Difficult to climb as support

General Discussion
41

Thank you!

Hm, I’m still very low Plat. I haven’t noticed a huge difference in my temmates’ skill yet.

Some months ago, I went from Silver to Gold. It was a bit hard to adapt to Gold’s rhythm. The more you climb, the more you feel things happen “faster” in this game.

Basically, this is the only difference I’ve noticed between Gold and Plat teammates. Plats are faster to act, to think, to create opportunities, to group up and to combo ults. I was “forced” to adapt to this new rhythm. I couldn’t adapt to this rhythm some weeks ago, but now I feel “at home”.

I don’t feel like I was carried tho. This is weird, because I definitely felt like I was carried as a Support in low/mid Gold (in many occasions). But during these last few days I made my transition from High Gold to Low Plat, I felt like my individual impact was good and got mostly great stats.

I was stuck in the 1700-2000 bracket for a long time (where you are now). It is a very frustrating bracket. Many players there are just crazy to climb to Gold, and act very impatiently.

I’ll give you the same advice I give everyone (because it worked for me): if you want to improve gamesense and climb, pick a character you’ve never played before. I only made it past 2000 SR after I trained a lot with tanks. For a long time, I never even touched tanks. I was a DPS main.

But playing with tanks in QP improved my gamesense, experience and gave me perspective on how OW really works. It was great. I don’t think I could climb without this particular experience.

In short, playing a role I never played before helped me with all characters and roles, no exceptions. It sounds weird, but it really happens. Your experience with different characters help you to read what is happening during matches way quicker, and make better decisions.

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42

Thank you for the comment. This echos other posts as well. I’ll try to incorporate more offensive plays as support.

43

Healing a sinking ship, I think no, I don’t know if you actually played on low rank, for @GiantAxe I don’t know if it’s like that in mid-to-high Gold, but below you need to carry or simply can’t climb by healing/providing utility, in theory everything is beautiful but when you queue a game it simply doesn’t work

When there’s a Orisa in the team yes, sometimes it’s two off tanks

I never got a single match when a hitscan of my team could land a single shot, plus when there’s a Pharah people don’t even switch from their heroes, we just proceed the game in chaos

In my opinion, healing/damage done is not something to compare in any game, who you healed? Who you did damage to and from what skill was that damage? Is what really counts imo, but I get what you mean, I still get way way way more damage than heal, and silver almost single match unless the support is a potato

I get what you say in general, and yes I do play normally as a healer when everything goes well, but most of the time it is not, I tried playing Ana before going DPS Moira and switching to Zen because it’s what I wanted to play as support, but it doesn’t happen, you heal heal heal as Ana, land sleep darts on the Reaper flanking, throw anti heal in the Rog, but your team doesn’t follow up.
Most of the time, you need to DPS if you want to win and get things done.

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44

Happy training and climbing :+1:

45

Awesome! Thank you for the thought out post.

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46

Hell, sometimes you kind of have to die in order to make space. If I charge in and die but get an impactful pick doing so, and then my team takes the point while I’m running back from spawn because I pinned their Rein or their Mercy right off the map, then I’m good with that even if they whine.

It’s okay if people don’t realize you’re the reason for a won team fight or won game. Only thing that matters is if you win, or that you at least learn something from a loss.

Yes, I have. I’ve climbed from bronze to gold on this account, and silver to plat on my second account. I had to climb out of bronze again with 2/2/2 actually because I had tanked my SR all the way to 1336 at the end of last season by spamming dps heroes I wanted to practice for 2/2/2. Now I’m at 2100 support, 1800 DPS, and 1930 tank on this account. (yes, I play wayyyyyy too much)

Haven’t placed my plat account yet, figure I’ll just wait till the ‘real’ season starts. Or I might not even do it, I’ll just grind my support SR to plat on this one finally. 2/2/2 has been a godsend to me.

I hate tanking, but funnily enough every game I’ve lost on tank has been because we’ve had a DPS Moira. LAst game I played I was on Orisa, I had 30 hp and I’m spamming “I need healing” at the Moira 12 feet away from me who is beaming her coalesence into the enemy team. She doesn’t turn to me to heal me, and as soon as I go to move in front of her to force the beam on me, she turns away.

Our Sigma couldn’t help himself and started complaining about it because he had died so much. DPS Moira is seriously a problem lol, you can’t tell if your team is good or not without actually healing them. If you don’t enable your tanks, they can’t enable your DPS.

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47

Wonderful and focus back-and-forth. Really appreciate the time all of you are taking on the post. I think everyone is benefiting from each of your insights.

48

I have to go lay down, gotta get up early, but I thought I’d leave you with one last nugget of wisdom.

Someone once gave me the best bit of advice I’d ever heard, in another team based game (Heroes of the Storm).

In a team based game, you have to play with your team whether or not they are dumb. But keep in mind that your enemy is in the same rank. They are also dumb. They will do dumb things that make no sense. You have a choice. You can either help your teammate do the dumb thing (heal them through it in this case), which might actually end up making it work, or you can keep on trying to do the absolute right thing, but you’re the only one doing it, so it doesn’t work.

It boils down to this: When you’re on a team full of potatoes, don’t try to be god. Be king potato instead.

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49

I agree that a DPS Moira when the team has both two DPS playing well is bad, what is actually rare but okay, when I’m playing DPS because the DPS is not doing it, usually the tanks stay fine with the another healer(only one time I got a Lucio as the another healer and he didn’t heal anything, just stayed with the speed thingy all time), unless it’s two offtanks, I can totally use the entire heal source on tanks more often too

I’m planning to try playing Hammond as he can DPS too, I got gold in tank with Orisa but playing her now just feels like randomness too, less than healer, so she’s good most of the time, but sometimes it’s frustrating

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50

But see here’s the thing.

In lower elos, it’s not the DPS that carry.

It’s the tanks

I almost always finish games on tank with silver, or even gold damage. Tanks do TONS of damage when they are up, this is part of how they make space. Orisa hits like a bus, Reinhardt can 2 shot just about everyone (or one shot them with pin), Sigma does INSANE damage (see what I did there) if he can aim, D.Va and Roadhog are basically DPS.

Don’t worry about whether or not your DPS are killing anything. Help your tanks kill stuff, and peel off your other healer. Spray your tank with heals, then toss heal ball, then throw some DPS until they get to about 3/4th health, then spray them, then dps, then spray them, then dps. When heal ball comes back up, throw it again. Don’t damage ball unless you’re doing it into a tiny room or you know for a FACT it will secure a kill. It’s a waste, and you get way more ult charge from heal ball than you do damage ball.

Of course heal the DPS too, but if you enable your tanks, the DPS will either eventually get picks, or it won’t matter because your tanks will be destroying everything.

Think about how often in low elo you see a Winston come into a game and just WRECK EVERYONE and you have no clue how the hell he’s even doing it. Or how dangerous a super aggressive Reinhardt is at these low elos when people are scared to death of him. His hammer hits WAY WAY harder than your succ beam. Help him hit people with it. Help Roadhog combo hook people.

Like trust me, stop looking at it as DPS are the problem. It’s your tanks. The more you think this way the more you’ll notice that your worst losses are from things like Orisas who keep backing up as the payload comes toward them and just hand the enemy free ground. Or Reinhardts who forget they have a ‘w’ key.

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51

Except it’s not true. Support is pretty much the hardest to climb with because you are dependent on the team being competent. You can be silver and still be top class support because your team doesn’t know how to act. I know because it happened several times to me.

52

It’s early in the enforced 2-2-2 meta, but so far I don’t know if I can endorse this advice.

The amount of healing your team typically needs makes it hard to play Zen with only one other healer.

Unless your DPS are shredding or their team just isn’t doing well I find tanks get shredded when there is a Zen around. His healing per second is just far too low.

One call out I’d say is if one of the tanks is Road and can handle some self healing, that helps a lot.

53

Not sure if you are going to get much help, because in probably the 2 most frustrating aspects of gameplay, you sre at the mercy of your teammates, tanks in particular.

The first is chokepoints. For some insane reason, they just dont want to move forward. Ive never seen anything like it, they will stand there until their team is gone rather than walking through and engaging.

The other is payloads. It drives me up the wall when Orisa puts her shield 20 feet from the cart, waits till it moves forward, then backs up again to give more room rather than just claiming the cart by putting her shield on the other side.

You’re right, there is nothing you can do about those, and that supports of all type are fairly weakened in damagecreep land, but you can still make a difference.

54

im glad im not the only one who cant win a game on support.

as a support main, it feels so strange that my dps placements placed me 200 sr higher (3300) than my support placements (3100)

:confused:

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55

I’ve always seen Zen as the ultimate enabler. A harmony orb on a Genji might not seem like much, but it gives them that little bit of durability and confidence needed to play to their fullest potential. Couple that with a discord orb on the targets they’re hunting down and you have a very aggressive synergy developing. I don’t really have an issue with his low overall healing. With an Ana/Moira/Mercy/Baptiste, they’ll be able to pick up the slack. And I’ve even had some really good games with Lucio/Brig, too. They have to be a bit more attentive, but it can work really well.

The only problem I am having is that I’m occasionally struggling to build transcendence quickly and reliably. Between the across-the-board ult generation nerf and the increasing frequency of shield tanks, I don’t seem to have it when I need it quite as often, and when that happens… well, it feels really bad.

It might just be me being a little rusty and thrown off by the new ult generation rate, but it’s definitely something that’s been dogging me the past few days.

56

Hmmmm?

Ok.

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57

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58

Can attest to this.

Just had a game where me and the other support had a total of 40k healing, but the DPS just couldn’t kill anything even when being Nanoboosted/ Amplification Matrix

There’s only so much a support can do if the rest of the team isn’t up to par, you can only enable/ heal so much. The rest is up to other people.

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59

Tbh with you ranking system is bad, I’m flex player who plays normally support nowsdays but my ranking on support is 500 point lower then my tank:

And I know it’s not my true rank because ppl started to call me a smurf…

Edit: exclaimer I don’t throw matches.

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60

Go, Go Battle Mercy!

No, wait, that’s bad advice. This is good advice:

I’ve definitely had some games where I made bad choices about healing target prioritization and it had a negative impact on the game. It’s especially difficult when your team is chaos and spread out in four different places. I dunno, I have trouble figuring those situations out, but it seems best to pick the two people who bother to group.

Also, don’t forget to hit the “Group Up” button. It helps. Sometimes.

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