Support wasn't weak in season 1, support players just sucked

They didn’t need giga buffs.

The passive didn’t need buffing.

It was a simple case of, the game fundamentally changed, you made both the other roles adapt to said change… but not supports. I will forever believe this as the case because I witnessed it with my own two eyes.

Supports moaned and groaned instantly, so instead of also having them adapt to actually having to PLAY the same game like the other 2 roles with the same amount of effort, awareness and positioning. You giga buffed the role for no reason and here we are still ever since… support still busted. Support players still not playing the same game as the other 2 roles. Support heroes still blatantly stronger than everything else in the game.

Supports were so used to being coddled in ow1, that literally 1 week of having to actually play the game and they instantly started complaining. Which is funny to me considering how much they tell everyone else to adapt to their idiotic heroes, but as soon as they had to adapt to the new game, where their heroes were still strong and everyone else was also adapting especially tank players who arguably had to adapt the most, they complained and ofc blizzard changed the game around for them and here we are.

Unironically the only passive that should exist in this game is the tank passive. If it’s going to be solo tanking for the future, tank should be the only one with the passive because they are the only one that pretty much NEEDS it. The DPS passive is meh and basically non existent for certain heroes. The support passive has proven to be broken. And even with the tank passive, the passive has been said to arguably need buffs and tank still feels terrible to play.

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Are Supports, Tanks and DPS on the same Tierlist in Role Queue?

If not, why are you trying to apply Tierlist balancing, between Roles?

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Here you go with this game designer talk bro. we already went through this on a different post…

it’s simple. Support is broken. Idk what kinda proof you need other than 75% of the community saying the same thing.

Like I said, it’s what I believe. Support wasn’t bad in season 1, support players refused to adapt and moaned and groaned til they buffed their role. Which again, is funny considering how often they tell people to adapt to their idiotic heroes but they funnily enough, refused to adapt themselves.

if you’re going to find some moronic game designer reason why supports should just be blatantly above the other roles, then please save us both time and do not bother.

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Oh this post is going to get flagged hard lol.

Just a thought about this bit:

Erm … sure. I think the main problem is that passives should work more “universally” and in this case, they gave it to the wrong role.

DPS should have a slow regen out of combat (and when not trying to damage anyone) and Support should have a small speed boost only applied when not trying to shoot or heal anyone and being under fire. That would be it.

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I mean that’s fine, Ik how the forums are, god forbid you speak out against the support cult.

Yea that’s probably the biggest issue. Passives affecting different heroes more than other. Like how hanzo has zero dps passive, but a dps with a long reload time is in love with the passive.

Or certain supports who benefit from the passive more than the rest.

Just wish they’d make the knockback reduction passive for tank just an in general CC reduction. Everything considered a CC simply lasts less time on tanks.

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Because it’s really incoherent to talk about something that may be a problem, with technical terms that have an entirely different meaning and context.

That said, what people are expressing is largely the sentiment that

  1. The Counterplay against Supports isn’t aesthetically enjoyable enough. (Usually due to low “Mechanical Risk” in either running away from duels, or getting kills)
  2. The overall Sustain in the game is too high, largely because of Healing/Immos. (And Tank Survival, and it’s all propped up by excessive burst damage)
  3. Abilities like AntiNade dramatically shrinks the “Worthwhile” Hero choices in the Tank Role.
  4. The misplaced fear mongering that we gotta be worried about GOATs comps in 2024. And that we gotta balance the Roles like they did in 2018. And that vaguely BAD THINGS will happen if they don’t.
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And pretty much all of this is true.

Add in the fact most supports have insanely bloated kits, with the best abilities in the game, some of the best ults, all while being the easiest role to play and get value out of.

This has been the case for most of overwatch, it was diminished slightly in season 1, aaaand then they giga buffed the role and we’re back to supports being broken.

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Gimme back JOATS and I’m happy

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what the hell is joats

JQ Brig Lucio from early OW2

JOATS like GOATS

oh lord, didn’t people hate that? lmfao I thought it was like a super slow stalled out gameplay when that was a thing. or was that beta JQ.

Yea def beta also. I’m a Lucio main so I loved it lol

And good news; Every single change from then has been nerfed or reverted!

The only net buffed abilities or heroes are Baptiste’s shift, Brig’s repair pack, Lifeweaver, and Lucio’s self heal during Amp it Up

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All they had to do was nerf flankers in S1. They made playing support terrible. But they hate nerfing flankers, so they buffed supports. We should definitely revert all supports back to their S1 version, and instead nerf flankers.

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honestly at this point I just want every dive tank to receive buffs so the value they get actually makes sense for the skill required to play them. This game has been perma brawl or poke meta, and we’ve had maybe 1-2 dive metas.

Orisa ALONE has had like 3 metas, and hog has had 2.

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The thing though is, that’s an aesthetic preference issue.
Which is still somewhat important, but it’s gotta compete against every other sort of player retention issue.

Notably, that you get more Queue/Matchmaker problems, the further you get away from 20% Tank players, 40% DPS players, and 40% Support players.

So you essentially got something that may be a problem with say, 5% of the players, being used as a justification for why 100% of the playerbase needs drastically worse Queue/Matchmaker quality.

We’re not even near 20 - 40 - 40. It’s more like 10 - 30 - 60. Support queues have been substantially longer than the rest because support is just more played.

Also the sheer amount of players in lower elos means that the queues simply won’t be affected that bad. That’s always been the case, queue times are a high elo problem.

It’s probably more like 15%, 40%, 45%
And even then, that’s specifically at high ELO.
Which is maybe 1% or less of the players.

Where additionally, what with the removal of OWL.
1x High ELO player doesn’t matter more than 1x player from any other ELO, except for the marketing value gained Influencers.

And those Influencers still want playerbase growth, because that means more Twitch subs.
And also the devs can supplement keep them happy with sponsorships and stuff.

I don’t believe there’s 15% of the players in tank queues when tank top 500 can’t even fill up with GM1’s til like… 2 days left of the season.

But again… changing supports won’t affected queues for a majority of players. Because queue times are only a problem for high elo.

Like we went through on the other post.

1x high elo player does matter when trying to balance your competitive team based shooter, compared to billy in gold who doesn’t actually care how you balance the game since it doesn’t affect him. Billy cares about fun, and you’d have to make some drastic changes (borderline reworks) to completely remove fun from billy’s favorite hero.

In which case they can be nerf down until they are played as much as DPS, and you keep balancing like that.

They are a problem for Blizzard at all ranks. You can’t have the matchmaker spending its time putting peoples in game because they are a role which has had the time blown out on it, and have any hope of the matchmaker doing well.

But I agree, if support has more people queuing than DPS, then you have space to nerf them down to DPS levels of play.