This is nothing to say about the fact that I do desperately hope for new support heroes and more fun changes for that role in the next beta cycle.
This is for that subset of players who seem to feel that they should be able to keep an ally alive for as long as they’re healing them.
Understand that it’s a totally intentional design choice that damage numbers outweigh healing numbers. You are absolutely not supposed to be able to outheal the damage an actively damaged ally is receiving. They need to either neutralize the enemy threat or disengage from the fight to survive. Healing is, basically, a “stall” tactic to give them more wiggle room to do so.
That’s all. Again, here’s hoping for new support changes and heroes soon.
There is a lot of core principles that people don’t understand about this game such as hero switching. You aren’t meant to main a hero like a class in WoW. It doesn’t make sense to be a “symmetra player” or a “Hammond player”. You are an every hero in your role player or you are playing the game wrong.
I know what people do. I do it myself, but that isn’t the intended design of the game. Which is pretty on topic of the thread. Intentional design choices that people have misconceptions about.
I’m pretty sure most people understand that damage has to exceed healing for the game to function. I think the issue occurs when you’re healing a high health pool target, and they instantly disintegrate despite your healing. Healing should extend their life under sustained fire, not have no impact.
It looks like OW2 may have addressed this a bit with higher tank health pools and better armor. Now they last for a few seconds under continuous fire, meaning they have a chance to fight back or find cover.
There’s a difference between intended design and realized design. They naively initially intended the game to be designed for constant swaps but this is not how the game actually turned out since many systems in game directly ran counter to that idea. They have since turned away from that philosophy and now acknowledge the concept of mains and lean more into it in terms of balance.
The idea of damage outdoing healing was both intended and realized, though. It’s a real thing.
Blizzard didn’t even know what the intended design of the game was “beyond be the better team but also have fun”. This is obvious by the fact that they released this game with no hero limits. It was always very much about pick who you like and enjoy playing the game. The players themselves are the ones who started re-defining the intent of the game with their incessant whining and complaining, and it’s the player’s fault that it devolved into a boring mess that required a complete overhaul.
I don’t know why you just said any of that when none of that is true. Nothing in the game since day 1 has changed to indicate that they have decided to change their intention on hero swapping. The game is not balanced and probably never will be balanced in such a way that you could pick any hero interchangeably and expect to not be at least soft countered.
I don’t know if you are just being contrarian for no reason or you are upset that I said words that ignored your original post or what.
even in OW1 I can’t think of any single healer that can keep a hero up vs consistent damage outside of some few 1v1 matches. I think most healers want it to matter, not negate Damage outright. Healing is to buy time for reinforcement, escape or an outplay. Healing is not meant to eliminate the entire threat of damage (missing several shots not withstanding). That’s what most reasonable supports ask from what I’ve seen.
Changing Torb and Sym to be slightly less niche does not mean that lots of heroes aren’t still niche and that hero switching is not still a core gameplay feature. We are nowhere closer to one tricking making sense in a game of counters and hero swapping.
I concede that you apparently didn’t make up this nonsense, but it is nonsense none the less. The game basically never evolved in the way that he describes.
