Nah you split it perfectly. Indenting and splitting subjects a bit more would be nice but lol who cares it’s readable and informative. Also I have a question -
Do you think Mercy is inherently supposed to be the most played? Or was she just the easiest option since the start?
Why play Soldier: 76 when Doomfist will ruin your day over and over? The game is full of questions like that one, and the positive answer is usually going to be “because they don’t have a Doomfist yet”. Most heroes have a good counter pick.
Everytime someone gives you advice on dealing with Brig, you come up with a situation you pulled out of your mouth. Like I said, if you don’t like it or disagree, just say so and move on.
Too many people have already given you sound advice that can be applied to pro and below. You keep refuting it by creating hypothetical situations.
Doomfist isn’t exactly balanced either, but he takes way more skill than bridgette and can be outplayed and has WAY more solid counters than bridgette.
Not really? Their advice is just “don’t go near her lol” which I’ve said is not really a solution since you can’t just magically not ever stand near bridgette unless you are playing Widowmaker or something.
As I said I was just kinda paying devils advocate, I’m more concerned about her vs flankers because that is a big issue.
The original thing I even said about bridgett wasn’t anything to do with her being op it was just saying that bridgette hitting me is not her “out playing” me in any way, shape or form.
You maybe interpreting their advice as ‘don’t go near her’ but that isn’t what they are saying.
Here is what they are saying.
Don’t engage a Brig until you have an advantage or you’re absolutely forced to. Take the high ground and try to get a pick, or try to break shields.
Sure the advice isn’t easy, but Overwatch isn’t easy anyways.
But if I’m playing a flanker then I almost never “have an advantage” against her, and even when I do it happens so in-frequently that I might as well be playing a non-flanker dps or doomfist.
First, flanking isn’t meant to kill someone. Getting a pick while flanking is great, and can snowball into winning a team fight, but that isn’t the purpose of flanking.
Flanking is meant to pull attention away from the frontline, so your team can gain space and push towards the objective. If you’re a Tracer, and you have the Brig distracted, you are doing a good job. As long as you don’t die, just keep harassing her and focused on you. Now the rest of your team can fight without worrying about stuns and boops from Brig.
Or just take your own advice and switch to a hero that can more reliably counter her.
If your not killing people when your flanking then you are doing a REALLY bad job at flanking. Distracting the bridgette isn’t really gonna give you the upper hand like killing someone is, it’s still a 6v6.
If the only way to win against a bridgette as a genji/tracer is to switch then there is no point in genji/tracer existing in the first place.
The game started with only Lucio, Zenyatta, and Mercy available. I believe the intention based on the design of the heroes at game launch was for a team to pick either Lucio or Mercy as a primary healer, and have the option of including a Zenyatta as a supplemental healer to help out if a solo healer wasn’t enough.
Ana was then introduced, but her inconsistency has always made it too difficult to play her as a solo healer. Her healing is powerful, but she needs a second healer on the team to both make up for her lack of self-sustain and her lack of consistency.
With Lucio’s rework and his loss of healing aura range, Mercy became the only hero capable of effectively solo healing whether or not the developers intended for that to happen. She was the only healer with a strong enough heal who could reach her entire team in a timely manner. As a result, she became the standard choice in Quick Play where having more than one person willing to play a healer is a rarity.
In addition to her role as the only viable solo healer, she is also the most widely accessible healer, and the most visually attractive healer. All of that put together led to her growth in popularity in Quick Play, and with so many people playing her, getting better at playing her, and getting better at playing with her, Mercy started to gain popularity in competitive. She was helped along the way by a series of buffs to help her keep up with the then extremely overpowered Ana.
It’s at the point where Mercy received her last pre-rework buff, invulnerability during her ultimate Resurrect, that her reign as the queen of supports first began, but her official coronation was the Valkyrie rework, and the game devs were genuinely surprised by just how incredibly overpowered their reworked creation was.
Now that we’re done with the history lesson, I’ll use it to answer your question: to my knowledge, the game devs have always intended for Mercy to be the go-to healer that you pick when what your team really needs above all else is healing. So, yes, I think by design she was meant to be the most commonly played healer in the middle skill ranks and in Quick Play. I don’t think her capability to solo heal was an accident. However, I think that with the healing nerf up on the PTR and the new “only one healer” tip on the hero select screen, the mentality of the dev team has changed.
I think that with this latest change, they are showing an intent to make solo healing with any healer including Mercy a legitimately poor choice instead of a barely adequate one by making her unable to keep up with the healing demand. I don’t think their intent is to reduce Mercy’s pick rate below the other healers, but rather to eliminate the part of Mercy’s pick rate that she owes purely to her capability as a solo healer.
I’m sure that was a lot more than you bargained for, but I hope at some point that it provided a good answer to your question.
And OP’s point was more or less that this is demanded by the design of the game, and that playing a support is hard in different ways.
Playing an extremely mechanically difficult healer would be frustrating to play, because of the increased cost of missing a shot. Playing with mechanically difficult healers would be frustrating for the same reason. If a mechanically difficult DPS misses a shot on their target, bad things can happen, but you can shoot at them again and maybe kill them on your next try. If a mechanically difficult healer misses their target, their target is dead, and there’s no second chance to get it right.
Additionally, healers cannot keep up with 1-to-1 HPS versus any enemy DPS. The most consistent healers put out relatively mild HPS, and the most bursty healers can’t put out insane HPS for long enough at a time to out-sustain incoming damage for long (and this is necessary to avoid unending stalemates). So if a healer were to be 100% as mechanically difficult as its nearest DPS counterpart (say, Ana and Widow), the healer is performing an equally arduous task for a lower payoff, which, again, stinks for everyone involved.
But in the balance with healers having lower mechanical difficulty, they have some of the gravest (and most immediately obvious) consequences for whatever mistakes they do make. Plus, they are top-priority kills for the enemy, they are heavily reliant on their teammates, they have to triage/multitask the health of their own team in addition to monitoring the activity of the enemy, and are always performing under pressure.
I would never say that healers have the hardest role in the game—I’d give that award to the main tanks—but it is also certainly not the case that supports are braindead and skill-less. Like the OP has said many times now, doing HPS is easy, but being a good support hero is hard.
Healing is the easiest thing to learn. Period. What’s so hard about left clicking something? Is it really hard to keep your tanks above 50% hp and DPS above 80% hp?
The goals of a DPS are mostly completely different vs a healer. It’s not to do over 90000 damage to a character, but to kill a hero as cleanly and quickly as possible. Why bother to hit something 10 times if you can do it once? By failing to kill something, they are giving the healers ult charge instead.
The skill ceiling for a healer is ultimately lower because there’s an endless ceiling for mechanical aiming that just outclasses healers no matter what. As a healer, you’re going to get outdpsed more than you can heal, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. As long as you maintain the minimum threshold where you can support your DPS and tanks, your job is mostly done. You are not meant to carry the game anyways, so why mention carrying the game here? The DPS is supposed to fulfill that role.
However, there is one point where you can say that supports get the hardest role of them all. The DPS become so good at the highest level that they instant kill supports for making the smallest positioning mistake. Just look at Shanghai Dragons. Freefree gets the nickname Freekill because he just gets killed over and over, which is something that I dislike. This is the only point where I can say that supports have the hardest task, surviving, but what’s so hard on healing?
Jjonak trained his mechanical skill levels to the degree that he simply kills the enemies before they kill him. Ark plays a non-death mercy and stays alive whenever he can.
The role of a support is to stay alive, heal/boost the minimum threshold where your DPS and tanks can function properly, and maybe get that occasional kill.
I could ask the same question in the context of playing damage dealers, and it would be just as valid. You’re grossly oversimplifying the job of healers in Overwatch.
It’s not just looking at health bars. Triage is about who’s in the most danger, not who has the lowest health. They just happen to be the same person now and then. Also, even if it were purely about health percentages, you got them wrong. Squishies need a minimum of 126hp if they are threatened by a sniper so they can take the body shot, and tanks need a minimum of 301 to live through a headshot. 50% of Rein’s health isn’t going to cut it. The percentage that represents these numbers on the health bar varies per-character, and snipers are just one example of the possible threats you need to prepare for. To heal against rapid fire hitscan heroes, your goal is actually to keep your tanks topped off completely so that their armor will reduce incoming damage.
You are correct that staying alive gets harder for supports as rank increases, but that’s just one of many skills required to succeed. While positioning to stay alive is key, playing too conservatively will leave your team without healing when they need it. Likewise, being too aggressive with damage will lead to failures to heal… Yet forgoing damage entirely can be just as detrimental. There is a fine line to walk between risk and reward in all aspects of support play because the whole thing is a complicated balancing act.
I could go on, but it is very late. Perhaps I will elaborate more tomorrow, but for now I must sleep. In the meantime, I hope that you take the time to re-evaluate your perspective on support play, because it is clear that the many intricacies which go beyond holding down left click are currently too far from your short sight.
God damn theres so many wrong things about this post that i dont even know where to begin with lol.
Dude you are comparing mastering a tool with the actual IMPACT and OUTCOME of a well used tool. Those are 2 different things.
Do you know how to use pencils, right? Can you draw the mona lisa in 1h ? No, right? Same thing.
Yeah mechanically wise healers are easier but the TASKS and the actual impact that they have to deliver CONSISTENTLY is much higher than a DPS and thats a fact.
Due to awareness, positioning and gameplay, supports (and sometimes tanks) tend to be the shot caller, the ultimate trackers , decision makers and also deal damage. DPS just do damage. Period.
Yes we all know that aiming is a bla bla skill, bla bla ceiling, bla bla potential but the task is only one : Do damage in the more efficient way.
Are you serious in comparing a mercy’s left click beam sensitivity or Zen’s left shift over a hitscan’s pixel size projectile? Now you’re just being biased here.
I’m obviously simplifying the job of healers and it’s because there are too many words to write down. The support healer’s main goals (excluding Ana) are the easiest to learn, but that doesn’t mean that it’s really explained in a few lines. My point is that the supports are still the easiest role to learn in comparison to DPS/Tanks.
If there’s an equivalent level of skill between DPS/Tanks, it comes down to healers making a difference. But if there’s a difference in the quality of Tanks or DPS, tell me what your higher skilled healers like can do (unless you’re Jjonak, he makes Zenyatta become a DPS role on top of the healing role)?
I don’t even know how to respond to this reply. That one task to “do damage” is the hardest thing to achieve. I mean if you achieve it, you can just go straight to overwatch league and play as a pro.
Edit: Actually, if you can achieve both healing and DPS, you’re going to become the MVP player like Jjonak.
It’s not the support class as a whole because there are those who are very hard to play well. When refering to the easy ones, it’s healers like Mercy, Moira and Brigitte people talk about.
Even though Ana’s hitboxes are more generous compared to others, she still needs to land those shots, actually she needs to land each and everyone of her normal abilities while also being able to utilize two different types of aim.
All those things are what makes it so Ana for people who aren’t extremely good at her like master and up are very inconsistent with her, not just because they can miss, but also because it can be blocked.
Ana is a hero that you have to play your brains out on with every match, there is no such thing as just chilling with her because the APM requirement for her to actually be worth the pick is insanely high. You always need to look for something to do, and on top of that you need to land the shots/abilities.
One of the main reasons why that Mercy is so good and is having her HPS reverted to 50 is because she actually has consistent healing, her healing is so good that 100% of the healing goes to the intended target without being interrupted, unless the enemy Ana hits a bio nade. That is incredibly good and grossly underestimated. Anything that’s getting attacked gets a major advantage when a Mercy starts pocketing it and it requires nothing of her to do that. Ana missing just a shot, having LoS blocked or even having to reload can get the team mate killed.
Even if you get a jump on something and get them low, a Mercy healing pocket will turn a disadvantage into a really big advantage against the person who originally had the upperhand. Again, it’s consistency. Very few damage sources have the ability to land 100% of the damage for the intended target all the time. The healing not only mitigates incoming damage it, can also provide additional based on how much the enemy damage dealer is missing.
There is a reason why Mercy + Zen was such a god tier support duo for a long time. Zen’s low mobility weakness stopped being a factor with Mercy pocketing him.
Most of the things you say in this paragraph aren’t exclusive to support at all. Any class not doing their job right will cost put your team at a disadvantage and cost you the game.
Just as how other people not doing their job correctly, makes it harder for you to do your job right.
It’s also not solely the healers job to keep people alive, that’s also the job of tanks as well, the better job a tank does at drawing fire while also not being ressource hungry, the better chance a support will have at keep things that do need healing up and also contribute to doing damage with things like damage boosting etc.
There is a reason why the roles are ranked in a certain way as to who are most important and who actually carries in the game of OW:
1 Tanks
2 Support
3 Damage
Damage is at the lowest because if the tanks and supports are doing their part correctly, there is simply no excuse for the Damage to mess up, even a mediocre Damage player should be able to find success when tanks and supports do their job correctly. If they aren’t doing their job correctly and you still find success, then that’s when you are carrying.
This is a very misunderstood question, it’s not “why are supports able to kill me” it’s rather “why are supports able to kill me with no effort?”.
Kills are supposed to be earned, not handed to you and heroes like Moira and Brigitte more or less are capable of simply having kills given to them. They both have incredible sustainability and they both also take control over space because of how they are made. Moira can keep a flanker at bay the same way a Torb turret does, but without the drawback of having a Torb, reason being that her range and minimum aim requirement allows her to stop flankers from getting in range to do what they want unharmed.
These heroes very rarely outplay anyone for their kills, they simply outlast the enemy while having tools that just gives them the advantage and high consistent damage output. Yes I said high consistent damage output, while Moira requires aim although very little, that full 50 DPS is more or less going to the intended target while also mitigating the damage she is taking by 30 each second. She also has the ability to either do an additional 50 DPS bringing her dps up to 100 or give herself an additional 75 healing per second bringing her up to 105 healing per second.
Brigitte denies area so hard because of her stun and 155 damage combo that even tanks don’t want to mess with her. If you put a Brig on the cart and have everyone else take all the good positioning, that cart isn’t going to move, most things that try to challenge her on it is either going to die or be forced back because it’s very easy for the other supports to assist her while the rest of her team can run rampant on the enemy.
People keep trying to refuse this simply truth, but Brigitte single handedly is a Dive counter, not just a counter to dive heroes but the entire strategy - 1 hero, that doesn’t require mechanical skill. The argument being, “why don’t we see Brigitte all the time in OWL if she’s so good”, these people fail to realize that Brigitte already does her job without even being picked, people used to use Sombra to scout to see whether or not they could actually play dive. The only time that people really tries to play any sort of Dive hero is when the enemy doesn’t have the luxury of going back to spawn and counterpicking to Brigitte. However when they do, you often see two players hanging out near their spawn to see if someone picks dive heroes/brig.
The thing about heroes like Moira and Brigitte is that they only require the player to understand the game. Nothing more, if all you have is high gamesense alone then you can have great success with these heroes. OW is a game with a lot of different types of skill sets and ideally, they should all be at a high level to reach the highest ranks. But these two can bypass that. Furthermore, the issue is that the player don’t even really require much more game sense than their peers.
The whole “heroes that are mechanically less demanding require so much more game sense/other types of skill” is a complete fallacy. If anything, introducing more of these types of heroes that can become META actually lowers the entire skill requirment across the board because the game devolves into a simpler state.
We have enough easy to play heroes across the board
We don’t need more.
True. It may be easier to be efficient with certain characters like Mercy, but that’s to make sure people can play efficiently at all levels. Its easy to be efficient with Mercy, but pro Mercy are a whole different story. They don’t just stand behind and hold down the primary fire. They are super strategic and really keep the team going.
i just want to focus on your last paragraph.
yes, moira doesnt need more awareness or gamesense than widow, probably. but also, her impact is way lower than widows. widow can, technically, delete a 250hp hero every 1,5 seconds or so. moira cant outheal headshots. moira cant even DREAM of doing the damage widow does. moira is mechanically easier, doesnt require more gamesense maybe, but her impact is much lower. thats the balance. when a moira comes on point and tickles me, my reaction is often “ah, ill ignore that for now, i gotta focus on doing my job” because her damage is so laughable, and shes wasting time she could use for healing usually. (not always, just what i observe in most cases)
Does it really make sense comparing the impact of any heroes to Widow and Hanzo atm? In this current META they are really the only DPS capable of having impact simply because it only takes 1 shot to kill something.
Moira does so much healing that saying that her impact is low is something I have to disagree with.
Is her damage really that laughable? It depends on whether you are a tank or not, because if she alone hits you as a 200 HP hero, it will take her 4 seconds to kill you if she only uses her grasp, add in biotic orb and you are left with 2 seconds assuming their is no other damage coming at you and that you aren’t being healed.
The consistency is what makes her good and why people just look at her damage output and are mislead to thinking that her impact is low.