There’s no real incentive to not gang up on or gun for the enemy Supports first.
The easiest wins and hardest losses for me simply seem to come from how good your team is at killing their Supports vs how good your Supports are at not being killed.
I can end matches with 0 deaths, and usually that was a lot of work with (semi-)frequent close calls and my ally support and I watching each other’s back first and foremost.
It’s mainly just kinda exhausting, there’s a bit of a thrill there being honest, but if I want breathing room I just stop playing OW because true rest only exists after a clean teamwipe and those aren’t exactly happening every match/fight.
I don’t know exactly what to do about it, or suggest. Some want more damage focus, less heals, others want more utility, some want more healing. I just know what I enjoy.
that’s not a support problem, that’s a skill problem, the higher you climb the more time you have to do damage as support because people aren’t blindly feeding and using corner and cover and disengage when they’re low
To me it feels like he is severely contradicting himself in the video, while I absolutely agree that there has been a huge playstyle shift from support going into Overwatch 2 with the 5v5 changes I would argue that support probably has the most inpact versus the least impact.
As a support your responsibility is to keep the team alive, while keeping yourself alive, dealing with flankers or other DPS/Supports diving you. That’s the biggest set of responsibilities out of any role.
If your supports die then it means the team as a while will wipe, they are essential to keep the brawl going so a team not helping them out to deal with flankers only leads to fights that slowly trickle away your life and will lead to staggers.
For me the only issue with supports right now (aside from the lack of hero options) is the sheer amount of harassment they get from their opponents.
Supports already have a lot on their plate (basically having five players they need to look after instead of just themselves) so when you also have 1-3 flankers on your back constantly, because there’s no space on the map for you to work, it’s just… emotionally exhausting. Like, even if you don’t die, you’re stuck having to spend all your time doing this chore just to stay alive so that maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to actually support your team for a few seconds here and there.
DPS players are going to cry tears of blood over this, but…
We do not need more “skill based” damage-hybrid supports, if “skill” means they have to constantly duel at a disadvantage in order to survive. This is not sustainable, and it’s also terrible for balance. Supports aren’t duelists and they shouldn’t have to be. They can’t be, not unless you like bloated, unbalanceable kits.
We need more supports like Mercy and Moira–supports who can actually decide if they want to take an engagement or not, because they have the ability to outposition enemies that they don’t want to deal with directly.
And, we need more supports like Brig, whose support abilities are empowered every time they have to turn around and swat a Genji off their back.
And I’d like to see more self-tanking abilities on supports too. I’d like the option to just… not have to care about that Genji for a second or two, and buy myself some time to finish what I’m doing before I have to turn around and deal with him.
And if DPS players don’t want to deal with any of this? Then they’re gonna have to eat some fat nerfs so that that they have to actually work for their support picks.
(But I do kind of think that Blizzard just needs to remove the new DPS passive, regardless. It serves no purpose but to make it impossible for supports to outposition flankers.)
Exactly. I’ve been saying this for years. At the moment the team is too reliant on supports choosing to forsake playing an FPS and play the ‘juggle ally healthbars’ minigame instead.
You go off to do something as a support, and you just sacrificed some teammates.
We’ve been given Kiriko, the ‘flanker support’ who is supposed to follow a flanker into enemy back lines or take one-on-ones herself….except if you choose that playstyle your team that isn’t on the flank with you is dead.
So you’re forced into a playstyle that’s essentially just Mercy in a ninja outfit with a cleanse.
I think my rank is fairly low and that is prob why but I honestly have no problems staying alive on support like Kirriko or Lucio I am just running circles around the enemy dps.
on the other hand, getting impact is another thing tanks / dps standing in the open face tanking and expecting to be brute-force healed thru everything.
That 10k Healing is a result of teammates being out of position. The first ones to pipe up and complain about supports not doing a good enough job are the dps, meanwhile DPS 1 has 1 kill but thinks they’re not getting kills because the supports aren’t healing them, DPS 2 is off in Narnia constantly feeding, and the tank is playing one-man army Zarya because getting kills feels good, and the supports are left to languish by the wayside because nobody is looking out for them but they’re looking out for everyone.
But it’s gotta be the supports who are just healbotting and not contributing anything special, right?
You are right in the things you list what a support does, but I think there is a nuanced difference between having impact and facing situations where if you fail, everyone else suffers the consequences. And the 5v5 change made it very easy to fail and in the end it’s unfun gameplay.
Let’s not forget that supports are facing characters that are specifically designed to kill things, they are naturally at a disadvantage.
And then you had a lot of players say supports are supposed to do dps, you can’t just healbot anymore and 2 weeks after release people complain that supports adapt and do just that switching more often to Moira because the role is so punishing.
I’m loving playing as support right now. The only issue is Genji is in 100% of my matches, and he’s all about picking me off. Me and my friend queue support together, and we switch to Brigitte+Moira if we’re being harassed, but damn, it’s boring to play against Genji all the time.
