Every game is Tracer, Sojourn, Widow. Tracer, Sojourn, Widow. Oh look, a Junkrat! Back to Tracer, Sojourn, Widow.
I pride myself on my Mercy movement skills and even I’m getting pummeled by the enemy DPS all game. And what are non-Mercy/Lucio/Kiriko support players supposed to do? Roll over and die? Tracer literally can do whatever she want with the removal of CC and her damage buff (although partially reverted) hurts like hell.
And the one shots from Widow and Sojourn make it impossible to peak half the map most of the game.
Like no wonder only Kiriko, Lucio, and Mercy are getting played. They’re the only supports who even stand a CHANCE of staying alive in this current gameplay climate. Zen/Bap/Ana/Brig would just flat out explode if played in most of these games.
Ramatraa and Orisa are also extremely unfun to play against as Support after his speed buff and Orisa’s ult buff. I don’t understand why the last several patches have been substantial tank buffs but NO real nerfs to DPS and NO real buffs or tweaks to supports. Tanks were already the most congested role and all they realistically did in Season 2 was make different tanks more overtuned.
The Devs either need to seriously buff the survivability of the Support role, or heavily nerf one shots and put Tracer back down to 5 damage.
I think putting the support passive back at 1 sec would help a lot to start. I wouldn’t even mind experimenting with 225 HP Zen again if they nerfed discord to compensate.
Support across every SR feels like that right now, except Mercy is a huge part of the problem also.
They need to nerf Soj and RH so dive tanks can help with pressure for sure. I’m not sure if Tracer still needs a nerf (they overnerfed Genji for no reason). I think Orisa is a little too strong, and Ram needs a little power taken out of his ult and put into the rest of his kit.
Kiriko needs a nerf, Ana needs her buff removed, and Mercy’s DB needs to be removed and replaced with something else. Supports should not need buffs, especially in regards to healing. They’re, mostly, fine. OHK (which Mercy is guilty of assisting with) is bad for the game, and damage is starting to creep up. They need to keep a very critical eye on damage right now.
I also play support in GM and it is genuinely miserable. Season 1 of OW -particularly before Kiriko came to comp- was the most fun I’ve had as a support player in OW for literal years. But they boned that up real quick.
I don’t care if they rework damage boost as long as they remove/rework Rez into a different E ability too. Such an unfun ability to use and to play against.
I personally am a fan of testing her blue beam to give like 30% fire rate speed and 30% speed buff to encourage her to pocket dive-y frontline-y heroes more than long ranged DPS, thus forcing her into the actual center of the fight more often and making you have good movement to work to stay alive.
I agree no healing buffs for anyone, at all.
I think they should nerf damage, yes, but I also wouldn’t mind if they made tanks a little less tanky across the board and made supports a little more survivable too. Like I genuinely think the support regen passive was fine at 1 second. Beta 1 felt a lot more fun in general I feel like.
I like the idea of the speed buff. Even as a Lucio player I can admit he’s held the team mobility niche for too long. Mercy would still be good for dive comp mobility while Lucio can still be good at rush comp mobility.
But I’m still worried about the fire rate speed buff. It’d still be good for long range burst DPS too since they now spam shots more often. I’m worried that it’d make Hanzo in particular too strong.
I don’t know why they didn’t do that in the first place, nerfed discord in compensation, I kinda thought it was the obvious thing to do with a 225HP Zen
How about everybody gets an out-of-combat regen passive, but they need to be within 20m of a teammate for it to activate. (So solo Flankers and offangle snipers can’t use it).
And then with buffed out-of-combat heals, they can reduce in-combat heals.
Although another way to lower composition durability would be to decrease Tank health, or increase Support firepower.
My guess after they remove the oneshot on Hog, and remove/limit the oneshot on Sojourn.
That Widow and Hanzo will probably get scaled down.
The problem with tanks is that they are so dang reliant on healing. Like, most every tank in the game needs to be in melee range to function and Hog is literally the only tank with viable self-healing. When you’ve got supports healing you back up, you’re pretty much invincible. Without it, you die in like a second. And if you don’t get healing between rounds, running to HP packs isn’t much of a thing most tanks can do, but without healing to top you back up, you really can’t make any plays whatsoever.
I honestly thing Hog is popular purely because he’s pretty much the only tank who doesn’t NEED constant healing to actually be effective. (I was hoping JQ’s self healing would let her be that way, but boy it really doesn’t.)
I am really on board for tanks getting a general survivability nerf, as long as it ALSO means they are given more independence from supports. Out of combat healing of some sort, more emphasis on self-healing abilities (just less bloated than Hog’s would be nice), more shield health… idk. It just feels like you’re too good with constant healing, but also really bad if you don’t have it.
Funnily enough, I think this is actually a lot of the problem–supports are so important in enabling giga tanks that the best play is ALWAYS going in and assassinating them.
None of this happened in Season 1. Zarya was very popular pick taking over like 30-40% of top 500 placements.
When you look at it double tanks really kept hog in check because he didn’t have free access to 200hp squishies. Ana/Zarya also helped to counter him rather directly. You can bioande his breather. Bubble the hogs. Sleep dart the hooks as well.
One less tnak lets him run around more. Kiriko’s rise helps to mitigate Ana counters. Zarya getting a bubble cooldown weakness makes her far harder to counter Hog especially since she can’t get a free 8sec bubble that can only be used for allies. She’s now forced to have to use a single bubble for everything on an 11 sec cooldown.
Since we are here I think Roadhog/Sojourn are relatively easy things to mitigate. Sojourn could get a numbers tweak on railgun again. Something like 0-100 base damage on it. This would kill the Mercy pocket making Mercy not as heavily picked anymore. They already have planned changes to hog, but we hope it is impactful enough.
Widow/Hanzo are fine. We have had double sniper before and overall they are pretty balanced and I don’t think need tweaks. Widow is dive weak and map dependent. Hanzo is more generalist, but still has issues. Adjusting Hog/Sojourn will do a great deal to mitigate the pick era.
Though Kiriko helps matters little when she can assist with burst dmg. Her burst dmg might need to get pulled back a bit from 120 → 100 perhaps.
There are many obvious things that the dev team flat out refuses to consider. Every single patch is one step forward, two steps back. There really is no doubt that, after 7 years, they literally do not know what they’re doing and have been relying on the art team this entire time.
In many ways, devs knew what they were doing in that Mercy is now a highly picked character because of Sojourn existing knowing full well what happened in the Ashe era were players see 1shot dmg bst kills on hitscan to be immensely powerful. Nerfing Sojourn railgun to a point where Mercy Dmg Bst can help her she’s now very strong up there. Mercy will still be a good value pick until Sojourn is no longer used. Though that goes into a rework.
So, they didn’t really buff or nerf Mercy heavily. Only gave a small quality of life buff that arguably is more important at lower tiers where pulling out pistol is the stronger way of rising through the ranks. More people are content with where Mercy is at.
Um, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but support is actually OP right now. A local silver player HARD CARRIED one of their games by healbotting, the role is fine.
But seriously, support needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Kiriko and Lucio are getting tiring but there just aren’t other options that can actually survive in high-ranked games. If they aren’t going to buff support survivability then they need to bite the bullet and actually start nerfing tanks and DPS that can delete supports with minimal skill/risk required. Support mains are starting to wise up by swapping over to Tank/DPS and it’s making the queue problem and overall match quality far worse.
man sometimes im glad im not GM since you’re basically going against the best of the best. so seems like you have to play seriously every game and try to play meta heroes. also the pressure of making mistakes
also at that level i am sure people are at the threshold of almost being a human aimbot with crazy accuracy that looks like they would be cheating heh (im sure most people dont cheat at that level?)
ill just stick to quick play lol. maybe if i was younger i would be a bit higher in comp like diamond level or something
GM in OW isn’t very competitive anyone can get it, there have been numerous metas where abusing a very noob hero would get you to GM, like Mercy, Doomfist (when he was a DPS) and, toward the end of OW1, Hog.
I would say anyone who is average at everything in life including aim & reflexes can comfortably get at least 4200 on any of the 3 roles because OW as a game has a fairly low skill ceiling and you don’t HAVE TO go something like Widow to win the game, heroes like Torb, Mercy, Hog, Phara exist too and those are extremely easy to play from every point of view (positioning, mechanics, etc.).
