Quoted for emphasis.
Quoted for emphasis.
Soldier’s ability to heal other is tied to a cooldown. The ability to heal others on Supports is tied to their primary fire or alternative fire.
For every single support, their main healing tool is not tied to a cooldown.
Roadhog does not heal others.
Because that’s what Blizzard originally wanted to call them when they had no defined nature back in OW1 beta. Torbjorn, Sombra and Symmetra would’ve been classified as Support too.
But by the end of beta, Blizzard went ahead and made sure that every future Support would be defined by healing their team.
In this game, Support is healing.
Quoted for emphasis.
This still falls into a legitimate complaint, since dealing damage, is mechanically demanding for the Damage-role. No amount of Damage-boosting from four different supports will improve that situation.
(Everything else above is correct, though)
Part of the problem with Supports (beyond the sameness), is that there’s little that can be done in terms of skill expression beyond healing. Looking at Mercy, for example, no matter how much the player heals or damage-boosts, the score is always going to read something like high healing, but little damage-boosting, because unless those Damage-role heroes and Tanks actually land their shots and hit things, there’s little can be done to improve that score.
You could be doing 50/50 in terms of damage-boosting or healing, but your score is still going to read 11k healing and 300 damage-boosted, because there’s nobody landing their damaging hits.
In the broad scope of the game and the playerbase, it is in the best interest that Mercy heals and damage-boosts her team. She can’t rely on her co-support to keep the team up and healthy, while she triggers Valkyrie and goes ham on the enemy team. No matter how good Valkyrie is, it won’t be enough to kill the entire team in a 5v1 as Mercy - unless the enemy team is extremely inept. Even that wouldn’t be ideal as the rest of your team should be enough to deal with that.
In more coordinated games, Mercy would have better chances of skill-expression beyond healing and damage-boost with Guardian Angel jukes and shenanigans. But for the general play, she’s limited here to largely healing. Because Overwatch is simply too fast and the Damage-role is simply too weak to do otherwise.
Cleric is still used.
Ironically, the modern cleric still has more spells for dealing damage and other things than healing, too.
Think of it this way…
In FF14, the Dragoon - melee specialist job that’s primarily focused on dealing damage and is classified as such - has several abilities that support the team through buffs such as Battle Litany and Dragon’s Eye. These abilities, despite being very powerful, does not qualify Dragoon as being a Support.
And likewise, both the Bard and Dancer jobs in FFXIV, have several more buffs that the Dragoon does not have, are also classified as “DPS”-jobs.
The healers in FF14, rarely have supportive abilities like the above mentioned and their primary focus is healing (and doing damage). But they would still be called support-roles because of the very act of healing is supportive.
See above. Soldier’s healing is tied to a cooldown. Support’s healing is tied to their primary fire or alternative fire.
Not quite. Brigitte requires actively hitting targets to trigger Inspire. And Lucio needs to switch auras in order to heal, as well as use Amp to increase that healing.
Everything else above is correct. (and a solid post overall).
There’s nothing wrong in the video clip. No one in that clip needed immediate or steady healing, (and they did toss a Biotic Grenade which is still healing). And no one nearby or in Ana’s immediate view required healing, so the situation is generally okay for the Support to do something else.
The problem is, in general play, you have Supports that aren’t healing when players are taking damage, and spending most of the time trying to deal damage instead of healing their team or supporting it. You could have a Baptiste player spending 15 seconds trying to hit an enemy Sojourn in front of him and the team, but while his team is taking damage from other sources, he’s still laser-focused on trying to hit the Sojourn, and his team is dying around him with little healing.
That’s the problem people are complaining about. That’s why Supports need to be focused on healing their team primarily. They don’t have 15 seconds to try and kill an enemy, when that time could be better spent on healing your team and keeping them alive against everything else.
Now self-defense is still important, and if it is going to take you that much time, you should probably be calling for some help. No one is going to be upset if you’re trying to stay alive against a flank attempt. But they may largely be unaware of it because the calls for help from Supports are so quiet comparatively.
(It says a lot about me, that I have it on hand 
)