Making supports in OW2 passively regenerate health when out-of-combat is the first step needed to properly fix Overwatch’s healing creep issues, starting with giving supports a way to restore their health other than handing out AoE healing abilities like candy.
The long explanation:
Most of the healing creep in Overwatch is a result of unintended consequences. The devs tried to give each new support they added to the game a creative new way to heal themselves, but most (all) of the time that just meant giving every post-launch support an extra, AoE heal ability in their kit that they can use on themselves (in addition to their default heal).
Examples include:
Ana’s grenade
Baptiste’s “regenerative burst” ability
Brigitte’s Inspire passive
Moira’s orb
All of these abilities are supposed to be the user’s main (or only) way to heal themselves. The AoE healing is just tacked on to justify the ability taking up an entire slot in the healer’s kit… and that’s where the unintended consequences kick in. Stacking a support’s AoE healing ability on top of their default heal (and/or combined with even more AoE healing from another healer) is where the ridiculous amounts of burst healing in this game is coming from.
It’ll be a lot healthier for Overwatch 2 if these abilities were reworked into (or replaced with) something other than AoE healing… but doing that would leave most of the support roster with no way to self-heal.
Giving supports an “out of combat regen” passive in Overwatch 2 is the simplest solution to this problem.
It also allows devs more creative freedom when designing future supports. Having to reserve an ability slot for a self-heal every time they made a new support hero is a MASSIVE creative handicap when it comes to designing a hero’s kit… so I’m interested to see what the devs can come up with after that restriction is removed.
Self heals is not the primary usage of any of these things and is rarely optimal usage. You have it backwards- the devs couldn’t think of any good single target heals and needed ways for supports to do their job while doing other things, so they used tons of AoE heals. Single target just doesn’t make sense if you’re zooming around on lucio or bashing someone on brig. Now that we have AoEs, the devs proceeded to shove self heals into the AoE to prevent them from being able to use their main heal on themselves, which tbf is a sound decision because shooting your foot all day isn’t super interesting.
Actually fixing heal creep starts with adding more utility, especially offensive utility.
This option scares me. When OW launched total team dmg was reduced because supports couldn’t contribute a ton of dmg. In a way nor could tanks. It was all trade offs. Then we launched tanks and supports that could do both heal and dmg in high numbers.
When OW launched Zen was unplayably weak and got oneshot body shot by widow without boost. Existio could provide 70% of his value emoting on near the team. DB is about as strong as it’s always been iirc, could be wrong here. But this pales in comparison to the sheer number of ults being thrown around before the first ult charge nerf.
Hog 1.0 says hi
Heals? Sure. Damage numbers aren’t really high, the devs just realized that not every support has to have insane mobility, and that necessitates self defense. Zen is the exception but he’s a launch character.
you’re neglecting the fact that a lot of the time these aoe/self heal abilities are used in combat to help deal with a threat rather than simply just topping themselves of outside of combat.
acting like out-of-combat heals substitutes in-combat heals to take away such abilities for supports without giving anything equivalent is going to be terrible for them.
Bap’s regenerative burst only heals teammates close to him for 75HP over the course of 5 seconds, and it’s on a 13 second cool down. I wouldn’t consider that a significant part of problem with healing being stacked.
Moira’s orb? Maybe it is contributing to her healing creep. But I don’t recall people complaining about moira so is it really an issue?
Ana’s biotic grenade, maybe. Since it does boost the healing of the allies that gets splashed by the healing grenade, on top of healing them for 100HP upon impact.
Brig? I don’t know, she has so many kits that I don’t know what needs to be tuned down/reworked.
And that started the wave of complaints about supports slowing down the pace of the game, making flanking hard and prolonging teamfights into battles of attrition (since supports are also not famous for damage spikes).
Pros, and high ranked players seems to want supports to keep on being glass cannons, so that’s the conflict with the casual audience, cause supports are not famous for reliable damage spikes or burst-ish combos, so how do you make them get agency to survive? For pros and high ranks it would be Insane mobility and/or insane debuffs reliant on ranged shots, in the other hands casuals were okay with in-combat self-healing, easy CC, easy damage mechanics, more defenses rather than mobility or offenses overall.
Bap’s fistpump was nerfed from 150 HP over five seconds, every thirteen seconds to 75 HP - its potency on allies slashed by half - and after a month or so, his healing output numbers on Overbuff had gone down by all of 1-2k. I don’t know why the poor ability gets so much attention, it’s small potatoes compared to RMB healing.
I think they need to adjust the way how you can get “out of the combat” state
It should be : not taking, doing any damage and not healing allies that are in combat for 5 seconds. Mercy can be an exception since she has her ow1 self-healing, so add on passive can work on top of her original passive to get more benefit of that.
Yeah, then they can add more stuff that absolutely no one ever complains about, no sir, such as sleep dart, immo field, damage boost and discord.
Also “heal creep” is a myth. Every single support has had their net healing nerfed since their release(except zen). Yall just want supports to be impotent sandbags rolling around the map until they die.
This is my primary complaint with the role passives. The DPS one is far and away the best one because it is interactive and the player will feel it. Getting to and away from fights and getting back to the point after respawn is inarguably good.
Cowering in a corner waiting to maybe not die is pathetic and boring, not to mention completely useless vs. the flankers most likely to kill you. The tank one is sad as well because giving less ult charge is not something the player is interacting with. You’re not getting melted in a quarter of a second and thinking “well, at least I gave less ult charge” while staring at the respawn screen. It feels weak.
I guess the solution to this “healing creep” is to buff the damage.
…oh wait, people are already complaining about rien’s hammer doing too much damage, roadhog one shotting you, bap shooting you, zen discording you, and ana anti-nading you blocking heals.
So we either live in a parallel universe and these things don’t exist, or we just conveniently forget about them to play along with this narrative of “healing creep” while ignoring “damage creep”. Maybe, just maybe, both exists and not just one.
I kinda wish we just had a cool self heal ability and animation for each character, like Ana shooting herself with her gun like Doc in R:6, or Mercy healing herself with her beam, Brigitte bandaging her arm, etc. You’d instantly heal a portion upon completion and then regen the rest of your health unless you take damage.
It probably wouldnt fit well at ALL in the game, either balance-wise or theme-wise, but it’d still be cool.
Bap smashing a heal-nade onto his chest
Lucio doing that thing where he holds his headphones idk
Zenyatta’s could be something similar to his reload animation mixed with his ultimate
the in combat healing debuff is also very important.
Even paladins turned it from an item into a base mechanic it was so essential to balance out healing.
Something like 25% less for 1.5s after being shot at the base level