True.
Because the reality is that Support is possibly pushing tank out of ‘strongest role in the game’. Supports complain and moan about how life is so hard for them, despite having the most broken heroes available to them.
You want reality? Reality is that support 90% of the time is an easy role that gets to passively decide the outcome of a game.
I’ve said before that the support role should not exclusively become the role that is essentially just healbots. There is no creativity or innovation in this role. Also, it’s ridiculous to assume or think they won’t release any new support heroes, calm down lol.
Your basically jinxing it now.
I’ve been saying this for well over a year now. Nerf healing, buff supporting.
2 things here:
First, ‘‘Healing creep’’ is not a thing. Every support has lower healing numbers than before. Reminder that even post buffs Ana was considered a throw pick to the Zen/Lucio meta. What changed was the healing needed to keep a team alive.
Second, this weird idea that ‘‘support has been ruined!!1!’’ and citing Zen and Lucio as ‘‘non-healers’’ is absolutely insane. The more Lucio’s healing gets damage creeped, the worse he fares for the 99% of the playerbase, and the more he becomes an extremely situational speedbot (or redditing meme).
The issue here will always be that the constant reduction in non-healing survivability over the years has done nothing but increase the workload of supports. If your supports stop healing now, your team dies, because a bunch of characters have lost effectiveness over the years, specially tanks and close range DPS.
Before supports could look away for more than 3 seconds without someone dying because barriers werent made of wet tissue paper, other tank defenses werent overnerfed (rip DM) and things like temporal HP actually existed before. Now-a-days a Mercy goes to heal someone else instead of the Pharah/Sym she was healing and they drop dead in half a second.
Couple that with the damage creep on tank and support roles and you soon understand why Lucio became a troll pick over the years: to keep his team alive he is heavily dependent on his healing complimenting the already existing survivability on his team. With all that removed or hypernerfed, its no wonder he has become a speedbot that only works on Rein comps.
Actually Ana started healing death spiral.
I don’t really know how accurate that is. Unless we’re talking Ana. As much as I adore playing her; I can’t deny that her sleeps and nades can really determine the outcome of a game by a lot. I still considered her pretty balanced though. Oh and I guess Brigitte. But I’m not unfortunate enough to be skilled enough to encounter the high skill Brigittes born from the depths of Hell.
How freaking bad are your Lucios that you think he’s a throw pick? Maybe he’s not top tier anymore but he’s still freaking great.
Lucio is pretty garbage on low Masters rn unless you play Rein comps.
Lucio can be good in those very specific comps, but I am talking about him outside that. If a hero is so woefully dependent on speedbotting because everything else in his kit cant keep up with damage, then there are mayor design issues going on, either on the hero or the game as a whole.
The best I can say about Lucio is that he is better than Moira. But thats about it. Every other support is far more flexible and far more useful outside a very specific comp. And part of that is that Lucio’s healing was good in an era where healing wasnt nearly the only mayor team survivability.
Honestly think its a syndrome that Lucio’s have now adays because he’s no longer a must pick. Thats what happens when a hero is must pick for the first 4 years of the games life cycle.
GOD yeah, the amount of Lucio pickers who think he is currently good in any map, mode or comp is just so annoying. The other support ends up having to pick up the slack in an era of barriers made of foam.
Now I’m really confused. He’s still good on Ilios Well and Lighthouse. In fact King Of The Hill in general seems to be where he shines. Except Ilios Ruins. Screw that map. At least as far as how it works with Lucio. 2 out of 3 Ilios maps favor Lucio, with the Well being the most infamous one. And then the third decided to be horrifically anti Lucio. And I agree he helps Reinhardt a lot. But I think he’s overall better than you give him credit for.
Also barriers made of foam? That depends I suppose. I mean with Orisa, 100%. Inexcusable HP pool to cooldown. And I’m tired of pretending it’s not weak. Sigma, sort of debatable. I think the weakest aspect of his shield is the regen speed is too slow honestly. If they just buffed that I think it would be fine. And as for Rein, well his barrier is still king, even with 400 HP less than it had in the past. Trouble is Reinhardt is still horribly vulnerable to cc … Which can make its effective health far lower. I don’t know; I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say foam. More like a shoddily made wooden door in Orisa’s case. A too costly and time consuming reconstruction process on a very fancy looking wooden door that gets the job done in bursts for Sigma. And then Reinhardt has a freaking massive iron-coated heavy door … that can be walked around or forced open without breaking it down. That’s how I’d describe it anyway, hehe. I still have a ton of fun with Rein and Orisa though.
This is like saying Symmetra is a strong hero because she has 1-2 maps where she isnt a complete throw pick.
That is the future for ‘‘non-healing supports’’. Being absurdly gimmicky and map specific.
And most King Of The Hill maps. Most of those favor him too. If anything Ilios Ruins kind of stands out. And a lot of people prefer maps favoring some heroes over others for variety. Not only does it allow more variety in map design, but it means you’re not seeing the same few heroes over and over again. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Ilios Well also completely invalidates Zarya. Does this make her useless overall? No. She’s made useless by Tanks she doesn’t synergize with being meta, lol. But even if Rein Zarya were the meta, she’d still be a bad pick on Well. Heck, she’s not that great on Lighthouse either. Better, but still not great.
Also Symmetra isn’t a throw pick.
That is still not enough.
If Lucio’s viability being so sorely defined by speed boost in a single comp, then he has become one trick pony hero. But people at this point reaaaaally dont like to see Lucio in their teams unless its the very specific comp he can enable.
Sym is a complete throw pick outside the very specific maps team TP can be easily broken. Every other team TP strat is not doable in the chaos of ladder, and once you remove team TP all you have is worse Reaper.
Source: me, a diamond/low masters Sym main since launch.
Care to at least make your profile public?
One thing he mentions that I don’t see talked about much in the replies, is the idea of not adding more supports
And the reasoning does extend to the other 2 roles as well
I legit think there is a good argument to be had that blizz shouldn’t add more heroes……but I think people are too entrenched in the “we need more content” idea that the thought of this is simply sacrilege
I mean; I can somewhat get that. I can totally understand there are arguments to be made to let things continue to be balanced around what there is. But I personally would like a few more heroes in Tank and Support before we get to that point. I do think Overwatch will eventually reach a point where, like we are on live currently, new heroes stop getting added. And maybe for the most part, that time it will be more final. I for one though am so not ready for it. I have felt very restricted when playing the Support role especially lately and would love at least a few more options than what we have currently.
I definitely understand what you mean but the truth is that there are many mechanics that haven’t been explored and it’d be a shame not to have those in the game at some point, for reference we have 4 different types of snipers and while there’s some overlap in the end they have enriched the game in their own way
if anything what we don’t need is more dps heroes since they already have the most diversity out of all roles but for example we still have space for a support that can create healing stations or healing fields or healing shocks or a version of sombra as a healer under a different name, there’s still many options to explore
I’m feeling feared about if supports got gutted hardcore in OW2 with that dumb idea of 50% less healing after taking dmg, then support is not fun and reliable anymore… for me the auto health reg for supports i like it, but man i’m gonna miss mercy’s res…
Honestly if they turned Echo into a DPS from a support in such a precise time where that was such an obvious bad idea.
And that they wouldn’t use another planned new “support” hero instead. (Remember these hero releases are planned in advance.)
Makes me think there was no new support hero in the line up at the time.
Meaning if things stayed the same…. No supports for OW2 release