Here’s how easy it would have been to have made Echo into a support:
Primary Fire - Tri-Shot: Same, but 30% less damage. Secondary Fire - Sticky Bombs: Same, but with 50% less damage. Passive - Flight: Pressing Jump with in the air surges Echo in the air freely, then can fly freely. Once the duration of Flight ends or is canceled, Echo can glide by holding Jump.
Ability 1 - Focusing Beam: When Echo damages enemies, she builds Focus, strengthening the power of her Focusing Beam. When used, Focusing Beam heals any allies that it touches, more depending on how much meter was charged at use. Focusing Beam does not damage enemies. Cooldown: 3 seconds.
Ability 2 - Duplicate: For 10 seconds, duplicate a targeted enemy hero and gain use of their abilities. 25 Second Cooldown, 1 second activation. Can die if killed while duplicating. While in duplicate form, Echo radiates a small amount of healing.
Ultimate - Reverberate: After 3 seconds, all living teammates and Echo are teleported to the selected ground location with an additional 200 rapidly depleting shields.
You’re acting like they’re too brain dead to make Echo a support, which is obviously not the case.
The devs have specifically stated that Echo is a not a support because they felt like her ult doesn’t fit a support, and yeah, I can kinda agree.
They wanted Echo to be a DPS.
Give it a rest.
Here’s how it goes, she’s a dps either you people like it or not.
Doing these kinda threads wont help you with anything nor prove anything.
They never said that she’s going to be support to begin with either.
If anything this is just considered as spam now. Cause it’s getting rather annoying to see same topic & similar to the other ones where people throw a tantrum how she was suppose to be support, etcetc.
The root problem is they came up with a mechanic, then insisted on hanging it on Echo. The root problem lies in that decision.
But I agree, at this point its a waste of time to complain, Blizz can hardly be bothered to fix problem mechanics, they won’t suddenly change a DPS to a Support after months of design and play-testing.
I don’t get why people have the idea that Echo was ever going to be a support or that Blizzard just didn’t know how to make her one, they obviously always planned for her to be a DPS and whilst we may not like it, it was time for a new DPS!
You thought trolls with Mei wall were bad? Well here comes Echo. You were on a flank and about to kill their supports? LOL! Nope! Echo ulted and teleported you back to spawn.
Even just in concept, you should never allow one hero to have control over their teammates.
Since you acted so high and mighty about knowing how to design a support, I won’t pull any punches: this support concept of yours is straight up awful.
Her primary and secondary fire would be beyond useless, pretty much everyone would be able to kill her or outheal her damage output. The fact that she has fall off on her damage and a limited range on her now healing beam also mean that both her main mean of attack AND her healing mechanic would go against her base design of being a flying hero.
Speaking of the beam, a healing ability on a ressource AND a cooldown? And one with a limited range to boot, and no utility beyond healing? Looking forward to her not being picked by anyone, I see.
About your take on Duplicate, again: asinine idea. Radiate a small amount of healing? So that means that picking squishy heroes or hero that doesn’t promote your team grouping up around you would be a waste, completely defeating the fact that she can transform in any of her foes.
And finally, the ultimate: 200 Hp decaying shields and a forced teleport, on a 3 second delay? Lucio take less time to activate, and it gives 750 decaying shield, you chucklenut. And let’s not get into how forcing your team to teleport is a stupid mechanic.
So no, as your pathetic attempt proved it, making a support kit is not that easy. Next time you act smug, try to back that attitude by not embarrassing yourself, would you?
By their own admission she was first conceived as a Support, and in a game where the character styling screams the role in most cases, it was more than reasonable to expect a Support. Jeff and team knew damn well the majority community had its expectations of Echo as a Support in some form, and with the very unreliable hint in the cinematic of a DPS, a Support was hoped for when there are after four years 7 Supports for 30% of the playerbase, when 50% of the player base had 16… see the reasoning?
EDIT : My bad, I was able to find an interview of Goodman saying “The original idea was to keep her support…” However, that is still different from her being conceived from the ground up as a support.
Noo, OW needs less of this, not more. Give us more Supports like Lucio and Zen, who can support the team while still getting to play the FPS. The Echo that shoots at hostile targets sounds way more fun than the one who shoots at friendly ones. There’s a reason they’ve focused so much on the other aspects of Mercy and Moira over the healing beam.