"Supports are too easy!"

and that right here is the trap. moira excels at duels against squishies, but thats not where she should be. she is a brawl healer, shes in there with the team. and aginst the enemy team. in a 1v1 moira is usually the winner, but in reality that barely even happens.

You can win games by going for a squishy kill and leaving something to die if you can get away with it yourself. Moira is capable of doing both easily. Going for the assassin play when the opportunity presents itself is not something hard to pull off when all you need is two seconds.
Just to compare this to Tracer, if Tracer doesn’t 1 clip her target she has spend 1 sec unloading it and another reloading her gun, by the time a Tracer could fire her guns again a Moira could have killed her target.

Just wanted to say thank you OP for understanding many of the struggles of playing support. When you keep hearing how “ez” it is to play support you really lose a lot of the fun in playing as the implication is a win is the result of everyone else and a loss is because you failed at something a chipmunk could do.

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well, if you want to waste your CD on biotic orb to kill a squishy, sure. go for it. if the situation allows you to do that, youve already basically won the fight anyways.
biotic orb should almost exclusively be used for healing, because of the cooldown and the resource on moiras primary heal.

and for the last time: people, stop thinking of 1v1 scenarios to balance a 6v6 game. moiras strength drops drastically, the more enemies are nearby. the orb spreads its damage, she does LAUGHABLE damage to heroes with armor, and she has only a single horizontal mobility/cleanse and no utility at all.

these sterile settings you all imagine, they dont exist in the actual game. ive seen pharahs being booped off by lucios, ive seen mercys doing half a teamwipe, ive seen widows killing winstons with their automatic rifle. just because something seems to make sense on the paper, doesnt mean it does in the actual game.

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 dps has positioning that’s good enough for them to comfortably miss their shots without dying, then why would they die if you didn’t heal them right away? Why wouldn’t they just hide in cover, or go get a health pack? The only time where healing is really urgent is in the middle of chaotic teamfights when everyone is out of position, and at that time, the comparison is moot, because you do die if you miss your shots because the enemy is shooting back.

Nothing your healer can do for you is going to make it more or less difficult for you to land a headshot with Widowmaker

This just isn’t true. If your healer fails to keep your team alive, they can’t pump damage into the enemy barriers, which means the enemy will just hide behind them. Which means you aren’t getting any headshots.

But Supports do achieve it.
DPS on average do 50% damage of the whole team. 30 for the gold medal and around 20 for the other DPS, guess where the rest of the damage comes from.

Yeah JJonak is an exception because he and Meko both do around 35% and that is god damn insane but still you can use it as an example. The dude is healing AND doing damage AND helping with call outs, peeling etc. The DPS just do damage, they are the finishers.

Sure its more “flashy” and its nice to see your name on the killfeed a lot but its still one task, just one. Arguably the hardest one but what is harder, to do 4 things or just 1 ? Yeah multitasking is also a skill that guess who have :smiley:

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So? We killed her team or most of it. Now, the rest of us can easily mop up a Brigitte.

I already knew because your replies made less and less sense and were just complaining for the sake of complaining.

Because you can’t take that chance either way.

They might make it to a pack and they might not. But any one of the six opponents on the field might land a stray shot that kills them in the meantime.

Tell me which Widowmaker pro requires them to do anything other than click heads. You have 1 job as that hero and that’s to have a clean kill. To maintain that clean kill, one has to go practice in the range everyday to maintain that aim. Seeing that ‘flashy’ feed isn’t because it’s simple to do that one left click; it’s a story of thousands of hours invested to do it.

If supports are easy why don’t we have more DPS players flexing to play them when the team needs and doing well in that tole? I’m a long time FPS player and playing support and keeping my often suicidal teammates alive is far harder than dealing damage in Overwatch or in any other FPS that I’ve played over the years.

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Moira and Brigitte are starting to trend near Mercy in terms of general player respect.

I think people get most upset over Brigitte right now, but as a support main who has had to deal with enemy Genji and Tracer mains in-game for years, when I see the complaints it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Now they know how their victims felt!

Brigitte takes everything about the vulnerability and helplessness of supports vs flankers and turns it on its head, and her addition to the game was a glorious day. It’s honestly more comforting to play any of the supports now because I always know Brigitte is an option if flankers are my problem.

Whether or not a person feels Brigitte is currently balanced (I think she is), I hope we can all agree that giving supports a toolset that allows them to defend themselves against high mobility heroes is a healthy step forward for the game, both for the variety in gameplay and the sanity of your healers.

Going a step beyond Brigitte, I think the continued addition of new healers to provide this kind of counter-picking option is important. I disagree with the notion that healers with more difficult healing mechanics should be added to the game (see above arguments about the necessity of consistency). However, I think the game still has room for the introduction of more heroes with low healing output like Brigitte who directly counter a specific class of enemy heroes by fighting them.

We could use a Brigitte-like hero designed to be weak against flankers, but very good at countering long range damage dealers like snipers and Pharah. Currently when you’re getting wrecked by a Widowmaker as a support player, there’s nothing you can really do. Even if she can’t shoot you, she can completely ignore your healing by clicking on your team’s heads. Ana is nearly able to fill this role, but her lack of self sustain to make up for her lower damage output leaves her at a disadvantage against these heroes.

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First of all, dont act like “aim” is a supreme skill and its so hard to master because its not.
Second, Widowmaker its literally the only DPS that is FULL aim dependant. Even Mcree or Soldier are having more or less success depending on their positioning and timing.
If DPS are so important and its so hard to “aim”, why all metas are defined by Tanks or Supports? Yeah, because decent DPS with good tanks/supports destroy good DPS with just decent Tanks/Supports.

Like i said, DAMAGE is a shared task, healing and tanking its not. Here in OW, DPS are not the king of mambo (like CSGO for example) and thats a hard pill to swallow for some.

PS: Funny how “Easy” supports are but good supports tend to play decent DPS … however good DPS are usually BS at support. The moment they cant tunnel vision, they fail miserably.

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Supports are too easy…

…still have problems getting 2 healers and heals even when there are 2 healers lol.

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What the heck are you talking about? The meta is defined by blizzard. Did you forget that Brigitte back then benched nearly ALL the tracer players in overwatch league? Are you telling me that a new hero in OWL that people put in maybe ten plus hours in, didn’t shut down Tracer with hundreds of hours of experience? Soon, who had to go back to playing widowmaker?

If the DPS is actually forced out because they can’t do damage because of the meta, is it

a) The fault of blizzard
b) The fault of the players

I’m not sure what you mean by aiming is not the hardest thing to master, because it literally is the hardest thing. Not sure if you ever heard of the Fleta Deadlift, but I’ll leave you with that.

“Utterly helpless” is not really the way to describe Brigette at range. Did you forget that she has a 600hp shield?

The only hero Brigette is really “utterly helpless” against is Pharah.

I think you might be missing the point here. Yes, healing is mechanically easy. It’s suppose to be, because it’s lower impact than damage. Skills can’t be both low impact and low accuracy and be viable. If Widow’s head shots only dealt 50 damage then she wouldn’t be playable.

That doesn’t mean support heroes need to be mechanically easy. Sure, the healing part of Mercy’s kit is very easy to use. But her pistol is kind of a pain (a lot of that is due to the weapon swap mechanic). So her skill ceiling is higher than I think she gets credit for.

I know the poster was mostly talking about healing, but they were really making a more general game design statement. If you want another example, then use tanks. Rein’s barrier is extremely easy to use mechanically. You just have to hold the button and face in the general direction and it does what it’s supposed to. Mechanically at least, it’s more consistent than most healing abilities. And it has to be. It’s one of those things that just needs to work. Countering it requires you to play around it somehow, because you can’t just dodge it. Could they add a tank with a cooldown bound barrier that only lasts for 0.25 seconds and is therefore “high skill”? Sure, but then that couldn’t be their primary damage mitigation ability, because it wouldn’t be consistent enough.

For another example, the same logic applies to the complaints about Lucio’s ult. It’s too easily interrupted for a defensive ability because of the cast time and ground contact requirement. It needs a lower skill requirement to be viable, given that it has lower impact than an AoE damage ult.

A hero/role isn’t necessarily easy, as a whole, just because part of their kit is. It does help, but you can have a mix of inconsistent and consistent abilities in the same kit (eg, Rein, Roadhog, Zen).

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‘The hero/role isn’t necessarily easy’

Out of everything, this part I can agree with. You do need a certain amount of understanding and skill to play supports, but they are literally the easiest heroes (excluding Ana). Now the time to learn Mercy? Maybe 50 hours for an overall package of game sense/positioning/shot-calling/ult counting (which you learn by watching vod reviews too), right?

Time required to learn widowmaker?

How many hours does of aim drills it take to reach GM levels if this is your first FPS? Then how many hours to learn game sense and positioning?

What? I have a much easier time playing Reaper than I do Zenyatta.

As for game sense and awareness, that never stops rising, anyone that says you hit a cap is probably capped in gold.

Eh. Define “learn”? It takes maybe three matches to fully understand the kit of any hero in Overwatch.

But if we define “learn” as consistently having 80% (random number) of the impact as a player at the hypothetical skill ceiling for that hero, then… Sure, Mercy is easier than most heroes. But that doesn’t necessarily say anything about that last 20% of the skill ceiling.

But, you know, I don’t think Rein or Winston are any harder to learn from that perspective than Brig or Moira. And Orisa and Bastion are probably at about Mercy’s level.

I think these conversations get mucked up a lot by people thinking “support” should mean low impact and easy to kill. Which, does happen in some mobas, but it’s crap design. Or some sort of MMO expectation where healers mostly just stand in one place and click ally health bars when they get low. Which is also crap design.

Both healers and tanks really need to be have higher impact than dps heroes to get people to actually play them. This comes across as those heroes being better than dps heroes, because they have healing without too much loss in damage output. That’s kind of true. And it’s also perfectly fine. That’s core Blizzard design. It’s why supports are so much more fun to play in their games than those from a lot of developers.

Mercy really is an outlier. Much like Lt Morales in HotS. She shouldn’t be the standard by which healer kits are judged.

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