Honestly as support you can’t carry a game, but you can give your team the best chance to win, if you severely outplay the other supports.
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At least with DPS if you perform well you will get more sr for wins than loss sr when you lose a match(not only thinking in climb, but to reach where matches are more even).
Didn’t test with supp yet because I just stop in the 4 classification match, where I healed a bastion that couldn’t kill a moira in close range, the others players couldn’t kill a reaper and I was me that ended killing him with baptiste(prioritizing healing them the whole time). When I was winning the duels vs reaper alone as baptiste I was thinking why I’m in this match.
Mei says, “I was only trying to help!”
That’s the nature of the beast though. Any character that has the bulk of their characters power in things like utility or healing is going to be massively team dependent.
Especially when the role is so strictly defined like it is Overwatch, and nearly as vague as it is in League, where the only real thing that defines a Support is that you (typically) play in the bot lane and you’re in charge of vision.
With those criteria in mind, Supports can range from the “traditional” enchanter style supports who shield and heal their team like Soraka, to the beefy frontliners who act as either the spear of the team, like Nautilus, or the shield, like Braum, or you can forsake the truly traditional supports and play a “carry” support who can often contribute just as much, if not more damage than the ADC’s, like Brand or even Pyke.
In Overwatch, Supports are healers, which means that they are pretty limited to what the rest of their kit can be.
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Lucio says hello, hello. Then he boops you.
Tbh the issue with this in my opinion isnt just about having lower potential to fight back, its that if you fight back and win by the time youre done your team is either dead (cause they decided to ignore your callout and engage anyway) or they yell at you for being a ‘‘dps support’’.
The other day I spotted a Tracer coming for me on high ground at the start of the kings row defense. I call her out to my team and no one reacts (they were in VC), so I prepare, I get a sleep on her, shoot+nade, dead. Im naturally feeling quite proud of myself aaaand I hear my reaper and Rein screaming at me for not healing them while they were pushed up past the choke 
I dont know if anything has changed, but I wrote down my SR gains and losses over about 20 games on supports. I would consistently get more SR and lose less (around 26 and 15) if I played aggro style support (aka focusing way more on dmg and elims than on heals), than when I played to primarily help my teammates and heal (around 21-24 loss and gain). I did 5 matches on Mei and sym after that and was gaining around 26 and losing around 15 even if i literally had no medals. This was a few months ago tho.
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You can’t carry as a support? You’re bad then.
Yup. I’ve had those moments. Not fun.
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I’m sorry, but aren’t/weren’t you a “Mercy’s fine” person when this is exactly the majority of the “no she isn’t” crowd’s issue?
Individual impact as a support is basically illegal now if you aren’t playing Ana (and she still gets bent by bad teammates), but Zen, Lucio and Baps can get away with a little every once in a while. Moira got the shortest stick, but saving your team from a Grav is no small potatoes.
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I think this is where the problem lies, in low tiers teamwork and positioning is dodgey at best and otherwise non existant. So even if you are a reasonably good support a good deal of your team dependant utility is absent without teamwork.
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Then he rides off into the depths of the enemy to fight/die 1v6.
Damn reddit lucio. Why you always green??!! 
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Well, there are a lot of things involved with carry potential. Supports are more inclined to provide survival utility to their team, they can carry not by a damage perspective, but by a survival perspective.
Overwatch is a game about damage and damage utility vs survival and its utility (healing, mitigation - things against damage). In a 222 “mirror roles” match scenario Tanks and Supports damage and survival utility will counter each other and DPS will be the top damage to secure kills. Of course it’s way more dynamic than that because you have space and time involved, player skills and counter pick heroes too.
I’m not sure about that.
I think you’ll climb slower as Mercy or Lucio, that’s for sure.
But your climb will be a steady one. With Zen and Ana, missing one crucial shot can lead to a lost game. So the climb as those 2 has more bumps and bruises.
I kinda wish they would’ve expanded on the support role more than just making every support healers. I liked how old Sym could give shields to teammates and had the TP which could be as valuable as Mercy’s rez if not taken care of.
I can think of plenty of situations where heals have carried a team through encounters they shouldn’t have.
Maybe it’s not so blatantly obvious, but if anyone actually knows what’s going on with a match you can see it happening probably far more often than you think.
Supports don’t need to have more non-healing power at all. If you do that, then take away the healing power.
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I find Baptiste is pretty easy to climb with.
And of course Moira (played properly I mean, just very good at sustaining a team).
This is exactly what I had in mind. LoL is a great example how they realized being a heal/ward bot is super boring and degrading, hence nobody wanted to play support. They significantly reduced the healing output of supports and gave them damage. At the same time they introduced their own “role queue” and guess what, if you queue as “fill” support is not the most likely role you’ll get because people actually like supporting (above bronze at least). This could be the solution for being so specialized dependant in 2-2-2 here, reduce support healing by 20%, increase their damage by 20%, maybe let Ana headshot idk, something like that would help.
The problem with this is DPS and tank still heavily relies on healing and they would blame the supports even more for a loss, which could be compensated by a self-regen, lifesteal mechanism but honestly, that’s already another game.
Overwatch supports are as good as they are.
Except there have been metas, possibly including the current one, with 2-3 designated hard carries. It helps to have one player be significantly much more aggressive than the other, especially in 2/2/2.
Or course not and that’s because Tanks exist. Baguette doesn’t really beat Hog since a good Hog will shotgun her down very quickly even though they sometimes do when the Hog player doesn’t even know how to play the hero properly. I don’t think that there’s a Tank vs. Support scenario where the support just wins aside from Zarya vs. Moira so you need to enable your team to get rid of those. You can’t effectively 1v6 unlike DPS or Tank heroes can sometimes but if your team loses a 5v3 then there’s something really wrong about them or the ultimate economy overall which both means that you can’t win the game if they keep performing that way anyway
I mean, you can only help so much it course but you can definitely help mask the mistakes of the rest of your team and make them less detrimental. You can take a mediocre tank or mediocre dps and make them good by good support. That’s just the nature of support. You help your teammates perform better and stay alive longer.
You don’t have to be reduced to a pocket to be effective.
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