Imagine trying to get hyped for OW2

This is true, but at the same time those players can be predictable.

What you see is not what they’ve done.
Why can’t people use a brain cell to realise this?

Do you think that the new Zelda only has a few floating islands cus you haven’t seen the rest of it yet?

Is nothing happening til you have personally seen it? Shrodinger’s OW2?

Healing is something that should be for topping off people between fights, not an extra layer of defence that must be overcome in combat to cause ANY damage. I advocated for something like this long ago.

But that was BEFORE they destroyed tanks. MY intent was to free up some headroom so tanks could be buffed defensively to be more self-sufficient.

Blizzard ran in the opposite direction, and are using it to doubly punish tanks.

Not only are they reducing healing, they also stripped tanks of their defences. And make no mistake, this healing nerf specifically targets tanks to screw them over. Darling DPS heroes will be much less impacted because they never relied on outside healing to begin with.

My intent was to end tanks need for pocketing to do their job.
Blizzard just ended pocketing. Period.

Oh, funny how Damage mains benefit from a stupid OW2 change again while everyone else is shafted. Funny how that keeps happening

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I don’t think the idea is bad, I think the execution is.

Personally my biggest issue right now with heals is similar to dmg, they are way too high in burst and low in sustain which in turn promotes high burst damage. I think it is ridiculous that you can spend 10+s getting a Rein down to sub 100hp, he goes round a corner for literally less than 1 second then pops out full HP and by the time you’ve chunked him back down again the burst healing has reset.

This sounds like it’s the opposite direction though since not only has healing been nerfed, but this has also been implemented. It’s like they are flip flopping between one extreme and another.

That’s why I’m only going to play the campaign

Thinking about this more, I’ve come to the conclusion that not only it’s going to feel absolutely dreadful for support players infight to be impactful for their team, it’s also going to be impossible to actually balance.

1. Ultimate charge gain

Simply put, characters who relied on healing to get their bulk of ulti charge (mercy, moira, lucio, brig) are going to feel awful to charge ultimates with, because their dps options are limited or undesirable or even conflicting. Characters who can fluidly dps between healing teammates (ana, bap, zen) are naturally in a massive advantage from the getgo. Funny how Super already mentioned that Mercy feels trash and ana/bap/zen seem to still be playable. Moth complained that his ulti charge is taking forever so Lucio doesn’t feel good to play.

An issue which could only be fixed by turning all the supports into hybrid dps so they can actually get ulti charge during combat. Which is not a desirable option for character design, as we known them.

2. Healing ultimates versus offensive and other types of ultimates

Do I need to even say it that ultimates like valkyrie, coal and trans would become trash tier if their actual healign was reduced, while ultis like nano, amp matrix, sound barrier and rally would retain all of their power in combat because their ability is not healing? It would create massive balance issues.

3. Healing versus sustain utility

Let’s face it, if in-combat healing becomes trash, then in-combat sustain like Immortality field which does not rely on healing would become 100% necessary and blow healing out of the water. Ressing the dead would become better than any pathetic attempts of healing them, at the detriment of the mercy player of course.

4. Why even bother playing the only healing class if they are not impactful with their core ability during combat?

Seriously, why would we even bother at that point if we can’t do anything during combat besides shoot at people and drop some utility down? It’s not very engaging watching your teammates fall, knowing them being in combat reduces your ability to help them.

What happens to the players who love this game because they are not great at twitch shooting rather than other skillsets, but will be forced to do that anyway when their other skillsets stop being impactful? They’ll probably just quit playing.

5. Punishing support players for teammate actions even harder

Players feed a lot. We get that. But if your soldier peeks in front of the rein shield and takes massive damage, your friendly mercy can still save them with perfectly timed heals.

Now? He’s just going to die because the support player, not the teammate taking damage, is going to be punished by having their impactful action’s value which could save a teammate from feeding, drastically lowered. The knowledge that your teammates cannot be saved because their poor actions caused YOUR impact to drop drastically is going to feel infuriating and make supports players feel completely powerless. They can essentially troll your existence in the game by taking negligible poke damage from a dva. They can punish you. Allowing your teammates to dictate HOW EFFECTIVE YOU ARE is not only bad, it’s the complete opposite of their vision of “individual” playstyles.

The whole team currently gets punished by a feeder, because it makes it harder to win. OW2 vision is to punish support players even more.

6. The infinite combat

We have means to keep players in combat indefinitely even if they tried to back away, if all it takes is them taking one point of damage. If players cannot reasonably back away for healing, how will they ever get topped off so they can engage properly, rather than just rush forward and die uselessly because they’re constantly lacking health?

Dva never having to reload makes entire enemy support roster 25% less effective full time.

7. Damage versus healing

Keeping damage at 100% with no visible downsides while reducing healing effects by 25% makes the gap between damage and healing impactfulness even worse. They will get 100% of their ulti charge, while healing ulti charge gets reduced by 25%. It also creates a situation where you are encouraged to spam as much damage as possible, as the opposing enemy team won’t be able to counter damage spam any longer with ulti economy, putting healing in a far worse position than damage.

You’re no longer encouraged to even killing blow, you’re actually encouraged to drag out the fight even longer for as long as the damage side has ultimates to charge, because they can keep well ahead of enemy healers by gaining 25% more ultimate during combat, while still winning the fights because healing is so less impactful now. This will massively affect the ultimate economy as we know it and game balance by throwing the flow of the entire match on the “who can do most damage” side of the ballpark.

Damage dealers will be able to spam tons of ultimates. Supports can only do less. The whole idea of countering ultimates will be thrown out of the window.

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  • Less shields
  • Less tanks. In fact, no tanks, just “bruisers”
  • Less healing

Remind me, how is this not DPSwatch?

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I try to remind myself that role queue doesn’t exist without the tank and support role, but it’s kind of difficult with their vision.

This post is well thought out, really great job

Thanks dude, I try.

AndyB said on another thread that devs have said it’s unlikely it’ll go through… but I’m not crossing my fingers quite yet because I’m getting a deja vu about things they’ve said “unlikely to go through” in the past and they’ve implemented it anyway…

All I can really do is speak up now and give feedback.

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He actually said “unlikely to go through as it is now” which… yikes.

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I understand why they think they need to reduce healing, since we need to heal one less player…

But I still think it’s completely unnecessary, with how high damage is currently, them not reducing damage and halving just about every potential kind of mitigation.

Purely reducing healing means peeling is going to suck big time and flankers are going to be super frustrating again and it’ll make healing just take a lot longer. Debuffing in-combat healing is going to result in above problems.

But I do believe that debuffing rather than buffing players in general is going to make anything more unengaging to play.

I want them to think “how can we make this fun and engaging gameplay for everyone?” I don’t want that to only apply to the dps category.

I just can’t believe there isn’t even a little hint at what supports should be excited for. The whole of overwatch 2 is just a massive F you to supports

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Ikr? It’s just massive list of nerfs and debuffs that we keep hearing about.

While other characters like sombra and bastion get exciting reworks.

Throw us a bone so I don’t need to dread about going into the sequel as much?

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Ooo don’t forget about brigs 40 damage bash, and the mystery moira rework (and they’ve proved time after time they have no idea what to do with moira)

I’ve literally been saying this for months. They’re lowering defenses and buffing damage. Its an objective fact since, you know, that’s what Blizzard said they wanted. I can’t believe people still don’t understand this, you know?

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I completely understand it and I’m very cynical about it too. But I still kinda wanna fight back because I don’t want it for Overwatch, which at it’s core is a great game that I want to keep playing.

But what I want is inconsequential to what the devs want… or what they THINK we want.

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Wait, so its ok for u to speculate that they have done proper reworks, but wrong for me to speculate they havent because I use concrete info we actually have? Holy hecking heck it, how dare I abandon my braincells.

See why the “you havent even played it yet” applies to both sides of the coin yet?

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/shoo troll 20 characters irrelevant emojis here

I think it would be good if they reversed this when out of combat they heal 25% more and while in combat they heal the same amount

Idk, this is just an idea