In-game heals keep getting worse despite healcreep technically going way up over the years. So much of the support roster has insanely high healing and lots of kill denial on paper, but once you get into an actual match (especially if you’re a tank) it feels like you’re pulling a slot machine to see if you get any healing at all.
A lot of if has to do with hero design. Most of the support roster is designed to appeal to damage-oriented players who dislike “healbotting”, which is obviously going to attract those kinds of players & the problems they create.
The few supports that were actually designed for heal-focused, support-oriented players all have major flaws & “clunk factors” that repel their target audience. And even if those issues do get resolved, Overwatch has already burnt so many players from that particular gaming demographic (long story) that it may not be able to recoup it’s losses…
It also doesn’t help that many of OW’s healing abilities lack the same level of polish, consistency, & responsiveness that makes damage feel so good to use. The worst offenders are supports who have tons of forced downtime on their primary heal: it pushes players towards damage-oriented playstyles, because of how damage is the only part their kit that’s always available & can be used immediately without any charge-up time.
Last but not least, Overwatch has been re-balanced over the years to always favor damage over any other course of action. If a teammate is under fire from an enemy who has a oneshot or other insanely bursty combo that’s impossible to heal though, then trying to heal them is pointless. Your only option left is to resort to “supporting” via killing the attackers before they can kill your teammate.
TLDR
Players willing to heal you whenever you need healing DO exist, it’s just that Overwatch itself is pretty hostile to the concept. It goes out of its way to disable, discourage or even punish purely-supportive playstyles, doesn’t offer a decent selection of “fun pure support” heroes to choose from, and has already screwed over + pushed out a huge number of gamers who enjoy supportive playstyles.
This is gonna be kinda baised from a support pov but in the games where ppl complain about not having enough heals usually come from ppl face tanking hits and somehow expecting the supports to keep them alive.
GM support, lower SR coach. This is so much the issue. In higher SR, very low healing comps are still quite viable (perhaps not the mathematically ideal), because players know how to position. They play with their health pool as a valuable resource that they need to manage on their own. Getting large amounts of healing (and I’m not saying even Ana heals, I just mean healing from an outside source) is often considered secondary in their thoughts on how to make/survive a push.
Lower SR players just stand in chokes face tanking things, expecting an IV drip of pure unadulterated healing shoved up them like an enema. If they die, it’s absolutely, ‘We are not getting enough healing, go a different healer!’ (or, if you’re already running super high heal heros (which should not be necessary in any SR), it’s just ‘you’re terrible!’. Players who learn and understand how to take care of this on their own are the ones who climb. If you get just accustomed to a life-support healing drip at all times and never correct your own misplays, you’re going to get stuck at your SR (or drop!).
It’s not an issue at all with people not wanting to play the ‘pure support heros’. High healing -particularly, high burst healing- is actually a crutch that has been enabling bad players for a really long time, and now that there are more heros that offer something besides that, and players are trying them out, the playerbase who are absolutely used to just far too much healing (which, as you mentioned, is what is responsible for healcreep) are complaining that it feels like they’re never getting healed.
If the team ever gets the stones to actually nerf Ana as she needs to be nerfed, I expect a lot more complaints like this…but it’s better for the overall health of the game, even if it means some players who had their SR inflated by being omega pocketed by just a deluge of healing drop in SR without it to cover their misplays.
You are right i reckon. we have no incentive to do our job due to us getting even more damage perks. Aka… Ana Crits. who needs to heal when we have Widow without the mobility.
Now it can just lead to triple sniper Aaaaaaaaaand throwing mercy a double blue beam is a bit too much. In fact, she is wasting resources and a potential rez if she even considers not taking double blue beams. 150 HP in a burst isn’t much. 2 Shots from a cassidy to hanzo can roughly deal with that as an example. At most, you can provide protection for roughly about 1.5 seconds with her rez replacement which isn’t gonna keep someone alive for very long.
[Insert James Franco meme]
First time getting blamed for something that is not your fault?
Welcome to Overwatch. Sincerely, every DPS/Tank player.
No FR, what you described is a skill issue, nothing balance related. Low SR players need to learn not to Face Tank and press W on a Bastion, this is just another thing.
Have you not played early overwatch where you had to manage multiple health pools on zen lucio mercy? They’ve done the opposite over the years.
Which ones? I wouldn’t call a 1.5s reload tons of forced downtime and they generally have cooldowns alongside primary healing to help in this situations.
This just seems like the post of someone who is mad at their teammates playing poorly and wants to be able to afk pocket someone the entire game. I don’t think we need to create even less windows of opportunity to kill through healing just because your team doesn’t know how to avoid taking excessive poke dmg in neutral.
This is why Lucio feels so miserable to play for me. I already 87.8% of the time end up with Mercy/Zen as my co-support, and more often than not teammates tend to play as bullet sponges. Then I resign to switching to someone like Juno because I know we’re not going to progress at ALL, and I won’t be able to make a dent in their team.
I used to play him a crazy amount when I duo’ed with another support main though
Damage should always be stronger than healing either through direct power, through faster fire rate, or through higher density of damage sources.
By removing a tank from the game, the number of damage sources has decreased, forcing a section of the roster to be buffed with raw damage (supports and a select few DPS). That’s why things either die in an instant or never die at all.
Having that additional tank allowed for the DPS to have the strongest damage, Tanks to have a moderate amount of damage that was split between the two tank players, and Supports to have less time to DPS due to having another person that they needed to attend to (This also meant they weren’t as pressured to DPS for their team, since the off-tank could do that for them).
More players meant that you were more likely to get a kill, regardless of the fact that you had less damage. Supports could not heal 5 people at once giving you a big enough gap to kill them with mediocre damage.
This 100%. Focused high damage burst DPS on a single target such as a shieldless tank or a DPS player essentially nukes them or redlines them and they cry about healing like a no brain without realizing that they are just taking that much damage and the heal is being zeroed out instantly.
You point to the scoreboard and how you and the other support are doing more HPS than the enemy team by far and they just say “oh you’re healing yourself/everyone but me”.
this is the best advise to players. as a support main healbotting is just not fun. im not a healer. im support. literally 90 percent of all… i need heals… no heals gg… comes from crap players.
Am I The Problem? Probably Since I Am A Balanced Support. I Heal My Team While Picking Off The Critical Hp Enemy Team to Help My Team Push/Defend. Ah Well Ill Continue To Be The Problem. I’m Ok With It
Usually you just won’t be able to react - death will come so fast, that teammate won’t be able to call for heals, before dropping dead.
Healing was made largely pointless, since you only delay inevitable, rather than allowing teammate to turn around fight, that they were losing.
However, it was inevitable. It’s inevitable degradation of any game with role system - because DPS are always most numerous players, developers will always, eventually, build whole game around things they like. It’s not a question of “if”, but “when” it will take place.
Do tell how supports are supposed heal 5 opponents gunning down the tank.
It’s not that you have to take NO damage. Just don’t take ALL the damage in your mouth. Utilize cover and your cooldowns to mitigate the damage so the supports don’t have to give you ALL their attention/resources. If you’re taking damage from all 5 it kind of sounds like poor positioning. You could use suzu and lamp, and ALL of kiri and Baps healing and 5 enemies focus firing could still take out a tank in the open.
