Before you raise your pitchforks at me, hear me out. I honestly think that one of the major reasons that the support experience is so awful is because the value they provide is too high.
The combination of healing + a tank is pretty much unbeatable. Tanks have their own mitigation, and due to armor being on the top of HP, keeping a tank perpetually topped off means the tank gets a perpetual +30% damage reduction. There is absolutely no way to kill the tank through healing unless you’re running something like Bastion/Reaper, but that’s got its own problems too–Bastion is super vulnerable, Reaper will likely die before the tank does.
So attacking the tank in any scenario where supports are alive is a waste of time. The DPS also aren’t a great target. They, too, can survive a lot if being healed, and they also have a lot better range (which means you waste time getting in range of them) and better mobility/survivability than most supports. You can grab a quick pick on them, but even if you kill both DPS, you still have the problem of giga tank being supported.
Healing determines the pace of fights in OW2 so freaking hard that you basically have to kill the supports to win them. Support as a role is more important than any other at the moment–even if you kill the enemy tank, if your supports die, you’re toast. This means that in any circumstance, in any condtions, your best bet is to murder supports.
As well as that, supports have more fight-defining abilities in their roster than any other role. Immortality field, Anti-nade, speed boost, even Kiriko’s cleanse, are all so insanely impactful that you pretty much have to murder the support first to prevent those abilities from swaying fights.
This was somewhat of an issue in OW1, but it seems to be much, much worse in OW2. The lack of a tank and having less people but the same amount of healing means that the healing is so dang important, supports have a giant target on their backs.
Is it fun to play with that target on your back? No. Is it going to be an equal dual between a support and a DPS? Hell no. The DPS will have all the advantage there.
But I honestly think that support has become so important in OW2 that it’s actually making the support experience suck.
I kinda agree, however I think that support will always be the target unless they are pretty useless as a role, because they are the most diveable and often the easiest to kill.
Maybe nerf support healing, compensate with dmg+mobility depending on the support.
Healing is high because damage is too high. Nerf damage and healing will follow.
If you nerf the healing but not the damage, fights will be over in a blink. And playing a walking simulator isn’t why I play OW.
Supports are powerful because tanks aren’t walls anymore. They’re mostly immobile dps who can kill things just as well as dps. A support who pockets a tank who’s killing things isn’t the problem, in my opinion. It’s game balance as a whole.
A lot of things broke in the transition to 5v5, and yes healing seems overwhelming because there’s one less person to sponge it.
Yep. Damage was tuned around trying to kill 2 tanks. Proportionally, it needs to be lowered across the board (or else people’s HP needs to be raised across the board) to allow for healing to actually be nerfed too. They tried nerfing healing before the betas, and it was so much bloodfest that they had to revert.
The general opinion I’ve had is that the lower 1/3 of the player base. Silver to Bronze have issues with supports. A little bit in the gold range, but after this support players from platinum and higher have rarely had any complains beyond just support balance within itself.
I think the Devs should nerf tanks to be less tanky maybe. Tanks are very fun and high impact and a very congested role now in 5v5, they can afford a role-wide nerf. I feel like in 5v5 right now it’s just best to ignore the tanks entirely and only shoot Supports bc the Tanks never die with any sort of healing.
Then the Devs can buff the survivability of supports a bit more + lower replace their long CD abilities with more shorter CD stuff that’s less powerful and maybe nerf heals a tad
Yes, 100%. Sustain is busted in OW2. Killing a support first is the win condition to virtually every teamfight. You can kill the tank or both DPS and it often doesn’t matter. The supports and their remaining allies can still stall until their dead teammates return from spawn. But kill a single support and that’s it. The fight is already won most of the time.
Many support players think they need more power, unaware that the power is precisely what makes them the highest priority target. Trust me…Monkey and Doom absolutely don’t want to dive on Ana to get slept and naded, they don’t want to spend 90s chasing Mercy as she breaks the laws of physics in the sky, and they don’t want to see a Zen at all. They’d love to dive on Hanzo all match instead, but they need to dive the supports first if they care about winning.
‘Kill the support first’ is such a tired gameplay loop and the game desperately needs to evolve beyond it. Blizz knows this. They had a plan to address it and were exploring ways to nerf healing or have heroes receive less healing in combat. This could’ve worked wonders for making enemies other than supports more viable targets, taking some pressure off supports and creating opportunities for non-healing related compensation buffs. But the community pushed back because they didn’t yet understand the 5v5 format and believed supports were weak.
Ideally I’d like to see healing nerfed and then damage nerfed by a smaller amount. This allows damage to better outpace healing, yielding lower in combat TTK, while out of combat TTK is raised, with enemies no longer exploding quite as fast when caught without heals.
Totally agree. Anyway it feels like if Blizzard painted a “target” big sign on the support back reduce the ways they can survive, less teammates to depend on and pretend it to be fun for everyone, support or not support.
I feel like a teacher that said “that kid over there…(pointing fingers at you) is the one to blame for the amoung of homework you have today, so you know what to do”.
Of course is a natural tendency to blame each other, support being blamed same as tanks or dps, etc between classes or heros in a match instead of realizing how frustrating the game can become and that, the players, are not the first to blame about it but a failed design.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but id rather have less healing across the board.
Supports should ‘Support’ the team, whether thats with damage,CC, or just generally healing.
Having such high healing makes for people not using cover or just charging in with no self awareness, i personally prefer how 'gundam evolution, dose healing.
It’s not that supports are powerful, at least most of them. It’s just they are the weakest link. Most supports cant’ defend themselves very well, they have less mobility, less dmg and less self healing/mitigation than any tank or DPS.
Add to that all the buffs to Tanks in OW2, there isn’t a lot they can do if a monkey or DVA jumps in on them. Especially since most lost all forms of CC except Ana.
OW has always been a weird game since E sports became a thing. Streamers and OWl loves flashy plays and big 6 man kills. Anything that prevents death or provides healing is “bad”. But they can never muster the courage to totally remove it.
Instead the game has been flooded with one shot mechanics while also removing most means of preventing them. Mean while support still exist despite the fact time to kill is so high most healing is worthless on anything but on a tank with even the slightest bit of focus fire or accurate shots.
The problem is, without healing, tanks are really, really awful. It is the most team-reliant role by a long shot because you NEED healing just to function at a basic level (unless you play hog).
If they’re going to nerf tanks durability, they NEED to buff tanks in ways that allow them to be more independent. As it stands now, tanks actually feel worse to me than DPS and Supports… and I was a dedicated tank main in OW1. You can manage without much healing as a DPS. You don’t really need it at all as a support. As a tank, it is literally the difference between whether you’re allowed to play the game or not (Again, unless you just pick hog, which… isn’t the best).
One of the main reasons why Lucio was picked for GOATS was for his speed boost, not necessarily his healing, though that was an important feature as well.
Also one of the reasons why Tanks were buffed post-GOATs when to 2/2/2 compositions became mandatory was to reduce the dependency on Lucio. Lucio also received reductions on his speed boosting because of that.
So it wasn’t “somewhat” issue. It was an issue, along with Brigitte and later Baptiste.
This was the defining thought when entering into OW2. With the removal of one tank from the composition, the focus and weight would be shifted towards the Support-role; particularly if certain supports kept their crowd controlling abilities. Fortunately, Brigitte didn’t keep hers, though Ana kept hers.
Right now, with OW2, that’s still a major point, and Kiriko hasn’t really dulled that weight and focus. And right now, Supports are still defining heavily on the compositions. As much as players would like to complain about Mercy having no weight or pull on matches, she very much is pulling that weight with Sojourn as hero that yields a great deal of benefit from Mercy’s damage-boost.
And likewise, so would Zenyatta with Discord.
Support-healing is a strong mitigation tool overall compared to armored/shield health or overhealth. A big issue with tweaking this downward is that it can have a huge impact on the Damage-role and maintaining their functions to stay alive and get kills. The Damage-role is already is a weak position in terms of value, since most of all they can provide is eliminations. Damage alone isn’t enough to justify their position. Another reason why Junkrat is a strong pick.
Rigth now, I don’t think there’s a major issue with healing output. At one point back in OW1, I would argue for it, but right now there’s enough challenge on the lower end in actually getting healing that it is causing problems. Further reducing that output is likely to cause even more problems.
Damage isn’t really that high, with all the defensive abilities and cooldowns available, it is easy enough to mitigate or deflect a lot of damage away.
Further, coming into OW2 we saw a few heroes get some damage-reductions already. Even more reductions isn’t likely to help except make Tanks even more difficult to deal with.
Hence the name of the role.
Damage isn’t likely to get reduced and healing isn’t high enough to warrant that, either.
This is false.
Most players here probably don’t remember when Scatter Arrow one-shotted tanks or that Double FTHs could do 600+ damage. Or the longer duration, 8-second Dragonblades, or 6-second Roadhog hooks. Or when Mercy used to boost damage by 50% instead of 30%.
All of this happened within the first two years of Overwatch. Significant number of damage and defense role heroes saw damage reductions. Well before 2-tanks became the norm. Damage hasn’t really gone up since then, and has largely stayed the same or saw further reductions across a number of heroes.
Today, the biggest increases in damage-output have come from the Support-side. Larger ammo capacities or larger damage per shot hits. Baptiste, Ana, Mercy, Kiriko and even Zenyatta saw some slight damage increases. Though Zen’s was mostly towards his kick and in exchange for a Discord reduction.
Also false. Healing did not see a reduction, period.
About a year or two before OW2 released, there was a number of healing abilities that saw reductions, notably Moira, Lucio, Ana and Brigitte, but that has remained unchanged, or saw some partial reverts in the most recent patch with Ana.
Depends on the ranks. Certain playstyles it is quite possible to eliminate the entire team leaving only the supports, simply because they didn’t want to heal their team, or just weren’t attentive enough. Others, find themselves quite implacable to kill because the Supports are healing their Tank/team so well that no one can make a killing blow.
Based on some observations, it doesn’t feel like sustain is quite busted, but rather, a lot of teams aren’t capable of focus-firing down one target, and so find themselves incapable of making eliminations.
Winston is quite capable of dealing with Ana, Doom is another discussion, entirely. The rest may be more applicable based on which Tank, but neither Doom or Winston should have any trouble with Zen.
Most players are actually using cover to the point where a lot of low-level fights are engaging at point-blank or CQC fights. This gets really interesting in watch Supports wade into these fights doing their inattentive best to damage enemy targets and their entire team die because they didn’t want to heal them.
Even when you have long-ranged encounters, you would end up with some Supports who are just completely unwilling to the ally is slightly obscured from their general viewpoint. It’s really quite vexing to the point where I’ve seen players leave the game because the Supports won’t get them when they’re hiding and waiting for healing.
Mostly false. While it may be true to switch gears from healing mindset to self-defense mindset, Supports have all the tools necessary to keep themselves alive and will do competitive damage, and are generally more mobile than the entire Damage-role. To say nothing of the fact that they all have passive self-healing that’s better than over the cast that has no such thing.
Also false. Only one new damage-role hero has been added into the game and while capable of one-shots, they require substantially more “requirements” that other existing one-shots available in the game already.
Further, neither Junker Queen, Ramattra or Kiriko has a one-shot. Though Kiriko can eliminate in two headshots, and Junker Queen has something of a Jagged Edge to Carnage combo, these are preventable with some basic healing. Not to mention inconsistent.
Not really. As many Tanks tend to have lots of mobility they can easily break off to go gather a healthpack, or if needed, retreat to spawn. Not every Tank can do this, but several can. Ramattra, Queen, Reinhardt, and Orisa having the largest difficulty.
Zarya, I would say, is a little more nuanced here.
Overall, these are about the same conclusions I came to back in the summer. And I think Blizzard had come to the same conclusions earlier, but wanted real experimental proof before moving into changes for the Supports. We’ll see what sort of quality-of-life improvements they’ll add to the role next year.
I’m honestly hoping for some more interface improvements too, beyond just character-specific ones.
Well I think it is could also be that tanks are “too tanky” instead of there being too much healing.
imho, certain tanks could be tuned down a little.
Quite a few of them are a bit “too tanky” in comparison to others.
But i am a support player who has their biases.
the same thing could have been said in ow1 with double shield meta; was it the supports that enabled it, or the two tanks? neither could have existed without the other.
the heal output of supports hasnt really changed from ow1, but what has changed, is the amount of hp/armor most tanks have. and the change in how armor works.
Also afaik as armor works now different to ow1, it also stacks with other defensive abilities in a much stronger way like with orisa’s fortify or ramattras block, who gets like 80% damage mitigation if he has armor and uses block.
its the state where he feels like just taking close to 0 damage. (and also orisa cant be head shot in fortify)
