All they need to do is nerf mercy’s healing for single target heroes if healing were to become a secondary ability that’s less impactful in this hypothetical version of Overwatch where tanks have their own survivability. Mercy would still be viable and get picked in certain comps that goes well with her weak single target healing like pharah/echo or hitscan DPS comps.
Since even small amounts of healing is valuable on a single target hero as it prevents death from losing health and raises uptime. Not to mention she has other utilities like damage boost and rez. Her ultimates will obviously need to be reworked so that it won’t provide as much healing as well.
As for the culprit in healing creep, that was more or less dev’s decision.Perhaps mercy, ana and moira contributed to the healing creep. But ultimately, that was a design choice made by the devs.
IMO Mercy was fine at launch, and wasn’t even a “main healer” (yet). Main healers didn’t exist until Ana did, who’s ridiculous healing output caused Mercy’s healing to be buffed to 60 hps one month later. Supports were just supports.
Single target 50 hps was the perfect standard for high healing at the start of the game before we got all the unnecessary healing creep. Mercy would have worked perfectly fine as this games only intended “pacifist” heal bot support. Her kit works because she can still contribute damage like other supports through damage boost and even use her blaster in a pinch.
OP is right. Creating main healers and turning them into a mandatory sub-role ruined supports.
The prerequisite to non healing supports is massive amounts of self heal among the DPS and tanks. And we’d never have that because the support hivemind would complain about dps favoritism and being replaced.
I wouldn’t say they’ve ruined the role, but rather changed it to be primarily healers. And they actually did a pretty good job at making unique, fun healers up until certain point. It’s honestly crazy the length they went to make healing, one of the most boring thing to do in any game actually tolerable with heroes like ana and mercy.
But by making supports into more of a healer, that starts putting restrictions onto what a support can be which might be too late to undo. Unlike DPS heroes which only needs to focus on dealing damage which tends to be easier to fix later on.
Tanks though, are probably the hardest to design overall more than dps or supports and hardest to fix which explains why tanks have one of the least fun heroes.
Tanks and supports in general have always been in a rocky place when it comes to hero design and which direction these roles should take.
well in their defense, WB barely functions as a tank, hog/ball is a terrible comp to have but when you get that dreaded combo all of a sudden OW becomes highly FPS centric, cover becomes super important because you don’t have tanks defending you
Personally, I would call that ruining.
Ana has a cool design but simply nerfing the healing on all her abilities to 60 heals and replacing antinade with another debuff may have been enough to fix her problems. It made zero sense to give the only anti-heal ability in the game to the hero that can spam and burst heal far greater than any other support. As a hitscan with no fall-off and 70 damage she would have played fine as dps/healer like zen and lucio. Ana was left in the game overpowered simply because other OP heroes like tracer, widow and dva kept her in check with dive.
As of now tanks are held hostage by supports’ powerful team sustain abilities. The self sustain should be shifted more to the tank who should be less reliant on a healer to play the game.
I agree, what I’m saying is that the choice of adding another tank without a barrier was controversial because it could have gone very very bad and at release it was bad, people didn’t know where to place WB but eventually he started to make sense
well… I don’t think they should be able to self sustain, they’re already tankier, if for example Rein was able to heal himself on top of a 1200 barrier and 600 hp… well… talk about inmortal
now a controversial take that seems to have prompted OW2 5v5 direction, if there’s only one tank then healing from supports is more available, so in a way, 5v5 is the answer to that problem
Tbh it would be too complicated to make a support hero who doesn’t have healing capabilites. OW over the years has become too reliant on healing and I don’t think boomers in OW team have the creativity needed to come up with an idea of a perfect healingless support
I think they would have to split support role into 2 seperate queues. One for healer and second one for support (either full utility or minor healing) and… does overwatch really need more restrictions?
Even now when you run Zenyatta who can only heal one person for 30 HPS and Lucio who only heals for 16 HPS with his crossfade (52 for 3 second with Amp it up) feels like a substantial healing loss if enemy goes 2 healing focused supports
