"Supports are too easy!"

General Discussion
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Supports in Overwatch have continually suffered the unearned reputation of being easy to play. I’ve been seeing topics recently demanding the release of more difficult support heroes. I’m making this topic to break down why they appear to be easy, and why they are actually deceptively hard to play. Hopefully, we can dispel some myths that have been plaguing the playerbase of this game for a long time, by answering some questions on the topic:

Why do supports appear to be easy?

The simple answer to this question can be written in one word: consistency. In general, it is easier to “hit” an ally with healing than it is to “hit” an enemy with damage. This is the case even for Ana. She never has to aim for headshots, and the hitbox for a wounded ally is much larger than the hitbox that Ana or hitscan damage heroes must hit to deal damage. Brief or intermittent playtime as a support will only give a player a small amount of time to notice what’s hard and what’s easy, and this is most likely the first thing any player will notice upon picking up support. The mechanical application of healing is easy!

How can anything mechanically easy be balanced?

A consistent ability is balanced by limiting the impact of that ability. In Overwatch, while healing is more consistent than damage, the maximum healing-per-second that a healer can do is generally far, far lower than the maximum damage-per-second that a damage hero can do. While Overwatch’s healing output is always readily available and easy to apply, keeping healing output low ensures that fights will always end, because damage will always eventually overcome healing during active combat, even when support play on both teams is flawless.

Why are supports actually hard?

There are many reasons why supports are hard to play, but most of them are specific to the individual hero. There is one common reason, however, that stands out above the others: healers don’t get second chances to do their job. As a damage-dealer, if you take a few shots at an enemy and you miss, nothing happens. Nobody gains an advantage. You take cover, reload, and try again. As a healer, if you miss your heal target, they die, and your team is at a disadvantage. If your healer is your team’s weak link, your team’s foundation will crumble in every engagement. It’s stupidly hard to carry a team from the support slot compared to a damage slot, but it’s incredibly easy to throw a game from the support slot by screwing up.

In addition, incompetent teammates actively make a support’s core job harder by taking excessive amounts of damage. There are many cases where healing becomes literally impossible, no matter how skilled a support player is. By contrast, incompetent teammates only minimally affect the gameplay of damage heroes. Nothing your healer can do for you is going to make it more or less difficult for you to land a headshot with Widowmaker. For a damage dealer, good healing doesn’t make the game much easier to play, it just means you have to take cover less often. It means you get to spend more time doing damage, but it doesn’t change how hard it is to do damage while you’re doing it.

In the end, supports are required to succeed, but they can’t effectively contribute to success themselves. They can only enable the success of others, or contribute to failure. They are hard to play, because the impact of their mistakes are far greater than the impact of their best plays.

Bonus question: Why should supports be able to kill me?!

Simply put, it’s the only way supports can personally out-play you. Anything else they do is just temporarily delaying your victory, and no matter how un-fun it gets to have your targets healed back up or even resurrected, it would be far, far more un-fun and even un-fair for the support player if they were defenseless against you. However, to make sure that the game is still fair for damage heroes, supports are still less lethal.

Generally speaking, the more pure the support, the less deadly they are. Mercy is the best healer in the game (at least for now with 60 hp/sec) but she’s also fairly harmless. Zenyatta has low healing but is incredibly deadly. Brigitte, however, is a bit more difficult for most players to wrap their heads around.

Brigitte’s healing is only slightly better than Zen’s. In close quarters, she can be more consistently deadly than even Zenyatta against squishy heroes… but she’s utterly helpless against any target outside of 6 meters. That’s an enormously exploitable weakness. The unfortunate truth is, if you died to Brigitte, it’s because she out-played you. Like every other support except Zenyatta, she has some pretty extreme limitations on her damage output. If you let her hit you as a squishy, then either you both played well and she happened to surprise you by playing better, or you deliberately let her hit you.

Play a tank if you think you belong on the objective with the red Brigitte. She does extremely low damage after her initial burst, making it literally impossible for her to kill a tank who has a primary healer supporting them. If you refuse to tank, then stick to your own role as a damage hero: do damage. You do not belong on the objective. You do not need to kill Brigitte first. Don’t let her hit you, and kill someone else. Your own healer will sustain you for longer than Brigitte’s repair pack will sustain your target. Remember, healing only delays the inevitable. More than any other healer, all that is required to outplay Brigitte is patience.

It is okay for healing to be easy. Playing a support is still difficult. It is okay for supports to kill squishies. Supports still can’t reliably out-damage enemy healing or take out tanks. The only thing that wouldn’t be okay in the support category is a hero who can consistently out-damage enemy healing, and also heal for more than enemy supports can out-damage. Zenyatta floats right on the edge of that line without crossing it.

I hope that this post helps clarify what it means for a support hero to be balanced in Overwatch. While I’m sure the devs already know these things, too many players have misconceptions about what balance means in a team game. FFA deathmatch isn’t balanced. Moira’s purple ball is incredibly overpowered in that mode, but Moira’s entire damage capability is almost forgettable when your team’s healer has your back. She can punish players for being away from their healers, but she in no way fills the role of a true damage hero. The ease with which one hero can kill another in a 1v1 in a vacuum has very little to do with the game balance of 6v6 objective-based scenarios. Likewise, the mechanical ease of healing one ally has very little to do with how difficult it is to carry a team from the support role. Healing one of your friends in quick play is very easy. Playing the role of healer for an entire team is hard.

With that thought, I’ll leave you with a classic video that serves as an excellent metaphor for the difficulty of playing a healer in Overwatch: Erich Brenn "Plate Spinning" on The Ed Sullivan Show - YouTube

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Wow, nice read lol😂

“A” for effort👌

I agree, all classes are equal and should be treated as such, and people need to stop with the whole supports are brain dead thing.

That being said, supports also need to stop acting like they are above everyone else, (not all do, just saying there are some). This happens all the time, and it’s verry annoying.

And also, no one is braid dead, but some are a lot easier then others. That’s not bad at all, but it is the truth. No one should be looked down upon by that though.

It goes both ways.

So in short, nice job, lots of effort put into it and that’s awesome.:grin:

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I think it’s mostly “Mercy is too easy!” Than the whole support characters tbh

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I wish they’d add more supports that need aim to heal. It seems like blizzard has tried to make the healing part of most supports easy for consistency, but heroes that require more skill to heal would be more fun

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Aww, no gold star? :star:

Mercy is the very embodiment of consistency. While consistent doesn’t directly translate to “easy”, that’s where that notion comes from. She’s absolutely the easiest hero to heal with, but that’s not a support’s only job even for Mercy and it doesn’t mean she’s the easiest hero to win with. In disorganized play, I think that award goes to Brigitte for being able to take advantage of the lone flankers who would otherwise rule the day.

Moira does count. While her hitboxes for her healing spray are very large, the healing spray is actually very difficult to land at max range due to travel time. So, we have long range hitscan and projectile healing in Ana, short range and long range projectile healing with Moira. The only thing we’re missing is short range hitscan healing in the realm of aim-dependent healers.

I think an addition like that could be fun, but it would present a major problem for game balance. The problem is rooted in the very fundamentals of the game’s design. Overall, potential healing must always be lower than potential damage. Because it must be low, it must be also be consistent to be valuable. Ana is the least consistent healer with the most potential output, but she can reach anything she can see, which gives her just enough consistency despite her need for finer aim.

The only way to increase the consistency of a short-range healer other than auto-aim is to increase their mobility. That is why Moira has fade, Lucio has speed boost, and Mercy has Guardian Angel while the less mobile Zenyatta, Ana and Brigitte can all use their primary healing abilities at a 30 meter or longer range.

So what the game would need to make another unique aim-dependent healer fit, is a healer who has a 15-ish meter range hitscan healing device and high mobility. The challenge for you to figure out now, though, is how do you create a character who is a healer with potential output comparable to Ana, with a 15 meter range and high mobility, without stepping on Mercy’s toes? Such a hero would straight up replace Mercy for any player whose aim is good enough to out-heal Mercy’s beam, which would cause a huge imbalance between the heroes across ranks.

I think the takeaway here should be that creating more aim-dependent healers sounds like a great idea, but actually getting them to fit in a game where healing really needs to be low and consistent is really hard. Either they will be underpowered at all ranks, or extremely overpowered at high rank just like Ana, who has been underpowered during the Mercy meta but was extremely overpowered during the Ana meta at Diamond+ SR.

I think it would make more sense for the next difficult-to-play healer release to be a builder, which could present amazing gameplay challenges for the player while the automatic output of their creations remains low and consistent.

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You brought this up, so I’m just gonna say that for every support with a god complex, there’s a DPS main who thinks healers should be walking healthpacks and nothing more. That’s all I’m gonna say on this matter.

Anyway to OP, this is a good and well thoughtout read. And you’re right, honestly. A shame no one is going to read it.

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that is what annoys me. It is mercy who is the easiest to play and because of that character other supports are also being called easy. what did not help blizzard was to listen to the casual and released characters like moira and Brigitte and dumping them in the support category.

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I always find it funny the same people who complain about support being easy and that any idiot can play mercy, won’t play her. They go on about how they aren’t good at her, don’t like how she plays etc.

But I will admit the skill floor of most healers is far lower than other classes. Any new player with no idea what they are doing can get something done with Mercy. They might not pick the best targets, dmg boost often enough and maybe get themselves killed rushing to heal an over extended DPS.

That said I’d rather have a day one Mercy on my team than a day one DPS or Tank. Really bad tanks tend to get the whole team killed as once they charge off into the enemy team alone the rest of your team is left exposed and helpless.

DPS well there are some hero’s easier than others but lets face it with the way OW works in that you have to kill 6 of the enemy team faster than they can respawn, it’s a very bad idea to have your DPS suck so bad they can’t kill some one faster than a 10 second respawn timer.

Sure in an ideal situation none of your team mates would be bad, but even a complete novice healer can get some work done.

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Playing support is Hell, makes you paranoiac where you think any ult like Doomfist’s or Junkrat’s are exclusively for you(often true), which your teammates believe too so they get away from you(hey fair but, sad too lol), people spam I need healing when they just let you die not checking behind, you can spam “group up” all you want, they’ll still scatter and have you run everywhere to heal all of them…
You can have five DPS and they won’t find it a problem at all, heck they’ll find a stupid reason instead of team comp… So many things.

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I love when people who don’t seem to even play healers complain about healers being easy - as if they’re jealous - when so many people complain any time the high-skill healers are on their team because it means they won’t benefit from easy value.

“Switch off Ana, she’s terrible!”
“Add more healers like Ana!”

Like seriously, are people this oblivious?

That feeling when people knew the healer was guaranteed to die at ult-timed intervals so they gave up even trying to protect you. I’m glad they added healers who weren’t guaranteed kills like that so we had some form of reprieve that didn’t require abandoning our role entirely.

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To the OP: Bless this post.

If we’re talking day 1 on any FPS game, I’d agree, but if we’re talking day 1 in Overwatch with previous FPS experience, I’d much rather stick them on one of the lower skill floor DPS heroes like Soldier:76, Junkrat, etc. “Stand behind the tanks and shoot the red team” is a much easier role to pick up and run with than “Multitask keeping all of us healed up, and if you die we’re all going to die, and oh yeah you are the #1 priority pick for the enemy, so they will be trying extra hard to kill you, specifically.”

100% agree. I think that main tanking is far and away the most demanding role in the game when it comes to gamesense.

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You need more upvotes. Like, waaaaaay more.

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Oh, I love being solo ulted. I’m serious. If they solo ult me, that means one less ult to take down my team with. If I hear an ult going off, I’ll always back off, trying to get enough range between myself and the team so that when it hits me, nobody else dies with me.

I mean, Pharah solo ulting me to the side of the map while my team is capturing the point? Lovely. Junkrat solo ulting me while walking back from spawn? Inconvenient, but my team’s still capturing that objective while he’s stationary, so why should I care?

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But… still no :star:?

:frowning_face:

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It’s true that when you give a support character more things to do an manage, their playstyle is affected in a positive way.

But there is one problem with the aim to heal idea - many people want it in the game, but too few know how to play with it. And I don’t mean the healers that need to aim. Aiming with Ana isn’t that difficult. What’s difficult is feeling helpless because a teammate needs healing but is stubbornly planted behind a wall/corner and you can’t possibly for the life of you get to them without compromising your position.

This was even bigger of an issue when Ana’s shots didn’t pierce. One more thing for people to not know - how to position themselves so that they don’t interfere with Ana’s LOS.

A skilful support requires skill not only of the player playing them, but also of the rest of the team. And said rest of the team rarely takes this into account when they say that we need more skilful supports added to the game.

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Or a teammate is strafing/jumping/juking enemy fire (as well as yours) while spamming “I need healing”, rather than retreating to cover where you can heal them before reengaging with the fight.

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You can tell which Genji mains also play support and which ones don’t just by watching this behavior.

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Here, have a :star: then

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I mean supports are too easy to play and way too easy to get value out of. If they weren’t then why do we have so many One-trick Mercy’s, Brigette’s, Moira’s, and Lucio’s that basically just exist to go from Silver to GM in one season.

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Or when they’re litterally in the middle of the enemy team an I can’t get LOS on them because they’re body blocked… sometimes I wonder if people are too complacent with healing that they don’t know what to do when the healer can’t pocket them…

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