I was stuck on gold 2-4 for 6 rank updates. I played heavy on heals and assist with least amount of deaths on Ana / Kiriko. I had 5-10 kills 8-14k heals mostly. 20-30 assists and 3-8 deaths.
Just got plat 4 in 2 rank updates with zen and kiriko because I was flanking and playing like a dps. My heals were around 4-8k. Kills 20-35 and deaths around 10-14.
Keeping your teammates alive by killing enemies is not being a support really. It’s mimicking dps.
At the end of the day kills are superior over healing to win games, capture points or push payloads but supports don’t play the role for kills. Support role is about helping your teammates to reach their potential, seeing them shine and annoying/distracting enemies. I hope support role gets better overall and in ladder soon.
These are just my opinion. If it resonates do your thing.
p.s. Playing as support can be interpreted into many things. But the fact that you have to race with damage role on kills to climb the ladder doesn’t feel right.
Similar experience for me. Played zen and jumped from gold 5>gold 4>gold 2. Started playing more heal heavy characters gold 2 > gold 3 > gold 4 > gold 5. So Im back to where I started. Maybe its their ranking system or the fact I performed more poorly on other characters but they need more transparency on how stats affect rank.
I don’t like support when it’s about raw healing. I don’t like support when it’s about raw killing. I like support when I both heal and do damage. Chucking a bunch of post-its at an ally and then dinking an enemy with a kunai? Firing a yellow grenade at a friend before firing off two bursts at red team? Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
No, it’s just contributing to the goal of the game.
EVERYONES job is to get to the objective, and it just so happens that getting kills is the best way to do that. Healing is only a way to enable damage by preventing allies from dying but it HAS never and WILL never be the best way to win a game. You could literally nerf all supports damage by 50% and they’d still be better off making offensive plays.
The game has ALWAYS prioritizied damage over healing even for supports. This is nothing new.
It’s kinda always been like that. The key to getting out of precious metal ranks as a support has been getting kills and assists. You play selfishly to get SR quickly. The system heavily relies on your individual performance, and kills and assists count a lot more than healing.
Once you get to higher ranks, you balance that out with more healing and team play, as the SR system is more concerned with wins than individual performance. And your team will need some healing to win.
Or that’s how it was in OW1. They theoretically made changes to how the SR system works, but it’s hard to tell with no hard numbers being visible.
I agree that the system should not favor dps over healing for supports. Supports aren’t meant to be dps, if they do dps, it’s fine, they shouldn’t have to do the same amount of dps as actual dps to be valid. Might as well put them in dps slots. Supports should have their assists, healing, death count, and utility considered. Dps could be extra icing on the cake. Also favoring dps basically encourages supports to not heal or heal less, which can make or does make a team suffer, situationally. In my opinion the game doesn’t measure our stats and contributions properly as opposed to dps and tanks.
That k/d is kind of bad thats 2 kills per every death roughly, my average is about 9 kills per every death, that’s with kiriko only she very hard to pin down and should not die that much
??? When did you start playing Overwatch? Because once upon a time, you could actually carry games without firing a single shot. Non-confrontational playstyles being a viable option was kinda how Overwatch got so popular in the first place.
It was only after the game’s ttk got accelerated to the point where even tanks can be ganked in less than a second that damage became king, and all playstyles that don’t center around dealing damage stopped having any real carry potential.
It doesn’t mean dps either, their are already two roles dedicated to that and if they can’t do their job without shields or cc to hamper them and damage being buffed to the hilt then their is truly no hope. By the way healing is a form of support and it no different from being a F*#@king damage buffer bot - the only best and only utility blizzard can come up with support besides a bit of speed boost.
The guns are there as a placebo to make the support feel better when the backline is being ganked and no help is on the way. Of course if we had a second tank to peel without being shot in the back while the main tank holds the frontline it might be slightly better
OH and the dev’s ALSO gave EVERY support the ability to heal so you could just as likely argue by your reasoning that they meant supports to heal - more so in other than soldier, echo and junker queen none of the other characters outside support can heal other characters.
