I mean, in most cases a good team was considered mercy+lucio and mercy+zen so it was clear even from the start that healing will have a big role in the game.
It was definitely consistent, but it also meant it was pretty crappy.
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We had a deathball meta with Zen+Lucio back then.
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Don’t worry, they will make the same mistake they do today and buff hps to compensate. Thus spiralling the game towards a black hole of burst heal/dps where all roles suffer as a result.
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I am talking about pre-ana times.
Yep, Mercy wasn’t very good until 2.0. She was a troll pick unless you were gold and below.
A support doesnt need to have healing capabilites but strong utility, but you cant really make more than 1. Imagine having 2 non-healing supports on your team, they would need insane utility to keep the team alive if they can even keep them alive without heals
Ana originally had very limited ammunition at first, and couldn’t heal through other players. She was supposed to be a type of “burst” healing compared to the sustained healing of zen or mercy.
Wide range, but lower healing overall. The passive (12-> 16hps) wasn’t the big change there. It was because with the percentage multiplier he only healed like 40hp/s during amp it up.
Yup pre-Ana. It was Lucio+Zen and Double Lucio with Mercy replacing Zen some times.
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Which is absurd when you think about it because she was originally supposed to have such an exponential possible hps because of all of her draw backs, but know most of those are gone and she’s still 87.5 hps baseline.
Honestly think they need to increase her dart size to .4 from .3, nerf her healing, and than nerf Moira/Baptiste healing, give Moira some utility, and try to make healers about more than just healing again. I want old Support Symmetra, but there’s no reason why she needs to heal to fill her role.
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Problem is, people want their supports to heal. And I feel like if you made something that was so good they’d forego healing for it it would probably become a must pick.
It’s the same problem as barriers.
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Before it was not, supports where just supports. Which is truly how I liked it. Now supports have to have some kind of healing.
I am assuming they changed it because of OWL or even the identity crisis of Sym.
A support supports. OW is literally the only game i see where supports just dump heal around like crazy while other games only give heal abilities on cooldown or resource meters and focus mostly on their utility to help their team being it CCs or defensive abilities. OW supports with the exception of Zen and Lúcio don’t really have a good design imo.
Ana heals too much and bionade is busted
Mercy damage boost mess with breakpoints and makes it too hard to balance
i don’t even need to mention Brig or Bap. Current Brig is what OW2 should aim supports to be: utility focused and less focused on healing, not heal bots than dumpster insane amounts of healing that mess with the entire balance of the game.
I think that’s a solid insight. To a lesser extent than heals maybe, you do see flexibility with off tanks sometimes, but to an extent it is true. Everyone expects at least A barrier on the field, if they don’t get it they get upset and the times when things have been better than the value granted by a barrier (DM for instance) they became must picks.
I think at this point it is not so much that they WANT them to heal, but that they NEED them to heal, because that’s the way the game has evolved over time.
Healing pack control used to be a huge tactical thing. Now healing packs are basically a way to screw up and deny your supports ult charge.
I’ve said it before, but bio-nade is ONLY broken in a world that has too much healing. If denying healing to the enemy tankline didn’t win you a fight 9/10 times, it would be a niche ability or a counter for specific heroes at worst.
First off, Healing SHOULD be all that they do. That’s what their job is supposed to be, especially after Sym switched categories. That shouldve been an indicator that Healers cant do anything else.
But because of Blizzard’s DPS favortism due to the OWL, Tanks being turned into DPS like Hog & Hammond one by one, and almost that whole Healer category being turned into dmg dealers(Mercy’s the only one left that focuses on heals, while Brig is dead), the answer to you question is that inevitably, Support wont heal.
At least that will make the Support name for that category make sense. Not to mention, OW2’s 5v5 would be a little frustrating if the one Bruiser gets stacked heals all the time.
which is the world we are in in current ow lol.
the ability is so busted its a joke. Just the other day i saw a fight being won in OWL because of a single bionade, no ults used. The isn’t a single ability in the game that can win fights like that except imortality field but we don’t talk about that lol.
We need to bring back Zen+Lucio, Zen+Mercy, Zen+Brig metas. That s how support duo should have been.
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We will only have that in OW2. Current OW is healing>>>>>>>utility
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