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