Can we just not? I like playing support and OW2 will be no different. Yes the role will be the new bottle neck but there will always be one! Its not that bad in therm of queue times from what I saw from the betas. Lets just look how it turns out. But I dislike remodeling the complete role. The only hero in need is Mercy.
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So, where exactly is the proof that any of the current and new DPS mains would swap to Support because of these changes? Why exactly would they suddenly choose DPS lite Supports over the actual full DPS heroes?
Like, who do you think is playing Medic? Sage? Lifeline? The people who main Support in every game.
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I feel like you aren’t accounting for the regen passives or massive healing increase with healthpacks on Tanks. (I.e. A large healthpack would heal Hog for 700hp)
Much less how revives would also offset a lot of healing needs.
There’s a pretty reasonable certainty that that they are going to lose a ton of current/potential players to bad queue times.
And given that they can basically just buff Supports to have similar capabilities as a DPS, it would seem to be pretty reasonable that would attract more DPS/Tank players.
And I’d argue that they gives at least enough reason for devs to test it internally, if not set up an Experimental Card to try it out.
Since a potential of a successful redesign is better than a near certainty of losing a ton of players to bad queue times.
And I’ve yet to see any sort of good argument that tells me they should intentionally not fix queue times. And suffer the penalty from that.
Like the way I’m interpreting that is
“They shouldn’t even attempt to fix a problem that could lose them 20-50% of their current/potential playerbase, because 1-10% of the players might quit over it”.
Also the big aspect that Overwatch has over Apex / Valorant / TF2, is that they have their roles balanced around Open Queue, with no Role Limits.
Role Limits allows the devs to make it so that Supports just have more overall “Raw Value” than DPS.
I don’t think there are ever going to be any more huge systemic changes to the roles. They spent a long time settling on these ones.
They literally just did one for Tanks.
Why do we need to insist that Supports need to be designed around 6v6 Open Queue, in OW2’s 5v5 Role Queue?
Also, sunk cost fallacy.
I’m saying OW2 is what this game is going to be for the long haul. They’ll make incremental changes like they did in OW1, maybe new role passives or whatever, but the basic team dynamic is here to stay.
Well, that seems more like a slower implementation speed, rather than a hard cap on the destination they end up in.
But for real, the player loss risk of not fixing queue times is so massive, that the devs can afford a pretty large amount of “collateral damage” to get it fixed.
Like if you got a problem that could lose 20-50% of your current/potential playerbase. Then losing 1-10% to fix it, is totally reasonable.
And just ignoring that problem and acting like it will fix itself, is just unprofessional.
I don’t know about that. It’s not like Bap’s all that popular. Lucio and Zen weren’t able to help with beta queue times either, even after Zen roided up with doomfoot and 225 HP. Supports are also going to feel weaker with a universal healing nerf, and that’s going to also put people off - not just current supports, but the people you’re trying to appeal to as well. Nobody likes feeling impotent and plinking away with Ana to try and keep someone up is going to feel just that.
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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).