Ever played a game where you felt like you couldn’t even poke your head out without getting deleted, and the opposing team didn’t have a hanzo or widow?
With encouragement from Blizzard, supports have been incorporating more and more dps in their repertoire. In addition, it seems like Blizzard’s approach to quelling the frustration of targetted supports has been to give them more offensive capability.
This focus towards damage has made supports incredibly strong. As the game currently stands, supports have good survivability, great utility, great ults, and now good damage.
I’m fine with everything but the good damage. Its not unusual to match up against a team where both supports blend-in a good deal of dps, which can feel absolutely suffocating to play against because you now have 5 characters, all with decent damage, shooting at you.
I find that the teams with supports that weave in a good deal of dps usually fare better than those that focus solely on healing. This is probably due the strength of burst damage as most chip damage can easily be healed away.
For example, An average Cass with 50% accuracy and 10% crit may hit 3 shots in 3 seconds and maybe one headshot every 5 seconds. Having an Ana shoot that same target with the same accuracy can half the ttk and, depending on when the shots line up, delete a 200 hp hero before most healers can react (Cass headshot + Ana bodyshot).
With both supports actively doing dps in between heals, the chance of catching an opposing hero on one of these combos goes up dramatically.
It goes beyond that, more people shooting means suppression (opposing players become hesitant to peek due to fear of being immediately deleted). It has a similar effect as having a good widow or hanzo.
Is it that surprising that the devs haven’t chosen to make it so 40% of the players on a team don’t really participate much in the “FPS Game” mechanics?
It’s a FPS. Everyone needs to be able to do damage and hold their own. What most supports lack is extra abilities that do damage, because they sacrifice damage abilities for utility.
So no, they don’t do too much damage and in fact SHOULD be doing damage as well as healing.
they don’t do to much, its imho perfect.
but its gets out of hand when one team has 2 players adding their dmg to the team while the others support are almost afking when nobody is hurt. that grinds my gears much more.
i want my enemies to fear me and think i am going to eliminate them.
not that i am going to run away screaming for peel from my team while refusing to fight for myself.
This is actually the issue. The role has a lot of power and it makes diffs feel more extreme.
Not saying that diffs shouldn’t exist, but a support diff can feel unovercomeable and very frustrating to play against. You literally can’t stick your head out without getting deleted.
They’ve always had this. It’s one of the reasons why the GOATS metagame persisted for so long back in Overwatch from year 2.
That design template for Supports hasn’t gone away with OW2.
More or less; though not every Support is actually giving up damage abilities, quite a few of them have them.
The general idea was that Supports needed to be able to defend themselves and primarily devote themselves to healing their team. So they are not required to do damage except in cases of self-defense.
However, closer inspection of Supports, their abilities and their perks shows that it is actually easier to do damage with them that with any Damage-role hero.
Game is an FPS. Basically built with the old Arena-shooters from the late 90s to early aughts.
Again, the original design templates haven’t changed. Support power balance is intended to be stronger than the typical Offense/Defense or Damage-role hero because of popularity. Blizzard did not believe Supports would be all that popular in the original Overwatch design. They were right, but never changed how they balanced the game.
Lmao this is a response from a support who doesn’t have the skill to aim themselves. Supports are fully capable of defending themselves ez and on top of that cause dish out damage and often delete other heroes faster than dps can themselves.
If they have to be able to fight them off a reasonable amount of time, then they will be able to fight you as well.
You know the entire “just fight them off, and position better?” thing for OW2? It is hard to position vs flankers (since… you know… they can go around cover pretty easily, so that leaves with “fight them off” - since it was MUCH easier for the flankers to get past the front line in OW2. Less people on the field, less CC, etc.
So yeah, more damage.
Projectile weapons never have falloff. So it can offset the lack of accuracy.
Ana, also only does something like 0.1 points of damage (as such).
The rest is a dot which is applied, and abilities typically don’t suffer from falloff either.
So it is consistent. It may not be fair, but it is consistent.
They should do damage, they shouldn’t as much or more damage than any dps.
Said it before, but I’m more scared of Kiriko at mid to close range than I am a Reaper in my face or a Tracer flanking me.
You mean unlike when Overwatch released, right? With Mercy, Zen, Lucio and Sym. Wait… three of them look like mainly offensive supports… hold on! Only Mercy is a defensive-focused support! What is going on here?
Alright, maybe the next released support is mainly defensive? Let’s see… Ana?!? Sleep dart, anti nade… that can’t be right. Ok, maybe Moira? Damn, her whole thing is that she deals damage to heal.
Ok I’m lost. When did the game focus on defensive supports, again? When did supports not deal decent amounts of damage? Is there some secret alpha version of Overwatch that I’m not aware of?