I already had concerns about my main role (support) months ago, and the last Rework news just deepen these concerns.
OW2 looks more deathmatchy than OW1. And surprise surprise, Support heroes are the worst heroes in deathmatch BY DESIGN.
All focus will be on who kills the enemy supports first. (Sounds very fun)
We are seeing „good“ reworks to both Tanks and DPS heroes and that‘s nice, but guess what? Supports ain‘t getting any „good“ reworks. In fact there is no info on any reworks at all.
Some devs said they have no plans to rework support heroes.
First feedback from some Pro players who tested OW2 tells that support heroes feel even worst than they were.
In fact, the overall healing in the game was reduced during fights and the healing numbers are lowered overall.
Even the little small changes we know so far are bad. Ana having her sleep cooldown up to 15 Seconds! Yeah folks, you can counter the 3 seconds invisibility hacks and 3 seconds blinks with your hard-to-hit 15 SECONDS sleep dart.
Brig, who is a very close range hero, is getting her only self defense ability (shield stun) removed. You now have a 0 mobility, 0 stun, low damage melee hero! (Sounds fun i know)
Support is already the role with the least number of heroes. But what are we hearing till now? Well, Doomfist will probably be a new Tank hero.
You, the support players, can keep dreaming of some love and care.
The current rework list (according to the pro players who played the early build last week) is that Moira, Doomfist, Sigma, Orisa and McCree are currently getting reworked / changed internally. I think the list will get bigger after the next bunch of reworks are done. So we need to wait until then.
This is fair, but thinking logically brig is losing Rally’s armour, shield bash, and as we found out yesterday, a tonne of healing. So she’ll need something.
Well this is just my speculation, but I can imagine that the devs will trying out in the near future how Brig could work as a Tank. She got a lot of nerfs with the CC & overhealth changes that she is not fitting to the support role anymore. I think they are looking how Doomfist rework turns out and maybe then working on Brig. In general… I’m very skeptical that they can achieve to rework all heroes until April 22nd.
Makes sense but I hope they don’t.
Homogenising the roles is bad and boring, “the tanky, peeling support” is a cool niche and they’d be dumb not to keep it.
Yeah I feeling the same way, but I think they restructuring the heroes, like Brig is a melee hero with a shield and some “CC” abilities (removed now). I think they really want to limiting the shields only to the Tank role now. It would be also interesting to see how a Tank Brig fights against a Tank Doomfist. I think these reworks can also brings new ways how we play the character. So, I’m open for any change.
the push game mode certainly does thanks to it’s map design, im wondering if payload and hybrid will too. during the devs showcases it didn’t seem like they were… those looked more like ow1 with more emphasis on map control and angles and less punishing tank engages, but how we will play vs how devs or pros play is very different. (a point I’m surprised isn’t brought up more here, considering how often it is used when people argue against using pro feedback)
in any case i find them to be very powerful in scrappy environs, like 2cp final fights and koth, hey even 3v3 elim. they have high impact cooldowns that are online enough to swing a fight when they connect and many have respectable enough dueling ability vs squishies provided you can aim as well as the person dueling you (Ana bap moira lucio are amazing in this regard)
…where i find them to be worse by design, is when you start dealing with actual deathmatch. their high impact cds like anti nade, sleep, immo, regen burst lose value because their cooldowns are based on teamfight cadences, not instant respawns in a kanezaka or chateau dm. makes sense when thinking about it logically. they’ll adjust the cooldowns to fit the cadence that ow2 plays at, i would hope
oh… and tanks working together, supports are horribly designed for dealing with that and that’s another notably unfun design quirk that isn’t gonna be a problem anymore either
We kinda need to take a step back and stop micro-analysing each and every change to the game, because we’re still just a little less than a year away from this game’s potential release. Things could change DRAMATICALLY during this time.
Let’s also not forget that Brigitte is getting a rework as they’ve mentioned multiple times that she’ll be looked at, and Moira was unplayable during the pros time on OW2 recently. These are two of the most controversial support picks, Brigitte for her CC and Moira for her complete lack of utility. We’ll see what they come out with soon enough.
What bothers me is that they didn‘t mention any thing about support heroes. There is an emphasis on how Tanks and DPS are redesigned to fit the new 5v5 world, but almost no news on supports. The only news we are getting are actually worrying, like the Ana sleep and Brig stun.
I actually take that as a slightly positive sign that maybe they are focusing on the tank and DPS now and then figuring out how the supports can best support them.
These blanket role changes I think are bad though. Passives are good, but should be based on character design and kit. Not the whole role. This is a poor design decision imo.
What is scary is this is what they chose to show us. Which would make you think they believe they are good ideas. That is worrying. If they think that match looked fun…oh my.
