A shield support could totally be a thing. It wouldn’t be healing, but it would provide allies with additional HP to give them a health advantage over their enemies.
A shield would have the benefit of protecting allies from burst damage. You could have five Moira’s all heal a 200-HP ally at the same time, but they couldn’t stop a Widowmaker from oneshotting them. A shield-based support could.
A support that couldn’t heal could still fill the off-healer slot if they provided enough sustain to the team to warrant that slot. If they could keep their teammates alive, then you would be better off taking another tank/DPS than a third support because you don’t need the extra healing. It would also have the added benefit of funneling ult charge to your main healer. A Lucio or Zen soak up a portion of the ult charge gained from healing, but a shield-based support that mitigated incoming damage rather than healed it would let a main healer get all of it.
Even then they wouldn’t be able to really keep a team up with a solo healer. Previously mercy could fit a solo healer role, but now she can’t. Granting shields could work but they still need a heal. It won’t help the lack of healers
My point was just that Echo is completely unclassified right now. We know NOTHING but the name for sure. So if she were “raw utility” she could still be classified into something like a DPS without actually outputting much damage herself depending on what kind of utility she offers.
A hero that grants shields to ally healthbars is essentially a support that restores heathbars without applying healing. It just means they have a self-regen at the cost of no natural armor. All-in-all, more health restoration than an actual healer.
And a hero that prevents an ally from falling below 1 hp would greatly lessen the heaing requirement of a solo-healer, so long as that support was peeled for by tanks, or had their own self-sustain. Turns healing 5 heroes into only needing to heal 3 for the duration.
I’m not saying shields is a bad idea. Infact I want shields as an ability, along with a debuff effect to make it better. I just don’t want a pure utility support with no healing.
Plus people did run triple support, double tank, and solo dps. Hell thats the precursor to goats. But that only worked because brig did a lot of damage. We just got an off healer last March. We need a main healer
I’ve seen no information as to what Echo really is. In fact, all I’ve seen is some item that’s stood up and stepped out from a shell. No name, no nothing. it talks, definitely. McCree seems to know the item in question, and vice versa. We don’t know if it’s a DPS, a tank, a support bot, or whatever. Same with this “Echo” person, whoever or whatever that might be.
I don’t even know where you got any information that refers to the name “Echo”. For all I know, y’all may have pulled that name out of thin air, either by not thinking or simply just by saying it to determine what reaction y’all might get.
So, really, why are we discussing this? I’m at a loss here. :-/
It depends on where you wanna take it. If she’s a main healer, it might need to be more consistent and higher and low damage. But if it’s an off healer, it needs to be completely different since off heals don’t focus much on actually healing
Idk just the idea of losing health sounds bad, maybe she has a max of x amount of shields to give which stays on them as long as the beam is connected. And then she can put it on multiple allies and distribute the shields between them?
It functions more like old Photon shield than a Mercy beam. She would lose 50 shield health (from 250 or 300hp overall) per use of Photon shield. She also has a passive that activates shield regeneration when she or her life link target does damage to enemies. This passive may be able to provide temporary shield health like Doomfist if health is full to make up for her lost shields.
Well it’s also almost 100% confirmed that she won’t have any of those abilities because that’s just Lucio’s ability, Symmetra’s original ability, and again Symmetra’s. So it’s likely she’s completely different from the original conception.
Like I said, I’m assuming they’ll play with the “Echo” name and give her something where she can “mimic” the enemy’s abilities and use them for herself or something like that.
But if you count that as utility then i guess Mei is a support now.
Point is Symmetra 2.0 was just bad, period it had nothing to do with what role she filled because if she was good at anything people would have eventually started running her as a DPS