I disagree. With all respect, I think it’s stupid & extremely risky to just overbuff supports because they were the least popular role in the betas when
Tanks got 3 new heroes
DPS got 3 new heroes
Supports got next to nothing
What would have been absolutely outlandish & bizarre would have been if supports weren’t by far the least played role. Myself and several other people I know would have played a whole lot of support if there was a new hero, but there wasn’t, so instead we played the new tanks & new DPS because we’ve been playing the same supports for 5+ years, why would we play them over the new things? That’s how a lot of people likely felt too. Throwing buffs at supports at this point is not the answer.
There’s a risk. But you’re comparing losing 1-2% of current/upcoming players to losing 30-80% of upcoming players. And claiming we gotta be more worried about that 1-2%.
And that’s assuming 1-2 weeks of overbuffed Supports when they didn’t have a beta #3 wouldn’t be forgivable. Especially if DPS queue times are down to like 2 minutes during that time.
But also it’s dramatically easier to to nerf/revert than it is to just snap your fingers and instantly produce buffs that would have needed at least 2 weeks of playtesting. And 2 weeks of console certification.
Also a lot of the dumb true-isms people throw around about the importance “Support vs DPS balance” are based on the view that we need to desperately need to:
Protect against “too many Support heroes on a team” with Role Limits. Which is wrong
Worry about Overwatch 2 5v5 becoming too Defensive overall. Which is wrong.
So all you have left is people who just don’t like Support buffs from a non-gameplay purely atheistic viewpoint. And to be honest, it really wouldn’t matter if 100% of those players quit. There’s not enough of them to matter. Especially since it’s very unlikely a large amount of them would quit over Supports being extra powerful for a few weeks.
I don’t agree with your math. I don’t think we’re “risking losing 30-80% of upcoming players” if we don’t overbuff supports that don’t need to be overbuffed.
I put far more stock in beta queue times being due to supports not having a new hero than you do.
I’m actually curious, what supports do you think need buffs?
Moira was doing pretty well in the betas.
Lucio was dominating until he was nerfed, and then still did well.
Zenyatta was dominating and had to be nerfed.
Baptiste was doing pretty well, especially with the regen burst buff.
Brigitte was doing pretty well.
Ana was doing pretty well.
The only question mark I see is Mercy?
Beyond that, what will overbuffing supports accomplish if you just nerf them a few weeks later anyways? Aren’t those players just going to think “Screw this, my hero was nerfed”?
Like I’ve said several times, the biggest issue was not having a new support, that’s really it. Myself and several people I know played support in the betas but had no reason to keep playing support again and again without a new hero to play while Tanks & DPS had multiple
Did you really think a bunch of players from TF2, Valorant, Apex, Fortnite, Warzone, Paladins and pre-role queue Overwatch players are going to tolerate 15-30 minute queue times?
Like it’s legitimately kinda insane if that’s what you’re thinking.
Oh, because I figure they’d buff them up about say 20%, then scale back to maybe 10% to 15%. Since it’s better to error on the side of too much, than not enough.
Additionally, another bullet point I forgot up to is that Tanks got a huge amount of impact buffs, and DPS also got a ton of indirect impact buffs from a lack of barriers/cc, and how 4v5 is a much stronger advantage state than 5v6.
And that’s gonna give them maybe 3-5 weeks of hype. Which is powerful and great, but not a long term solution.
Especially considering they are also very likely to get something like 2x as many DPS players when all the F2P FPS players join in.
Like if what I’m saying is genuinely too much and Supports have higher queue times than DPS. Well oops, just roll that back a bit with some server-side variable tweaks that don’t require .EXE file changes.
As a support player in the last beta, my queue times were instant to the point that at super active hours, I would load into a new game the INSTANT a game ended
And with the data points they showed off, Ana was the most popular support, and had sub 50% unmirroed winrates the entire beta
If people have been crying that “Omg Ana is so overpowered supports are broken” doesn’t it scare you to think that in a situation where one team has Ana and the other doesn’t the non Ana team has a higher chance of winning?
Like the “most impactful” support is doing worse than every other support, and you wonder why no-one wants to play the class in OW2
No I don’t, I also don’t think we’re going to have 15-30 minute queue times. I don’t see any reason to believe that we will.
I fail to see how overbuffing supports who don’t need it and then nerfing them is going to have any kind of long term effect. If people don’t want to play supports because they “aren’t strong enough” as is then what will temporarily buffing them & nerfing them do? Not a whole lot.
I disagree. Having a new support for the first time in 4 years is going to make a lot of people want to play support again for more than just a few weeks. It not only adds someone to play, it adds someone to play alongside & against. Not to mention there are also 2 supports being released after the new tank in December which will just add even more interest to the role.
As far as I could tell every support besides Mercy was doing just fine if not great
I think necrotic orb is a good idea that was executed poorly. Just change the numbers.
Instead of a 50 damage burst that reduces damage by 75% damage for 4 seconds, change it do a 40dps orb with a max damage of 160 damage that reduces damage by 50% while they’re taking damage, viola, still a valuable damage tool that also has utility with proper placement which takes skill to maximize
i have the feeling they will give rewards for playing the flex role or bottleneck role. maybe with $$currency… dont see them giving a whole lot tho lol…but they better if you think about it. would solve queue times pretty quick if people find out you can get currency for skins for free if playing the least popular role
It’s not about strength. Supports as a whole just don’t translate into 2 as well as the other roles did.
For example, Baptiste, a support built around AOE healing groups lost his main purpose as a healer since people rarely group up anymore. It would be neat if they tweaked his right click to be not as reliant on group healing and buffed his left click a bit to play into his dps-ey nature a bit. That would make him fit more into how OW2 is played.
Like yeah you can buff his ammo count, but that won’t fix the core issue that makes him and other supports feel bad to play. You need to address the issues at the design level, not the balance level, else you end up with balanced or even overturned heroes nobody wants to play.
No. I think support will be the least popular role, one role has to be, there is no making roles entirely even. Support being the least popular role does not mean queue times will be 15-30 minutes
Idk, I played support in the betas & I just fundamentally disagree that there’s some kind of major design flaw in the role. I was able to do really well with all of the supports. I’m not saying they were perfect or that they couldn’t be improved, but there wasn’t some glaring issue in the games I played
I feel like you’re trying to fix an issue that doesn’t yet exist which will just cause other issues.
I feel like you’re saying “Don’t dive your car with your seatbelt on, because worst comes to worst, you can put your seatbelt on after you crash the car”.
If they screw up the launch window with bad queue times, there is no do-over. The damage would not just be magically erased.
I’m not saying you can’t do well on them. Again, it’s not about strength. It’s about design issues that keep the role from being fun in OW2.
I won most of my games on support in 2. There’s just a lot going on that make most supports not that fun to jump into or play compared to the other roles that can be addressed with mini reworks.
