Yesterday I was digging around on the forums regarding the early responses to “5v5”. I know Reddit and social media was fairly pissed, but I was curious what the forums had said last summer when the announcement and footage dropped. I went through about a dozen topics, some positive, some negative.
These three really caught my attention, not because they are all negative, but because they were accurate predictions of what is happening now.
We have a six year track record for the balance team. We have six years of gameplay to lean on. Anticipating the future is NOT difficult in regards to this game. These folks understood that.
I say all this because the idea of this balance team reworking every hero in the game is absolutely terrifying. This was avoidable by leaving the game 6v6.
I’m gonna sound like a mean person here, but these two quotes really are important. A lot of the playerbase doesn’t know how to play support well, or chooses not to. Part of people choosing to be passive, or refuse to min/max their support to damage/aggression, is because they don’t want to play well or don’t know how to.
That has not changed in 5v5. Those people are still the same, and in the end they will continue to be where they always were.
It’s a heartless, broad generalization, and I am not saying those people don’t deserve to play how they want, but I am saying that hasn’t changed from 6v6 to 5v5, except that now it might be more obvious.
With that being said, I know some supports are in a bad place right now and that’s factual.
This is going to depend on composition and strat and maps. I think that should be obvious. I saw lots of play from every tank over my 12 hours yesterday.
But I think that was the point of the first article. Support players have formulated 6 years of bad habits that are going to be more punishable in OW2.
Healbots aren’t going to climb the ladder, but they will at least exist and thus fill a queue.
Now they become farmable, DPS have more autonomy, and now these healbot supports feed and die because they are healbots. Their frustration will lead to them quitting.
And as I stated the day before the beta, the fallout from the beta will be universal nerfs to all support’s healing numbers. Because it’s still the most broken role in the game, but 80% of the community are existing as healbots and cannot properly play them.
The amount of sustain (when your team is decent) in OW2 makes your team immortal. The base numbers are simply too high for a 5v5 environment and when OWL premiers in a week we’ll see the outrage of how much sustain is still there.
Then we’ll see base healing get lowered and alot of folks who just spent two weeks getting farmed as a healbot in the beta are going to be like “WTF?!? Why are you nerfing support!?! They already suck”.
I know this sounds incredibly specific and maybe too specific, but mark my words, whether it’s at the end of the beta, between betas, or the after the next one, sustain across the board is going to get nerfed.
Again, the point of this entire post being some folks can predict the future with all the evidences we have been provided. Maybe I’m wrong, but everything that’s happening is pointing to universal sustain nerfs and wild confusion for all those healbots.
I guess the question will be does that include utility, or will there be a balance shift? I don’t mean in group sustain, but perhaps self sustain, which seems to be the common talking point about what most supports actually need. I should spend more time on other supports rather than just Moira, because as it stands Moira feels absolutely perfect and should be used right now as the archetype for other supports being able to take care of themselves, just with scaling skill. And I don’t mean just slapping a stun into their kit…
I’m okay with less sustain, but sustain doesn’t exactly feel OP right now… I don’t think Blizz will do that, so those people who like to play that kind of role more should be okay in that sense. Is my take anyway
Everyone needs to start somewhere - nobody is instantly good at every character. I know its annoying seeing low skill players, but everyone was low skill at one point or another. If you make the game too hard for bad/new players to even start playing a role, they just wont. You’ll have less supports as a whole.
Complaining about low skill players wont make them go away. Neither will blaming them or telling them to Get Good.
Hopefully they improve the matchmaker/ranking system somehow, some way, which they probably won’t, or a better tutorial system. Maybe the PvE campaign will help with that. I don’t know if there’s a lot to be done there, and you’re right people do need to start somewhere, but which people will decide to move on and get better… and which will refuse to do so, knowingly?
Hey, I play mostly support. I’m not terribly good, but I still have fun playing. The changes make it sound like it won’t be fun to play support anymore. If that’s the case, and I don’t find the other roles enjoyable, which is likely. I’ll just stop playing. I just don’t have enough time to play a game that isn’t enjoyable. And I certainly don’t have the time to put practice WORK in to make it enjoyable. Plenty of other things to choose to do with my very limited down time.
The dev said something about 85% just need to get better well guess what if you make a game for 15% of the players you failed. its going to be a massive learning curve and many wont like it. Nothing was wrong with being a healbot in a fps game if it worked. If anything its what made OW unique. You think they are just going to either get gud or quit their preferred playstyle? Well its going to be quit. They have many more games to play.
You can make the game and cater to the fanbase and I assume you have statistics to back up your choice. Please don’t then anyone complain if the people who played a certain way leave if the game goes another direction.
Supports issue isn’t whether or not you play agro. The issue is that support’s hard counter, dive, is rearing it’s head again, making support extremely unfun to play when it’s picked.