"Supports shouldn't be 50/50 vs DPS"

This is a very common fallacy, which stems from the misconception that if a support hero is 50/50 vs DPS in 1v1 duels it also means that they are just as good at DPSing as a DPS is, so it’s essentially a DPS with added healing abilities. This is wrong though. The difference between a support hero and a DPS hero is NOT their 1v1 potential. It’s their ability to ENGAGE and disengage at will and force their damage on the enemy team. For example, short-range DPS heroes have gap closers, and long-range DPS heroes are hitscan with high damage and long fall-off. Supports don’t have that, and if they do it’s traded off by low damage. That’s why support weapons are projectile-based most of the time. Those that are hitscan (Bap and scoped Ana) are owned by heroes that have either low mobility, spread, severe fall-off or low DPS.

Conclusion: 1v1 potential does NOT equal kill potential/lethality. Supports are good at 1v1s because of their self sustain, not their damage. Zen is an odd one, because he does deal high damage like a DPS, but he has no mobility to take or escape duels and a massive hitbox, which means he usually requires his team to peel for him in order to get kills and he’s very inconsistent at long range, so he actually does follow the support archetype.

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Exactly

Supports have a chance in a 1v1 because they have ways to stay alive, however against tanks who have sustain on par with supports, they will basically always lose a 1v1.

On top of that, supports simply don’t have the damage to kill anyone other than in a slow 1v1, most of the time they’re winning that 1v1 in the first place because whoever they’re fighting has no healing themselves.

A support will always lose a 2v1, sometimes a DPS could trade, maybe win.

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Supports shouldn’t even be able to beat a DPS 1v1. They should rely on keeping their DPS alive to survive.

Then DPS shouldn’t have any survivability outside of supports help.

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My hot take:
theres not 1 correct way to handle this. it depends on your game philosophy.

this could be a valid rule for a game, it might even be “balanced” in terms of power at the end of the day but it would probably be very unpopular

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I mean that’s kinda why good flankers keep such an eye on support cooldowns. The entire dive comp is pretty much built around this isn’t it? Because 1v1ing an Ana who already used her cooldowns is a free kill. Same with most supports tbh.

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I hope you know that if this were the case we would probably have to buff healing across the board, along with reworking zen

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Nope. Skill should be rewarded.

If I’m the better player, I should be able to walk through every character as Zen. Why? Because if I can’t, every time I die would be the DPS and Tanks fault.

“Hey Reinhardt! Blizzard made the game so that I physically can’t defend myself, so take this report for letting me die.”

“We lost the game because our DPS and Tanks decided to not help the defenseless healers. Clearly there’s nothing as a support that I could do, so why were out Tanks and DPS so bad?”

I mean, if that’s your idea of a good game, you should pitch it to a studio. Only so that the studio can say “What? No. This is an awful idea.”

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Do you really want to play a game where, every time a support dies, its literally everyone’s fault but the supports? Every time you lose, it’ll be “clearly there’s nothing I could do as a support, we can’t fight back. I tried to heal, but I can’t heal from the spawn room. Hey, DPS, why didn’t you help me? You didn’t want to win?”

That sounds like awful gameplay to me.

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This opinion usually comes from people who don’t peel to begin with.

You have a very bad grasp on game design especially for FPS style games. Noone would want to play support if it was 100% just pumping cooldowns into tanks and dps backsides.

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Okay, then you go play support and ill go play dps…
I’d make you eat those words.

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I think the question is “are supports able to survive long enough to drive DPS’s away”. You don’t need to be able to beat them at doing damage but you should be able to have enough resources to survive long enough to whittle them down.

I think maybe 3/7 or 4/7 are. The rest are either required to have a much higher skill then their opponent enough to bypass the disadvantage or their opponent is a potato.

1 Like

Cool. Then remove:

Deflect
Lunge
Self healing on Recall
Cryo Freeze
Overload armor buff
Doomfist self shield
Bastion self heal
Reaper lifesteal
Soldier Biotic field

And we have evened out the field since DPS should only dps and not have healing or survivability (those are for tanks and supports).

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This line of thinking is why every support wants to video game themselves.

Imagine relying on DPS that already ignores support players already.

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People who insist that Supports should be useless offensively are maroons.

Especially since, you know, Zenyatta has been in the game since day 1, clearly indicating that Blizzard does not agree with their short-sighted game design ideas.

But there are different skillsets at play. For equal map/geometry utilization, DPS is typically micro mechanics and driven by precision aim that forces cds. Support is more MOBA/cd based with the intent to force mistakes, outlast, and hedge resources on their own duel vs. what team needs vs. waiting for peels.

I think a better question for DPS vs. Support is what cds can be forced, their value on the team, and how much FPS skill is required to basically force them on demand. It’s not a ttk vs. ttk matchup. And when it is, the support generally prefers longer interactions with greater depth (macro resource allocation), the dps, shorter ones with greedy opportunity.

Genji forcing a lamp through poke, for example, not getting the pick or kill completion on baptiste in time (for his own hp to be low), but trading most of his hp bar for more of the supports cds.

heard a support called mercy does this

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Well, no. I used Zen as an example because Zen can only win if he out aims the opponent. He’ll die way faster than Tracer if he can’t aim worth a damn, and while Aim is a requirement for Tracer, she need only aim in Zen’s general area to do damage while Zen has to be dead on his target.

For Zen, there is no moba style cd based outlasting or forcing mistakes. Its fight or die.

In that circumstance, he had better be able to win because he has to do the DPS’s job without any of the things that make DPS great.

Baptiste, generally speaking, can win by outlasting. But its at a cost to his cooldowns. All of his skills have lengthy cooldowns, so its better to just aim well than use the heal field and IF on yourself and then not having it for your team. I’d argue if you make Bap use all his cooldowns, you will have won far greater that he’d in by killing you. As long as your team is willing to push the enemy.

Mercy is one support, though. Not THE supports. Beyond that, Mercy has skills that make fighting optional, not mandatory. Besides that, don’t forget that her gun is pretty good for killing weak targets, and its FANTASTIC to use when ulting.

The opposite of her is Zenyatta who basically would just sit there and wait to die if he couldn’t fight back.

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Only bad ones. I’ve heard of people complaining about her having damage boost :slight_smile:

Actually, to be fair, Mercy is the support which plays like this. Doesn’t stop people complaining that she has mobility abilities.