Kiriko, Illari, and still to this day with Moira. Every time there is a dps-friendly hero, you have obvious dps mains queueing support and dpsing with them at the expense of their team. It’s only been 2 days and I already have numerous cases of dying right next to, even in front of, a Juno dpsing something 5 yds away. These same players then get on the forums saying Juno needs buffs because she isn’t a killing machine.
I’m obviously exaggerating about releasing a support with no weapon. But for sure there needs to be more incentive for support heroes to actually provide support to their team, instead of chasing dopamine feeding eliminations.
The next support needs to have a weak or slow primary fire. I don’t care if it’s a Junkrat style weapon. Supports just shouldn’t have such high uptime, dps-style primary fire, because dps mains are pick this hero and stinking up the support queue.
EDIT: To make clear I am not saying release a healbot. I mean provide more utility, more things to do, instead of just run n gun. The more action-packed a support hero’s primary fire is, the more likely players are going to try and dps instead of using their abilities. Watch how often Juno is using her speed porta for herself to dps more, instead of in front of her team to boost them.
i think making heal-bot supports is just not really the play, mostly because then you end up with people who never die, but then also healers that cant contribute anything to the team other than healing/boosting (cough cough Mercy cough cough) which makes them very weak in engagements and reliant on their teammates to do everything for them
supports that hard chase elims die or let their teammates die unless the enemy is not very good. only time where you can expect to find somewhat competent support players is through ranked, but even then maybe not guarunteed, just more likely (until you reach high elo)
I get what op is saying, maybe we need it so as soon as a Supports damage is higher than healing they take an additional 30% damage until the issue is corrected, then we would have less damage playing support as damage and throwing the game (and this is coming from a support main)
As a support main i hate people who go support and only dps, i report them for throwing (avoiding half your kit is hard throwing) and will stop healing them.
Supports need a way to defend themselves through damage or they become useless for their team if they cannot manage to kill the 2 ennemy flankers that the rest of the team ignore.
The day when there will be no more trolls, throwers, selfishes players and where everyone cares about their teammates, we could talk about supports.
Until then, you can keep your idea in the “Utopia” box.
To be completely fair, nobody uses my speed ring when I try to use it for the team. That’s the problem with this game. Nobody wants to play as a team and therefore you just learn to be selfish.
It just sounds like you have bad support players. Same as me being a support player and getting bad dps. You really can’t control that.
But to try to make every support heal bots is bad and here’s why. It won’t make the game better. There are a ton of games where I as a support have heal botted and get absolutely steam rolled, but hey I had 20k in heals so I win right? Not exactly, because if I see an enemy genji is at 1hp, I’m actually hurting my team letting him escape than if I shot him/punched him and did SOMETHING other than heal my teammate and EXPECT them to kill the genji. Why? Cause solidifying a kill in matches is more important than solidifying heals. As a support, you must be smart enough to know when to do each.
Plus the other side of this argument. Only healing is SOOOOOOO BORING. If people were only forced to heal, the support que could increase drastically because people may find it boring to just wait for damage to happen and dodge bullets.
Lastly, I like being able to defend myself. I can’t rely on you to kill everything while I just flitter about the screen, can I? It’s the exact reason why I do not play Mercy as much anymore. If I’m getting tunnel vision’d by the Tracer, Sombra, Hammond, whathaveyou, support is absolutely useless at just healing and not being able to have a weapon. Then all you do is die over and over and guess what…you still get 0 heals.
At the end of the day, to me, Overwatch is a shooting game, not a healing game, and I want to be shooting. Which is why I absolutely LOVE Ana. Like other people before me have said, the role is called Support not Heals. We support and assist with kills, survivability, and with defense, but we do not healbot. How can we when so many of the dps can’t hit a Winston?
I feel like you’re describing Lifeweaver. He’s support focused, has multiple utility-based abilities, and his gun generally has low damage/uptime. I’m not saying it can’t work, but Lifeweaver sucks hard.
I literally said that I am not saying make a healbot. I mean a focus on utility like most supports do.
Too many players have this binary view of supports like they are all Moira. They are they expected to be burst healing for 1000hps, or adding monster dps.
You literally don’t want them to have a weapon…soo…that’s a healbot.
You can call it whatever you want but increasing teammates defensive abilities to them and still not allowing them to dps is healbotting? Or am I missing something?
BTW I have seen people play Juno the way you are talking about, but I mean people say the exact same thing about Ana for years. She is dps’n more than healing me. At the end of the day, bad support are bad support. But then again some people claim the Ana or whoever is bad, but they aren’t bad they are just more big brained and higher skilled than the person complaining. And that support is what is winning them the game.
Sometimes I wonder if bringing back the end of match commendation voting screen would help with some issues in the game like this.
You do a bunch of healing as support and get several saves, people vote for you and then you get store credits if you get the most. Would incentivize people do actually do a good job/their job.
Being good at juggling offense and defense is a skill. Some players go in too hard on DPSing, others on healbotting. That resulting in losses is how it’s got to be. Bad players should lose games. It’s not a problem to be solved.
I agree and I think there’s room for both kinds of support design in the roster.
The devs in Overwatch just haven’t quite figured out how to design their non-dps support subclass yet, as evidenced by Lifeweaver, whose the only “mercy-like” support that they’ve ever released.
I don’t care what anyone says. Not the content creators, not the tryhards, not the sweats, not the coaches, not even the game designers. I love my healbot champs and will play characters like Mercy and Lifeweaver until my fingers fall off. I want more of them.
If they can figure out a way to do that without giving a support a weapon then so be it.
Support isn’t starving for players, we’re way past the point of trying to get people into the role. The game is 8 years old at this point and I think its time to accept that it will never be the most popular role.
Lifeweaver’s design doesn’t suck because he’s a healbot, it sucks because its overly focused on defense.
If memory serves correctly, I think that LW was the first support to be designed after most of the original devs quit. He was a learning experience for the new dev team.
They just need to figure out how to make their “healbots” work in Overwatch, and it will take time.
