[Mini Rant] I mostly play tank, and I see enough of these tank nerf threads as is.
But according to the forums lately most every healer is broken or OP . Do people really expect healers to be moble health packs ? Like imo overwatch has been in a pretty decent balance lately . I play multiple roles often and find most interactions make sense. Very rarely do I find scenarios I can’t counter .
It just seems that some people would destroy every hero but their own instead of learning to deal with them.
It’s the forums. Every hero except soldier is broke- scratch that there was a soldier nerf thread the other week. The forums is made up of a lot of people so naturally you’ll find nerf threads for every support if they’re all by different people
As I see it, the only problematic supports are bap and brig for different reasons. Ana, mercy, lucio, zen are all balanced and moira is kinda bad
I’m a GM support player. The support role has always been slightlt overtuned compared to the others. IMO, that was something Blizzard did intentionally to try to bring players to what is generally a disliked role. So they always need a lot of balancing. Also, the supports are almost always responsible for meta shifts…so they’re the first thing people notice as a meta shifts. There are also not many supports, and seldom are more than a few of those even viable…so it’s easy to point fingers.
With my experience with the game, I personally think every support could have something tweaked to improve them, some flat nerfs, some QOL changes…but I do think that the role is very strong at the moment.
Cause they see us as “healers”, not supports and when we kill someone, we are suddenly OP. People seriously take their pride damaged if they get killed by Mercy…
Most the people complaining about healers rarely in game actually put any form of damage in their general direction. They don’t realize they have no right to complain about something they don’t even know exists.
They pretty much are. If it takes you 4 seconds to find a health pack that restores 80 health, you can get over 200 health back from one Support in that same span of time.
In a team situation, this is normal, but the individual heroes are really where the problems start to be apparent. It’s extremely easy to see how power Supports and Tanks are compared to Damage-role heroes and to a lesser extent, Defense-role heroes.
Especially if you start looking at value; damage is done by everyone. But not everyone can do healing and not everyone can negate damage. So immediately, Tanks and Supports are contributing more value than Damage-role heroes. It’s gets even nastier when one takes a look at utility and puts that under a lens and tries to balance that with everything else.
Baptiste’s biggest issue is Immortality Field, and it always has been. Everything else Baptiste does is par the course for all other Supports. Brigitte, likewise, is generally in good shape for a Support, with Rally being the biggest issue (and a minor one at that). Lucio, Mercy and Ana tend to have the biggest issues; and ones that need to be more carefully looked at to see why.
Partially true. It’s actually Tanks that determine it; and then compositions build around that. Usually, most compositions will feature Ana, because you can’t go wrong with her. Very rarely does the Support-line cause a meta-shift and it’s usually damage related, rather than mitigation (See Zenyatta and Mercy).
Because they kinda are. Again, you have heroes like Lucio and Ana putting out more damage per shot than Ashe would, and partial damage being far more forgiving on Supports than it would be on a Damage-role hero. In addition to that, you can do what no other damage hero can do; heal others. On top of that, Supports also have utility, and while that utility may overlap (count how many boost damage); that’s not something a damage-role hero can do.
As far as the mass playerbase is concerned, Supports are supposed to be healing. Particularly in less coordinated matches and match-ups. Supports have all the tools to do this, and in more coordinated games where random damage is far less common, Supports have more than a forgiving amount of healing to work with, and little to no aim-requirements.
Supports may not have damage-abilities; Swiftstrike, Helix Rocket, etc - but you replace that with utility that more than good enough if not better. Take Biotic Grenade and Dynamite, for example. Dynamite is on a 12-second and only does 50 damage on impact, less than that on explosive splash. Biotic Grenade does 60 damage, regardless if it was a direct impact or not. While Dynamite’s burn is 100 damage over 5 seconds, it can be cured with a health pack. Biotic Grenade’s healing negation debuff cannot. Further, Biotic Grenade also has a beneficial effect; dynamite does not. It’ll be six seconds before Biotic Grenade can be used again, it’ll be seven seconds before Dynamite can.
It’s pretty clear, Biotic Grenade is more than competitive with dynamite - it’s more flexible, does more damage on splash and it’s debuff can’t be cleared without teamwork. The one saving grace that keeps dynamite competitive is the larger than usual explosion radius if self-detonated by Ashe. Otherwise, Biotic Grenade wins, every time.
And this is not unusual for many Support comparisons. OW2 hopefully will fix that.
Hot take, Bap’s lamp isn’t nearly as powerful after the 10% HP nerf. The thing that I thought was “OP” about it was how it could completely stop a team wipe. Now it typically stalls the wipe because you’re low enough that the other team will easily focus fire.
There are a few exceptions to this like riptire because junkrat can ult some distance from a position where the enemy can put in the burst damage needed to outdo healing, but for the most part it’s more useful for enabling aggressive plays or for protecting a one or two indviduals at a time. (Which is needed otherwise there’s zero chance against focus fire.) And while it’s still the strongest support ability it’s not that much more impressive than some other abilities. Hell it’s a glorified Zarya bubble.
Here’s what I gathered from now supports are designed. You are allowed some skill expression but you don’t get the rewards for said skill expression.
Most healing is capped at a set amount of the character and the only way to increase that is a cooldown ability or ultimate. You will not be able to critical healing, so it doesn’t really matter how good you are with healing you will generally never be able to exceed the hard limitations the developers placed on it besides being more consistent.
Healing also needs to be much lower then outgoing damage otherwise you run into issues. So as per the explanation above, there is absolutely no need to make the method of applying healing difficult because a) you are shooting characters that don’t generally try to hide from you and b) you arn’t going to be popping off big numbers no matter how hard you try.
Damage for a support is also lower because it’s not your primary purpose (supporting your team) but you still need to be able to do damage because you still need to protect yourself and you need something to do during downtime. That said the damage is still acceptable but the method of damage is generally harder then DPS (usually slower moving projectiles). In Bapt’s case, he came out with RNG spread on top of recoil. Moira’s beam is one of the lowest values in the game and Ana’s shots are made that you can heal through some of the damage instead of a burst shot.
So lower damage, capped healing. But at least the utility for the characters that have it is pretty spot on. If supports had weak utility you would definitely feel worse off then other roles simply because damage feels weak and healing can feel weaker or in same cases useless (depending on the enemy team and your own team’s comp).
Why people hate/afraid of supports? I can’t speak for anyone but if I had to guess, it’s because it’s easy. The role is made easy. People don’t like characters that they think is “cheese” or has “higher value vs skill”. If supports start at 30 and cap at 50 then people that are lower then 30 in different roles are going to complain because they haven’t reached past 50 yet.
In fact, they want their supports to be considered a mini pack, even smaller than the Small Pack, and they want the enemy supports to be useless but their own supports to be Grade A+ at lower ranks. Also, a requirement to not think, only buff and heal at the perfect times.
First they came for the tanks. Now that job is done, so they are coming for the supports next. Eventually, it will just be DPS. And then there will be a DPS civil war between the hitscans and the projectiles. There can be only one.
They want skilled play and counter play but really what they want is their own character to be totaly op with no counters and as little effort to rip through support / tank training bots. But they also want other dps characters to not be able to steal their limelight.
I think it’s less about all support and more about Mercy and Ana specifically.
For Mercy specifically the problem isn’t being op but rather general kit. The more general you are the harder it is to deal with you and the more you can do in every situation.
Sure her damage boost is better or worse for different heroes but you can’t really say she’s only viable for one composition or play the same playstyle every time like many other heroes… she can fly in with dive, play from range with comp, walk with brawl and the same goes for countering every comp, jumping up against dive, playing from range from brawl or hiding against poke.
The hero is just able to do its job without too much risk when played right or at least with a good player you enable which just makes her annoying to play again.
As for Ana. Most of the hero is really fine and balaced, but her nano and anti nade are a big problematic… Anti nade does have a lot of counters from the tank category but when protections get nerfed and we still lack an anti effect support… Anti nade just becomes a game changer when used right.
As for nano, most other support ultimates are either not that oppressive (valkyrie for example) or easy to counter (like Moira’s ult for example). Nano has a lot of impact when used right but doesn’t have a real way to counter it. (Stopping a sniper at 0.2 sec cast time when she plays from range isn’t really realistic).
which just creates scary monsters such as nano Rein or nano Genji that a lot of players struggle to deal with due to their extra free boost.
Other than that I don’t think i’ve seen any other complains about support being op…
Maybe bap but that’s mostly people who struggle to counter his lamp. I do think they should increase its size but other than that noting else.
Healers are the secret carries of the team. They, just like tanks, don’t get the fame and recognition for it. People only get mad at things that kill them.
Just had one of this. 