With all the people completely neglecting the blatant conflict in current dependent support kit designs vs new expectations in OW2 and claiming “there’s no kit issues, just git gud and don’t healbot”, I want to pose this question to them:
Given how OW2 is supposed to be about EVERYONE having more individual impact and more individual playmaking, how do you want supports to have more individual impact and more individual playmaking if
they can’t 1v1 dps well; nor
keep someone alive well (considering you don’t want supports to make “nothing die”)?
Like what do you want support individual impact and playmaking be in OW2 exactly?
either they’re intended to get kills or they’re intended to save lives. which one?
They can keep crying as loud as they want honestly. Blizzard has already confirmed they’re looking at improving support kits for OW2, it’s too late for them to keep going on about it.
DPS MAIN (noun)
A person who will complain that supports have too much healing power while also will complain not getting any healing when Supports are playing more offensively.
Ya, I think we have seen enough on these forums that that’s not how people tend to think on these matters. People rant about dps moiras all the time ignoring that she has to dps to get her heals or about mercys ignoring them even if they are healing someone else.
People tend to see support with guns out and assume they are throwing. Could they be? sure. But most of the time the thought process seems to be “oh no my heal bot isnt heal botting me, they must be punished”
They will probably never be able to 1v1 on the same ground, supports aren’t dps heroes, however through strategy they should be able to defeat dps heroes on 1v1 but to make it clear, supports should always be at a disadvantage when facing a dps simply because dps heroes can’t keep their team alive by healing (outside of soldier I guess)
keeping someone alive is such an odd take really, when you are given the chance to fight together with your teammate you choose to entrust your fate to them? I just don’t understand it but at this point we gotta respect it
either way supports healing should be used to mitigate damage not to negate it altogether (outside of a few skills)
clearly both depending on the situation
What I personally don’t want is for Mercy to hold her beam forever and watch as her enemy who was at 1hp takes out her ally just because she felt like she had to stay tethered no matter what, what I want is freedom for aggressive supports to make plays when they get the chance without being yelled at for not keeping their healing mechanic on 100% of the time
individual impact for supports depends on their ability to adapt accordingly, it shouldn’t be about running away all the time or holding right click until your mouse dies, you got a gun, this is a shooter, SHOOT THE ENEMY when you can
I agree with you mostly but to be honest, it shouldn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter anymore than seeing a soldier not using his rockets when he can clearly one shot someone, this is their individual input and we should respect whatever choice a support player makes, they can be bad choices don’t get me wrong but who cares? focus on what your character can do and let supports do their thing
as a dps there’s a million things you can do to adapt, play near cover or a healthpack or maybe you’re just out of position, if you’re in the thick of things and you’re not getting healed try to draw as much value as you can from your character’s death, it isn’t the support’s responsibility to keep you alive, their responsibility is to win their game for them, not for you
it’s been statistically proven that the team with the aggressive support wins more, even if carries die, if your whole team is dealing damage and the enemy supports are just healbotting statistically, the odds benefit YOU so who cares if the support is doing something else like shooting another enemy? you won’t carry a full on game, that’s not how OW works
the only thing that matters in your examples is the fact that mercy has to go through inaction frames with her gun, so switching becomes a problem because you end up wasting time in between, this however can only be fixed by the devs but if you see a Mercy shooting don’t think she’s bad, just use her input in your favor
Who cares what those entitled, self-absorbed little premadonnas think?
Literally everything that comes out of their mouths is ignorant and foolish.
There’s nothing more pathetic than watching the lowest common denominator of Hero mains attempting to talk down to others.
Besides, Blizzard has already confirmed that Supports will be receiving reworks in the future, so in spite of their best efforts, Blizzard has listened to actual Support Players rather than the DPS Mains.
Healing is largely the reason why supports lack individual impact in OW1. Healing mechanics have a high value to effort ratio, which isn’t necessarily bad for overall balance, but these mechanics provide no means of skill expression outside of Ana and to some extent Bap.
Imagine two pocketed Genjis dueling, each with a Mercy attached. The Genjis have huge capacity to outplay their opponent both mechanically and strategically. How do the Mercy players in this scenario outplay each other? Hold left or right click better than the other? Mercy’s most important contribution in this scenario are mechanics that don’t allow her the opportunity to have the impact that Genji’s does. A Moira 1v1 is similar. It can last several minutes because the kit lacks the skill expression for either Moira to outplay the other.
A team fight is more complex, but in many ways it’s a scaled up version of the above scenarios. Both teams are surviving thousands of points of damage as the healing helps sustain them through it. The healing mechanics are typically easy and incredibly strong, and all four supports are spending the majority of their time using them. The supports are therefore just existing, canceling each other out until someone gets a kill and ends the cycle. This is because when everyone has the same easy access to the same power, there’s much less opportunity for any one of them to stand out as the best. There’s much less opportunity for individual impact.
Imagine if there were a hero with an aimbot gun that did 1K DPS. Everyone in bronze through GM would have the same stats, because they all have the same easy access to the same power. Healing obviously isn’t that extreme, but it’s a little too far in that direction.
OW2 attempts to solve this by encouraging supports to use the non-healing mechanics of their kits more, which offer more skill expression and thus impact. The ease of keeping only one tank alive enables supports to seek out more opportunities to provide value outside of healing, while the reduced damage mitigation on the enemy team makes it easier for supports (along with everyone else) to contribute more damage and offensive utility. And it’s working. I believe supports are much more impactful in OW2 overall. Healbotting is less effective because if the enemy supports choose to provide more damage, they can now help break through the sustain and push the fight in their team’s favor. This means the supports that focused on damage had a greater impact than their counterparts that focused on healing.
And the answer isn’t always more damage. It’s up to supports to find the appropriate ratio of damage or utility to healing, which can change at any given moment. With this comes more opportunity to distinguish yourself from the enemy supports by providing the right kind of value at the right time, rather than simply healing 75+% of the match. This is consistent with industry standard support design in all ability shooters, whether PvP or PvE. There is no ability shooter to my knowledge that allows a team to healbot through damage for 60+ seconds outside of Overwatch. And Overwatch didn’t allow this at launch either. The game mutated into something else as sustain was creeped exponentially, and then damage was creeped to compensate, with both having detrimental effects.
The caveat is that with more value might come a little more deaths. This is a necessity for balance, as deaths create the downtime that help keep a hero’s stats per 10 in check. Whether or not this new direction is fun for players is an entirely different matter. Fun is every bit as important as balance, and sometimes the two are at odds. I believe both are achievable in this case, but we’re not there yet. Blizz is working on it though.
Hopefully, but we all know that they will complain hard if supports are made better at dueling.
Or maybe blizz misses the mark again.
Who knows. Regardless, the point and philisophical topic is relevant tho.
Except
Support designs currently don’t really support juggling all that well e.g. mercy beaming vs shooting
Not really relevant to the philosophical point here. Blizz will have to make a decision as to whether supports’ plays and impact is saving lives or killing people. And it basically has to be at least 1 of the 2 otherwise they’re not going to realistically have much individual impact.
People that seem to thinking keeping current support designs largely focused on saving lives but also want to remove capability in doing so AND also don’t want supports being capable of actually dueling/dpsing well literally are wanting neither which begs the very important core question, if neither killing not saving lives, what else would their impact be?
Except you can’t both make supports not healbot + make healing less effective AND also make them not very capable of 1v1 resulting them into being fodder.
Like something has to give for individual impact. Esp when like half the supports or so can’t really heal for decent sustain and damage/duel at the same time.
Again half the supports can’t actually damage and sustain someone at the same time. Heck even in terms of peeling, most of it’s concentrated in brig whilst everyone else doesn’t have decent peel tools (if other supports actually had sufficient peel tools to begin with, brig wouldn’t have needed to be created and relied upon for dive and hypermobile threats).
If we were to go this way without making supports healbots, there will be many support reworks that’d be needed.
But the more general philosphical point is, if the people in question don’t want supports to be capable of saving people’s lives (whether be healbot, peeling with a combination of damage + damage mitigation in parallel, cc, whatever), yet they also don’t want supports to be capable of reasonably 1v1ing, then what would their impact and plays be?
Not according to the people in question evidently.
Right and a lot of support feedback including my own has been “current designs can’t actually do that, reworks are needed to actually do that rather than what others have been saying which was ‘jUSt dOnt HeaLbOT aND sHOoT More’”.
And this can be clearly shown by mercy. She obvs can’t shoot to duel or help dps AND beam at the same time, nor can she even swiftly switch between them, let alone all the other hurdles of pistol effective range, sens disparity between the 2, how much less tools to duel mercy with pistol has vs just about everyone else, etc.
Like want us to shoot more etc.? Sure, but don’t accuse players of not meeting such expectations when the kits don’t actually let us really meet such expectations.
Supports will need to rely on getting value out of their additional utility and unique aspects rather than just pumping out obscene heals while standing behind a shield like before.
Ana and Lucio aren’t strong because of their heals, they’re strong because they have the strongest utility and can make amplify the effectiveness of others.
So I suspect other supports will follow suit; Rez and/or damage boost buffed, Lamp buffed (kill me) and likely Regen replaced with something else, Zen’s orbs properties buffed (increased duration and speed probably)
Moira and Brig are pretty okay due to synergizing with the new passive well, so they might not get much. Maybe increase Armor pack speed and shield HP and size.
theres a difference between mercy zen lucio moira brig and bap, that being mercy cant dps well and 99%of people that play mercy dont know how to track with her weapon and its fire rate, you ever seen a mercy try to dps? all the way to gm they cant
Since mercy atm is using her beam most of the time, people choose a higher sens for her beam, which in turn is likely worse sens for pistol
You simply can’t track with her pistol in most ranges… It’s projectile with decent travel time (depending on the range). Even if you lead your shot, you don’t necessarily know which way they’re going to strafe either hence why most mercies don’t necessarily bother with precise tracking.
Like I’ve done the calcs for OW1 and the range which you can somewhat aim like hitscan for mercy pistol isn’t high (see strafeable range column):
That’s why I play with super high sense on all my characters. The more you get used to it, the better it will be. That being said, I definitely don’t play enough to keep my muscle memory going, so that’s probably on me…
I feel she does better dps than Lucio or Brig. However, the issue is she does not passively heal as they do. Nor is she contributing any utility while she does said damage.
