To perform well, supports need to focus on two different things, often at the same time: healing teammates and contributing to damage.
Underperforming on healing will often overwhelm your teammates and lead to losing the team fight. Underperforming on dealing damage will also overwhelm your teammates, while making the support extremely dependent on other player’s performance to win the match.
Adding to all that, supports are priority targets to the enemy team, are handicapped against most DPS (and Tanks) when trying to defend themselves, and are usually the ones been blamed on loses. This often results in an unrewarding, stressful, and ultimately unfun experience for all players.
The possible solution:
Healing is no longer a primary function of the support role. Now, their focus is to deal damage (as the other roles) and empower (not heal) allies with their cooldowns and ultimates, giving them advantages over the enemy.
Overall damage output of DPS and Tank roles are slightly decreased (needs to be adjusted for each hero), to compensate for the lack of active and constant healing from supports.
The healing passive (which currently applies only to supports) now applies to every role. This way, DPS and Tanks are no longer dependable on supports to keep them alive.
Support’s cooldowns will be reworked to focus on buffing teammates, removing negative status effects (cleanse), and improving their own survivability. Healing abilities and ultimates can still exist but should not be the norm.
Support’s cooldowns will be reduced, to be on par with the cooldowns of the other roles, allowing for more proactive and less punishing use of abilities. Adjustments will be made to each ability, to compensate for shorter cooldowns.
Support’s overall ultimate charge received by doing damage is slightly increased (to compensate for no ult charge from healing).
Support’s new passive: if the support is at full HP, any burst damage that would kill them, leaves them with 1 HP instead.
Examples of reworks for supports
ANA: Biotic Rifle: no longer heals. Can now headshot. Biotic Granade: no longer heals. Removes negative effects from self and allies. For enemies: halts healing passive and reduces any healing received by 50% for the duration (3 seconds). Cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds. Sleep Dart: cooldown reduced from 15 to 9 seconds. Duration reduced from 5 to 3 seconds. Nano Boost: can now be used on self.
BRIG: Inspire: no longer heals. Reduces damage received by 10% instead, for 2 seconds (applies to self and allies in range). Repair Pack: no longer heals. Reduces damage received by 15% (stacks with inspire). Also removes negative status effects from target. Duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds. Whip Shot: can now headshot. Normal damage reduced to 60. Reduced area of effect from 0.5 to 0.1 radius (similar to Hanzo’s arrow) Barrier Shield: reduces damage received from the front by 15% (stacks with inspire). Rally: no longer heals. Provides 100 overhealth to self and allies, +25% movement speed, +25% damage reduction (stacks with inspire and repair pack) while on area of effect.
BAP: Biotic Launcher Alt fire: no longer heals. Removes negative status effects instead.
Regenerative Burst: No longer heals, provides 50 overhealth instead (only to self). Increases rate of fire (attack speed) by 25%, reduces reload time by 25% (self and allies). Cooldown reduced from 15 to 9 seconds. Duration reduced to from 5 to 3 seconds.
LUCIO: Primary fire: increased projectile speed from 50 to 60. Increased damage from 20 to 24 per round.
Soundwave: damage increased from 25 to 40. “Healing Aura”: no longer heals. Instead, increases rate of fire by 10% (25% with amp it up). Amp it Up: cooldown reduced from 12 to 9 seconds (duration stays at 3 seconds).
KIRIKO: Primary fire: base damage increased from 40 to 60 (headshot stays at 120), projectile speed increased from 90 to 100. Secondary fire (Ofuda): no longer heals. Instead, reduces all active cooldowns from allies by 0.2 seconds per ofuda that connects to the target (up to 2 seconds total reduction). Protection Suzu: no longer heals. Area of effect reduce from 5 to 4 meters. Cooldown reduced from 14 to 9 seconds (durations remains at 1 second) Kitsune Rush: rate of fire reduced from +50% to +30% (everything else remains the same)
MERCY: Primary fire: damage increased from 20 to 25. Projectile speed increased from 50 to 60. Caduceus staff: yellow beam no longer heals, instead removes negative status effects from allies; blue beam remains unchanged (+30% damage). Valkyrie: no longer an ultimate. Duration reduced from 15 to 3 seconds. Cooldown 9 seconds. Everything else remains the same. Resurrect: is now an ultimate. Everything else remains the same.
MOIRA: “Healing spray”: no longer heals. Instead, removes negative status effects. “Healing orb”: no longer heals. Instead, increases damage output by 30% divided by the number of allies affected by the orb (including self). Effect lingers for 3 seconds. Ex: if only Moira is touched by the orb = +30% damage for her; If Moira and two allies are touched by the orb = +10% damage for each player. Coalescense: no longer heals allies (but still heals Moira). Gives +20% damage to allies in range and -20% damage to enemies. Everything else remains the same.
ZEN: Primary fire: damage increased from 48 to 50. Projectile speed increased from 90 to 100. Orb of Harmony: no longer heals. Instead, increases damage output, damage reduction, and movement speed by 10% each. Orb of Discord: enemy receive +25% damage from Zen (same as now), and +15% damage from Zen’s allies. Transcendence: Removes all negative status from allies (and make them immune against debuffs) for the duration (6 seconds). Healing reduced from 300 per second to 150 per second. New passive (levitation): holding the jump button allows Zen to move upwards, for 2 seconds. Cooldown 3 seconds. (this gives Zen a little bit more survivability, as he can now access some high grounds, similar to Bap).
I know that removing active healing from supports is a controversial subject, but I’d like to hear feedback on this.
Stop trying to push them into a DPS role with other jobs. Healing is needed in OW. If you remove the main form of healing you have to reduce all damage in all role, make health packs spawn time faster, place more and change how maps are build. Also you would lose 90%+ of the supports.
The only thing they need is more heroes, maybe a passive that is also active in the fight and a way of pushing back flankers and attackers.
and what way of pushing them back do you think would work?
CC like lucios boop?
does to little for slow moving healers as any dps can instantly move back into range
more movement for the healers makes them into cowards that run away from fights and therefore contradicts their role
more health makes them tanks with heal
more dps… we see how that worked on moira
so? what is left aside from clear rework of the role??
more heros dont help as that would mean the current ones would jsut be pushed into offmeta hell forever
fact is dps players want healbots but noone wanna play that
as proven here
dps that can heal work very well in other games paladins battlefield tf2 foxhole to name a few
but dps dont want others to contest their turf
so meaningless of what type of rework the role gets
they will hate it anyway
that only makes them uselesss as every other abillity also does exactly that
if all supports can cleanse all debuffs are meaningless
said like a true dps
without any reason given as to why
i admit most of them have way higher player numbers but paladins and TF2 are the most similar and both have healers taht dont need to wipe their dps behinds the whole game and still work perfectly
I have better idea, literal multi billion dollars company idea, lets remove 1 support slot and just buff the entire support roster. 1 less player = less queue times = less money to pay for owl teams. 0 drawback whatsoever. …man im bored.
so make one support suffer as they try to keep 3 other players alive while getting flamed for not healing that one person at that specific time?
yeah…i bet that would help…
not to mention that it would still cause all the problems i named with buffs
But even with a new hero, the problem was not resolved. Most players still won’t queue support. Maybe the problem is how punishing and unrewarding the role currently is.
Removing active healing (id est, use primary fire to heal a teammate) + changing healing abilities into buffing abilities + giving every role a healing passive + slightly reducing overall damage output = supports can actually focus on the fight AND DPS/Tanks can be more independent as they won’t require massive and active healing from other players to play.
The objective of this changes is to make supports actually supports, instead of healers that also need to do damage, but are handicapped.
I agree. The “primary fire” healing abilities are the ones that I struggled the most with the rework. I didn’t want to remove them, but making all of them a cleanse button is not the solution.
i think the main problem is that the switch from OW1 to OW0.75 has nerfed the supports into oblivion
5v5 means the tank that protected the supports is gone
the dps buff makes it harder for supports to defend themself
except for kiriko none of the supports are designed for that
just look at how different her kit is to all others
she can do real dmg on headshot
she can do massive heal
she has good mobillity with her teleport
so she is meta
the other supports that are seen the most are lucio who also has most of those boxes ticked
and ana who fell out of the role since her debut and is mostly keep in it for her healbuff and antiheal that till now was only her speciality and had no real counter
so we have 1 designed for 5v5
1 that was alrready close to the core design supports now need
and 1 that was always a special case
the rest of the supports cant tick those boxes as they are now and need a complete rework
This is one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater things, unfortunately. Healing is why supports are focused so hard, and with a more non-healing support role that wouldn’t be as true, but the fact of the matter is that most support players want to heal.
Giving everyone the healing passive sounds like a good way to not dramatically change the pace of the game, but unfortunately I think that would have a pretty severe discrepancy in value for someone like Genji or Pharah versus someone like McCree or Mei.
It’s a radical change to the support role (and to heroes from other roles), indeed. And it could backfire, as other have said in this thread.
However, I think a deep rework to support is necessary. Adding new heroes, and/or making tweaks to existing ones is not enough to bring more players into support. The situation we are in right now proves this.
If one of the roles is bottlenecking the matchmaker, match quality drops significantly. Which leads to players quitting the game.
In my opinion, the best approach would be to at least try these “radical” reworks in the experimental mode. See how the community reacts. And go from there.
The reality is that support problems are directly linked to tank strength. Tanks don’t feel as though playing a protective role is beneficial because they are already so ridiculously strong that they don’t NEED supports to win team fights, so there is no value in being slowed down to babysit the little snotty nosed wimpy kid who is getting bullied.
The single biggest support boost would be to create a symbiosis between tank and support, ostensibly by making tanks afraid to let supports die. Tank bravado is what is really killing support players. Your tank devaluing you and the enemy tank using you as a doormat.
I agree with your diagnosis, but the solution (in my opinion) is to make roles more independent from each other, not the other way around.
I know OW is supposed to be a “team game”, but that’s not a reality outside of OWL. Most players solo or duo queue. If your role (or hero) depends too much on other players performing well (and by “well” I mean the bare minimum to not be considered a throw), you won’t have an enjoyable experience with that role/hero. That’s one of the main reasons match quality is so low.
The changes being proposed aim to reduce such dependency (for everyone, not only supports - hence the universal passive heal), while preserving each role/hero characteristics. In other words, if your teammates play cooperatively, you’ll still have an advantage; but if they don’t, you won’t be handicapped and will still have a chance of winning.
Alpha pointed a similar issue with the cleanse rework, and I agree. That needs to be improved. However, I think that the ability to remove negative status effects from allies and/or positive effects from enemies should be a feature in every support kit (each hero with a distinct way of doing it).
Also, we have quite a few negative statuses (not all should be “cleansable”, necessarily):
Ramattra: Ultimate (-50% damage in huge radius) and vortex ability (slow enemies and pull them to the ground)
Orisa: Ultimate
JQ: Ultimate and Wounds from various abilities
Sigma: Ultimate
Rein: Ultimate
Doom: had a slow, but was removed (could come back though)