“Overwatch Support heroes have changed drastically over the years. A role which once teemed with potential for cool and creative abilities and mechanics has now largely be reduced to mere healers. But with Overwatch 2 bringing big changes to the entire hero roster, what sort of changes might we end up seeing with Overwatch 2 new heroes in the Support role? Could Blizzard finally be shifting the role away from simply healing? Or will they double down by further simplifying Overwatch’s Support heroes?”
Honestly imagining what would happen if by OW2 no Supports were improved and no new support heroes were released.
Imo the other direction this game could’ve taken is by making support heroes more like torbjorn, sombra and symmetra. If healing didn’t become support’s primarily asset, and we gave tanks their own survivability (e.g. cool down ability that granted temporarily shields) this might’ve been possible.
Damage dealing class would still have plenty of variety in their roster since there’s already plenty of DPS heroes that doesn’t have support-like utilities like echo, soldier: 76, cassidy, tracer, widowmaker, doomfist etc. If torb, sombra, symmetra were pushed into the support role and there wasn’t as much emphasis on healing in the game, but more of a niche use, this might’ve worked.
Plus, burst healing being nerfed wouldn’t ruin popular support heroes like mercy either as she would still be picked to pocket pharah/echo or hitscan or for her rez.
And I agree that I hope they do move away from the primary healing aspects of supports more in ow2. I’ve said this in the past and I’ll carry on saying it again, they ruined Brig by shifting her into a more generic - or as they said when reworking her, “primary” - healer. Instead of tweaking what was already there to be more fair, reliable and less oppressive. They just watered her down completely.
Just my opinion.
Anyway, I really hope they do come up with more interesting supports in the future and don’t focus too much on high healing outputs all the time. Give us more new and interesting ways to support.
In order for non-healing supports to work the game would need such a massive change. Healing is too important to be able to sustain in fights and would both make long range poke unbearable and playing tank absolutely terrible.
Maximum healing throughput would need to be dramatically reduced, probably to the point where healers like Ana ends up healing less than Zenyatta currently does so that healing can be easily overwhelmed with damage.
Spam will also need something done, especially with how tight a lot of the choke points are. With damage sticking and spam/poke being powerful it can make pushing through chokes significantly harder.
I just don’t think the way Overwatch is built and designed really allows for non-healing supports to work. If damage sticks for one team, but not the other then the team without the healing is put under a tremendous time pressure to finish out or else they will get out-sustained and poked out.
honestly the culprit for this is Mercy and Mercy mains, you see, as the video states she was the only main healer available for quite a while until Ana was released and even then she wasn’t particularly healing focused, her ult didn’t heal and she had a smaller clip and if I remember correctly nade didn’t heal as much and she was a throw pick from the get go, I still remember the crazy amount of posts asking for ana to be buffed
now if they were to take the direction you mentioned, Mercy would have needed to be changed somehow because her main focus has always been to be a healing support, her ease of use was so strong that if more supports were to be more like sym, then Mercy would overwrite their existence on her own because of how much healing she was able to pump out, she would become a staple on every comp because she was sleeper OP at the time until… we got another main healer
Moira raised the bar for Mercy hard, all of a sudden this character with no utility posed a controversial question of Mercy not being good enough at just healing and with her every single other support was lacking healing power when compared to Moira
but how about a Moira Mercy comp? the lack of utility started being an issue but still, their combined power started to make the game feel slow, nothing was dying and then to top it all off, Mercy was able to reset fights for an even more sluggish OW
So Mercy got reworked in order to prevent a potential healing mess but we all know what happened… it became even worse BUT you could find a lot of posts in this forum about this, what the community wanted was for other supports to be as powerful as Mercy and not the other way around… they buffed Ana and made her a main healer while trying to take Mercy down a notch together with Moira it was THAT patch the one that set the tone for future supports… so much so that brig’s initial state was incredibly busted because of overhealing
Overhealing was the devs’ answer to a support who couldn’t heal constantly due to her being melee range and as it’s painfully obvious nowadays, she didn’t need it
the mess we’re in today is all because of Mercy’s mere existence in the game at release… and the question that always remains is… would Mercy mains be ok with a Mercy that wasn’t focused on healing as easy as she does today? as in… if she would have been changed to something more FPS like would they be ok with that? say they turn her into Baptiste, you gotta aim your healing somehow, no dmg boost but secondary is the pistol… can you imagine the malding on the forums?
I’d be okay with roles passive also introducing self healing mechanics. Let’s say something like all Tanks get Brig’s passive self healing, all supports get Mercy’s self passive and all DPS get temporary shields on kills.
Supports could have their healing reduced or turned into a niche and they could get more utilities else oriented.
Support characters deserve to be fun and interactive rather than focusing on healing 24/7 like in OW1, where your Ana shoves her scope’s barrel up Reinhardt’s big fat bunda and pumps it full of syringes until she charges her nano boost and stuffs that up there, too.
Where Moira isn’t spraying all over her teammates for half the game then sucking the enemy’s life force for the other half. Characters like Symmetra that had slows, could give shields, teleport her teammates back to the fight and displace enemy comps by firing orbs that pierce through shields at them. More of this please!
This is what I’ve thought for such a long time. “Supports” don’t exist anymore. They’re just “healers.” Zen/Lucio are the only exceptions but even then people complain we don’t have enough heals.
I really hope the support role is properly addressed in Overwatch 2.
I would not be interested turning Mercy into a clone of another support but we could make her more shooter like.
Delete pistol
Staff becomes laser beam rifle with reload - I mean laser beams where she can rake allies or enemies with laser since each shot lingers for 0.5 second - make the beam hit box really small.
Can GA to enemies
Rez becomes part of her ultimate and loses any restrictions
E replace by Spartan Kick - Knock back boop that does some damage.
I really don’t understand your timeline of events or what your talking about. You imply that a mercy moira meta existed before her rework but moira wasn’t even released until 2 months after mercy was reworked.
I wouldn’t be opposed to it that’s for sure but I don’t think Rez should stay on a mobile hero as Mercy much less without restrictions that said, I’m pretty sure the main reason why they wanted to keep Mercy as a more or less pure healer was because of her popularity :S
Yeah I could be misremembering the dates for sure but devs most likely saw this coming from a mile away, having mass rez and Moira at the same time would have been even worse
