Well having less HPS doesn’t determine which healers will be picked. Lucio has always had more healing than say zen. Yet Zen has spent just as much time as a meta pick. Moira had the biggest healing output for longest time but wasn’t always picked. Because she lacked utility.
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No tanks have similar damage output to damage dealers. Support outside of Mercy can do okay damage or in the case of Zen DPS level damage.
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I too hope that this is the case.
Hard agree with not only this, but with many facets of your post! I’m hopefully optimistic that these healing reductions are paving the way for more tactical healing boosts. Thank you for your well-constructed and thoughtful post.
This is why I made it a point to mention several tweaked elements of Kits and mention where numbers could deviate from expectations or calculations were impossible.
Thanks for making me chuckle! I’m pretty…passionate, and won’t deny that I can overreact to things 
Interesting commentary on not only the state of the game, but the importance of hero selection within a given role! I personally would like to see chain hits make its debut in Overwatch, and the return of Barrier-piercing abilities (old Symmetra orbs and Moira’s Biotic Orbs being some of the only examples to date). I think that maybe the super-importance of healers is due to the limited quantity of heroes and specifics of their kits as they relate to the rest of the cast. I’m a Lucio main, but I know better than to run him on every round because meta. I’m excited for the notion that reduction in healing will open the door for sustain damage, and hopefully players won’t consider S:76 as “trash” anymore. His kit is in a good spot but he does suffer against intense healing despite being effective against Support heroes specifically.
Excellent post. Worth the read. Makes total sense. Thank you for your contribution to the discussion!
In my games I typically see Damage players killed first and that’s usually the GO signal to collapse on the opposition.
True. Prior to the nerf, I could routinely dish out 10-12k heals per match or more, and have met or exceeded the 10k heals per 10min benchmark demanded on my platform to join 3k+ teams. Brigitte adds a lot of durability to her team, and I don’t want her to lose this identity. I personally like to Melee Brigitte when fighting against her as it bypasses her Barrier and her inspire self heal is pretty low. I’m not saying “spam Melee 4head,” but I also wouldn’t factor in her entire Barrier life into her EHP. Think of it like exchanging punches in a monkey duel. Effective if timed properly, but better damage is usually available.
Mixed feelings about this. Brig is versatile to an extent, but yes she is pretty situational and loses hard to her counters. Like just swap off if they’re running pharmercy unless you have a D.Va, Baptiste, two Hitscans, and a Barrier. Or a pharmercy of your own. Mostly because
See also: Tracer. I still think people are sleeping on her hard.
Hmm…buffing Bash isn’t a bad idea, but would be met with heavy backlash. 5 seconds would allow the ability to be more flexible while the altered mechanics and gutted damage make it still not extremely threatening.
Tracer can still recall before most follow up from Bash so it should be fiiiine. /s
I’m gradually yet reluctantly embracing it. Top-down balance is awkward even as a player who is technically in the top 10%.
I can only imagine how it would feel to be so good that the other roles are simply an afterthought more than a means to an end.
Thanks for clarifying! I’ll edit my OP to include this information.
I’m pretty sure that the most recent Orisa nerf patch a couple of weeks ago had 40 -> 30% on the PTR alongside the 8s -> 10s change. Am I mistaken? Am I going crazy?
Testify! The fact that I’m not outraged about these changes. shows that Blizzard is keeping good pace and not hopefully completely destroying numbers. I’m no authority on supports, but I’m pretty passionate about the role and have hundreds of hours played.
The game has definitely evolved beyond simple 50 HP/S single-target healing though. Let’s not return to those days.
Not exactly.
Hot Take: I’m simply showing that power levels are being toned down the board. (Featuring one man’s opinion in the OP and surprisingly healthy discussion below it!) I tried to be non-biased in the OP, but you bet I made a clickbait title.
Nerf burst? YES!
Revert healing nerfs? Not all of them, despite how good it would feel.
AHA yes! I started playing in Season 4, so I never experienced this granny-nade-centric meta. The og triple tank meta must’ve been fun.
Ironically, I began this game by playing Widowmaker for one round and then started maining Ana…juuuust after she fell out of meta. Before I even knew what meta was…
…I was able to deduce EMP health pack meta in Season 5, but couldn’t get enough like-minded golds and plats to jump on board with me.
Is 10-12k healing average a good spot for all healers to be in? Kinda feels like the waters are getting a little muddied, and the difference between supports being less about healing and more about… ultimates?
“Shoot to heal!”
I remember when shooty tanks were meta. People hated tbat.
I don’t think I ever implied that the fact was denied. I was hoping to spark a discussion, and it seems to be going pretty well! I also wanted to post clear numbers and % reductions for myself and others to see because I noticed they’re rehashing the mercy % reduction or referencing the mercy HP/S with regards to healing balance.
Ooh! I did not know he’d said that! I for one am not opposed to reduction in healing power as long as other roles are seeing reductions in power as well.
I hope this isn’t the same post that you referenced before in that thread you made right before the Baptiste nerf because I’d feel really foolish if that were the case. Could you please link or quote the post in this thread to improve visibility?
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For that PTR patch, the only change was the 9 -> 10 damage semi-revert.
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Fair enough! I don’t recall the specific thread, however I screenshot the dev response because I thought it was really interesting and might offer insight on upcoming balance changes.
I do understand your comments about appeasement. It sucks for your hero to suddenly be objectively weaker. Struggling with that with Baptiste myself currently.
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Thanks for the screenshot! It allowed me to search for and find the relevant post. Bam.
It doesn’t explicitly detail plans to nerf healing output, but it does provide insight nonetheless!
What’s interesting is that my search also brought me to another post of his from Sep ‘19 mentioning about how some balance changes during the goats era were in preparation for 2-2-2 and that more balance changes would come, but they would need time to gather stats and data to make informed deductions because 2-2-2 had just debuted with a new hero at that time. Seeing as it’s been nearly half a year, Blizzard may finally have enough data on the support role to execute an action plan beyond “nerf whatever is meta.”
I just really hope they don’t touch Lucio.
Not true, the issue with brig was the heals out sustained the dmg capabilities and these changes aren’t really big at all with brig and this isn’t appeasement with dps. But I still strongly feel doom is broken and needs a rework or nerfed again because he can press abilities to eliminate a team which is not fun.
I main tracer but have equivocally 400 hrs on support. I mained zen and mercy during dive and some ana, then brig/ zen and stoped at moira cause I noticed healing becoming saturated. Allowing these (moira, lucio, brig, bap), in my opinion, boring heroes and style of playing support (and even tank) as a massive problem attributed to massive healing output.
Healers used to mean something more than healing, it used to be mostly peeling not some crazy heals that resulted in sustain from most dps that weren’t burst. Burst became meta because healing became too powerful, widow wasn’t that favorable because the sustain dmg was better than hitting the hard shots which I think isn’t that healthy for pros but forum hates one shot but loves doom. Healer meant something more than peeling too, it was the ability to enable and disable someone especially seen in ana, mercy, zen. The split decision to give the orb to and discord became haphazard, chaotic turned more pristine when practiced which is an amazing feeling. They are not meant for healing only more like boosters to the team.
But then aoe heals became too good and goats was introduced which then moira continued the 2-2-2 goats and then bap. This crazy sustain negates dive and sustain dmg; if you want to kill mei well dive her but if she gets sustained from the dmg then you get the L.
If all healers have a lower output then they need to play smarter because tbh the recent healers have been complete sluggish experience and lazy. It is not that hard to play healer now in the day then a dps or tank. They are gonna add more difficulty to the healers.
TLDR: SO not appeasement you are wrong with your prediction, it was to lower the crazy heals and for healers to learn priority/ peeling/ positioning/ playmaking then the lazy lackluster meta style for heals. I have more than 400 hrs on healer (100 for zen) but also 1000 on dps 400 for just tracer.
you know what?
that’s called balancing. too much healing makes the game less fun, so healing gets balanced…
I don’t mind each healer being in and around the same numbers
That way there isn’t one just flat “better” support and it comes more down to being able to make plays with the tools the character has
Like getting that perfect Rez off, or landing a nice Whip Shot to save a teammate
I dislike the mentality that happens around here that when a support is a meta pick, they’re OP, despite remaining unchanged at time for years.
I’d rather each support to be viable, but of course, the higher skilled and more difficult ones having more reward for the effort required to do well. Ana is a perfect example. She’s probably the best balanced support we have had, where she can be amazing in the higher ranks, mediocre in the middle, and difficult to use in the lower.
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It isn’t exactly a secret. Josh Noh himself said “I admit there’s been powercreep since launch, specifically with healing” This statement might look legit if you consider the fact that at launch we had one main healer and two off healers (lucio and zen) but it completely discounts the fact that those same supports also had more utility. Discord has only been nerfed as time has gone by and even if Mercy wasn’t capable of AOE heals she was capable of mass res.
It’s just like what Blizz did when they nerfed armor to nerf brigitte’s effectiveness and then took a year to unnerf it after they found out she was only offering as much protection as she was thanks to a bug.
I don’t know what these kinds of gaps in perception are born out of. I could hazard guesses but who really knows why.
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I noticed on her PTR debut that brig would receive significantly less damage from a mace swing (like 18 as opposed to the intended 30) and Pharah rockets when I or they had full rally armor (everyone was playing 6v6 brig on PTR lol), but I ignored it and dismissed it as just immense stack heals or rally armor application outhealing the initial damage or splash damage being reduced by armor.
Oh how I wish myself or somebody else would’ve investigated it then because in hindsight it seems like it’d’ve been an easy bug to identify. she would’ve been a lot more susceptible to long range damage and wouldn’t have felt like a monster for as long as she did.
Instead everyone was like “WOW SHE’S POWERFUL FULL SEND SHE’S EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORT ROLE NEEDS”
After some thought I came up with a conclusion:
The are nerfing Healers to allow more room for more healers.
Think about it if a new healer had, say, Healing Stations; their healing stations would have to be extremely weak to the point of uselessness. Since Lucio Exists and Brigitte provide a similar function, there is no room for a builder healer since he’ll be useless or over shadow the current AoE healing picks.
Plus if healers are to have possible healing/defensive utilities (Symmetra shield buff might be a future ability granted to new hero) then having lower healing might help in allowing said abilities to be included in the game.
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fully charged zarya can deal disgusting dps.
Otherwise, I agree.
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Anti-PowerCreep for everybody.
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this is exactly what Bliz is doing.
they probably agree that the powercreep is getting out of hand, so now they need to rein it in across the board.
Plus this opens up the door for new heroes to be a bit weaker if everyone else’s legs are chopped off.
Pharah’s damage was heavily nerfed, not buffed.
This isn’t surprising for anyone who could read between the lines of how 2-2-2 would “help them balance the game”.
Now that you are required to have two of each class, they can start to adjust their power levels so that more heroes are pickable, because strategies where you had less of one class with a stronger hero are no longer possible.
You can see the pluses and minuses of it obviously – but overall if you didn’t see that Blizzard was going to start nerfing well performing heroes to be more “in line” with low performing heroes to start balancing out the picks of each hero class, then you clearly don’t understand game design.
Brig is a bit of an outlier as she was only over performing at high tiers, but the concept in general is pretty consistent thus far.
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Am I reading this wrong? I feel “proof” would imply some kind of scandal when it’s been pretty clear from the beginning. High sustain has been an issue for over a year. They nerfed the tanks with the most sustain, and there was still a problem, so heals were next. Be glad they’ve nerfed the easy, less interesting healing before the things like Ana’s Biotic Rifle or Moira’s orbs.
No,
It was because she was trash with 50hps AoE
wait… 50hps AoE???
that sounds familiar… 
Lucio creepily pokes his toad head around the corner
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What’s even more unique with Brig is that her viability drops off greatly going to the pro scene.
On ladder below masters/gm Brig is practically useless because communication and coordination just isn’t there for Brig.
Brig is great in masters/GM for the opposite reason. Communication works really well with a brig, and you get a lot of coordination at that level.
But in the pro scene, we just don’t see her much yet, which is weird because you’d expect an even higher level of comm and coord.
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