QP = Dive Supports?

General Discussion
21

The reality is that Zen isn’t a good pick in most situations. You should swap vs a dive-heavy comp unless you have enough peel from your own team to survive. If the enemy isn’t running a comp you can reliably discord and shoot at, you need to swap. Ana has similar survivability issues.

The game is designed with the expectation that we swap, usually multiple times in a match. If you’re in a situation where you can’t stay alive and are getting dived on, try Moira, Lucio, Kiriko, or Brig depending on what best enables you to help your team. By that I mean don’t pick Moira if your whole team is going to be out of range of your healing.

Being support is pretty great right now, because all support heroes are strong in at least some situations, but you need to be able to play all of them. That’s more important on support than any role. Mercy, Ana, and Zen are probably going to be least effective since it’s hard for them to stay alive right now, but they have their uses.

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22

I play support for a few games every night, and then play some games on my main, Tracer. I feel your pain, and I inflict it. I want to note first, I play on console and I am mid at best. That said…

Supports are high value targets - eliminating you makes it infinitely easier to take down every other member of your team. If anyone isn’t focusing supports, imo, they’re doing it wrong.

All roles need to try to prioritize their own survival to produce value for their team - you aren’t healing if you’re dead - and staying alive is your responsibility. As a support, you should well know the sinking feeling of watching your teammates throw themselves into situations where they will surely die - it’s easy to spot in others and hard to see in ourselves.

So, if you consider yourself a noob, I would recommend Moira and Mercy. Both have excellent GTFO buttons when a dive comes knocking, and neither requires much aim skill. Moira specifically excels at taking out Genji in particular, so keep her in mind if a carry Genji is giving you trouble.

Lucio is strong all-around and generally challenging to land shots on, once his movement is mastered.

Kiriko and Baptiste are excellent duellists, have very strong cooldowns with immortality field and suzu (to negate Pulse Bombs). While Kiriko has an excellent GTFO button, both of their survivability comes more from how dangerous they are than their cooldowns. A Baptiste can kill a Tracer faster than the Tracer can get one clip off. So can Kiriko.

And that brings us to Ana and Zen. Ana and Zen are, like Bap and Kiri, high skill expression heroes. They rely entirely on their aim to survive - they survive only by being better shots and more tactically-minded than the enemies coming for them.

If you’re playing Zen or Ana and a Tracer is repeatedly killing you? That’s on you failing to hit your shots, and it’s time to switch to Brig, Moira, Kiri or Bap.

It takes a lot of practice and requires a lot of failures. Open yourself up to the expectation that you will fail. Repeatedly. Come to peace with it, and learn from each failure - and if you just wanna’ see a flanker die, please enjoy these clips of me beating the holy hell out of an enemy Tracer last night on Zenyatta.

Here’s hopin’ she learned something ^.^

Have fun! Practice practice practice!

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23

Ana just needs some kind of upward mobility.

I think she should get a grapple or something like Widow, she really needs some way to get to high ground.

She’s an ex-sniper, she would surely understand the benefit of concealed high ground locations. Her and Widow are of the same ilk.

1 Like
24

Supports, especially back-line supports like Zen and Ana, are arguably in the best position to be calling shots, and “I’m getting dove” is a shot you should always be calling. Use voice chat if your team is in voice chat; but also use pings, and if they get ignored, tell your team (nicely) to pay attention, and then continue pinging.

Try to anticipate when you’re going to get dove, so you can get better results from your team. Should be easy when Venture’s brainlessly tunneling at you in a straight line, but also keep an eye on flank angles; if you’re in a good position you can sometimes actually see enemy DPS peel off and enter side rooms looking for the flank.

You might still die a couple times, but it’s fine as long as the diver also gets killed; they’ll usually learn they can’t get value that way anymore, and then you’ve got the rest of the game to practice your other skills.

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25

Psst… Try Kiriko. Swift step is wonderful. Turn every 1v1 into a 2v1 and escape certain death.

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26


Lumin

15000 posts

1h

Psst… Try Kiriko. Swift step is wonderful. Turn every 1v1 into a 2v1 and escape certain death.

Congrats on 15k posts!

3 Likes
27

Thank you!

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28

that part fr. I’ve been in countless games where tanks and DPS spam “Thanks” and “I need healing” yet absolutely neglect to see why we aren’t healing them, most of which is one of two things:

  1. they run out of healing range/sight
  2. they completely neglect to keep near us so we can survive dives

granted it’s QP and people are more or less inept and refuse to listen to anyone but themselves, so yeah. Like when I play DPS, I’m always aware of where my Support are and what’s going on with them, like it’s not that dang hard to do, but apparently it is. I’m certainly still in my growing pains with Ana and more often than not it really boils down to team awareness on whether I survive or not because if we can work together, it’s good. Often I see people counter pick me and then just harass the literal heck out of me as Ana and I really just want to heal, man :smiling_face_with_tear:

Like I get the skill shelf is high, but holy, with how the game is setup right now, like many have said, the stationary Support are just getting dogged while I’m just learning to diversify my pool of support heroes (I can do Zen/Moira/Kiri/Bap/Ana/Illari) I just want to practice with certain heroes sometimes of which is Ana this week, and it’s just been absolutely the worst time and have never in my life been targeted more in game, and I play Pharah INTO HITSCANS. Overall I’m a decent player (Gold 2 DPS and Support last season despite playing for maybe 3 months, so I’m certainly still learning but I’m overall decent imo), very situationally aware (to the point I get reported when in reality the opp just doesn’t realize how telling they are with their strategy/movements), but just that doesn’t save me in a lot of cases, especially where QP has become a continual matchup against the heroes listed in the original post.

I just hope the devs figure out something about this, because it’s pretty abysmal, but if I’ve learned anything about game devs, they’re slow to react and generally don’t correct a lot.

5 Likes
29

Such is life of support - you are ignored by your own teammates and actively chased by enemies.

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30

Yep, the current support experience is just playing Dead by Daylight at the moment. What I hate about it the most is that it basically forces you to play Moira + Brig/Lucio/Baptiste because while your DPS ain’t gonna peel for you, they will sure as hell cry “where’s my heals?!”

2 Likes
31

What wonderful, beautiful, and glorious fantasy land to you live in? Can I move there? Can I play on this magic server? Because from my experience:

  • No one’s ever in Voice Chat anymore
  • DPS never peel for supports, even when you’re calling for, asking for, BEGGING for help, and spam pinging the flanker
  • Most DPS have one-speed and it’s Turbo-Feed.

I can hear them now: “Use corners for cover? Make sure you’re supports have line of sight? Why? I’m THE MAN! I don’t NEED help! I will 1v5 their entire team with my ULTIMATE! Oh wait, why am I dead? WHERE’S MY HEALS?! Worthless supports! Support diff!”

9 Likes
32

Might depend on when you play. I have noticed some days/times of day are pretty bad, and the possibility of bad games is never eliminated, but on the whole I’ve been playing surprisingly solid games in quickplay.

33

We’ve been down this road before. Dive may be a fun meta for those who play Dive heroes but it has historically been unfun for supports who are often left to fend for themselves but are unable to.

Dps just don’t peel for their supports, but expect the supports to never die and always be healing them.

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34

Had a game yesterday where I was chased by a Briggitte and Mauga. I was on Briggitte myself. It was so odd round of QP…

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35

Yeah, it really sucks. I dont want to play Moira, but i feel forced.

Moira is meta. If i win with her, my hidden SR goes up. When i dont play her, i get double-punished by meta enemy counters and because my individual hero skill is lower than my support SR.

Playing the wrong hero when i know the right one to play feels like throwing.

TBH, the game rewards counterpicking way too much and punishes trying new things.

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36

In the current meta you can’t, really. But that applies to characters in pretty much all roles all the time. Some are viable, some aren’t. Also applies to pretty much every multiplayer game out there, Overwatch isn’t special there.

But there are maps where Ana is very viable still, e.g. Circuit & Route 66. Zen only on Circuit, really… but Zen never had the luxury of being viable anywhere unless his Discord was so broken it not only increased damage, but sucked the life out of tank mains as well. I like Zen but honestly I’m not sad that he’s not a good pick.

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37

Until you’re not playing with a Winston. It’s a lot more fun to have a Dva on your team because anyone can engage first as long as others follow up.

38

And people wonder why Moira shows up in their matches so often.

It’s gotten to the point I don’t even try Zen right out the starting gate. I know I’m going through have to switch as soon as I see the enemy team comp so why bother. Just pick Moira.

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39

Wait, so your matches aren’t just shoot the tank meta? I’d actually stop being a flex player and start tanking again properly if that was the case.

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40

Get your practice in on Total Mayhem, cooldowns are less, and people generally care less that you’re practicing. I see a lot of Widows in TM, and everyone on the team is like ‘Ugh’ but we understand why they’re doing it.

2 Likes