The myth of support balance

General Discussion
43

Although I agree with most of what you’ve said, she actually has more decision making now than she did before the ‘dreaded’ rework and the nerfs to her kit since then haven’t changed that (aside from the extra resurrections during valk and the very high pistol dps I guess, but I don’t see any complaints about those things being toned down now).

It’s just an inherent problem in her design that hasn’t been solved yet. The best I can think of is conditional passives that boost her healing output. For example granting +10-20 healing on the first tick of her beam if you haven’t healed that person for the last 10 seconds. That way they could reward Mercy players for looking out for her entire team instead of pocketing a single person, and allow a small extra heal burst in critical situations. Conversely they could also allow damage boost to build up from 25% to 35% over the course of 10 seconds if you maintain that beam on the same person. Granting benefits to the choice of sticking with a single person. Or even make it so that if you’ve damage boosted for 10 seconds in a row, your own pistol gets charged up to do a bit of extra damage for a short period of time.

Then if you want to go particularly crazy you could also steal ideas from the Hamster and increase her healing throughput based on her momentum from Guardian Angel, forcing her to remain mobile to maximize the effect. That might be a bit TOO gimmicky though.

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44

I beg to differ with the basic premise of the OP. The idea that support balance is in a good spot now is not propaganda. It’s an idea built up from different axioms of game design and personal preference than the OP agrees with.

28 heroes are currently in the game. A few have near 0 pick rates. This is because their designs have not worked out to be useful after the meta has been sussed out by the community. This is what competitive communities do. Any changes to any character, maps, whatever, will always end up being explored to death by a sufficiently competitive community.

When patches are constantly added to a game, people will advocate for whatever they deem to be important. Only a small portion of a community is ever happy with whatever current state a frequently patched game is in. It doesn’t matter if the game is in a perfect spot for competitive play, and the game is designed to be a competitive game. People will complain the thing they like isn’t good or that the way they want to play isn’t the currently agreed upon best play.

When patches are stopped, the meta in a sufficiently deep game will continue to grow (Note: Complex != Deep). Things will be accepted as bad, good, indifferent and people that want to get better will learn to use what is best. Skill grows, heroes that required skill and were bad may become good when explored to their fullest and exploited at the highest skill levels.

For further research into how deep games develop overtime, without patches, please see the history of chess (since crazy queen), and the history of BW after it’s last balance patch in 1998 to the current shifting metas in the present day Star Leagues.

tl;dr Patches can be very bad for game health. If your character or way of playing isn’t the best, save your mental health and learn the whole of the game or do something else.

45

No matter how much you want Overbuff to be accurate, it’s not.

46

I really disagree about decision making. Mercy, at least in my experience, is the highest decision making healer, and also the fastest decision making healer.

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47

For me it’s an insult to say: The support balance patch was a rousing success. I play mainly tournaments, very little competitive. Overbuff will tell the truth, but my experience that I am seeing is a domain of ana.
There is little to say, ana has created g.o.a.t.s …
For me it is not good to nerf ana, otherwise back in limbo. The best thing is to return mercy to 60 hps, so the roster is balanced between them. Moira is a complex problem, it has so much healing burst that one always risks a quadtankmeta. Making buff on her is difficult.
Both ana and moira every time you play buff, you risk a meta focused on the tanks.
The buff ana was a confirmation of fears expressed by goodman too long ago (I do not find the post).
I always thought that mercy was only favored by the double sniper meta. If you have hanzo dominating along with widowmaker it was natural that mercy was a must. He could have 50 hps at the time, but he would have been there.
There was no need to do nerf at mercy, just the nerf to hanzo and widowmaker and buffs to moira and ana.
Brigitte pushed to triple support, but as the only dps was convenient hanzo, mercy even here it is normal that it was a preferable choice.
In the g.o.a.t.s. that is becoming increasingly popular, ana, lucio, brigitte are a must, sometimes in place of ana there is moira. Zenyatta has its own value. But he too will soon drop his pick rate, with the increase (which I foresee) of the use of the G.O.A.t.s. It 's true that sometimes there is the dive, but now mercy is not appropriate given its hps too low, Lucio - zen or in some cases even ana (nunbani) or moira. Mercy is there if there is pharah (dive pharmercy) or widowmaker in dive. There are obviously some exceptions due to the maps. But good or bad the g.o.a.t.s. it is almost always convenient.
I speak of high levels, because at low levels it is difficult to find the g.o.a.t.s. or even the dive. It is here that there is a misunderstanding for many players. The g.o.a.t.s. excludes those who like to play dps. We know for sure that most players love to play dps.
Support is now obvious, determines the meta or affects it. I will say something very unpopular, but in my opinion true: during the OP mercy (2 rez in valkyria) the goal was not constant, there were more tactical varieties. It is also seen in OWL.
I’m not saying that mercy must be OP (even I found it unbearable), but it is a finding, since mercy has never had a strong healing burst and with the rez by way of playing many otherwise useless dps. I can think of pharah, mccree, soldier, roadhog (tank I know), junkrat, even reaper. Because the rez is a very powerful tool, it is the healing burst of mercy that does not allow the use of many tanks.
With mercy if seen also comp as 1 tank and 4 dps, 2 tank and 3 dps, of course also the classic 2-2-2 which in my opinion is the best thing ever for OW.
Also because we often forget an obvious fact. Mercy is the only pure support, he is completely dedicated to the team. From here another observation. If mercy is a pure support because its healing average is lower than moira which is a hybrid? If you always see on overbuff in the support tab and click on primary, you see that in gm moira exceeds on average healing mercy. Denies the intentions of the devs. Which stated that mercy should still be the support with the highest healing average. Because it does not kill or damage. If you do not have at least the highest average recovery what is the use?
All this to accept the rez on the E. Now I’m tired of the rez on the E, must be in the ultimate.
But other than that, I am convinced that a shift of pick and win rate would be healthy for everyone. Mercy must return to 60 hps. It probably does not destroy the g.o.a.t.s., but at least we can see a slight extra variety.
I do not agree in a nerf to ana. Even ana must have the same possibilities as mercy and moira. If they do nerf to ana, the rebuttal into oblivion, and if they do nerf to ana and mercy remains at 50 hps, we risk a moira meta and we are always with the same problem.
Again, from the main support of the tournament team, all three must have access to similar pick-ups and similar win rates. Only in this way we have a variety of strategies. And the games become exciting. Now it’s a horrible dish.
They are nagging speeches that Ana should be for the high levels while mercy and moira in the low rank. Otherwise when we want to enjoy a match on OWL or contenders we see the usual formations. And I remind you that Ana meta leads to the meta with 3 tanks.
I know very well that I do not write very well English, and I apologize, but I hope to make you understand my ideas.

P.S. I have not read all posts sorry, I wanted immediately to respond to the thread :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
48

I think people underestimate how difficult it actually is to use Rez. Unless someone dies near a corner or there is a break in the fight it is almost sucide to attempt a rez.

Certainly in gold and below (I’m gold so don’t know about higher up), the amount of players that die in no mans land is high and I aint risking my neck to swoop in behind enemy lies to save some numpty who overextending. I imagine in higher ELOS good DPS should be camping that dead body and focusing the Mercy to make it difficult.

I don’t think it needs buffed in anyway certainly, but I don’t think it’s as OP as everyone says.

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49

I don’t think they should nerf Ana until they balance Mercy. This is how Mercy is in the state she is in. They nerfed her as she was overshaddowing other supports, but the answer should have just been to buff the others then wait and see.

Now we are back to having one or two supports seemingly OP, when really another is weak.

50

No, this isn’t true, you’re confusing mobility control with decision making. I specifically said that decision making in this context refers to abilities. Mercys problem is linked in with her healing output being a flat line whereas every other healer except for Zen is able to regulate healing output. If you are healing someone with Mercy and that person takes more damage than you can heal, you have no way to increase your healing output to compensate for that. You fail not because you made a bad decision and boosted/stacked your healing abilities at the wrong time, you simply fail because your numbers aren’t high enough.

If a Moira wastes her orb before the right time or wasted her resource too early, then her healing output might not be enough for when she needs it.

If Lucio wastes his healing boost too early or uses it on speed boost then he might not have it when he needs it.

If Brig wastes her E too early then she might not have it to stack with her LMB healing when she needs it.

If Ana wastes her nade on using it offensively then she might not have it to stack healing when she needs it.

This is the point. Decision making in regards to ability usage for healers is largely about when and when not to use your stackable ability to achieve a healing spike. Mercy and Zen don’t have this element to them. Mercys healing output is always the same so other than target priority, there is no/little decision making and if you prioritise your targets correctly you can still easily lose your allies which is un fun and worst of all you’re left with the conclusion that nothing you could have done would have saved that ally. You couldn’t have increased your healing output, because Mercy has no way to do that. You failed solely because your numbers weren’t high enough.

Now obviously every healers output can be out damaged, but at least the other healers can take measures to deal with spikes in damage.

Obviously Zen also can’t regulate healing output either, but Zen isn’t a main healer.

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51

Her decision making issue has become an issue due to the healing nerf that she has received in the latest nerf. It creates many situations where Mercy is doing all the right things, prioritising her target, keeping her healing on the person who needs it whilst staying alive herself and yet her ally simply dies because healing output isn’t enough. That’s baaaaaaaad design. You cannot have players failing after they’ve done all the right things this frequently. When a player fails, they need to be able to learn from their mistakes as often as possible. Obviously sometimes in the game you literally couldn’t do anything better and that’s okay, but those situations need to be kept as infrequent as possible otherwise it becomes “boring”. Mercy has to either have higher healing output as she did before or they need to implement a way for her to regulate healing at the cost of a cooldown, a resource system or something similar.

To use more analogies, think of it in terms of a MMORPG.

A healer in these games will have a low mana cost heal for every day use and then a faster, more expensive heal for when s**t hits the fan. Every other healer in OW has this. It might not be as simple as a resource meter like what Moira has, but the same effect is achieved by stacking multiple healing abilities on top of each other or by boosting Lucios heal with E. Ability cooldowns are a resource in themselves. The resource is time.

Anyway, I’m aware that I’m repeating myself too much here, I’m just a bit passionate about this because I believe it is the big issue that has arisen because of this latest nerf. I think the devs are so desperate to balance everything around res that they’ve brushed aside the scab that was concealing this issue from her initial creation. Her healing output was satisfactory before, but reducing it has made this flaw in her design all the more obvious and apparent.

It’s okay to have this flaw in the design, but you have to have her healing output high enough to conceal it from the every day player. If the player has too many instances where they feel cheated into losing their ally because their healing wasn’t high enough then their enjoyment of the hero/game will be affected negatively.

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54

thats basically every meta a single nerf is a massive buff to the roster. I do feel more heroes are more meta now than before (not of all time just the last season) but still not perfect. I can’t remember exact dates but December to January felt the best where any support was seen in many games and any other class like dps or tank. sure not all dps like torb but it still was the best meta we had imo.

55

This is a very insightful post, and I’m glad it was done in a neutral, objective tone. Thank you for making it.

1 Like
56

Yepp, I’m a Moira main and will advocate for some changes to Ana if other supports don’t get buffed. Ana just has too much going on for her, it’s pretty ridiculous she can shut down ultimates and stop healing for an entire team.

57

It makes me sad that S9 is now viewed as one of the most balanced seasons. The Supports were more balanced, the DPS were more balanced, and I’m not sure about the Tanks

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58

Personally I think Moira’s ult should bypass buffs and debuffs.

59

I don’t think anyone believes the support cast is perfectly balanced, only that the balance has shifted away from Mercy and Zenyatta and towards Ana and Lucio with Moria being overly niche and Brigitte being too universal. That said, I do agree with the developers that the changes were a success as we’re seeing more diversity than before with risky Ana and Zenyata or safe Moira and Lucio backlines with more variations of triple support between Moira, Lucio and Brigitte, Ana, Lucio and Brigitte as well as Zenyatta, Lucio and Brigitte with Mercy and Zenyatta still being viable in Orisa comps, with Pharah or 2xSnipers.

The major issue is Ana was over buffed, Mercy was over nerfed and Brigitte has never been meaningfully nerfed while Moira lacks a clearly defined role. I believe the imbalance is more of an issue of Nanoboost giving too much value with a 300hp flash heal and Valkyrie receiving a double nerf to ultimate charge and healing output. The disparity between the two ultimates needs to be addressed, 300hp to 200hp and -15% ultimate cost respectively, so that they are offering more equivalent value and Ana doesn’t eclipse Moira as the go to tank healer.

Nothing drastic needs to be done, just tuning numbers.

60

The solution is to ofc attack Zenyatta for being a balanced, but strong support for being too viable too long.

Wait…

I agree with all of this, except that current form of Nanoboost is too oppressive and far too easy to gain compared to other support ultis and extremely impactful. Games are far too often decided simply by whomever gets better nanoblades off and that’s neither good nor fun way to play. And there needs to be more counterplay to nanoboosted target than sleep dart from another ana, as the nanoboost targets are currently too strong to just avoid and shoot down.

If nano was toned down a bit, mercy’s hps buffed back up to 55hps minimum and moira being able to heal through barriers again, we might see more balanced support roster than ana being a must pick due to lack of competitive main healers.

Tbh season 4-5 and seasons 8-9 feel the most balanced seasons overall to me. Before mercy rework moth meta and before hanzo rework sniper meta.

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61

It’s not the devs fault for poor balancing? What?

62

Those damn balancing gremlins. Always creeping in and gumming up the works.

63

Ah, yes I have only heard of those in stories.

64

As mentioned, do not need a nerf to ana, just mercy bring back to 60 hps

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