Not trying to come off as toxic or generalize support players.
I was in a game where the support kept barking out orders because of a pharmercy giving our team issues. “D.va dive the pharah”, “switch to soldier”, “how hard is it to kill them?!”. I was sick of it and finally spoke, saying that maybe since the healing isn’t keeping us up, why not help us kill the two instead…?
The one barking responded with “I have 12k healing, maybe you need to get better at the game.” and the other support playing Mercy just let out a sigh on comms and said “GuEsS i’lL UsE My pIStoL sInCE ItS So gUUD” (sarcasm).
I know my weaknesses, so I’ll ask for help in areas where I know I’ll fail at. I was just trying to contest the other tank and slow down the objective for the most part, so leaving the Zarya to dive the Pharah, which I failed miserably at, was a challenge for me. I apologize for not being good enough but dang, do supports really expect to get carried to wins just because they hold down or tap left click or something?
This applies to all the numbers on the scoreboard. Damage, elims, healing, mit, even deaths.
Using a single metric to make broad statements about skill or how well anyone is playing is foolish, its a single metric. Sometimes it can be used to evaluate things, often times it doesnt mean anything.
Only problem I have with your post is that you are singling out supports as ordering teammates around in a very toxic manner, as though DPS and Tank players never do this.
I don’t condone that behaviour, but it isn’t limited to support. I very much see all roles doing it, not just support.
I would agree completely with everything in your post if you didn’t specifically tie it to the support role.
I’m not even reading what you posted, I’m just gonna agree with the title completely.
I’m not going into detail, but it’s 100% true, and if you don’t wanna take my word for it yet, I’m a gm4 Lucio one trick, and you don’t get all that much healing…
Yes supports must do a certain amount of helping with eliminations if they want to climb, only being a heal bot wont get you past plat. How and why each support should apply damage instead of healing is hero specific and situational, but for sure at some point they must contribute to getting frags.
I do believe some people who play this video game treat is like an MMO and not an FPS, wanting a fantasy of a strict class hierarchy where healers only heal, or at least, raw healing is the primary factor dictating skill level of a support player. These players will obviously be gone once you climb high enough, FPS mindset wins in the end in an FPS game.
Maybe you did suck, maybe the support player was actually just being a heal bot. All you can do is either get better and try and call out what is clapping your teams collective cheeks in coms and hope somebody gets the hint to either switch heroes or to start focusing that thing that is a problem.
And yes to that person playing mercy, sometimes you have to rip out the glock and go to work, especially in low ranks, don’t be scared now pull out that thang.
You don’t go for a Pharah being pocketed on a Zarya, you use D.va to fly into her while using rockets and hitting her with melee attack. Hit scans in dmg role are the best ones suited for dealing with a Pharahmercy either way, so your support wasn’t wrong at all there. I would’ve called it out myself as it’s frustrating enough to keep dmg and tanks alive when they ignore the Pharamercy combo and focus on the enemy tank instead…
when i’m playing support, i don’t expect to be carried but at the same time, i don’t expect having to carry either due to having dmg or tanks with a negative IGIQ…
To be fair, I think we’re all adapting to the new Mercy. It’s difficult to kill her pocket since they get extra healing when below 50% so we need to focus the Mercy more.
Sounds like they supported you best they could and as you stated, you weren’t good enough to kill the enemy.
If you are asking your supports to help you kill then you likely aren’t good enough at dps to be criticizing their choices or opinions.
Now they do sound bratty… and that’s a valid complaint. But I’d be upset too if I support Tf out of a dps and they still couldn’t accomplish anything. At that point you have a superior team mate and should maybe try your best to accept guidance and strategy because what you were doing with proper support wasn’t enough.
Sometimes supports need to help damage but it’s very rare that’s the deciding difference in a game (as in, its rare save for zen who doesn’t heal much anyway, for the play making move to be stop healing and focus on killing as a support) Very often a mercy pocketing a powerful dps is more useful than swapping to baptiste to shoot a pharah- unless your dps is not good enough in which case your support would have to be absurdly better than their own team and enemy team to kill said pharah.
Asking your supports to help you kill something you cannot is asking them to do their job and yours. Supports should be attacking too, when possible. but at the end of the day if you can’t kill the pharah with 12 k healing… it’s a dps issue.
Too bad you team up with bad habit people but it doesn’t mean you have to degrade all effort of support work. Don’t want support to have high heal number? What should support do then? Let teammate die to make up the number? It’s all come back to how everyone in the team perform during match. Did tank stay at bad position? Did DPS fail to kill threats so opponent do lot of damage to team?
Actually OP, it was good that you brought up that your supports needed to do more damage. This gave them carte blanc to contribute meaningfully to damage. If you didn’t, your teammates would have been screaming at the top of their lungs for more heals the second they started doing damage. Good work!
What works at the upper rank doesnt always work at the lower ranks. In gm ppl can actually dodge a reasonable amount of shots or know how to use cover, try it at lower~middle ranks without the aim and game sense of a gm yourself and its impratical because your team is just gonna eat so much dmg your other support cant keep them alive.
Pharah stomps in almost any lobby where the team as a whole decides it is not their job to deal with her. I am not saying you need to go double hitscan, double hitscan support and Dva. But most people pretend unpocketed hitscan is enough to match her when in reality it is not and those teams fold regardless of how many counters they run or how good their hitscan are. Pharah just wins the mental game effortlessly.