"Supports are too easy!"

Haven’t once ever in my life heard anyone say that Ana, Lucio or Zen was too easy. This is a One-Star difficulty Support issue only.

And I find Ana and Zen unfathomably easier to play than like… any DPS, but my DPS-main friend tells me I’m crazy. :man_shrugging:

in my honest opinion besides mercy supports are like tanks they seem easy to play but in reality to be effective with them you need to be good besides mery ofcourse

I completely disagree. Many people have said that supports can make great DPS because of the awareness they develop when playing support, on top of knowing how to protect their supports. I personally prefer tanking over DPS because I prefer protecting my team over killing the enemy, but as a tank, I watch out for my supports as much as possible.

And there are DPS who play healers and tunnel so badly, don’t know when to ult properly, or can’t prioritize healing properly, and you can really feel the impact of this poor performance. It’s why I generally choose to heal. I know when healing is lacking, and it frustrates me.

1 Like

Only Brigitte is super easy, though. Moira has constant Micro-Management, Ana is a demanding hero on game-sense, positioning and aim, and Zenyatta is game-sense, positioning, aim, and very reliant on good call-outs.

Mercy also has skill. She’s very defenseless and for success she must learn to use her mobility to zip around efficiently through all the battlefield, and has absolutely no means of standing her own ground, even if she is stupidly overpowered.

I’ve definitely heard it for all three, but between those three most often for Lucio. While his aura range is currently too limiting and needs that upcoming buff, his original 30 meter aura range allowed him to out-heal Mercy simply by existing somewhere in the vicinity of his team. While he did pay for that extreme consistency with extremely low single-target output, he could literally go AFK and still heal reasonably well. I don’t think he has ever completely escaped that reputation, and he’s still the only healer with a constant always-on self-heal at the ready.

Ana had the reputation of being easy back when her Nanoboost had a speed boost attached to it. She was a press-Q-to-win hero. Just add Reinhardt. Her aiming requirement has kept the masses somewhat placataed, though.

Zenyatta is a bit different, but the bulk of the value that he brings to the team is still in the form of his orb abilities, which require no aim and have no cooldown to manage. He can heal for half of Mercy’s beam and damage boost the entire team at the same time, which makes him incredibly valuable even without his own personal damage. He may be the single most powerful support of them all, but he gets a free pass from the player community because he deals damage, and aim-dependent damage automagically means the hero requires more skill in the eyes of the general population.

I have won games (not comp, I wouldn’t risk my teammates’ SR that way) with Zen without ever firing a shot, just to see how hard it was. It’s surprisingly not that hard. He gets the least hate of all the supports, but he still gets some, primarily for his Orb of Discord being an offensive auto-aim ability.

That said, I still stand by my original message: healing is easy, but playing the whole support in a team setting is still hard.

2 Likes

“Just walk away from them” applys to every hero, but If I’m actually playing the game I have to go near bridgette at some point.

Unless bridgette is alone your going to get dunked on by her teamates while you spend ages dancing around trying to break her sheild, tracer was not designed for long fights, bridgette was.

Yeah, I never heard anything like this. Nanoed targets still had plenty of counters, so anyone who thought Ana was Q-to-win is a fairly inexperienced player. Sure, the Beyblade Meta was a thing, and was troublesome, but that’s no more of Ana’s fault than Reapers.

Not while Mercy has Rez on E he isn’t.

Yeah, this is undoable vs any even remotely competent team unless you get hard carried.

Having a skill-less asect of their kit doesn’t mean a hero is easy, and most people know that. Zarya’s Bubbles don’t need to be aimed and no one calls her no skill. Tracer doesn’t need to aim Recall.

the tl;dr is that all roles (and Heroes) require different (sometimes VERY different, sometimes BARELY different) playstyles and skill sets. No single Hero is too easy, because there are always drawbacks to “easy” classes that people fail to mention despite being incredibly important drawbacks (ex: “Sym is ez! - but getting someone into her tiny range AND surviving is probably one of the hardest things to consistently do loloopsie I guess she isn’t ez”).

Back when nano had speed boost, Nanorein only had one reliable counter: sleep dart. The only real counter to Ana was another Ana, at the time. That was a long time ago, but sleep dart being the best counter to any nanoboost target is why the Ana meta happened. Triple tank was just icing on the cake.

Stats on their win rates, last I checked, say otherwise. Zen has a significant pick rate as all supports do, but a win rate that is much better than Mercy’s. It has been hovering about 2% higher than Mercy’s win rate for some time now. He has an ultimate that could be compared to the old mass resurrect in terms of what it can do for the team, an E ability with no cooldown that is as strong as Mercy’s current ultimate in that it can damage boost his entire team, and the ability to delete enemies all by himself.

Everything about the numbers agrees with Blizzard’s previous post before they decided to introduce the upcoming Mercy nerf to the PTR: Mercy on the current patch is balanced… and while I think her gameplay needs some work to make it more exciting, I do think that her balance is good. However, the general player perception remains that she is overpowered or at least too easy… because of the supports, she is the most consistent. And you can see where this train of thought about consistency is going, right back to the first post I made in this thread.

That does bring up another point, even if it is a tangential thought: Mercy’s kit prior to the Valkyrie rework was less consistent than the kit she has now. Because it was less consistent, there were more obvious skill requirements.

That’s just some food for thought, though. Let’s not turn this into a Mercy thread.

2 Likes

He’s right. That was exactly the perception at that time. This forum really has a short memory.

1 Like
1 Like

How do you walk away from a Genji, Dva, Winston, or a Tracer?

Overwatch isn’t LoL or DoTA where you’re locked into your hero choice for the entire game.

Brigitte was designed to be a deterrent to Dive heroes. Yeah, if you have to fight in CQC, Brig is a major threat, but if you don’t, well what’s she gunna do to you?

90% of the reason that Brig is currently picked less than Ana in EVERY rank (except GM) is that the argument “just stay out of her range LOL 4head” is actually a pretty effective strategy against her.

5 Likes

Yeah like I knew that someday, people were going to forget that Mercy was ever an F Tier support and considered a troll pick even in BRONZE.

That was during the days where all Ana had to do was follow a tank, slam down a grenade every few seconds, and then press Q.

People think Mercy is braindead, but they haven’t seen an Ana-Rein duo.

1 Like

They can’t follow you into your spawn. Bridgette shouldn’t have this strong area denial as a support and Its not like she becomes useless once she’s out of melle range, she can still hit things with her whip to heal her teamates and use her armour packs. You can’t just forever stand away from her and shoot her she can just stand behind a barrier or even her own barrier and them move with her team to attack you. If bridgette is standing behind the payload do I just not go near it and let her push it?

She probably has the hardest counter in the game… Staying away from her. There is literally nothing she can do about it. At least Reaper has wraith/teleport to try and close the distance and you know what people say about Reaper.

If you can consistently limit a Brigitte to just this, you have no idea how big that is.

Literally any other support would be more valuable in that case.

Case in point, Mercy can pull out her pistol, Pew Pew, and then switch back and give more value than Brigitte in that situation.

3 Likes

But you can’t consistently limit brig to that, all she has to do is wait for her team to push and then boom, she’s in range.

Yes you can.

If you think you cant, no wonder you think she’s too powerful.

1 Like

Why’s that? Zoning is a pretty standard part of support kits in most game.

1 Like

You can if you play one of her counters. Junkrat/Pharah or the snipers. I do not believe I have ever died to a Brigitte as any of those four characters because it is so easy to keep her away and bust her barrier which makes it so that she is not shield bashing my team either.

1 Like