Well, they could skip the healing nerf and just give Supports the damage buffs.
I just think at the end of the day, unless they just eliminate the support role, it’s going to be the bottleneck.
That doesn’t mean DPS timers have to be 20 minutes. I do think Kiriko is going to help with timers, both short and long term.
She’s like Ana. A very strong kit, with a familiar weapon to genji who is the most popular DPS.
I think with more support heroes to choose from we’ll see more people playing the role.
I’m glad to hear that 2 of the 3 heroes next year are going to be support.
Hoping that the next is more of a mercy type hero and that the one after that is higher mechanical skill.
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Fair enough.
Well yeah, but also it would be incorrect that they can’t shrink that gap.
Like maybe they can’t get to 1x Support player for 1x DPS player
But if they are currently at 5x Support players for every 1x Support player.
Then it is probably possible to shrink that to 3x-or-2x Support players for every 1x Support player.
And also I’m almost entirely ignoring the effect of Kiriko, since
- The new hero hype will wear off in 3-5 weeks
- She’s got a really high skill floor difficulty
Like when the “December Tank Hero” launches, 8 weeks after Kiriko comes out. Then the Kiriko hype will be mostly dead.
The last thing OW2 needs is more damage and less healing. There was already more damage in the OW2 beta resulting in everyone dying faster. This change would fundementally alter the game to the point where it wouldn’t be Overwatch anymore. It would play far more like a tac shooter since everyone would be afraid of getting one bursted.
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You know, it wasn’t the point you were trying to make necessarily.
But Paladins and Gundam do have a lot higher base-health equivalent.
Which kinda resolves the “burst kill concerns”.
Guess I’ll have to ponder that one a bit.
I hear you, but unlike the average hero, she’s pretty unique.
I think Ana drew quite a few players to the support role when she came out.
I’m not saying she every genii main is going to change to support mains, but you might see a handful more willing to queue support for shorter queue timers.
I just think shifting the game that much (increasing support dps and decreasing healing) is bad for the game.
TTK is already much lower with 5v5.
I think “Bad for the game” would be measured in “Reduces the overall playerbase size”.
And whatever “Bad for the game” numeric amount of players you’d lose over it.
Would need to be worse than the players you’d lose by having longer and longer queue times.
People need to get really comfortable with the idea that “Lose 0 players” is not an option. And be aiming at “Lose the fewest amount of current/potential players”.
Right, but I don’t think your solution is going to decrease dps queue timers.
At the end of the day dps players are going to play dps.
They don’t want to heal their teammates, and as long as that is an expectation of support characters, you aren’t going to switch their role.
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I can see what you are going for and while the suggestions you make are far from perfect and many of them problematic in many ways. I can fairly safely say that the game would be more enjoyable for a broader audience.
However, the people on the forum that have stuck around are also the people that like Overwatch enough it is current state to stay, meaning such a wild change that changes the core of Overwatch and how it plays would be hated here.
I would argue, Overwatch has always been fundamentally floored though.
Well again. A lot of that assumes Open Queue style balancing where it’s important that Supports don’t have fundamentally more overall value than DPS.
When they can give Supports nearly DPS levels of lethality, AND all their healing stuff. That would be Role Limit style balancing.
But yeah, the issue you are outlining is real. However that’s less to do with “DPSing and Healing isn’t something people would enjoy”.
And more along the lines of maybe finding ways where healing can be more like Zenyatta or Lucio. Where the healing portion of gameplay interaction is largely on autopilot. Or some other sort of mechanism to reduce the time spent on the healing portion (i.e. Brig Repair packs).
While I think making Supports more dps-like would appeal to a new playerbase, I also think that OW2 shouldn’t dismiss the current playerbase in hopes that the new one will be better, even if just “20%”. Mercy’s unparalleled popularity before the reworks proves that there is an audience. I think it would be a wasteful direction to abandon that selling point completely.
I think a lot of your suggestions would be good additions, but more-so for new heroes. There’s not as much reason to change old heroes, especially ones with proven appeal.
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Well if anything, that becomes less about speed at which they implement changes, and whether they do it through buffs and nerfs, or almost entirely just buffs.
Like if all Supports got 10% more firepower with no nerfs. There would only be a tiny minority of Support players that would hate that.
Well I think the way you go about that is
- Make the changes slowly
- Do it mostly with buffs
- Mercy and “April Support Hero” can fullfill the “True Healer” style.
- Where are they can DPSify the other Supports
Yer but then you would get a massive portion of DPS players that would hate it, which is the majority of the playerbase.
I can’t imagine tank players would be too happy either.
I’d argue that isn’t not possible to fix queue times without making some percentage of players unhappy.
The only thing to worry about is if the “Cure” is worse than the “Disease”.
I think this assumption is inherently flawed. By making a game with the broadest appeal, you cease to appeal to anyone at all. You have to decide what your game is, and then design around that. If you’re going to change Overwatch into a class based shooter, then the changes need to be so great that it will basically be a new game. I’m pretty doubtful about the actual game direction regarding hard counters as well. Not because you can’t design bloated kits to let people do everything, but simply because each character only gets one weapon and has infinite ammo. To eliminate hard counters, you would have to simultaneously have a map that benefits both Widowmaker and Tracer at the same time. That’s setting aside that Mercy would then need to be able to beat flankers, etc etc.
This is a round hole square peg problem.
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Yer, I agree with that but it also means from a dev perspective the #1 priority is keeping the DPS players happy. It is just the sad truth of the game and effects all balancing decisions.
If DPS players are really happy, queue times are down. Then the devs are 70-80% there to making Overwatch a super great game to play for the majority of players.
Obviously, very hard to be done.
I’d disagree. I’m not trying to appeal to everybody.
I’m suggesting they double-down on making the playerbase they have (or are likely to get) be happy.
i.e. The vast majority of the players they have or are likely to get, would prefer the game had low queue times, and moved in the Class Based Shooter direction.
Which is going to make a good amount of “MOBA/RPG preferenced” players be upset or quit.
I’m suggesting that it’s dumb to try to make everybody happy, and instead to aim at the largest amount of players happy. Even if that means deliberately alienating some of them by having a more targeted audience group.
Increasing damage and reducing heals on supports means a lot of damage and healing is going to be inexistente in team fights