What if the people who would feel “unfair” could all quit the game entirely, and there’s too few of them to matter compared to fixing queue times?
Why do you think SUPPORT that want to SUPPORT with their SUPPORTIVE characters want to frag out?
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Just generally how durable is the composition and how long do the teamfight durations extend for.
Supports and Tanks usually extend out the duration. And Lethality across all roles tends to reduce that duration.
If maybe 80% of the playerbase is either DPS, or plays their heroes like DPS.
What makes you think a percentage increase on that 20% is going to make a real dent in queue times?
Like what’s the argument from a simple Math perspective?
I think their performance and capability is fine, but the experience is lagging behind the other two roles.
Shifting the experience is fine, but balance needs to be even a little bit maintained. Giving them significantly more power (he’s suggested an across the board 40% damage buff which is beyond ludicrous) with no compensation will lead to a horrible experience.
No one wants to play “Which team has the better supports because no one else can even compete with their busted power”
I am telling you, this change would lose basically the entire DPS playerbase.
It is not 1-5%, probably more like 50%.
I agree in concept, I wouldn’t mind supports being more damage focused but they would need to have some of there defensive options nerfed.
Like I reckon, some supports could straight up out duel a Roadhog with a damage buff because there defensive abilities are so powerful. Do you really want to see that happen. Would you feel like it was fair?
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Stagnancy is the problem, not damage/being underpowered. Support needs content.
The comparison made earlier up thread to Roadhog is extremely apt. When you 1v1 him, it feels pointless, because he’s going to beat you. If the entire support roster feels as futile to challenge as Roadhog, a bigger player exodus than the one GreyFalcon is making up out of thin air will happen. Tanks will hate being melted by supports, flank dps will be unplayable, and the entire game will hinge on who has the better supports. Everyone will lose.
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If according to you most players are DPS players then you seem to be prepared to lose like 60% of the playerbase
OW2 needs a good and balanced launch not one that kills the game on release
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Source?
It doesn’t really matter what the number really is, as long as it’s smaller than the number you’d lose from bad queue times.
That said, if DPS were going to quit in droves over one role having more overall value.
Wasn’t that basically what happened in OW1?
And yet the reason they all left wasn’t “Muh Impact”, it was abysmal queue times.
They need to make the game feel better to support, not drive the power creep even further. I’ve been a support main since the game released and it felt the best when you could leave someone alone for more than 2 seconds without them exploding. Increasing damage only promotes more “healbot” gameplay driven by anxiety of, “If I look away from them, they’re going to die.”
TLDR: More damage = fewer support players
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Just repeating this so everyone has to see it twice.
I don’t know if lowering the overall ttk of the game by just increasing Support damage would be healthy, but I do feel like Blizz really missed an opportunity to bring the roles closer together when rebalancing everything for OW2. They did it with Tank and dps, but didn’t bother with Supports and now they’re the queue time bottleneck because most people want to actually pvp in their pvp game instead of just enabling someone else to do it.
It would probably be a lot more sustainable and easy to balance if damage and healing across the board were reduced but the damage differences between roles were ~20-30% as opposed to the 50-70% it is right now. Make everyone less reliant on a support to keep them up while giving supports the opportunity to actually participate in a fight outside of just healbotting and the occasional CC.
I mean, a lack of new content for three years and bad balancing was probably a bigger culprit.
the majority of current supports have a lot of fire power and some even outclass dps because of their damage output and utility they provide, so i do not see a reason to add even more firepower to an already unstable role. instead, just nerf sustain. surely this would be easy for the blizzard devs to achieve, right!
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Thing is, Grey was a staunch anti role queue person who has converted his frustration with RQ into the desire to break the game so that maybe it will go away, or every character will just be dps.
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Here’s League of Legend’s top executive balance guy saying that the #1 thing you do when balancing is the rough large scale balance changes. What he calls “Macro Calibrations”. After which, then you can worry about the fine tuning. i.e. “Micro Calibrations”. And he puts that as the absolute #1 thing you do, when trying to balance.
GameDev.net - Techniques for Achieving Play Balance
Similarly, here’s Jeff Kaplan talking about how bogus is is to talk about “Power Creep”.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/i0x4q5/jeff_kaplan_on_power_creep/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/i0x4q5/jeff_kaplan_on_power_creep/
Basically, autopilot “Rules of Thumb” with zero context, don’t mean much. And aren’t a replacement for actually working through issues “in context”.
Makes sense.
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This is the tradeoff.
How much crying from queue times vs how much crying from fights?
We are all trading on DPS tears here, and how big the tradeoffs will be, that will be based on how much the supports queue in OW2.
I’m with Grey in that I think there is going to be a problem there.
I’m not with him on the size of changes needed for it. Or at least how much we should do preempting it.
I think it will be bad though, and I would rather have changes so they queue, but not enough that it breaks the game.
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I thought we were playing a different game in a different genre.
Jeff was wrong, power creep is real, and he isn’t here anymore.
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