Something the "just git gud supports" people neglect

General Discussion
22

Yeah, nothing here stated is wrong.

What to be concerned about is more about… trend and proportionality. Sure if the two of you go in and kill the target, you’ve done good a job. If your ally dies and you still managed to kill that target, you didn’t really gain an advantage here, because you just traded (and yeah, there’s more nuance here). And if that keeps happening, you’re not really gaining an edge.

Above everything else, getting elimination is a ton of value - it puts your team in power with the advantage. Every trade though, is more of an equalizer, and never getting an edge (but still controlling the objective), can still lead to a win.

But if you’re not able to control the objective, and you keep making trades instead advantageous wins, your value starts to dwindle, and for anyone that isn’t solely dedicated to damage, that can be a problem.

And most players aren’t going to recognize this in casual play, but we could still encourage or reward/benefit/teach players how to make advantageous wins.

Probably not the best way to argue this. More or less, I’m thinking of ways of trying to encourage more teamwork and trying think of ways that, not necessarily discourages certain actions, but that not every action is equal.

This is false. Mercy is the only one who has this choice, and is largely rewarded for favoring healing/damage boosting over doing other things. Mathematically, it is possible to prove situations where Mercy can be a better assistance to dealing damage over damage-boosting simply based accuracy of the allied player and the Mercy player.

They already did. Overwhelmingly saving lives benefits. You maintain a level of power by keeping the team alive, rather than having them take down time. Support ultimates further encourages this and rewards appropriately.

Except they already have and they are very successful at this. The above statement is false.

Again this is false.

Again, false. Sound Barrier, Soundwave, Wallride, Guardian Angel/Valkyrie and Recovery Passive, Transcendence, Sleep Dart, Immortality Field, Fade, Coalescence all are powerful tools for healing and defense.

False, again. She is helping damage-role heroes by Damage-boosting. She is helping Damage-role heroes by attacking with her pistol in Valkyrie form or not. She’s not going to do both at the same time, but she will benefit greatly by doing, either.

They are to.

False.

Pretty sure many can.

Here’s some anecdotal evidence:

Actually it is, because they’re the only ones that can heal others as a primary responsibility and every support has at least two forms of healing and every support has area effect healing.

Were this not to be true, there would be supports that could not heal, cut downtimes, or otherwise assist the team in defense.

It less about Moira doing damage, but more about Moira being within 5 meters in front of Tank trying to suck them dry, or tossing Biotic Damage Orbs all game, or having a very low healing totals.

Or using Coalescence to kill targets, failing, and not using it in conjunction with their team pushes to keep them alive.

It’s basically the same problem when Lucio’s tend to use Sound Barrier the moment it is available instead of using it to defend against a Death Blossom or Rip-tire or Tactical Visor.

Easily teachable elements, that are not taught, or at least recognizable. More pro players know how to balance between the two, others do not. And tutorials would help with that in recognizing situations where it helps.

2 Likes
23

I agree with a lot of what you wrote but not this, just because they can bring value through keeping you alive it doesn’t mean they are required to because once again, if they’re finding value in simply killing the enemy or by simply giving supportive damage then how come they’re responsible for your life (in game lol)?

each player should be responsible for their positioning and timing, it isn’t the support’s fault that you decided to jump 1v6 or 1v2, most of the time the support has to keep an eye on everyone and if they can’t reach you it isn’t their responsibility

I understand you’re talking in broader terms but I think being specific when talking about supports is needed, support players are also fps players and just because they can heal or mitigate damage doesn’t mean they are excluded from doing anything else, that’s all I want to point out, the rest I think we agree on

24

Support in OW2 is moving away from this. Healing is one way of supporting but not the only way.

25

I WILL NOT JUGGLE

4 Likes
26

and the thing is OW2 hasn’t actually attempted encouraging supports to use non-healing mechanics because in order to do you, you need to rework them to allow for that, as you can see in your mercy example above.

and the thing with non-healing mechanics, what’s not situationally valuable boils down to 2 things: either it let you get a pick/kill, or it let you save a life.

and the problem with the people in question, is that apparently they don’t want supports to be able to actually 1v1 (i.e. meaningfully capable of getting kills) despite also want supports to be less about or less capable saving lives.
which brings the question of what the heck do they want support impact and playmaking to be?

except as stated before, generally valuable/important utility really boils down to 2 things: either it let you get a pick/kill, or it let you save a life. esp if we’re talking in context of individual impact or individual playmaking.

and the problem with the people in question, is that apparently they don’t want supports to be able to actually 1v1 (i.e. meaningfully capable of getting kills) despite also want supports to be less about or less capable saving lives.
which brings the question of what the heck do they want support impact and playmaking to be?

and “keep someone alive well” wasn’t simply referring to healing…
to quote some of the people in question, they don’t want a game where “nothing dies” which doesn’t necessarily only talk about healing but talks about their capability in sustaining allies overall in any method…

4 Likes
27

The term keep someone alive is the key thing here. I think the devs want to model future supports in the spirit of someone like Lucio. Because ideally his kit is very proactive. You don’t keep you team alive (except for soundbarrier sometimes :sweat_smile: ). You help your team chase down kills while going for some yourself. You’re a catalyst in team fights as opposed to reacting to everything coming your way.

2 Likes
28

This whole thread is based on a false premise, point by point

1- They can 100% 1v1 DPS well enough. That is just a fact. Many of them have escape mechanics or things to defend themselves. They are not on equal ground of course, because if they were, then we would not need DPS, just 4 Supports +1 Tank would obliterate anything in sight.

2- You are not supposed to. You never were. You can help someone in a 1v1 and “turn the tables” by making it a 2v1 but you are not supposed to keep everyone everywhere alive. Supports are not “life savers” they are enablers and you cant “enable” bad positioning. You shouldnt. In fact is one of the first Support 101 lessons : Learn who to heal and heal prio.

They are intended to complete the objective. If doing damage is available, do so. If you can heal 1-2 before doing damage then do so. Supports are literally built for multitasking, trying to make this a false dichotomy is hardcore dishonest. Its not one thing or another, its a role BUILT for switching back and forth between Heal and Damage.

What do YOU suggest then? they should have more HP than DPS now? Do more damage, equal to DPS ? The solution is not on the Devs roof, its mostly on player’s adaptation. You cant make a global change to boost the entire role’s power, just to cater to Passive Players :man_shrugging:

PS: Stop using Mercy over and over and over again as a response to people, since we all know she is the exception that has to switch weapons and not heal and damage in the same second. The rest of the healers can do both at the same time.

2 Likes
29

But that’s not really individual impact or an individual play not is it. the kill is not reliant on you as the support, but rather reliant on someone else following through. and I’ll get back to the a bit later.

but 1 point is that even if they were to do that, they have to rework the supports before they can actually do that viably. which the people in question don’t understand and just go “juSt sToP hEal BoTTInG aND sHoOT mOaR!”

and the 2nd point is where we bring in my initial bit in: even if you go that route of not being able to kill much AND not being able to reactively save someone, what exactly is the support’s individual impact and individual play?

you can’t just do a blanket cheque argument of “they impact/play is utility” because the value/impact of utility really boils down to either it getting a kill or it saving lives.
e.g. hacking/stunning/sleeping to cancel ults is a great individual play and has valuable individual impact because it saves yours teammates’ lives and the consequence of that is direct from the user’s inputs (you land it, it’s canceled, no buts).

30

When people say individual impact I don’t think they mean you solo kill the entire enemy team. OW should always be a team game. But even in a team game there should be room for individuals to express their skill in meaningful way.

I honestly don’t see many arguing this. It’s not that we want supports to dps but we want them to support in ways other than healing because just healing doesn’t fully express a players skill.

I have the example of Lucio. But besides that you know tons of ways supports can save teammates besides healing. Ana sees a pinned teammate and sleeps the rein. Bap sees someone stuck with pulse and throw lamp. Mercy uses cool ga tech to escape and save a teammate. With less emphasis on healing the devs allow supports to shine in these other ways.

Tbh to do this supports need more help. The out of combat heal is very underrated. But newer sustain abilities for someone like Zen or just more hp in general is a start.

2 Likes
31

  1. escaping isn’t 1v1ing. it’s offloading onto someone else and whether that works (i.e. whether the threat is dealt with) is entirely depending on your teammate(s)'s capability in dealing with the threat as opposed to your own —> less individual impact contrary to OW2’s direction.

  2. they obvs don’t have sufficient tools to defend themselves. like consider this:
    for dive to possibly be a meta, the peel and self-peel tools in the entire game need to be inherently insufficient. and yet we’ve had dive metas pre and post brig in OW1, before all the anti anti-dive changes in OW2 rn. so guess what the state of peel and self peel tools are for OW2 rn.

if they’re inherently disadvantaged, then they can’t 1v1 reasonably.

and the problem with your logic is that the result of following your principles are heroes that don’t have individual impact nor individual plays which is completely the opposite of the intention of OW2.

if you can’t individually get picks nor can you individually negate/prevent the opponent’s picks, then what is left for the role’s individual impact or playmaking?

like if they can’t 1v1 reasonably, then either they’re fodder or they’re dependent on the team to deal with their threats —> less individual impact and has more dependence.

if they can’t save anyone, nor can they kill anyone themselves, and even with whatever utility it leads to less individual impact and has more dependence, because value and importance of utility really boils down to whether it got a kill or saved a teammate. and whether it’s an individual impact or play, means the kill or saved life was a direct consequence of the user’s inputs.

except it 100% is on the dev’s roof.
you can’t expect players to viably “be more active” when the kits provided don’t necessarily let you do that viably.

the most obvious and blatant example of this is mercy: she can’t shoot more to “be more active” or “fend for herself more” due to weapon swap delay and how much less value shooting is inherently compared to beaming (due to not that great dps, low effective range, inherently not having much tools to duel with compared to other heroes, etc.).

what I would suggest?
learn from how paladins design support kits and follow their philosophy.

  • healing being a HoT which may or may not have a slight initial burst amount so that healing runs in parallel user actions
  • make the supports capable of reasonably 1v1’ing dps i.e. capable of dueling, but not capable of outputting as much damage over a sustained period of time, and not necessarily having as high burst.

that way your kit actually capable and is actually actively encouraging you as support to do more than just heal bot and you can balance the supports to have their power be less in healing. they could still save lives if they time their heals right/heal at the right time. and they can get kills if they use their tools well/right and do so not in a very niche/situationally like current because with that design, you have more dps or utility uptime as you’re not locked into actively channeling a heal to get whatever level of sustain an engaged teammate needs/demands.

except at least half the supports experience a very similar problem.

for like half the supports, their main heal method is on their primary which they effectively have to actively channel in order to reach a level of sustain/hps to sustain someone.
actively channel —> you can’t go aim to shoot to damage and kill or so because you’re needed to keep healing or that ally dies.

9 Likes
32

So many inaccuracies IDK where to begin but lets address the weird here … why do you keep bolding individual ?. Do you actually UNIRONICALLY think that means you should be “soloing” people as any role? Because thats 100% false (another false premise to add I guess)

More individual impact in OW2 means that since theres 1 less people to lean on, the rest of the players will have, mathematically, effectively and empirically, more invididual impact.
We clear on that? IDK why you keep bringing that word up like it magically means “Supports should be able to solo” people or something. Its weird.

Do i need to bold the “OR” ? Because you completely ignored that and also, escaping is NOT an option for many DPS either so in that sense you are priviledged. Besides Ana (and she has sleep) and Zen, every support can escape somehow.

Black or white is it? Another false dichotomy fallacy.
Not being as good as a flanker doesnt equal bad, therefore even you are playing semantics here, you are wrong.
Since the whole “individual” thing has been debunked, nothing else is needed here.

No.
We already proved that. Also there are many other Support players, that are not passive, that are doing 100% fine in OW2 so yeah, wrong again.

Yeah that doesnt work, because :
1 - Then all DPS that dont have burst would be thrown in the trash
2 - Again, this is false, but even if it wasnt, any DPS that is not able to burst would be thrown in the trash. Supports too. Pretty much anything besides Ana/Zen.

Again 100% false. Mate please take a look at the wiki at least before answering. 5/7 have DAMAGE related Primary Fire.

Bap: Primary = Damage Hitscan, Secondary = Heals
Ana: Primary = Both
Zen: Primary = Damage orb
Brig: Primary = Damage flail, activates Inspire
Moira: Primary = Lingering heal, you can spray and then damage, doing both things at the same time.
Lucio: Primary = Damage projectile
Mercy: Switch weapons (exception)

That literally proves that ALL the supports except Mercy, are built to multitask : Healing and doing damage in the same second (if they want ofc).

Debunked :wave:

2 Likes
33

no-one here made the implication… even the quoted bit you’re replying to is literally talking about A single kill.
and the point I making there is 100% valid.

“You help your team chase down kills” isn’t expressing your skill in a “meaningful way”.
skill expression that doesn’t actually proportionately translate skill to value/impact/“a play” isn’t individual impact or an individual play.

it’s not your own individual play or individual impact if it’s completely reliant on someone else making a play or making an impact.

where have you been then? o.o

  1. again, you’re not going to get this without reworking the heroes. literally every support has a high uptime spammable heal method that doesn’t really have a cd like a primary fire and are designed to have high uptime around that heal method. outside of a dps weapon fire, you’re not going to find much to compete/replace much of that heal uptime.

  2. again utility that’s impactful and has playmaking individually boils down to it directly getting a kill or directly saving a life. again:

hence the question: if you don’t want supports to be capable of getting kills, or be capable of saving lives, what do you want as individual impact and individual plays for supports in OW2?

which i showed how it wasn’t individual impact or an individual play.

except people in question just don’t want supports being capable of saving teammates period. again, their words were about not wanting “nothing dying”.

as someone that frequently uses GA tech for various things, no, ga tech does not save teammates. she heals 55~60hps regardless of your GA tech. if your enemy is bursting through that, no amount of GA tech is going to somehow make that hps enough to keep that ally alive. sure you can body block, but chances are you die alongside them.

3 Likes
34

Funny really that’s the opposite to there point. There point is you can do those things so stop saying you can’t do those things.

I’ll agree with this mostly some supports need retuning but none are broken but as a whole every support has a niche right now and can be impactful.

The issue with support are simple the role isn’t that fun. Lack of hero choice, it’s a reactive role meaning you make the least amount of plays. Honestly, the worst thing about the role is when your locked into playing one support in a boring way. With dps and tank you rarely get to that point.

35

except that IS the premise yall been asking for in OW2. not exactly “solo any role” but to be able to make solo plays and for them to mean more.

I keep bolding individual because a lot of yall’s points aren’t actually about the individual which is supposedly what OW2 is supposedly meant to prop up.

escaping to leave it up to someone else to deal with the problem isn’t about an individual, it’s about the team as a whole (moreso teammates because you’re the one not doing much about the threat).

‘help someone in a 1v1 and “turn the tables” by making it a 2v1’ isn’t about an individual, that’s about a 2v1. any kinda of hero that can contribute anything of significant would do that.

“supports are enablers” is not about an individual, that’s about a team as a whole.

and I literally covered both cases of the “or”.
I explained how escaping is actually less individual impact as it’s actually just offloading the problem to someone else to deal with and praying that they do.
and I explained to you how anti-dive and anti-hypermobility tools are clearly insufficient in OW2.

:eyes: how snipers and sniper-like characters have mobility to escape and/or other lenient aim tools to self peel like ashe’s coach gun, hanzo storm arrows, etc. which didn’t get nerfed or removed for OW2 and are more lenient aim and easier to use and more consistent than say ana’s sleep.

:eyes: how cass who used to have a lenient aim stun now has a homing nade to deal with such threats which is also more consistent to use compared to say ana sleep.

idk… you tell me who’s actually entitled

you can’t emphasise individual plays or individual impact or individual skill of everyone if you make interactions between 1 role and set of heroes (that may or may not span over more than 1 role) be more and more one-sided. esp when it comes to flankers and their targets, whether they get engaged on by the flanker is at the discretion of the flanker.

I mean I see no such proof and there’s apparently less and less supports queuing in the beta :eyes:

  1. depends on numbers
  2. any dps that can’t burst are already in the trash. burst (esp combined with consistency) will always be the name of the game.

bap: unless you somehow managed to always be piggybacked on your heal target, you can’t heal nade AND shoot hitscan at the same time. you can’t aim at 2 directions at once.

ana: similar with bap but moreso because it’s the same weapon fire. you can’t shoot 2 bullets at once nor can you look in 2 different directions at once.

moira: similar as bap but further with a range limitation (unless your heal target is <20m of the damage target, you will not be in range of both) AND you can’t “weave” primary or secondary in between each other at all like bap can.
and no, “spray then damage” isn’t reaching the level of sustain/hps to sustain someone as I specifically said.

mercy is obvs.

brig has a massive caveat of often being out of range of her flail. yeah you can whipshot, except that’s once per 4s tops. and in between she’s legit forced to be passive waiting as she’s got hardly anything else to do except like packing also once every few sec on average.

that is half of the cast that has mutual exclusivity between damage uptime vs heal uptime.

3 Likes
36

are we playing the same game??? I can pump heals into orisa and she never dies… or any tank for that matter.
Also on brig ana moira and lucio I’ve been able to 1v1 dps and win, beating heroes like bastion reaper tracer etc.
hell I even lost to a brig yesterday on bastion in the 1v1 fight…

1 Like
37

I mean they’re against making supports more reasonable to 1v1 dps and want supports inherently at a disadvantage, the latter of which being the status quo. and in their biased mind, they think it’s entirely reasonable to 1v1 dps with an inherent significant disadvantage sooo…

except at least half the supports, their kit and gameplay inherent design wasn’t built with the expectation that they would nor realistically could viably dps/duel more.
the most obvious and blatant example demonstrating this is mercy.

38

After scanning the direct responses to you thread almost all the people as your posts states, are not Support players. They don’t actually understand how Support plays, but have this simplified version in their mind that Supports just wander aimlessly around in OW 1 behind the tanks, and in OW 2 just doing the same thing without thought.

Okay, you will not get decent healing for your team trying to “healbot”, ie mindlessly healing. It’s reflected in low healing outputs, and usually high number of deaths and your team is apt to complain because they are not getting the heals when they need it because you are out of position.

Anyone believing this fiction that most Supports weren’t playing with equal skill in game sense/positioning to DPS and Tanks simply has no idea what they are talking about, esp. with Mercy who’s entire value is in staying alive and being aware of bother her team and the other almost moment to moment unless she’s doing the wrong thing and just pocketing constantly one player or two.

5 Likes
39

I mean you can, in many cases you only have to land one more shot then they do. While at the same having the tools to make it so the dps have to land a third shot themselves.

Like ana ana nade forces Pharah to land two direct shots and at least one splash.

While a close range hero like genji most likely is going to get hit by splash of nade, making it so that you only have to land to ana shots.

Lucio actually has the same kill combo as genji, one volley to the head + melee + dash/boop. Both of these will combo down a squishy.

And keep in mind unlike dps who more or less always needs to be in LOS of the enemy to do their job, supports usually have a tank and dps in front of them. And out side of flank attempts tend to be a bit harder to directly engage then any other player.

40

Laugts in Moira and Lucio

1 Like
41

When ya teammates just want supports to “git gud” and tell em to go dps like:

https://gfycat.com/magnificentunfoldedcarp

But then stand in the choke, don’t push and can’t do anything without supports healbotting them anyway (classic dva demeching) or get blown apart by enemy team pressing Q.

What is even more ironic is that ultis like valk and coal have more impact when they just go full dps in OW2. Getting picks like it’s deathmatch mode with teamwide enabler ultis and forgetting you have a team to support should not be the optimal way to play supports, it should be situational like in OW1.

Nobody wants to play dps lite with extra responsibilities and extra danger when they could just go play dps and actually have fun.

The only reason Moiras and Lucios even have fun in OW2 is because they can go do exactly that and be impactful because they can also get away without feeding.

1 Like