As stated their are so many complaints mainly coming from dps and some tanks that supports are overpowered. So much of this is coming from the standpoint of being a threat to ones ego though. Saying things like a character is annoying to kill, doesn’t mean that that character is broken or deserves to be nerfed. Saying things like well they do too much dps also doesn’t make sense, this is a fast paced game, full of flanks and one shots, and supports need ways to defend themselves to live. Rarely ever is the team going to help them. Generally never at all. Not only that, but in competitive it values damage and kills more than it does anything else, so more passive characters such as Mercy and Lifeweaver climb exceptionally slow because the system does not properly evaluate support performance.
If supports get nerfed, both sides are going to significantly suffer, though this is a team oriented game, it is actually less and less of one, and people play for themselves. How do you expect support to live? Healing for most characters is more or less fine, if characters are healing through everything, you might be focusing the wrong individuals on the other side. You might be playing the wrong characters, you might not be working with your team to focus people, you may not even be hitting any shots. Who knows.
I’m not surprised supports are being blamed, especially by non supports saying it’s a power creep. I am not saying no one and nothing needs adjusting, but I am saying that there is more to the story that stats alone, stop trying to balance based on numbers, and instead play and watch your own game. Feedback from people crying because something threatened their ego is also not what a game should be balanced on.
When support is weaker, who is going to help the supports? Certainly not their teammates. Then who is going to suffer? The team. Then what’s going to happen? The support is going to get flamed for being ‘trash’ or similar.
Bro for the love of god play other roles. You support mains are so stubborn and incredibly biased. Just play the other roles for a whole day before you realize how problematic supports are. Im a GM in all roles and I would be crazy if I said supports weren’t a problem.
Op im just going to assume that you are a support player with that icon and your post.
Just from the title i want you to go and look at a recent noobhunter video. Its the first clip of the video, the supports (i believe it was kiriko illari) just outheal and out utility a nanoblade without even using an ult to counter it
If thats not a problem then idk what is.
In this game you can feel like you are pouring thousands of points of damage into a target without them going under half. Kill the supports first you say? Suzu, teleport, lamp, platform, etc.
This right here. I play all roles almost equally with a little more time on support thanks to Illari. Supports aren’t even playing the same game as the other two roles. We’re beyond the point of reasonable counter arguments. We’re at Brig 1.0 levels of disastrous balance, albeit no individual hero compares to that monstrosity.
Certain support comps can make enemy tanks and DPS nearly powerless regardless of their skill level. The supports can continuously cycle abilities that have enormous impact yet require no effort, and this mostly stems from Blizzard’s support designs which focus on oppression of enemies rather than empowerment of allies.
Geoff Goodman called supports force multipliers. He’s right for other games. He’s wrong for Overwatch. OW supports are enemy force dividers. Their kits are largely centered on easily shutting down enemies’ attempts to do their jobs.
A tank will require 20 seconds and two full cycles of using every CD to get one kill through enemy healing. A support can prevent or undo that kill with one button. A DPS will spend 60 to 90s charging up their ult in an attempt to finally provide any semblance of value. A support will nullify it with one button. The button doesn’t require aim. It doesn’t require noteworthy gamesense. It doesn’t require positioning. It requires a thumb, a brain, and nothing more.
It’s bad balance. Objectively. Healing is so strong that using coordination, gamesense and high level mechanics to find a brief moment of vulnerability should be the logical counterplay. However supports also have counterplay to this counterplay in the form of free kill denial buttons…
This kind of thing isn’t new to Blizzard. They have a history of becoming desensitized to their own sustain power creep, but at least this time they’re recognizing it after one year instead of six.
I’m masters in Both Support and DPS and will tell you straight up that support is overtuned right now.
Baptiste essentially has three health bars at the value of 470 hit points RN so he’s impossible to take out and can duel just about anyone. Lamp is incredibly dumb because they gave it unneeded buffs and if there was a hero who can solo carry RN it is definitely Baptiste and Illari.
Illari is incredibly ridiculous, like she’s basically a DPS with a projectile sized hitscan hit box that can also heal her team, there was an OWL scrim were an Illari spawn camped two other supports and a DPS, that should be setting off some red flags from the get go IMO.
Ana and Kiriko are slightly overtuned and need some minor changes but not as much as people say.
The passive needs another tweak because I find myself being able to go for pokes or play incredibly aggressively with little to no punishment, it also makes being caught out of position way more forgiving then it should be.
Lifeweaver’s self sustain and healing are just ridiculously overtuned, I shouldn’t be able to sit 30 meters in the backline and just vomit out heals like there is no tomorrow.
Brig needs a small adjustment to pack, it shouldn’t have any burst properties to it again.
Zenyatta is mostly fine but he does likely need a rework due to how oppressive he is to play into as Tank for doing so little himself, literally just sit in backline and perma discord the enemy tank and they’ll lose the tank match up.
Lucio is fine tho, literally feels incredibly balanced and is only “trash” because every other support is simply overtuned.
Mercy and Moira just need some kind of rework IMO, you work for so little but get incredibly high value for it.
Its toooo late. Its too late to change blizzards mind. Its tooo late! Yeah, Yeah. Oh its tooo late to change blizzards mind. Its TOOO late. Blizzard listens to the forms, and youtubers, yeah yeah. They say support stops people from dying! So its too late! Yeah, Yeah. The twitch streamers complain on to Blizzard. So its too late! Yeah, Yeah.
It’s the the same game it was when Kiriko launched, and the only support I remember getting a buff was Brig, so the fact y’all are jumping on this bandwagon NOW sounds like 100% skill issues. You want easy kills? Go play BF or TF2 or against bots or something.
You hit the nail on the head. All of these nonsensical changes to appeal to the lowest common denominator. A sniper does not even kill with a headshot at range because of these clowns. The game is such a joke and I have no idea why anyone takes the balance seriously enough to pretend as if support is a genuine problem.
Maybe because, 1, they often don’t do changes around top play and in fact even still hold many characters hostage to low level, and 2, they often misunderstand the problem and do something completely unwarranted (same reason people are scared of the upcoming support changes, its not that they don’t need the change, its that Blizzard will most likely screw it up).
Balancing from a level where people actually play the real game is how you do it. Blizzard just doesn’t really do that properly.
I agree with your points OP, tho sadly what will come will come. Let’s see what the future brings.
As an aside, pls don’t not worry too much about getting flamed as a support. If you’ve already tried your best, just leave qp if your team is unhappy with your performance.
I feel sad when someone I tried so hard to keep alive calls me trash. But the team also deserves to have a better support, so I leave for their sake.
You are too wholesome, but I disagree. Those people deserve to have their psyche violated. You should stay to support the other teammates which will get substantially easier once you let squeaky voiced teen perish.
This is such a terrible take. Support players are also hugely issuing complaints about the support role. I’m a GM support player who coaches and VOD reviews lower SR; if you do not see that supports are the largest pain point in the game right now, you are flat out misunderstanding the game. You don’t understand the game from a fundamental level.
I mean I had a qp game on Havana defense recently where me and another dps went 3 and 7 and 4 and 9 because our supports would not stop healing/supporting only the tank. We ended up winning because our tank simply out existed theirs while the we (the dps) went in over and over in waves to kill their tank (apparently that works very well).
Then I had another game on Halloween Eichenwalde where the supports on defense were “not meta” and it was a horrible roll. Tank was good, dps were good, but supports just picked a bad combination and couldn’t help their tank outlast us. We had lifeweaver+ana and they couldnt kill any of us even though they should’ve at times.
And you realize if they nerf healing not only are you going to have games where you go 3-7 because support choose to double pocket a tank you are going to have games where they are FORCED to double pocket the tank because it’ll be the only way to keep him alive.
Y’all want to whine in 6 months about getting NO healing from your support. Y’all want higher queues because people won’t play tank if they can’t get healing? Keep on down this road. This is how we ended up with 5v5 and this game is at an all time low.
