn’t changing the game’s pace fix this problem? We could also just… raise back their healing but than we have unkillable raid bosses because of the meta at the moment which you’d hate more than a Moira with a dash.

30

Delete moira from the game

Zen can now float like in the exp

Brigs new ult is a ferrari

1 Like
31

You cannot balance for Platinum and below, bad players lacking object permanence and not being aware enough to keep track of enemies that aren’t on their screen is not a game problem.

Supports do have an equal chance vs a Flanker though. If a Top 500 Support is forced into a 1v1 by a Top 500 DPS on a flanker, they can still win the 1v1 a decent amount of the time, the only thing that skews it towards the DPS is the opportunism of the DPS player specifically choosing when to engage after the Support has used cooldowns or is completely unaware.

If someone is unaware of you and/or wastes cooldowns that is a mistake, flanking punishes mistakes, it isn’t a viable gameplan more often than not.

No, I just play against real humans.

32

Honestly this. 5v5 has made the game easier for tanks, harder for supports, and 50/50 for dps. Thats what we got, and im fine going back to 6v6.

3 Likes
33

No they really don’t. I play both. In low and mid ranks, it is VERY stacked on the flanker side.

Which is why I play DPS.

It won’t fix it. Because you have the tank problem, which means they STILL have to pull CC from the game.

What happens when you pull CC from the game? flanking becomes a low risk strategy.

1 Like
34

We can’t change the game’s pace because everything is forced due to only having 1 tank per team. If this game had no roles everything would be fine, but in a game with so defined roles you can’t have the game in odd numbers.

1 only tank means tank need to be op as hell, nerf him and he will be useless as hell. The only logical solutions are either delete tanks or just adding a second tank.

1 Like
35

Well, also if ML7 can’t make Ana work, without saying he feels powerless unless he’s getting babysat the entire game.

Then that’s a problem.

And it’s kinda weird to ask a Rank #1 Support player to “git gud”.

2 Likes
36

I’ve played lucio in masters and where you start to see the rare gm or even top500, yes you can pepper them a bit, dp your knockbacks but a gm tracer will melt you if you aren’t getting backup.

Platinum is as platinum does. You can rework heros but you can’t rework players. You can’t expect people in lower ranks to play the game the way it is intended no matter what.

37

So whats the problem exactly? 2 tanks and no CC, I see it better than now, still worse than before but better.

38

Right, but you DO need them to queue and keep new players, and have those new players play support.

“I don’t care about most of the player base, and all of the new player bases game experience” isn’t a viable long term balancing strategy.

The game still has to work down there, and it isn’t.

39

Because in low and mid ranks, Support players are generally less mechanically skilled than DPS of the same rank.

It’s just a side effect of the role being so inflated for so long and only recently actually forcing Support players to do something other than pump heals into their teammates to win games.

If Support was heavily disadvantaged vs DPS, then the best DPS in the world would consistently be farming Supports in Top 500 lobbies, but they don’t, because a good Support is very capable of fighting a good DPS.

That’s not because Ana is bad in a 1v1 vacuum with flanking DPS, that’s because the entire meta literally blitzes Ana. Ana isn’t bad because she can’t fight flankers, she’s bad because she can’t fight Doomfist/Winston, Kiriko, Lucio rush compositions. Not to mention Kiriko not only outclasses her, but denies her so much value with Suzu.

40

I mentioned this in my first post here as the first solution and my most preferred, but compared to what we have now there are several “first steps” we can take that will, although not be preferred, can be easier to contemplate on fixing what the next fix has to be.

Supports just have a rough time living OR are being distracted because of fast pace and anything that can fix that and make the engagements not long will fix it. At this point, I wouldn’t care if it’s 6v6 or something else so long as we get supports playing the game again.

1 Like