I combined the total damage of four of the DPS I played with in the past couple games vs my damage as a DPS in a single game.
Widow on Oasis: 5,366
Soldier on Oasis: 7,560
Vendetta on Paraiso: 2,581
McCree on Paraiso: 5,667
Total damage: 21,174
Me (Sojourn) on Samoa: 21,402
Make it make sense as to why I’m getting paired with these people in my games. How is it fun for anyone involved for them to be in games way above their skill level? They get rolled, and I get forced losses.
Cause y’all the same rank.
Nobody care about the damage numbers, that doesn’t tell anyone anything. Y’all the same rank for a reason.
Damage as a stat doesn’t mean much in the context of the game, kills, death, positioning, team composition, counter picks, are the factors you want to look at.
It actually does matter. “Stats don’t matter” comes from people who get bad stats. When you’re a damage character, you have two jobs. Land elims, and do damage. If you can’t do those, you’re the reason your team loses, or you’re getting carried if you win. It’s that simple. A 21k damage Sojourn is contributing a lot more than a 5k damage McCree.
No, it comes from people who understand that stats are always depended on many factors and do not represent skill in any way, especially in a single match.
Stop fixating on shooting the tank and nothing else and you’ll notice the difference.
Damage numbers means literally nothing if you’re not getting the right picks. If you get high damage numbers but less picks than the others, it means you’re just dead weight.
A 5K Cass can have more picks than someone with 21k damage done because crits matter. If you’re not getting headshots on Sojourn and just go for bodyshots, you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve played plenty of games with Cass where i’ve gotten between 5-7k damage but more picks than the dude with 10-15k damage. Why? Because i click heads and prioritize squishies over fixating on the enemy tank who’s getting double pocketed.
I think it definitely matters it’s not end all be all. But I’ve been on teams where my team is doing 2k dmg and the enemy team is doing 10k, it’s just not a winnable battle, everyone’s getting headshotted all game.
It literally, does, not, matter.
The only thing that matter is that people get the right picks and tanks are not high prio targets. Anyone who keeps fixating on tank are literal dead weight.
Getting headshot all game long means their positioning is horrible and/or they keep peeking that Widowmaker non-stop.
Even so, a match can still be won even with lower damage numbers as long as people get the right picks, and also this is something i do need to point out: Headshots are critical hits, body shots are not and it takes longer to kill someone by shooting them in the body, meaning if you shoot enemy players in the body, you’ll do more damage overall, but the TTK is much longer, even longer if they get pocketed..
If someone are consistently clicking heads, their damage numbers will automatically be lower than some fool who thinks that the enemy tank with a massive health pool is the priority target and keep fixating on them instead of the support keeping them alive or the enemy dps who’s out of position and can easily be punished.
I never imagined I’d see someone say that landing headshots doesn’t do damage, and that actually damaging the enemy and landing elims is not how you win games, lol.
No one said that.
Context matters.
Not much to tell from looking at a single stat. For all we know you could’ve gotten 0 kills and just focused the tank the entire time, which is the opposite of what you should do. It’s kind of like showing your mitigation stat as a tank to prove that you can indeed block damage.
I recently had a game where my team had half the kills of the opposing team, yet we won the match pretty easily. We were just more focused on making a play when it really mattered. In the end it’s all about winning team fights and clearing the objective.
I never said headshots doesn’t do damage.
Landing a headshot does far more damage than landing a body shot. What seem to be so extremely difficult to understand here?
The TTK when headshotting someone is much lower than if you spend time shooting someone in the body, because bodyshots deals normal damage, whereas headshots deals more than normal damage. Some heroes deal 2.5x normal damage when they land headshots, like Widow and Kiriko among others. Some deal 2x damage, and the TTK by landing headshots on tanks, is still much longer than landing a headshot on squishy targets in comparison, as squishies have far less health.
Winning team fights is what matters more than anything.
Who wins a team fight faster? The players who fixates on shooting the enemy tank in the body for 2 minutes straight just to rack up the damage numbers? Or the ones going for actual prio targets, clicking squishy heads, killing them almost instantly? I think you should know the answer to that.
You said damage doesn’t matter, headshots do. Do you know what headshots do? They do damage. Lots of damage. Come on, man.
That’s what i said. Might be a good idea to stop circling around looking for a way out of this hole you’re digging for yourself.
So, if landing headshots matter.. And headshots do damage.. Then by definition, doing damage matters.
You’re grasping at straws buddy, not a good look 
So which is it? Does doing damage with headshots matter or not?
A DPS with lower than average damage and high deaths is only an indicator that they’re probably playing respawn simulator.
Otherwise it’s like others are echoing in this thread, damage is a non factor as a stat, they could replace it with a point tally of how many ults you farmed for all the good it does. (At this point Blizzard just redo the stat screen again, no numbers allowed except maybe Healing Received lmao)
I love my Torb games and can out farm Junk & Bastion for raw chaff damage by bullying the tanks, but if I’m not hitting the M1 clicks down range and threading a rivet through Juno’s eye socket then I’m not doing much more to enable the teamfight than say Reinhardt or Mauga.
DPS with their 3rd Eye opened look for the elims at the right moment, damage is just a pressure valve to force space if it’s not directed at a meaningful target.
I am confused. Why did your compare your damage on Samoa not to the damage of the other DPS in the same match?
These numbers do not tell me anything at all. These might be super short matches while Samoa could have been a match with 3 long overtimes with back and forths with 2 pocketed Maugas.
And damage numbers in isolation do not matter anything. The context is important.
There is a distinction betwen doing damage in team fights (picks actually matter, distracting supports, focussing targets, and most importantly, killing) and shooting at enemies when fights are lost (basically just charging enemy support ult charges), for example.
Doing damage to a hard pocketed tank or DPS might not be as useful as getting a crit.
For example, imagine doing lots of damage over time by landing body shots with sojourn’s primary, which get effortlessly healed.
Compare that to a Cassidy who manages to give single headshots here and there which create meaningful breakpoints of HP for his teammates to execute.
Or a Soldier who flanks and lands a helix rocket burst combo to secure a kill.
Focussing on when to attack whom is more important than just getting high numbers. Of course this is all relative.
Honestly, posting 21k damage as Sojourn on a three-round Samoa game like it’s some kind of flex just screams metal rank peak. You’re clearly just farming the enemy tank the entire match to charge your rail and then failing to actually confirm the kills, which is why your “huge” stats didn’t lead to a win. That’s the definition of trash damage; you’re literally just acting as a human battery for the enemy supports to farm their Ults off of, giving them a free Nano or Kitsune every single fight while you pat yourself on the back for a meaningless number. Comparing your bloated stats to a Widowmaker on Oasis is a joke because a Widow only needs a single 250-damage headshot to delete a target and win a fight, whereas you’re probably dumping 1,000 damage into a pocketed tank just for it to be healed back instantly. High damage without high elims just proves you have zero understanding of focus fire, breakpoints, or resource economy. You aren’t being “forced” into losses by bad teammates; you’re losing because you think Overwatch is a spreadsheet simulator instead of a game about timing and target priority, so maybe stop looking at the scoreboard and start actually hitting the shots that matter.