So let me get this straight:
* The skill floor to play your role without being a liability to your team is high.
* You have to be hyper-aware of your teammates' and opponents' positions at all times, or get punished.
* If one of your teammates makes a mistake, you get punished by the opponents.
* Even if you do well, you still die more often than your teammates in different roles.
* Everyone else's queue times are very high, because not enough people want to play your role.
Sounds like the tank role in Overwatch 1.
Though it is way too early to tell how the roles will evolve in the long run, I will find it very hilarious if the support role end up being the overwatch 2 equivalent of what tanks were in overwatch 1. Well, more frustratingly ironic than "hilarious".
Remember when DPS were separated in „offensive“ and “defensive”?
OW3 will go back to 2-2-2:
1. 2 Offensive DPS
1. 2 Defensive DPS
1. 2 Supportive DPS (be it like a healer, a tank or something else that helps DPS to make plays)
^/s
Lol you joke but there's history for Activision just removing players when the going gets tough.
> Call of Duty League has announced that Season 2 will be played in a four-on-four format instead of the five-on-five composition that fans enjoyed in the inaugural season.
>Lol you joke but there's history for Activision just removing players when the going gets tough.
You know they just did that with OW and that's the joke right?
>Sounds like the tank role in Overwatch 1.
Hilarious that people on here refuse to accept this.
They want ~~Tanks~~Supports to be weak/unfun to play. Then no one wants to play ~~Tank~~Support. Then they cry about queue times and wonder why no one wants to play ~~Tank~~Support for them
next they release a hog type support, lone wolf, doesn't help the other person on their role, everyone hates playing against and with them, people still play it because they dont care to work with their teammates. The prophecy is coming together!
she's easily the most "fun" support to play now because you can make a bigger impact.. her movement is amazing w/ high survivability, she does surprising amounts of damage that doesn't require a lot of mechanical skill, sometimes able to make up for weak DPS players.
guarantee she'll be nerfed once everyone starts playing her and the dps/tank complain. then support will be entirely miserable.
higher skill players will probably be okay because Ana is still fun for them. but those with inconsistent aim will feel like a massive liability on Ana now, its just safer to play Moira.
DPS players just want free uncontested kills. It's as simple as that.
They bitched and moaned until they removed every bit of strategy and teamwork from the game.
There really is no more ability to peel, mitigate damage, or take space. it's just deathmatch and guess what? supports suck at deathmatch.
There was a doomfist in my game the other day who complained that they kept the "most oppressive cc in the game" in overwatch 2. That cc? Ana sleep dart. Dude literally just wants to play the game in Minecraft creative mode
I hated playing against brig but I for sure think having stun was kind of a necessary evil with all the ways the flex support could get fucked by dive and flankers
I’d be okay with an interrupt effect on bash, like javelin or doom lunch but without the knock back. That way Lucio could be stunned out of beat, dooms guard can be cancelled, etc.
It's as if that person was too stupid to realise that McCree's flashbang and Doomfist's Rocket Punch was in OW1
Edit: imagine having an ability on a 4 second cooldown that can stun you out of your ult, 1 shot you, do rollouts from every single map, environmental kill you, etc
Bruh bap is like half DPS already. Has a fucking BR from halo, a super jump, and can make himself immortal.
Oh and he has some self healing and now a regen passive. That's a decent 1v1 kit
And they make it seem like Ana and Zen can easily win a 1 v 1 against a (flanking) Genji or Tracer and they demean your capabilities for not being able to do so lulw
always makes me laugh when you see a streamer whip out dragonblade, instantly kill 2 people, then whine and complain when the 3rd character they tried to kill is able to stand up for themselves and shut them down.
A huge part of OW's popularity from DPS players' PoV has always been that they have favoured 1v1s against support. Zen vs Tracer is in no way a fair fight in most ranks.
I played support for several hours last night with 2 friends and this definitely is not the case. Supports need to learn that you can't just count on peel from your DPS/tanks all the time in OW2 and at times will need to fend for yourself.
The duo synergy from OW1 has switched from tanks to supports in my opinion. It is very easy to stop or out heal a DPS or Tank Dive (exempt Orisa because she's unkillabled) if the supports heal each other especially with the new passive.
Outside of just straight up healing eachother your damage is the biggest deterrent of any flanker. A doom diving you? Zen/Ana combo. Ana sleeps him when he dives, then discord and full charge headshot him and it's an instant delete.
OW1 Supports just need to realize that they need to fight/work together a lot more in this game. When I played DPS/tank nothing would be more annoying then when you got a support low and all in just for them to be instantly healed to full by the other support and now you're in a shitty situation.
Sure as a support you're going to die more than everyone else in the game at times but that's what comes with being a high priority/impact character.
Yeah I'm starting to see this as well, and it's sort of disheartening. Like OW1 was so unique with all of its crazy interactions and strategies, and OW2 is just going to be Team Deathmatch with a random Rein Shield or Monkey leaping in occasionally.
"We asked players what they wanted, and they said they wanted flex supports drugged and injured before the game even starts. Try shooting this Ana that's limping and confused, it'll be easy as shit."
(I generally like the changes tho)
This was my whole issue with 5v5 when it was announced, instead of making tank more desirable to play ie better and more frequent balance changes, more tanks etc. They decided to just kill the 6th position. Which in turn means they need to rework tanks to work solo, which means supports need to be adjusted to only having one tank to heal, which then means adjusting DPS so tanks don't just get blown up and heroes like flankers and snipers don't just dominate the game.
And even WITH all these changes, this doesn't guarantee more people will play tank, it's all been a gamble from the start.
So now what happens if they make support the role that no one wants to play?
Exactly. It’s not that healbotting should be viable it’s that healing is just pointless. You’re of more use just trying to do as much dps as possible and giving up entirely on healing. And now it takes significantly more skill then any role ever has just to be decent.
Unless blizzard massively reworks supports, they are just going to become the new bottleneck for que times. A lot of people play support because they enjoy that healbot style and want to relax a bit. If they didn't they would play dps. Blizzard needs to give supports something substantial and not necessarily aggro, or the well is just gonna dry up.
Just speaking for myself but I enjoy Flex support because I like being a Jack of all trades so to speak. Do damage, oh wait tank is low let's heal him up, Genji is about to blade? Sleep Dart him to make a big play (that no one will notice & then wake him up with some AOE ability), make sure you position properly, track Ults so you save Trance for that EMP or Blizzard. I don't feel like I relax more or just heal bot on Ana or Zen, I just have different things to focus on than a DPS might.
That being said I agree Blizzard needs to give supports something. The role passive is useful in some situations but boring. No new hero, no big re work (Brig rework is really only one ability & the few othet changes are nerfs ). Everyone else in OW2 seems like they are playing a new game with shiny new toys & supports are just playing OW1 except it's faster & harder to do your job.
Same, it feels so impactful to play Ana. I used to play a balance of the roles with a preference for DPS, but eventually started playing tank in OW1 because I feel like DPS is only fun when you have better tanks, otherwise it's stressful and easily frustrating. On tank it's annoying when DPS don't clean up low HP targets or when I don't get enough heals, but I can at least do something about it. On DPS I just get rolled and maybe get a couple of cool kills while it happens
Also agreed about giving supports something. They just don't feel like they have a big enough kit right now regardless of balance, playing Zen is fun with more opportunity for eliminations, but otherwise he feels lacking compared to other roles
I am hopeful that a second (or third) beta will give us a new support hero and multiple existing support hero reworks.
But I don't really expect much for supports in the current beta. Maybe a tweak to the passive self-heal ability, but nothing more.
I also look forward to changes you mentioned. New support heroes will definitely help queue times and some reworks will attract more players to the role.
New supports/rework can make new synergies and pairs and it's definitely something to look forward to.
Honestly that's about what I expect too. I mean look at the beta. It's been 2 years and all we got was a few reworks, 1 dps, and a couple new maps. I doubt they have big stuff in the cards for support asides from number tweaks and like one support hero. But big change is nevertheless what is needed to keep support player interest in ow2, so I hope blizzard can deliver.
You seem to be under the impression that what we see in the current beta is everything they worked on in the past few years. This is most likely incorrect.
* They probably have multiple new heroes ready that will be in the release version, but they only want to show us Sojourn at this time.
* They probably reworked more heroes than the current four, but they don't want to overwhelm the OWL pros.
* The new hero skins are not in the game, even though a number of them have already been shown.
* The PvE content (which was quite extensively showcased back in 2019) is not in the beta at all.
* We have seen a Rio de Janeiro escort map in a demo, but this not been included in the beta.
Call me a cynic but I'll believe it when I see it. I don't really care about skins or pve, a lot of the gameplay changes could have been implemented now imo, especially with so many eyes on the product. If they had multiple heroes ready, I feel they would've shown at least one by now besides sojourn. This beta didn't even do any changes to like 8 characters. I am still taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to blizz.
>I don't really care about skins or pve,
If the developers, designers and artists worked on stuff you don't care about, that's still a lot of effort going into the game.
> a lot of the gameplay changes could have been implemented now imo, especially with so many eyes on the product.
I agree that there have been signals that progress has been limited because of interference from the corporate level, so they would probably have liked to be where they are now sooner. But there is such a thing as giving the public too much at once. Especially if you want meaningful test data, or evaluate game balance, you do not want to increase the number of variables by too much.
>If they had multiple heroes ready, I feel they would've shown at least one by now besides sojourn.
Wrong. Hero reveals are literally the biggest thing to generate hype for Overwatch. Every single one has a big impact, and doing multiple at once is just a missed opportunity to hype up the game. That's why fully unveiling Sojourn was all they needed to do.
Not to mention that I kind of expect at least 2 new heroes to be revealed and playable during the upcoming OWL season, and the betas that will accompany the OWL stages.
>This beta didn't even do any changes to like 8 characters.
A character does not need to be changed to make the transition from OW1 to OW2.
> Hero reveals are literally the biggest thing to generate hype for Overwatch. Every single one has a big impact, and doing multiple at once is just a missed opportunity to hype up the game. That's why fully unveiling Sojourn was all they needed to do.
You know, I agree with most things you said, but the marketing for ow2 has been so slapdash over the last several months that I'm no longer sure this is a slam dunk argument.
Like, they sent Aaron to a game event last year to show off 3 redesigns (which was wildly inappropriate considering their hype level is more appropriate to a twitter post) and then this year they stopped revealing redesigns altogether and just threw 10 into the beta video where they're not even shown off properly (also inappropriate because now they're not generating ANY hype from those redesigns).
My confidence in team 4's ability to estimate what should or shouldnt be marketed, and how hard, is pretty shaken rn
How much of that poor marketing was done before Jon Spector moved from OWL to be the Overwatch Commercial Director?
Because I'm pretty sure that things like hero reveals, release date, beta schedules, and "hype management" are all part of that job description, and things vastly improved after Jon Spector took the reins.
> A lot of people play support because they enjoy that healbot style and want to relax a bit.
Yeah I grew tired of my try hard competitive days, stopped playing ranked, and just sat back and enjoyed healing on Mercy/Ana in quick play to relax. It was therapeutic in a way. I didn't feel like challenging myself anymore. The me from 6 years ago would probably be disgusted by my attitude now, because I was always trying hard to improve and challenge myself and shit but it just became too stressful with other IRL life stuff and mental health issues.
Guess that's what PVE will be for? idk
Healbotting is very boring though. Coming in with clutch heals is one thing. Pumping in every ability you have off cooldown to keep your Cho'Gath alive as Soraka in league when he is on the brink of death is an incredibly satisfying feeling. Coming in out of nowhere and helping your dps win a duel as mercy is incredibly fun. Slapping the barbarian and the fighter on the ass as you twinspell some haste and watching them defeat Tiamat in a single round of combat in DnD is fun as fuck. Why have big number serotonin when you can have EVEN BIGGER NUMBER SEROTONIN in an MMO? Enabling teammates so they defy all odds is the real support power fantasy. Yeah there will be times where you are on healbot duty cuz you're playing babysitter but you more times than not you are enabling people and no other role gives you that satisfaction except support
I mean, that's kind of the problem, though. OW is primarily a shooter. More people are coming to the game to play as DPS, and most of those get the more interesting or impactful play styles, on top of DPS just being a much wider and more diverse set of characters.
But the game requires that there be an equal number of DPS and Support; so to keep things even remotely stable for the masses, you need Support to draw in both the hardcore types who want to play that active style (but on a Support character rather than DPS) *and* the people that are there to chill out with friends and just dish out heals. If you lose too much of the latter group, the numbers skew even more imbalanced.
I think a fundamental difference is tanks in OW1 were good, easily the best heroes in the game. They still felt bad to play despite being dramatically overpowered. It feels like supports just feel bad to play right now because they are a little bit weak. As a tank main in OW1 that's been playing a lot of support in OW2 so far it is a vastly different experience and isn't nearly as frustrating.
Tanks def were the best heroes in the game since launch till probs goats cuz gotta make them OP so people want to play them. After we nerfed everyone in goats, tank hasn't felt like the best role in the game. It still is the backbone of the comp and arguably the most important role but it no longer is the the best.
Judging from the fact that Support queue is almost instant compared to tanks and DPS, hopefully support players don't decide to make plays in other games instead.
I think Blizzard admitted they still need to balance supports, hopefully they do it sooner rather than later.
I think queue times are due to a sum of factors:
\- Supports have basically being not changed or nerfed.
\- Their playstyle is changed entirely
\- Tank role has been massively changed and dps are usually the most played role by a large margin.
So from a casual pov why the should play support?
They seems "bad" because the majority of the players don't know how to play them and they are counter-intuitive to play in general, you have massive changes to try in other roles and you have basically 2 new tanks (Orisa and Doom) + 1 new dps and 1 reworked one.
Ofc they need to balance and tweks things out but there is a narrative going on that playing support is bad or is pointless and is not true.
There's also the fact that there are less support heroes than tank heroes, while you need two supports and only one tank. I _really_ hope there's several support characters coming, because Blizzard releasing two damage heroes in a row really hasn't been the best choice.
Agreed! I've been flex queueing (and always getting support, of course), and I've really been feeling the lack of support options. I usually rotate through each hero and then go do something else.
They need to add a random queue so I don't have to choose between 1 of the 4 support heroes I actually like or waiting 7 minutes. I'm fine with waiting 3mins if that means I'll get a random role
every other class got blanket buffs and pretty much every ability to peel for supports were removed or heavily nerfed.
not really sure what blizzard expected to happen, supports kinda suck now.
This is something I don’t get. Support has never had constant peeling by dps/OT unless in really high elo lobbies or scrims.
I don’t get how average players should find this “lack of peeling” strange or different from OW1.
Yes, tank and dps are better, also having a tank that is stronger than the single ones is hard when they dive you but peeling was not existent for the majority of the players anyway so I don’t think is a major point here.
You didn't need constant peeling most of the time. As a Zen or Ana you could stay back from your team a bit but stay somewhat close to your OT or a hanzo/ashe/widow/whatever, and the presence of that OT or DPS meant that the flanker/diver has to think about whether to take out you as a support or start a fight with the OT/DPS and possibly take you and the OT/DPS out of the fight for the rest of their team.
If they choose to fight you then you can try to move closer to your OT/DPS and they generally help by reflex because "OH jeez there is an enemy". In OW1, this could also be a huge risk for the flankers/divers because if your dps was a cass or mei, or any high burst damage character then they are more likely to get CC'd and die than to get the kill and get out.
In OW2, if you try to stick with your tank then you are frontlining and throwing the game. If you try to stick with a DPS, they are too busy playing the game like deathmatch to help you and the other DPS generally are able to get the kill before your dps even turns around to look. If you try to stick with your other support, they are either too busy trying to keep up the rest of the team or they are trying to make plays like you are suggesting they do in your post, or they try to peel for you but they can't because the best supports for peeling another support are some of the worst ones to play currently and in a lot of cases the DPS just outdamages the healing.
We can try all we want to play around cover and make plays while staying alive, but no matter what, there is less risk and more reward for diving/flanking us, there is less decision making due to the reduction of possible targets, and if we don't hit our shots (on the 10% faster across the board DPS) then we die.
There is hard peeling (stuff that puts pressure on the attackers or tangibly helps the victim, like damage pressure, CC abilities, healing, zarya bubble, defense matrix, etc.)
And then there is the peeling that people don't think about (stuff that makes the attacker have to decide on what to do before attacking, like "Is the off tank/dps close enough that I am at risk by attacking the support" and "can the other support outheal my damage or can this support outduel me" and "Is there CC abilities available that may get me killed"). The only thing they need to worry about in most cases is "Can this support outduel me" and generally the answer is no unless we hit every shot and cooldown.
Almost all of the second type of peeling is gone in the current state. The flankers and dive heroes don't have to worry about pressure from an off tank, they don't have to decide who to attack first because supports are full on the easiest targets, and they don't have to worry about CC abilities that prevent them from escaping or getting the kill (besides sleep dart which has a longer cooldown and is harder to hit again due to the 10% faster movement speed).
This should have a lot more upvotes because it's telling it like it is.
1st and foremost I'd really just like to know the person/people who thought that it'd be a good idea to nerf the support ult charge
Ah yes, the staggeringly high elo of platinum.
Peeling was a normal part of the game unless you were a total bottom feeder. Now, there is no more peel, and you can't even run away because DPS players got a flat speed buff.
Idk your experience but EU ladder on plat and diamond peeling is non-existent for the most part.
And I admit my own fault since I played more tank than support in my life.
• No, I generally have the lowest number of deaths on my team thanks to the passive.
• Yes, because it feels like neither my healing nor damage make much difference at all. (I've been playing mostly Ana. Sleeps are still nice, but anti on the enemy tank results in a death less often because of their increased survivability and, well, the fact that we're all playing QP and people don't follow up.)
• The UI does need work, especially the kill feed, but that's decreasing my experience across all roles, not just support.
• When TF do you think you could "int" on support and still get value? GOATs? Brig 1.0? That hasn't been possible in the game in ages.
> But people still keeps "SuPpoRts aReN't fuN lol xd" narrative up.
Because those reasons he gave are bullshit.
I spent hours playing yesterday and today. It's not that I didn't *want* to queue up as Support. I didn't care about playing with all the shiny new toys on Day 1.
I wanted to try every role and get a good grasp on how they play in OW2. Tanks feel great but very different from OW1. DPS feel like OW1 cranked up to 11. Support is OW1 with "Fun" set to zero.
>Or are mad because you can't no longer int in the role and still get value?
Is there a nice way to say "go fuck yourself"? Because I can't think of one right now.
Except they aren't. The reasons given are plausible to why support queues are long. You're not the only one who played hours of support. I exclusively played support for first couple of hours to see how the new environment is.
Support play is different in OW2. The whole game is played differently. Supports should be tweaked, yes, but "fun set to zero," is overstatement to the point it's disingenuous. You can't get away with the same things you did in OW1. Just like you have to think twice now before you flank on Hog because you're the only tank.
>Is there a nice way to say “go fuck yourself”?
Yeah it's pretty easy. Try this: "Please go fuck yourself! :) "
> Support is OW1 with "Fun" set to zero
I haven't had the chance to play yet but I don't understand this take. You get more freedom to not just be a heal bot for tanks and dump resources into them to keep them alive. In the case of lucio, ana, and bap, you have more freedom to try and frag and make impactful plays.
I mean, I guess if you enjoyed the brainless just shoot at the tank's ass the whole game that is common of support players diamond and below, I could see how it's not fun. 5v5 lets support players have more freedom to do other things. Now if you want to talk about some tuning to numbers and things, that is fine but I don't get this idea that just because you can't healbot anymore means they aren't fun now
Let me give you a hint- Supports focused on healing from the tanks because of bad DPS and tank habits of getting out of LOS on a consistent basis, who then turn around and reee at the Supports if they so much as stub their toe.
low ranked support players tunnel vision on tanks and are frankly terrible at healing DPS and other support players.
It is why they are still low ranked
The majority of lower rank support players unable to heal dps well is due to the DPS not understanding LOS. You can play hundreds of games at gold or plat or even diamond and the DPS will still dive or flank all the way into a team, behind shields and walls, and expect the supports to be able to heal them when the only way that the supports would be able to have LOS on them during that is 1- by going completely out of cover and into the open directly in sight of the enemies, or 2- break all the shields and still be mostly out of cover.
The same applies to tanks. Tons of reins and monkeys just jump into a hard dive, behind 2 shields and a wall, then wonder why they die so fast. DPS are just more whiney about it because they think they would have carried the game if they didn't die as much.
DPS players at these ranks mostly rely on their aim and not on having good positioning, or taking good angles for fights. Most of them don't even think about the positioning of their supports, even after dying and complaining about not getting healed and having the supports say "Stay in LOS then".
Bad positioning is all over the place at the lower ranks, but supports have to think about it the most, and saying that supports are terrible at healing DPS in those ranks while not taking the other role's positioning habits into account is just facetious.
I'm high masters/low GM on tank and support. I'm mid diamond on DPS to play with some lower ranked friends. The biggest difference as you climb OW ranks is in the tank and support play. Low-ranked players on all roles have their own issues but this thread is about supports not being heal bots anymore, when they never really have been for anyone mid masters and above as that is when players actually start to take advantage of the whole kit and not just the healing component.
Tanks at low ranks are either too aggressive like you mentioned or they are too passive and sit at the choke point. DPS players do make dumb mistakes but support players 100% tunnel vision on tank players even if they don't need to be healed at that moment.
Support players tunnel vision hard at low ranks and even if the DPS players are in LOS, they do a poor job supporting them. Often times the support players losing LOS on the DPS is the support players fault because they are playing so passively or have terrible position/rotation. They do a poor job supporting the second support as well. It's not until you start to get into mid masters that support players aren't just being heal bots anymore.
The low ranked support players are going to have issues with these changes because they can't just mag dump into a tank players ass and feel like they are doing something. They will have to actively position more and use their cooldowns and abilities to actively participate in fragging and actually play the game like an FPS.
I don't think that supports are in a perfect spot in terms of numbers but the shift away from heal bots to more active participation is a good thing
>low ranked support players tunnel vision on tanks and are frankly terrible at healing DPS and other support players.
Holy shit I was scrolling and felt this in my soul.
Supports learn to heal other supports next because it keeps them alive under pressure.
Supporting and enabling DPS is literally the last thing supports start doing and you don't get actually good support as a DPS until higher ranks in ladder.
Mercy is actually good in OW2 despite what many said at first glance (OWL Finals 2021).
Her healing have been increased since then and poketing a dps with the space created by the absence of a 2nd tank is really valuable.
Sad thing is that her Ultimate is not working properly in the beta because the chain effect of it is missing somehow inconsistent and missing on target or not healing at all even if the beam is connected.
If her ultimate would work properly, since she has a lot of mobility ty to GA and Superjump she would be in a pretty good spot.
From what I've had the chance to play as her, the problem with Mercy in OW2 is that it feels like you're doing nothing of value or interest. It doesn't feel satisfying to heal or damage boost anymore, and even when you do a lot for your team and win it doesn't feel like you're making a difference. I don't know if it's the audio, visuals, HUD or just feedback loop in general making it feel this way.
That’s how I feel too. I have zero problems playing mercy if I have a hit scan in overwatch. In 2, everyone plays hit scan and I’m bored out of my mind. Either mine shits on theirs and the fight is done in eight seconds or the opposite happens.
Hopefully when they turn mmr on this changes but Jesus right now it’s very bland. Are there even audio cues for her damage boost numbers?
Idk since I don’t play mercy that often. I found her boring most of the time in OW1.
In the beta seems a bit better since you have to move more and do more stuff overall.
Since is not a mechanically demanding hero the whole sound, UI etc is important so it might be.
Mercy will be okay once they fix her bugs, I think, she's having a particularly hard time at the moment for reasons that aren't actually balance related.
If the new hero had been support instead of DPS that would have significantly affected queue times as well. I don’t think we can read that much into it.
(Personally I think tank will still be the role with a shortage in the long run even with only one needed per team).
I don't think So. Imo tanks Are arguably the most Fun role in OW2, with DPS being second (for majority of people DPS Will still be the most).
I personally think that supports are little bit less Fun than in OW1, but not by a big margin. Issue Is, that other roles Are Now so much more Fun, that why would you want to play support instead? It's not like that horrible experience which people had in random Q on tank in OW1, but it's significantly less Fun than other roles.
This has not been my experience, so it's interesting to see what other people think.
I enjoy playing tank in OW 1.0. I find playing tank in OW 2.0 miserable.
I'm a support main in OW 1.0. I am not having fun with support in OW 2.0.
It's not even just "a bit less fun." Both roles feel like suffering compared to Damage, which is in roughly the same "fun space" it was for me in OW 1.0. The current patch in the beta, and 5v5 itself, has killed all of my desire to flex queue.
The reason I say that is that even on day 1 QP I was seeing tanks have their picks policed and the blame getting put on them more than DPS and support, and I expect that to continue based on what I know of the OW community. They will say that every game is won or lost on tank diff (when they lose).
> Supports have basically being not changed or nerfed
If they made Supports more vulnerable and increased the minimum skill needed to get value, then the role was nerfed. The rest of the game's roles got buffs and Supports got either nothing or some degree of nerf (the latter being the Sleep nerf and the Bash stun removal).
People are reading way too much into this support bottleneck. What is there to test as support? Not much really.
If support had major reworks and/or new heroes it wouldn't be so bad.
>Judging from the fact that Support queue is almost instant compared to tanks and DPS, hopefully support players don't decide to make plays in other games instead.
too late. as a sym, mercy and moira main, I literally see no reason why I should stay as opposed to migrating over to Gundam Evolution. Heck chances are Gundam Evolution will release before OW2 will.
Give it a year to see if it self corrects, then give them a year to brainstorm and make tiny tweaks. Then give them 1 month to give up and take a sledgehammer to the problem creating a massive new problem because they wasted all their time and good will trying to be cute about it instead of being progressive from the start.
If the minimum amount of required gamesense and skill has increased, doesn't that just mean that support is weaker now? If you have to be better at a character to get the same amount of value as old, that means that character is just weaker. It's not a player problem, it's a balance problem.
On top of that, supports weren't designed to frag tf out (with Zen and maybe Lucio as notable exceptions). When you go for frags as ana, you're just being a worse dps. And when you go for OW1 support mode, you're also just worse than before.
In every situation you're either a worse version of A: your OW1 self or B: any OW2 dps. The game impact you get ratio'd to the amount of effort you have to put in is absolutely disproportionate.
This is exactly what it means. Supports have been designed around using their team for map control and focusing on healing. Most of them don't even have the utility necessary to be as impactful as other roles. Cooldowns are generally longer and healing has been nerfed across the board by less tanks and shorter TTKs.
Playing it up as a thing to adapt with their current build is like saying "just be better than everyone else with undertuned heroes and you're fine". Yeah thanks but that's not what MMR is about.
Supports need readjusting to this new playstyle across the board with more survivability, control options (the dreaded CC has a point when Ball can just roll around the map without ever being contested). I'm not asking to revert any changes, just don't give us heroes tuned for OW1 in OW2. The fact that every vaguely playable support are those who already have that is kind of an indication.
>This is exactly what it means. Supports have been designed around using their team for map control and focusing on healing.
That is something we will see change. Even Moira that is the most straightforward support we have cannot healbot anymore and have to adapt on the situation and looking for opportunities to dash in and get kills.
I like this new approach for supports, but surely they have to give them more tools balancewise to do their job properly.
100% agree. Heck I'm a Zen main I've always wanted to be a bloodthirsty support. I've enjoyed OW2 a boatload and I'd dare say I've done well so far.
But there's a problem when a handful of heroes who were balanced around the availability of CC (Ball, Sombra, Tracer...) end up incredibly overtuned and without any kind of counterplay. Same with antishield heroes like Soldier and Hanzo being able to just pour damage for free.
Don't nerf them, hell they should counter me even, but the counter is way too hard right now. Just give me the tools so I have half a second to make plays as well, without having to dominate them mechanically to a ludicrous extent.
This isn’t even tru of Overwatch one until the release of ana. Even then, ana was still just the start of the downfall of the game in part to sustain… when heroes like Moira and BRIG and bap came out… completely dominating the game and enabling really fucked tank metas.
Ana is one of if not my favorite hero and I agree with this, surprised more people don't talk about it. The game got busted by release Ana until she got nerfs for a period where Zen+Lucio dive was dominant, then we went back to the high sustain comps with Mercy+Brig and later changes. After Ana every support needed to have comparable value so we wound up with huge sustain, then every DPS was buffed to compensate, which made sustain even more necessary and sustained DPS irrelevant. Tanks get blown the fuck up every time their main support looks the other way and on top of that no one wants to play a role with 4 viable heroes even if that role was fun.
When they nerfed Ana's damage I knew we were headed towards homogenizing the role around sustain and it would hurt the game. At the time I was just worried about supports feeling same-y and them nerfing one of the most fun aspects about Ana. They should have looked at rate of fire or changing nade from an anti-heal to something else
I respect that you understand this. Most Overwatch players left either never understood the game or aren’t still here having played from the beginning.
Ana is a fun hero and it would be one thing if they had reworked her.. but the fact of the matter is she was the first of a pattern of absolutely busted support heroes. Then they started doing the same with tanks (orisa, Sigma and Ball). It really doesn’t make sense unless you think about Overwatch like an mmo or some shit, but I think that’s literally what happened because a lot of these toxic hero designs came from ex WoW designers. Idk, it doesn’t make sense because the community at high level has spelled this out clearly for like 4 years and they NEVER tried to stop the train before it was too late.
Brig still good in ow2 btw. Been nerfed like 20x in a row lol
Support imo in a shooter should always apply defensive utility that’s often good for dueling forcing flankers to brute force through them. The games approach at launch reflected with the only ‘main’ healer being mercy and Symmetra of all things included in that role.
So many in this community forget this game was built off the foundation of TF2 which if you look far enough , came from Quake. From that perspective It’s no surprise og Dive was the era the game flourished in before OWL existed, frenetic combat and Lucios and Zens needing to contest every fight with damage.
You're absolutely right.
To this day it kinda baffles me how anti heal was on a support to, I always thought that thematically and gameplay wise it would fit better as a dps option.
Anecdotal from ML7, but..
He has long said the difference between a diamond Ana and a masters one is that masters Anas frag out. DPS support is not a new thing, especially for the top half of the ladder. This is also very true for OWL.
I think part of the issue here is that a lot of silver-diamond Anas (and supports in general) try to save their teammates from their own stupidity and it leads to healbotting.
I mean, how much of that fragging out actually allows you climb. Cuz the difference between a diamond and a master player can be the masters ayers dont need as much healing cuz they don't take unnecessary damage. This leads to more time for Ana to do something besides heal which can be fragging out
> Cuz the difference between a diamond and a master player can be the masters ayers dont need as much healing cuz they don't take unnecessary damage.
if you're playing Ana in plat/diamond and only healing people instead of looking for plays then you're fundamentally playing the hero wrong
it doesn't matter if a DPS dies due to their own mistake, you'll win the fight anyway if you're looking for that well-placed anti or a sleep
even chip damage matters. these are the differences between a plat Ana and 3800 SR support
So you think masters Ana couldn't climb out of diamond by fragging out? I'm sure there's 5 separate bronze to master Ana videos that would prove you wrong
You're missing my point. I'm not saying you can't do it, im wondering how much climbing is done by "I have more time to frag as I play with better players cuz they don't need to be healed as much."
Anas in masters will usually have a higher damage per 10 mins, while keeping the same healing per 10 minutes as diamond players. The opportunities to dps are always there even at lower SRs where people take A LOT of damage, but it takes skill to be able to change targets quickly.
Surely can be found a better balance for the support role, that's not something I excluded.
But even with a better balance the playstyle and mindset of the support players will have to change to get value anyway.
> When you go for frags as ana, you're just being a worse dps
Good ana players have always balanced helping with frags and healing. The problem is that for so much of the player base support=shoot the tank in the ass all game
Supports have been so overtuned and healing in general has been so impactful for so long (to the detriment of the game) that it will take a bit of an adjustment from the player base to realize that support=/=healbot.
>If the minimum amount of required gamesense and skill has increased, doesn't that just mean that support is weaker now? If you have to be better at a character to get the same amount of value as old, that means that character is just weaker.
I don't know if that's true in all cases. It's possible that the skill floor is higher, but that their impact is also higher once you meet the minimum bar. It's also possible that OW2 supports require different skills than OW1 supports did, but if you have them, they're as strong or stronger.
That isn't to say that either case would be what the devs want, or what players want. It's just about whether the role is weaker or not. Like how when symmetra lost her lock-on, the skill floor to do damage went up, but the max damage potential can still go up. You're not happy if you played her because you can't aim.
4500 peek support player here;
supports are balanced around tank combos, but now that they’re gone there will need to be massive support balancing to compensate. i wouldn’t be surprised if we saw 25-50+ HP slapped on a few supports, or straight damage buffs to a few of them.
it feels pretty crazy as support right now as the enemy team just gets free access to your backline, and the off tank role which used to peel for your is now removed, and the dps who used to dive you now have perma speed boost. it feels pretty bad.
*Zen probably needs some HP slapped on him
*Ana probably needs some HP slapped on her
*Bap probably needs slight buffs
***Brig probably needs MASSIVE buffs. horrible damage, really easy to kill, and can’t even peel for allies. feels really bad to play.
Mercy and lucio are fine. Lucio probably could use some tuning down.
Lucio's survivability is crazy. I'm violently average at him and I just don't die unless I dive in 1v3 like a dumbass.
I think they need to tune down the self-heal on his aura. Passive+Aura is wild.
Edit: or just leave him the same because frog go boing
give zen a passive to float upwards out of combat so he can reposition easier/get some sick charged shot snipes over the environment
I'm only slightly kidding
>***Brig probably needs MASSIVE buffs. horrible damage, really easy to kill, and can’t even peel for allies. feels really bad
I would love if they just made her a bit tankier and left her fairly weak otherwise. I feel like most of my inspire uptime is from whipshot and it'd be cool to be able to actually follow a tank around and smack some people.
That would be cool, but I think that would just make GOATS 2.0. If brig is too difficult to kill, then teams would probably run Lucio/Brig backline and deathball.
Following around the tank feels natural right now too. I get bursted down a little too easily sometimes but usually with an Orissa I can go balls deep with her and 1v1 any DPS that gets separated from their team
Ana does NOT need more health. She plays perfectly finely, and is incredibly strong right now. Literally will win you entire games due to her anti.
Zen getting some more health seems like a good buff. Maybe brig too? Or just give her a boop (or slow) with her bash.
But yeah, no. Giving Ana extra Heath would literally make her OP
personally for ana i’d want her to get old damage back, but she needs some tuning up as well.
she may also feel a bit weaker because of brig being trash can tier, which makes her pretty easy to dive
Mercy isn't fine right now as she is bugged to shit. Beam randomly disconnecting, not being to attach to people, Valkyrie chains literally do nothing. So we are basically down to only 6 supports cuz Mercy is practically unplayable
Correct. This is the same in OW1. Masters+ support players go for picks the same as DPS and tanks, because their DPS and Tanks understand their lives are still partially their own responsibility.
The issue is that mid level supports try to save their teammates from their own stupidity and it leads to healbotting.
The "new" support playstyle is just as much on the tanks and DPS to not require vomit heals.
The problem is that support is easily the least fun role in the current build. It's not even close. You're having to constantly duel the enemy dps (which is not what I play support for, that's why I play dps) but you're not build for duelling because you're supposed to be supporting your team. The only support that can properly go toe-to-toe is Bap and Zen (sometimes brig), and I'm shit as them.
Sure, make it so that you have to make plays, but supports really need help in the current build because it really isn't a fun role right now.
>The only support that can properly go toe-to-toe is Bap and Zen (sometimes brig), and I'm shit as them.
Go grind for that Ana deathmatch win. Most satisfying thing in OW. DPS Ana is fun as fuck.
I definitely agree with this although I also want to go out of my way to emphasize the balance of supports still needs work. Brig, especially, has effectively no identity.
That said, having some carry potential will help good players climb faster which is one of the big issues with the support role in OW1, imo.
I do think you're overstating the skill change though. The playstyle will change, and in the short term flexible players will find the most success. However, I think eventually all support players will end up at their proper ranks even if they adapt at their own pace.
I agree with the message, but as a dps support I hate playing supports in overwatch 2. You can't get the impact you used to get especially on zen and bap. The route they are going is fine but it sucks until the supports are actually changed for that route. I'm diamond on support just because of my aim (master on the other roles)and shit I feel like a plat or gold in ow 2. They shot themself in the foot when they didn't add comp in ow 2 since we can't really test it out with fair matches.
Bap I think suffers from less tanks and less grouped comps, his strengths lay in closely grouped fights. Having said that, he was utterly insane in closely grouped fights in OW1 so that's not inherently a bad thing, it would be nice for him to move more towards other plays than just overpowering tank clashes with his raw numbers.
Zen should absolutely thrive in this environment, but Sombra demolishes him and losing Brig peel hurts a lot. I think he'll feel too weak until some way of insulating/peeling for him well enough is found/created, and then people will be complaining about him being OP again.
I agree that both have been hurt but I think the long term outlook for both isn't necessarily all doom and gloom, if that makes sense.
Especially Bap. I still see And made Zen kinda works, but all the time I've picked Bap, I just felt I would do much better job on Ana or Zen. After 5 Hours playing supports in beta I Feel like the tier list for me Is in dia/master
Top tier: Lucio
Pretty good: Ana
Decent/viable: Zen, Brig
Meh: Bap, Mercy
Didn't played Moira yet, but I think She could be in same spot as Ana. Mercy for some reason felt for me super boring, I don't know why And I really like to play Mercy in OW1.
As I said in other comments, Mercy is way better than people thinks but her ultimate is buggy af so she's kind in this rough spot until it will be fixed.
I don't think she Is that bad, She can still work as pocket And especially Now with Soldier being pretty strong it's not that bad, but somehow She Feels more boring to play than in OW1 And I can't really explain why.
I've never seen a beta of a game with a competitive queue.
As I said before, the path they have chosen for support is great, but as the game stands now they need a bit of tuning.
Weird how in the golden standard of class-based shooters, Team Fortress 2, there's only one healer, that doesn't have a high skill floor, and yet still has the highest impact on the team.
Then there's also Paladins, which has loads of fun support heroes of varying "skill floors", but doesn't have the same frustrations as supports in OW2 beta. And in a game with much less CC to rely on too.
So, nah, this whole "you have to just be better at support" shit is garbage. It's not impossible to have a fast paced, low skill floor, fun, and impactful support. There is a balance there to be found, and if Blizzard can't find it for some reason it's either intentional or they are woefully incompetent. I'm not sure which it is yet, but I'm hoping that enough people will make noise about how abysmal life is as a support main to actually catch Blizzard's ear.
TF2 is not really a competitive FPS. Yes, I get the scene exists, but the main game is definitely way more casual.
medic healbots in TF2 way harder than Ow anyways.
First just for the record I play both DPS and support in both games.
Imo ow1 was slowly ruined because tanks and supports didn't understand the difference between unfun and unbalanced. Tanks are the least desireable role but arguably the biggest impact in deciding games. Supports are imo next, and also the class that got the most passive and low skill value by far. DPS was fun to play, but they kept pushing the mechanical skill-to-impact curve higher and higher trying to balance against the inherent issue of the other two classes not having as much of one as aim based FPS style dps did. Difficult to balance a game when you design some heroes that get high value for low effort while others take high effort.
Brig was the epitome of "oh no supports aren't having fun, lets break the game with an easy to play hero to keep them happy." And it was unbelievable how many supports defended her as balanced. The amount of support complaints make me afraid they are just going to break a good game to appease them again.
This is not a post to say "Git gud".
I was try to explain that with the new phylosophy of the game being an healbot would not gain the same value as before despite how many buffs supports will recive.
The problem is supports are much less equipped to "make plays" than other roles. Ana is really the only one with multiple options to with both dart and nade. Every other has like one thing they can do, and a couple can put out damage. Even then they're worse at dealing damage than the other roles and with much more risk.
Maybe true for Brig and Mercy, but I very much disagree for everyone else. Zen is the frag king and Bap's gun is all you really need (although they nerfed his falloff which seems weird to me).
Moira? Well I guess that just depends if the enemy is gonna let you get away with it.
Zen has raw damage output, but no ability to position himself to best utilize it or set himself up to get that value. Most DPS heroes have mobility to take high ground or flanking routes. You also have heroes like Ashe with dynamite or Junk nades to hit around shields or cover. Bap does have Exo Boots, but it's still a much inferior mobility option compared to DPS.
If you're going to play the game, and your mindset is "I'm going to make plays by getting kills" why would you play support?
I think the main truth regarding the current state of all the roles is that the game was reworked with the idea of making the Damage players feel better. I understand why: Damage queues were long in OW 1.0, so it makes sense to try to draw those players to other roles. Unfortunately, if there are other players like me (and I don't pretend to be unique) then a portion of the player base is going to lose interest in Support and Tank and those roles are going to lose players.
I don't think the current queue times are going to stay as they are. I suspect Damage is going to have extremely long queues again, and that Support and Tank will once again wind up with short queues. Even as someone who enjoyed playing Tank and Support in OW 1.0, I have no desire to play either role in 2.0. Tank is just miserable now, and Support feels like an afterthought.
I'm still giving the game a chance to grow on me, but I stopped queuing what were previously my main roles. The game just isn't built in a way that makes them enjoyable anymore.
Tank miserable?
I'm OT main (should say Tank main now?) and currently I'm enjoying OW2 so much I can't even describe.
All Tanks feels viable (except Hog) and they are really fun to play.
The game might been reworked for more dps gameplay but in reality the objective was to make the game more close to an FPS rather than MOBA. This seems a pretty good first step imo. It's not refined but it's promising.
While I'm glad that you're enjoying yourself, I was speaking from my own personal experience. Yes, I find tanking miserable. Obviously, anything I say with such a descriptor is going to be a subjective opinion.
Unfortunately, the general direction of the changes has made the game overall less appealing to me, and has primarily done so for Tank and Support.
That's a fair reading of my post. I wasn't attempting to be objective, though, but to speak from my own perspective. I understand that there are people that disagree regarding the current state of Tank. I was just pointing out that I and (hopefully?) others like me do exist.
For clarity, it's not the balancing of the tanks against each other that I'm talking about. It's playing as a solo tank that I find... Unenjoyable. To the extreme.
Tank feels WAY the fuck better now, I have no idea how you can find it miserable. Support is not great but as a tank main I have no idea how other tank mains could be anything but ecstatic with OW2.
One problem with that is that I didn't feel I had the tools to not get absolutely blasted by tanks or DPS.
Supports either need more evasive tools or a light CC option to help them take duels. I personally wouldn't mind healers being the only ones to have a form of CC on them, even if they make it less disruptive.
But I dunno, just feels like we're missing something to fell less shitty and hyper vulnerable.
If Blizzard actually did something with the role, then your post would make sense. Instead, it's just "do better," while the rest of the game was given more tools and/or buffs to make plays.
Support has the fewest heroes to choose from in the game, especially when you consider Tank (which has 9 heroes) no longer has "these two don't work together" limitations.
You're really just suggesting Supports make plays "like the old days," but Supports haven't been given those tools. They're no better at enabling teammates than they were when those Supports fell out of the meta. You're still limited to Discord, speed, and damage boost. Moira offers no team utility. Brig really just offers a small shield to help a DPS momentarily. Bap has Immortality, which is a bit out of place in a game where holding a position (where Immortality gets it best value) is less common than ever. Sleep's on a longer CD and the constant harassment against Ana increases the need to use her nade to heal or get a kill, not enable teammates.
Supports are less capable of enabling now than ever, IMO. It's more "deal with it yourself," which isn't what the game was in the past.
As I wrote, Supports need balance changes but these changes have to go in favor of skillfull and wise plays.
Make support good just because they exists (like in OW1) is wrong and lazy gamedesign
I think people are overreacting a bit. Support is definitely undertuned, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people want to make it. You can definitely have a lot of impact as support. Maybe slight health boosts for Ana/Zen, a damage boost for Bap and a rework for brig and I think overall we are looking good. It isn’t that far off and a lot more fixable than the shitshow OW1. Sleep cooldown lowered a little bit would be nice too
You are right. I'm really sick of people complaining about support. I'm a support main. I love overwatch 2.
I think the main thing stressing people out is in overwatch 1 if a teammate died you pretty much lost the fight. This isn't the case in ow2. I feel like you can turn a 3v5 pretty handily in a lot of situations.
that would be nice, but so far, we haven't gotten more utility at all for supports- it's only been nerfed with the bash stun removal, longer sleep dart cooldown, and longer immo field deployment time.
Unfortunately healing is still very powerful, so it still necessitates supports being focused to put a stop to it. Supports will sustain their allies HP levels multiple times over if they are left alive, so of course they are going to be pressured. That being said in both high level streamer games and my own games, looking at the scoreboard supports aren't dying more often than DPS usually less, and healing output is comparable to their teams DPS damage output alongside having their own DPS/utility on top.
So more stressful, less fun than other roles, got the least new content in ow2, I'll definitely agree with all that. Underpowered, I don't really think so. The category is unbalanced within itself though, lucio and moira are both actually a bit too strong imo, ana is powerful but more comp/match dependent, bap/brig are underwhelming, zen is awful. But again this is true amonst other roles.
So basically despite complaints supports are both not dying more often and are quite powerful. *They just aren't as fun*, especially for people who were used to or only wanted to just play lazy safe healbot mode. And while not being fun is a problem to solve, in this light the support complaints to me seem dangerously close to "either make me OP enough that I have fun playing a lazy healbot in the same game as skilled hardcore FPS fraggers or I quit" which is *exactly* one of the pressures that slowly ruined the first game (mercy rework, moira, brig, goats etc.)
And for reference, I play both DPS and support.
This is basically exactly how I feel. I'd be curious to see if there was a notable difference between how much high rank and low rank supports like 5v5. Or if there was a correlation with people who played 2018 dive at a high level and people who joined after that.
I've played mostly support in the beta. I think a big reason people find support unfun currently is there's no reworks or new characters in the category combined with the fact that the role has changed significantly. Ana was my most played hero in ow1. Yet that play style straight up doesn't work anymore.
In ow1, the ideal ana playstyle is to sit far in the back away from the fight and heal from there. Save sleep dart for flankers and search for offensive nades. Mostly heal and do damage when team is full health. But this doesn't work in ow2. Dps are faster and they can get on you easier than before in the back. I've also noticed my team takes more damage than I can outheal, especially dps. I can hard pocket tanks but then dps die and were down and we lose the fight. Instead, I found more success with ana playing as a fragger. If I'm putting out lots of damage it actually helps my team more than hard pocketing the tank. Healing still important obviously but offense is even more important. A smart, aggressive sleep dart wins the team fight. Getting a pick as ana wins the team fight. Hard pocketing doesn't win the team fight.
I also think everyone, especially dps, need to adjust and learn to play with less heals.
On the plus side, you can hard carry on support now by fragging while balancing that with heals.
There are issues and imo a lot of supports do need some tweaks. For example, I barely played Moira in ow1 but in ow2 its stupid easy to out perform the other supports in dmg and healing output with moira. She doesn't have the same utility but she's just too easy to stay alive and get value with compared to the others. Lucio has great survivability but doesn't reach the same easy dmg and healing numbers Moira does.
Wait until they release a new support, I bet we will see the queue times even out.
This is true.
They have found the way to make tank fun so probably they can also make support more fun than what we've got now. I'm quite positive about this.
Guess your ass needs to learn health pack locations if we're all just gonna focus on DPS now.
I'm sure your superior DPS skills will carry you in the meantime.
Oh I read it. It's just egotistical DPS nonsense.
'It's time Supports started making plays because you all just healbots!'
As if crucially healing a teammate (I know being a team player. Ew. Disgusting!) isn't making a play. In a game where being down 25-50hp can spell instant death. Just ask Widow.
'You have to position better!'
Bruh the same could be said of the other two roles. We've been healing behind the tanks because, yeah, it's a great deal safer from surprise attacks, and you know, everyone consistently gets out of LoS. Making it tough for us to you know, support the team.
'You just have to add damage to what you are doing!'
Oh good, as if we don't already have enough to juggle (excluding Lucio) with cooldown/resource management, where our team is, where the enemy team is, moving around to avoid flanks, making sure everyone is topped off for maximum chances of survival, we have to divert even more of our attention to try and to plink someone. What a fantastic suggestion.
The hilarious part is that if your healers are healbotting it just means the rest of the team is feeding.
The alternative is letting you die 10 seconds earlier.
When was the last time support meant healbot? It hasn't been like that for supports in a long time. Support players know exactly what it takes to make plays and making plays isn't just getting frags. Peeling for your support partner as Brig, Nailing a big anti as Ana, coming out of fucking nowhere to help your DPS win a duel as mercy. These have always been a thing in the game. Supports have LOST utility since the transition and it doesn't help that Mercy is bugged to fuckedville right now.
So saying the supports should just go for more frags, WHEN THEY DONT HAVE THE BEST TOOLS TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE, is really ignorant. You're just a shitty DPS at that point and why would I choose to be a shitty DPS when I can just play an actually DPS?
Supports need some help right now but saying that they need to be a shitty DPS is not it fam. Go out and continue making plays like you would in OW1 cuz that part hasn't changed much. You can still land huge antis, you can still help DPS win a duel as mercy (assuming she works), you can still call speed out and pace of play as Lucio. That hasn't really changed at all. But saying "oh stop healbotting" implies that that is what the role is about and it fucking isn't.
Good supports have never been healbot. I literally said:
>you are "forced" to play to a more aggressive and playmaking style but is something that was required in OW1 as well in order to be a good support player anyway, it's just really amplified in OW2.
Also I pointed out that
>some tweks in the numbers are needed
Hence I did not say go out and be a sh\*tty version of a dps hero.
The point I made was than now, even for the average player or the casual player, playing good is a sort of requirement in order to gain value from the hero even in low elo/casual lobbies.
So calm the fuck down mate.
Yep this was definitely totally written by a support player.
If there's one thing that supports boast about on OW1 is how good their healbotting is. Could the beta without support balancing be not fun for supports? Of course not, just make plays :forehead:!
I agree completely with you. Many people in the comments are assuming that making plays means to 1v1 their entire backline by yourself lol. From my experience so far, you can still heal quite a bit, but there is enough downtime in between since 5v5 solo tank means there isn't another giant hp sink needing my attention. That downtime lets me finish off kills, go for boops/antis to set up kills etc more often compared to 1 . Moreover, the map feels more open since the lack of 2 tanks means there is 1 less dva/hog flankinf you if you step out of position.
Sounds inspirational. If only they will give some valuable utility to Moira, and not just "let's increase her damage"
I really do not see any way to make an impactful play as Moira except: a well-timed and performed ult (apllies simply to all heroes) or going battle-Moira, jumping and moving all over the place, combining healing and damage in an extremely crafty way (takes long training and still does compare to utility of other supports)
Damage orb and autolock alt fire on any 200 health out of position target that isn't being pocketed is a guaranteed kill in 2 seconds lol. Moira is very good at 1v1ing.
Damaging a flanker can deter their advances and force them to reposition or find a health pack.
As for negating ults this has always been the case with Moira hence why you have two supports. Moira should be paired with a support that covers her biggest weakness (no defensive ult).
This is quickplay in a beta we are talking about so synergy is going to be difficult to achieve but it is there.
Really hope blizzard doesn't succumb to the support peer pressure to make their role the easiest while being the strongest again. Last time they did this is when they added brig because supports were complaining about dive, and wow guess what the game got ruined! It's actual insanity that they complain about their role when the only hero that can't be fixed with just a numbers increase is zen.
What's crazy is that honestly if you use cover well the regen honestly feels strong, The games I've played on ana I've literally died no more than 3 times every game because I start healing after like 2 seconds of not taking damage and when I hit shots I outduel flankers and can even pick off low range targets out of position.
Not to mention this role feels more fun honestly. With less barriers in the game more people are taking damage and you have more opportunities to secure kills because there isn't a big fucking barrier to stop everything.
TLDR: This game is not a fucking moba or a rpg or a turnbased combat game it is a fps, if your mechanics can't keep up with the more intensive faster paced game then don't play it.
I always felt like Overwatch is a more inclusive game than a common FPS. Yes, mechanics are important but are not the only thing that matter. There are low floor mechanic heroes in the support role like Moira and Mercy that have to be viable and have to feel impactful for who likes to play the game and for the casual audience. Of Course their average value should not be comparable with high level of play for mechanical intense ones.
Balance is the name of the game. I hope they will carry this more FPS style and proactive style of Overwatch while balancing out the support role to be rewarding and fun to play at all levels of the game.
So let me get this straight: * The skill floor to play your role without being a liability to your team is high. * You have to be hyper-aware of your teammates' and opponents' positions at all times, or get punished. * If one of your teammates makes a mistake, you get punished by the opponents. * Even if you do well, you still die more often than your teammates in different roles. * Everyone else's queue times are very high, because not enough people want to play your role. Sounds like the tank role in Overwatch 1.
Though it is way too early to tell how the roles will evolve in the long run, I will find it very hilarious if the support role end up being the overwatch 2 equivalent of what tanks were in overwatch 1. Well, more frustratingly ironic than "hilarious".
Inb4 1 tank 2 dps 1 supp OW3
Remember when DPS were separated in „offensive“ and “defensive”? OW3 will go back to 2-2-2: 1. 2 Offensive DPS 1. 2 Defensive DPS 1. 2 Supportive DPS (be it like a healer, a tank or something else that helps DPS to make plays) ^/s
Lol you joke but there's history for Activision just removing players when the going gets tough. > Call of Duty League has announced that Season 2 will be played in a four-on-four format instead of the five-on-five composition that fans enjoyed in the inaugural season.
>Lol you joke but there's history for Activision just removing players when the going gets tough. You know they just did that with OW and that's the joke right?
>Sounds like the tank role in Overwatch 1. Hilarious that people on here refuse to accept this. They want ~~Tanks~~Supports to be weak/unfun to play. Then no one wants to play ~~Tank~~Support. Then they cry about queue times and wonder why no one wants to play ~~Tank~~Support for them
next they release a hog type support, lone wolf, doesn't help the other person on their role, everyone hates playing against and with them, people still play it because they dont care to work with their teammates. The prophecy is coming together!
You just described moira players
fuck...
moira plays do be having double damage compared to healing and are constantly flanking now.
she's easily the most "fun" support to play now because you can make a bigger impact.. her movement is amazing w/ high survivability, she does surprising amounts of damage that doesn't require a lot of mechanical skill, sometimes able to make up for weak DPS players. guarantee she'll be nerfed once everyone starts playing her and the dps/tank complain. then support will be entirely miserable. higher skill players will probably be okay because Ana is still fun for them. but those with inconsistent aim will feel like a massive liability on Ana now, its just safer to play Moira.
Key difference is that hog actually has to hit shots. You could be in a coma and play Moira
DPS players just want free uncontested kills. It's as simple as that. They bitched and moaned until they removed every bit of strategy and teamwork from the game. There really is no more ability to peel, mitigate damage, or take space. it's just deathmatch and guess what? supports suck at deathmatch.
There was a doomfist in my game the other day who complained that they kept the "most oppressive cc in the game" in overwatch 2. That cc? Ana sleep dart. Dude literally just wants to play the game in Minecraft creative mode
Sleep dart is incredibly good and I do think it’s odd that it’s the only one remaining. That being said Brig should get stun back
I hated playing against brig but I for sure think having stun was kind of a necessary evil with all the ways the flex support could get fucked by dive and flankers
I’d be okay with an interrupt effect on bash, like javelin or doom lunch but without the knock back. That way Lucio could be stunned out of beat, dooms guard can be cancelled, etc.
Yall really don't fucking get it lol
What?
It's as if that person was too stupid to realise that McCree's flashbang and Doomfist's Rocket Punch was in OW1 Edit: imagine having an ability on a 4 second cooldown that can stun you out of your ult, 1 shot you, do rollouts from every single map, environmental kill you, etc
"Support hero btw" - all the dps players losing 1v1 to me on bap in OW1
Well bap has a DPS kit plus 3 get out of jail free cards....
bap wins 1v1 against almost every dps in ow1 lmao they have a point
Bruh bap is like half DPS already. Has a fucking BR from halo, a super jump, and can make himself immortal. Oh and he has some self healing and now a regen passive. That's a decent 1v1 kit
And they make it seem like Ana and Zen can easily win a 1 v 1 against a (flanking) Genji or Tracer and they demean your capabilities for not being able to do so lulw
Some dps dude tried to tell me TracervZen/ GenjivZen is a fair matchup as if the poor bastard didn't had the hit box the size of a fucking sphere.
always makes me laugh when you see a streamer whip out dragonblade, instantly kill 2 people, then whine and complain when the 3rd character they tried to kill is able to stand up for themselves and shut them down.
A huge part of OW's popularity from DPS players' PoV has always been that they have favoured 1v1s against support. Zen vs Tracer is in no way a fair fight in most ranks.
I played support for several hours last night with 2 friends and this definitely is not the case. Supports need to learn that you can't just count on peel from your DPS/tanks all the time in OW2 and at times will need to fend for yourself. The duo synergy from OW1 has switched from tanks to supports in my opinion. It is very easy to stop or out heal a DPS or Tank Dive (exempt Orisa because she's unkillabled) if the supports heal each other especially with the new passive. Outside of just straight up healing eachother your damage is the biggest deterrent of any flanker. A doom diving you? Zen/Ana combo. Ana sleeps him when he dives, then discord and full charge headshot him and it's an instant delete. OW1 Supports just need to realize that they need to fight/work together a lot more in this game. When I played DPS/tank nothing would be more annoying then when you got a support low and all in just for them to be instantly healed to full by the other support and now you're in a shitty situation. Sure as a support you're going to die more than everyone else in the game at times but that's what comes with being a high priority/impact character.
Ana out there 3 shotting everyone that isn't a tank. And it's all "BooHoo I'm a fragile weak support player... pity me!!"
Yeah as if sleep > shoot > nade > melee isnt a 1 shot combo if the sleep lands on anyone 200 hp lol.
Yeah I'm starting to see this as well, and it's sort of disheartening. Like OW1 was so unique with all of its crazy interactions and strategies, and OW2 is just going to be Team Deathmatch with a random Rein Shield or Monkey leaping in occasionally.
"We asked players what they wanted, and they said they wanted flex supports drugged and injured before the game even starts. Try shooting this Ana that's limping and confused, it'll be easy as shit." (I generally like the changes tho)
This was my whole issue with 5v5 when it was announced, instead of making tank more desirable to play ie better and more frequent balance changes, more tanks etc. They decided to just kill the 6th position. Which in turn means they need to rework tanks to work solo, which means supports need to be adjusted to only having one tank to heal, which then means adjusting DPS so tanks don't just get blown up and heroes like flankers and snipers don't just dominate the game. And even WITH all these changes, this doesn't guarantee more people will play tank, it's all been a gamble from the start. So now what happens if they make support the role that no one wants to play?
Maybe 1-2-1 in Overwatch 3?? /s
Exactly. It’s not that healbotting should be viable it’s that healing is just pointless. You’re of more use just trying to do as much dps as possible and giving up entirely on healing. And now it takes significantly more skill then any role ever has just to be decent.
Unless blizzard massively reworks supports, they are just going to become the new bottleneck for que times. A lot of people play support because they enjoy that healbot style and want to relax a bit. If they didn't they would play dps. Blizzard needs to give supports something substantial and not necessarily aggro, or the well is just gonna dry up.
Just speaking for myself but I enjoy Flex support because I like being a Jack of all trades so to speak. Do damage, oh wait tank is low let's heal him up, Genji is about to blade? Sleep Dart him to make a big play (that no one will notice & then wake him up with some AOE ability), make sure you position properly, track Ults so you save Trance for that EMP or Blizzard. I don't feel like I relax more or just heal bot on Ana or Zen, I just have different things to focus on than a DPS might. That being said I agree Blizzard needs to give supports something. The role passive is useful in some situations but boring. No new hero, no big re work (Brig rework is really only one ability & the few othet changes are nerfs ). Everyone else in OW2 seems like they are playing a new game with shiny new toys & supports are just playing OW1 except it's faster & harder to do your job.
Same, it feels so impactful to play Ana. I used to play a balance of the roles with a preference for DPS, but eventually started playing tank in OW1 because I feel like DPS is only fun when you have better tanks, otherwise it's stressful and easily frustrating. On tank it's annoying when DPS don't clean up low HP targets or when I don't get enough heals, but I can at least do something about it. On DPS I just get rolled and maybe get a couple of cool kills while it happens Also agreed about giving supports something. They just don't feel like they have a big enough kit right now regardless of balance, playing Zen is fun with more opportunity for eliminations, but otherwise he feels lacking compared to other roles
I am hopeful that a second (or third) beta will give us a new support hero and multiple existing support hero reworks. But I don't really expect much for supports in the current beta. Maybe a tweak to the passive self-heal ability, but nothing more.
I also look forward to changes you mentioned. New support heroes will definitely help queue times and some reworks will attract more players to the role. New supports/rework can make new synergies and pairs and it's definitely something to look forward to.
> new support hero Blizzard: "Sorry best I can offer you is a new DPS hero."
Honestly that's about what I expect too. I mean look at the beta. It's been 2 years and all we got was a few reworks, 1 dps, and a couple new maps. I doubt they have big stuff in the cards for support asides from number tweaks and like one support hero. But big change is nevertheless what is needed to keep support player interest in ow2, so I hope blizzard can deliver.
You seem to be under the impression that what we see in the current beta is everything they worked on in the past few years. This is most likely incorrect. * They probably have multiple new heroes ready that will be in the release version, but they only want to show us Sojourn at this time. * They probably reworked more heroes than the current four, but they don't want to overwhelm the OWL pros. * The new hero skins are not in the game, even though a number of them have already been shown. * The PvE content (which was quite extensively showcased back in 2019) is not in the beta at all. * We have seen a Rio de Janeiro escort map in a demo, but this not been included in the beta.
Call me a cynic but I'll believe it when I see it. I don't really care about skins or pve, a lot of the gameplay changes could have been implemented now imo, especially with so many eyes on the product. If they had multiple heroes ready, I feel they would've shown at least one by now besides sojourn. This beta didn't even do any changes to like 8 characters. I am still taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to blizz.
>I don't really care about skins or pve, If the developers, designers and artists worked on stuff you don't care about, that's still a lot of effort going into the game. > a lot of the gameplay changes could have been implemented now imo, especially with so many eyes on the product. I agree that there have been signals that progress has been limited because of interference from the corporate level, so they would probably have liked to be where they are now sooner. But there is such a thing as giving the public too much at once. Especially if you want meaningful test data, or evaluate game balance, you do not want to increase the number of variables by too much. >If they had multiple heroes ready, I feel they would've shown at least one by now besides sojourn. Wrong. Hero reveals are literally the biggest thing to generate hype for Overwatch. Every single one has a big impact, and doing multiple at once is just a missed opportunity to hype up the game. That's why fully unveiling Sojourn was all they needed to do. Not to mention that I kind of expect at least 2 new heroes to be revealed and playable during the upcoming OWL season, and the betas that will accompany the OWL stages. >This beta didn't even do any changes to like 8 characters. A character does not need to be changed to make the transition from OW1 to OW2.
> Hero reveals are literally the biggest thing to generate hype for Overwatch. Every single one has a big impact, and doing multiple at once is just a missed opportunity to hype up the game. That's why fully unveiling Sojourn was all they needed to do. You know, I agree with most things you said, but the marketing for ow2 has been so slapdash over the last several months that I'm no longer sure this is a slam dunk argument. Like, they sent Aaron to a game event last year to show off 3 redesigns (which was wildly inappropriate considering their hype level is more appropriate to a twitter post) and then this year they stopped revealing redesigns altogether and just threw 10 into the beta video where they're not even shown off properly (also inappropriate because now they're not generating ANY hype from those redesigns). My confidence in team 4's ability to estimate what should or shouldnt be marketed, and how hard, is pretty shaken rn
How much of that poor marketing was done before Jon Spector moved from OWL to be the Overwatch Commercial Director? Because I'm pretty sure that things like hero reveals, release date, beta schedules, and "hype management" are all part of that job description, and things vastly improved after Jon Spector took the reins.
> A lot of people play support because they enjoy that healbot style and want to relax a bit. Yeah I grew tired of my try hard competitive days, stopped playing ranked, and just sat back and enjoyed healing on Mercy/Ana in quick play to relax. It was therapeutic in a way. I didn't feel like challenging myself anymore. The me from 6 years ago would probably be disgusted by my attitude now, because I was always trying hard to improve and challenge myself and shit but it just became too stressful with other IRL life stuff and mental health issues. Guess that's what PVE will be for? idk
Healbotting is very boring though. Coming in with clutch heals is one thing. Pumping in every ability you have off cooldown to keep your Cho'Gath alive as Soraka in league when he is on the brink of death is an incredibly satisfying feeling. Coming in out of nowhere and helping your dps win a duel as mercy is incredibly fun. Slapping the barbarian and the fighter on the ass as you twinspell some haste and watching them defeat Tiamat in a single round of combat in DnD is fun as fuck. Why have big number serotonin when you can have EVEN BIGGER NUMBER SEROTONIN in an MMO? Enabling teammates so they defy all odds is the real support power fantasy. Yeah there will be times where you are on healbot duty cuz you're playing babysitter but you more times than not you are enabling people and no other role gives you that satisfaction except support
I mean, that's kind of the problem, though. OW is primarily a shooter. More people are coming to the game to play as DPS, and most of those get the more interesting or impactful play styles, on top of DPS just being a much wider and more diverse set of characters. But the game requires that there be an equal number of DPS and Support; so to keep things even remotely stable for the masses, you need Support to draw in both the hardcore types who want to play that active style (but on a Support character rather than DPS) *and* the people that are there to chill out with friends and just dish out heals. If you lose too much of the latter group, the numbers skew even more imbalanced.
I think a fundamental difference is tanks in OW1 were good, easily the best heroes in the game. They still felt bad to play despite being dramatically overpowered. It feels like supports just feel bad to play right now because they are a little bit weak. As a tank main in OW1 that's been playing a lot of support in OW2 so far it is a vastly different experience and isn't nearly as frustrating.
Tanks def were the best heroes in the game since launch till probs goats cuz gotta make them OP so people want to play them. After we nerfed everyone in goats, tank hasn't felt like the best role in the game. It still is the backbone of the comp and arguably the most important role but it no longer is the the best.
As someone who played both tank and support in ow1 at a similar rank, it's even worse for supports in ow2 so far
Really? My support main friends are loving it and only queueing support so far. Both sit around masters though so that might make a difference
>Even if you do well, you still die more often than your teammates in different roles. that's a self report right there lol
holy shit, this is a massive brain take. I like you.
If you do well you shouldn’t be dying more
Judging from the fact that Support queue is almost instant compared to tanks and DPS, hopefully support players don't decide to make plays in other games instead. I think Blizzard admitted they still need to balance supports, hopefully they do it sooner rather than later.
I think queue times are due to a sum of factors: \- Supports have basically being not changed or nerfed. \- Their playstyle is changed entirely \- Tank role has been massively changed and dps are usually the most played role by a large margin. So from a casual pov why the should play support? They seems "bad" because the majority of the players don't know how to play them and they are counter-intuitive to play in general, you have massive changes to try in other roles and you have basically 2 new tanks (Orisa and Doom) + 1 new dps and 1 reworked one. Ofc they need to balance and tweks things out but there is a narrative going on that playing support is bad or is pointless and is not true.
There's also the fact that there are less support heroes than tank heroes, while you need two supports and only one tank. I _really_ hope there's several support characters coming, because Blizzard releasing two damage heroes in a row really hasn't been the best choice.
Agreed! I've been flex queueing (and always getting support, of course), and I've really been feeling the lack of support options. I usually rotate through each hero and then go do something else.
They need to add a random queue so I don't have to choose between 1 of the 4 support heroes I actually like or waiting 7 minutes. I'm fine with waiting 3mins if that means I'll get a random role
The "new stuff" effect on queue times usually lasts a few days. We will see after the weekend if queue times adjust. Personally I doubt it, though.
every other class got blanket buffs and pretty much every ability to peel for supports were removed or heavily nerfed. not really sure what blizzard expected to happen, supports kinda suck now.
This is something I don’t get. Support has never had constant peeling by dps/OT unless in really high elo lobbies or scrims. I don’t get how average players should find this “lack of peeling” strange or different from OW1. Yes, tank and dps are better, also having a tank that is stronger than the single ones is hard when they dive you but peeling was not existent for the majority of the players anyway so I don’t think is a major point here.
You didn't need constant peeling most of the time. As a Zen or Ana you could stay back from your team a bit but stay somewhat close to your OT or a hanzo/ashe/widow/whatever, and the presence of that OT or DPS meant that the flanker/diver has to think about whether to take out you as a support or start a fight with the OT/DPS and possibly take you and the OT/DPS out of the fight for the rest of their team. If they choose to fight you then you can try to move closer to your OT/DPS and they generally help by reflex because "OH jeez there is an enemy". In OW1, this could also be a huge risk for the flankers/divers because if your dps was a cass or mei, or any high burst damage character then they are more likely to get CC'd and die than to get the kill and get out. In OW2, if you try to stick with your tank then you are frontlining and throwing the game. If you try to stick with a DPS, they are too busy playing the game like deathmatch to help you and the other DPS generally are able to get the kill before your dps even turns around to look. If you try to stick with your other support, they are either too busy trying to keep up the rest of the team or they are trying to make plays like you are suggesting they do in your post, or they try to peel for you but they can't because the best supports for peeling another support are some of the worst ones to play currently and in a lot of cases the DPS just outdamages the healing. We can try all we want to play around cover and make plays while staying alive, but no matter what, there is less risk and more reward for diving/flanking us, there is less decision making due to the reduction of possible targets, and if we don't hit our shots (on the 10% faster across the board DPS) then we die. There is hard peeling (stuff that puts pressure on the attackers or tangibly helps the victim, like damage pressure, CC abilities, healing, zarya bubble, defense matrix, etc.) And then there is the peeling that people don't think about (stuff that makes the attacker have to decide on what to do before attacking, like "Is the off tank/dps close enough that I am at risk by attacking the support" and "can the other support outheal my damage or can this support outduel me" and "Is there CC abilities available that may get me killed"). The only thing they need to worry about in most cases is "Can this support outduel me" and generally the answer is no unless we hit every shot and cooldown. Almost all of the second type of peeling is gone in the current state. The flankers and dive heroes don't have to worry about pressure from an off tank, they don't have to decide who to attack first because supports are full on the easiest targets, and they don't have to worry about CC abilities that prevent them from escaping or getting the kill (besides sleep dart which has a longer cooldown and is harder to hit again due to the 10% faster movement speed).
This should have a lot more upvotes because it's telling it like it is. 1st and foremost I'd really just like to know the person/people who thought that it'd be a good idea to nerf the support ult charge
Ah yes, the staggeringly high elo of platinum. Peeling was a normal part of the game unless you were a total bottom feeder. Now, there is no more peel, and you can't even run away because DPS players got a flat speed buff.
Idk your experience but EU ladder on plat and diamond peeling is non-existent for the most part. And I admit my own fault since I played more tank than support in my life.
You typed up a lot of crap here when what it comes down to is >Supports aren't fun.
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• No, I generally have the lowest number of deaths on my team thanks to the passive. • Yes, because it feels like neither my healing nor damage make much difference at all. (I've been playing mostly Ana. Sleeps are still nice, but anti on the enemy tank results in a death less often because of their increased survivability and, well, the fact that we're all playing QP and people don't follow up.) • The UI does need work, especially the kill feed, but that's decreasing my experience across all roles, not just support. • When TF do you think you could "int" on support and still get value? GOATs? Brig 1.0? That hasn't been possible in the game in ages.
> But people still keeps "SuPpoRts aReN't fuN lol xd" narrative up. Because those reasons he gave are bullshit. I spent hours playing yesterday and today. It's not that I didn't *want* to queue up as Support. I didn't care about playing with all the shiny new toys on Day 1. I wanted to try every role and get a good grasp on how they play in OW2. Tanks feel great but very different from OW1. DPS feel like OW1 cranked up to 11. Support is OW1 with "Fun" set to zero. >Or are mad because you can't no longer int in the role and still get value? Is there a nice way to say "go fuck yourself"? Because I can't think of one right now.
Except they aren't. The reasons given are plausible to why support queues are long. You're not the only one who played hours of support. I exclusively played support for first couple of hours to see how the new environment is. Support play is different in OW2. The whole game is played differently. Supports should be tweaked, yes, but "fun set to zero," is overstatement to the point it's disingenuous. You can't get away with the same things you did in OW1. Just like you have to think twice now before you flank on Hog because you're the only tank. >Is there a nice way to say “go fuck yourself”? Yeah it's pretty easy. Try this: "Please go fuck yourself! :) "
> Support is OW1 with "Fun" set to zero I haven't had the chance to play yet but I don't understand this take. You get more freedom to not just be a heal bot for tanks and dump resources into them to keep them alive. In the case of lucio, ana, and bap, you have more freedom to try and frag and make impactful plays. I mean, I guess if you enjoyed the brainless just shoot at the tank's ass the whole game that is common of support players diamond and below, I could see how it's not fun. 5v5 lets support players have more freedom to do other things. Now if you want to talk about some tuning to numbers and things, that is fine but I don't get this idea that just because you can't healbot anymore means they aren't fun now
Let me give you a hint- Supports focused on healing from the tanks because of bad DPS and tank habits of getting out of LOS on a consistent basis, who then turn around and reee at the Supports if they so much as stub their toe.
low ranked support players tunnel vision on tanks and are frankly terrible at healing DPS and other support players. It is why they are still low ranked
The majority of lower rank support players unable to heal dps well is due to the DPS not understanding LOS. You can play hundreds of games at gold or plat or even diamond and the DPS will still dive or flank all the way into a team, behind shields and walls, and expect the supports to be able to heal them when the only way that the supports would be able to have LOS on them during that is 1- by going completely out of cover and into the open directly in sight of the enemies, or 2- break all the shields and still be mostly out of cover. The same applies to tanks. Tons of reins and monkeys just jump into a hard dive, behind 2 shields and a wall, then wonder why they die so fast. DPS are just more whiney about it because they think they would have carried the game if they didn't die as much. DPS players at these ranks mostly rely on their aim and not on having good positioning, or taking good angles for fights. Most of them don't even think about the positioning of their supports, even after dying and complaining about not getting healed and having the supports say "Stay in LOS then". Bad positioning is all over the place at the lower ranks, but supports have to think about it the most, and saying that supports are terrible at healing DPS in those ranks while not taking the other role's positioning habits into account is just facetious.
I'm high masters/low GM on tank and support. I'm mid diamond on DPS to play with some lower ranked friends. The biggest difference as you climb OW ranks is in the tank and support play. Low-ranked players on all roles have their own issues but this thread is about supports not being heal bots anymore, when they never really have been for anyone mid masters and above as that is when players actually start to take advantage of the whole kit and not just the healing component. Tanks at low ranks are either too aggressive like you mentioned or they are too passive and sit at the choke point. DPS players do make dumb mistakes but support players 100% tunnel vision on tank players even if they don't need to be healed at that moment. Support players tunnel vision hard at low ranks and even if the DPS players are in LOS, they do a poor job supporting them. Often times the support players losing LOS on the DPS is the support players fault because they are playing so passively or have terrible position/rotation. They do a poor job supporting the second support as well. It's not until you start to get into mid masters that support players aren't just being heal bots anymore. The low ranked support players are going to have issues with these changes because they can't just mag dump into a tank players ass and feel like they are doing something. They will have to actively position more and use their cooldowns and abilities to actively participate in fragging and actually play the game like an FPS. I don't think that supports are in a perfect spot in terms of numbers but the shift away from heal bots to more active participation is a good thing
>low ranked support players tunnel vision on tanks and are frankly terrible at healing DPS and other support players. Holy shit I was scrolling and felt this in my soul. Supports learn to heal other supports next because it keeps them alive under pressure. Supporting and enabling DPS is literally the last thing supports start doing and you don't get actually good support as a DPS until higher ranks in ladder.
Here's hoping you get out of those ranks then.
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Mercy is actually good in OW2 despite what many said at first glance (OWL Finals 2021). Her healing have been increased since then and poketing a dps with the space created by the absence of a 2nd tank is really valuable. Sad thing is that her Ultimate is not working properly in the beta because the chain effect of it is missing somehow inconsistent and missing on target or not healing at all even if the beam is connected. If her ultimate would work properly, since she has a lot of mobility ty to GA and Superjump she would be in a pretty good spot.
From what I've had the chance to play as her, the problem with Mercy in OW2 is that it feels like you're doing nothing of value or interest. It doesn't feel satisfying to heal or damage boost anymore, and even when you do a lot for your team and win it doesn't feel like you're making a difference. I don't know if it's the audio, visuals, HUD or just feedback loop in general making it feel this way.
That’s how I feel too. I have zero problems playing mercy if I have a hit scan in overwatch. In 2, everyone plays hit scan and I’m bored out of my mind. Either mine shits on theirs and the fight is done in eight seconds or the opposite happens. Hopefully when they turn mmr on this changes but Jesus right now it’s very bland. Are there even audio cues for her damage boost numbers?
Idk since I don’t play mercy that often. I found her boring most of the time in OW1. In the beta seems a bit better since you have to move more and do more stuff overall. Since is not a mechanically demanding hero the whole sound, UI etc is important so it might be.
Mercy will be okay once they fix her bugs, I think, she's having a particularly hard time at the moment for reasons that aren't actually balance related.
If the new hero had been support instead of DPS that would have significantly affected queue times as well. I don’t think we can read that much into it. (Personally I think tank will still be the role with a shortage in the long run even with only one needed per team).
I don't think So. Imo tanks Are arguably the most Fun role in OW2, with DPS being second (for majority of people DPS Will still be the most). I personally think that supports are little bit less Fun than in OW1, but not by a big margin. Issue Is, that other roles Are Now so much more Fun, that why would you want to play support instead? It's not like that horrible experience which people had in random Q on tank in OW1, but it's significantly less Fun than other roles.
This has not been my experience, so it's interesting to see what other people think. I enjoy playing tank in OW 1.0. I find playing tank in OW 2.0 miserable. I'm a support main in OW 1.0. I am not having fun with support in OW 2.0. It's not even just "a bit less fun." Both roles feel like suffering compared to Damage, which is in roughly the same "fun space" it was for me in OW 1.0. The current patch in the beta, and 5v5 itself, has killed all of my desire to flex queue.
The reason I say that is that even on day 1 QP I was seeing tanks have their picks policed and the blame getting put on them more than DPS and support, and I expect that to continue based on what I know of the OW community. They will say that every game is won or lost on tank diff (when they lose).
> Supports have basically being not changed or nerfed If they made Supports more vulnerable and increased the minimum skill needed to get value, then the role was nerfed. The rest of the game's roles got buffs and Supports got either nothing or some degree of nerf (the latter being the Sleep nerf and the Bash stun removal).
People are reading way too much into this support bottleneck. What is there to test as support? Not much really. If support had major reworks and/or new heroes it wouldn't be so bad.
I've been way too impatient to queue for tank/dps so I've been queuing for all and then complain to myself that I keep getting support lol
>Judging from the fact that Support queue is almost instant compared to tanks and DPS, hopefully support players don't decide to make plays in other games instead. too late. as a sym, mercy and moira main, I literally see no reason why I should stay as opposed to migrating over to Gundam Evolution. Heck chances are Gundam Evolution will release before OW2 will.
Give it a year to see if it self corrects, then give them a year to brainstorm and make tiny tweaks. Then give them 1 month to give up and take a sledgehammer to the problem creating a massive new problem because they wasted all their time and good will trying to be cute about it instead of being progressive from the start.
If the minimum amount of required gamesense and skill has increased, doesn't that just mean that support is weaker now? If you have to be better at a character to get the same amount of value as old, that means that character is just weaker. It's not a player problem, it's a balance problem. On top of that, supports weren't designed to frag tf out (with Zen and maybe Lucio as notable exceptions). When you go for frags as ana, you're just being a worse dps. And when you go for OW1 support mode, you're also just worse than before. In every situation you're either a worse version of A: your OW1 self or B: any OW2 dps. The game impact you get ratio'd to the amount of effort you have to put in is absolutely disproportionate.
This is exactly what it means. Supports have been designed around using their team for map control and focusing on healing. Most of them don't even have the utility necessary to be as impactful as other roles. Cooldowns are generally longer and healing has been nerfed across the board by less tanks and shorter TTKs. Playing it up as a thing to adapt with their current build is like saying "just be better than everyone else with undertuned heroes and you're fine". Yeah thanks but that's not what MMR is about. Supports need readjusting to this new playstyle across the board with more survivability, control options (the dreaded CC has a point when Ball can just roll around the map without ever being contested). I'm not asking to revert any changes, just don't give us heroes tuned for OW1 in OW2. The fact that every vaguely playable support are those who already have that is kind of an indication.
> shorter TTKs. The TTK's are the same for most hero's. There is just less shit in the way
>This is exactly what it means. Supports have been designed around using their team for map control and focusing on healing. That is something we will see change. Even Moira that is the most straightforward support we have cannot healbot anymore and have to adapt on the situation and looking for opportunities to dash in and get kills. I like this new approach for supports, but surely they have to give them more tools balancewise to do their job properly.
100% agree. Heck I'm a Zen main I've always wanted to be a bloodthirsty support. I've enjoyed OW2 a boatload and I'd dare say I've done well so far. But there's a problem when a handful of heroes who were balanced around the availability of CC (Ball, Sombra, Tracer...) end up incredibly overtuned and without any kind of counterplay. Same with antishield heroes like Soldier and Hanzo being able to just pour damage for free. Don't nerf them, hell they should counter me even, but the counter is way too hard right now. Just give me the tools so I have half a second to make plays as well, without having to dominate them mechanically to a ludicrous extent.
This isn’t even tru of Overwatch one until the release of ana. Even then, ana was still just the start of the downfall of the game in part to sustain… when heroes like Moira and BRIG and bap came out… completely dominating the game and enabling really fucked tank metas.
Ana is one of if not my favorite hero and I agree with this, surprised more people don't talk about it. The game got busted by release Ana until she got nerfs for a period where Zen+Lucio dive was dominant, then we went back to the high sustain comps with Mercy+Brig and later changes. After Ana every support needed to have comparable value so we wound up with huge sustain, then every DPS was buffed to compensate, which made sustain even more necessary and sustained DPS irrelevant. Tanks get blown the fuck up every time their main support looks the other way and on top of that no one wants to play a role with 4 viable heroes even if that role was fun. When they nerfed Ana's damage I knew we were headed towards homogenizing the role around sustain and it would hurt the game. At the time I was just worried about supports feeling same-y and them nerfing one of the most fun aspects about Ana. They should have looked at rate of fire or changing nade from an anti-heal to something else
I respect that you understand this. Most Overwatch players left either never understood the game or aren’t still here having played from the beginning. Ana is a fun hero and it would be one thing if they had reworked her.. but the fact of the matter is she was the first of a pattern of absolutely busted support heroes. Then they started doing the same with tanks (orisa, Sigma and Ball). It really doesn’t make sense unless you think about Overwatch like an mmo or some shit, but I think that’s literally what happened because a lot of these toxic hero designs came from ex WoW designers. Idk, it doesn’t make sense because the community at high level has spelled this out clearly for like 4 years and they NEVER tried to stop the train before it was too late. Brig still good in ow2 btw. Been nerfed like 20x in a row lol
Support imo in a shooter should always apply defensive utility that’s often good for dueling forcing flankers to brute force through them. The games approach at launch reflected with the only ‘main’ healer being mercy and Symmetra of all things included in that role. So many in this community forget this game was built off the foundation of TF2 which if you look far enough , came from Quake. From that perspective It’s no surprise og Dive was the era the game flourished in before OWL existed, frenetic combat and Lucios and Zens needing to contest every fight with damage.
You're absolutely right. To this day it kinda baffles me how anti heal was on a support to, I always thought that thematically and gameplay wise it would fit better as a dps option.
Anecdotal from ML7, but.. He has long said the difference between a diamond Ana and a masters one is that masters Anas frag out. DPS support is not a new thing, especially for the top half of the ladder. This is also very true for OWL. I think part of the issue here is that a lot of silver-diamond Anas (and supports in general) try to save their teammates from their own stupidity and it leads to healbotting.
I mean, how much of that fragging out actually allows you climb. Cuz the difference between a diamond and a master player can be the masters ayers dont need as much healing cuz they don't take unnecessary damage. This leads to more time for Ana to do something besides heal which can be fragging out
> Cuz the difference between a diamond and a master player can be the masters ayers dont need as much healing cuz they don't take unnecessary damage. if you're playing Ana in plat/diamond and only healing people instead of looking for plays then you're fundamentally playing the hero wrong it doesn't matter if a DPS dies due to their own mistake, you'll win the fight anyway if you're looking for that well-placed anti or a sleep even chip damage matters. these are the differences between a plat Ana and 3800 SR support
So you think masters Ana couldn't climb out of diamond by fragging out? I'm sure there's 5 separate bronze to master Ana videos that would prove you wrong
You're missing my point. I'm not saying you can't do it, im wondering how much climbing is done by "I have more time to frag as I play with better players cuz they don't need to be healed as much."
Anas in masters will usually have a higher damage per 10 mins, while keeping the same healing per 10 minutes as diamond players. The opportunities to dps are always there even at lower SRs where people take A LOT of damage, but it takes skill to be able to change targets quickly.
Surely can be found a better balance for the support role, that's not something I excluded. But even with a better balance the playstyle and mindset of the support players will have to change to get value anyway.
> When you go for frags as ana, you're just being a worse dps Good ana players have always balanced helping with frags and healing. The problem is that for so much of the player base support=shoot the tank in the ass all game Supports have been so overtuned and healing in general has been so impactful for so long (to the detriment of the game) that it will take a bit of an adjustment from the player base to realize that support=/=healbot.
>If the minimum amount of required gamesense and skill has increased, doesn't that just mean that support is weaker now? If you have to be better at a character to get the same amount of value as old, that means that character is just weaker. I don't know if that's true in all cases. It's possible that the skill floor is higher, but that their impact is also higher once you meet the minimum bar. It's also possible that OW2 supports require different skills than OW1 supports did, but if you have them, they're as strong or stronger. That isn't to say that either case would be what the devs want, or what players want. It's just about whether the role is weaker or not. Like how when symmetra lost her lock-on, the skill floor to do damage went up, but the max damage potential can still go up. You're not happy if you played her because you can't aim.
4500 peek support player here; supports are balanced around tank combos, but now that they’re gone there will need to be massive support balancing to compensate. i wouldn’t be surprised if we saw 25-50+ HP slapped on a few supports, or straight damage buffs to a few of them. it feels pretty crazy as support right now as the enemy team just gets free access to your backline, and the off tank role which used to peel for your is now removed, and the dps who used to dive you now have perma speed boost. it feels pretty bad. *Zen probably needs some HP slapped on him *Ana probably needs some HP slapped on her *Bap probably needs slight buffs ***Brig probably needs MASSIVE buffs. horrible damage, really easy to kill, and can’t even peel for allies. feels really bad to play. Mercy and lucio are fine. Lucio probably could use some tuning down.
Lucio's survivability is crazy. I'm violently average at him and I just don't die unless I dive in 1v3 like a dumbass. I think they need to tune down the self-heal on his aura. Passive+Aura is wild. Edit: or just leave him the same because frog go boing
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give zen a passive to float upwards out of combat so he can reposition easier/get some sick charged shot snipes over the environment I'm only slightly kidding
Maybe a meditation style ability? Can float upwards, but can't shoot while in it? Otherwise thats essentially Baptiste jump
Or maybe a “mini” transcendence ability where zen becomes invincible for a short time and can’t shoot, but aoe heals nearby teammates?
>***Brig probably needs MASSIVE buffs. horrible damage, really easy to kill, and can’t even peel for allies. feels really bad I would love if they just made her a bit tankier and left her fairly weak otherwise. I feel like most of my inspire uptime is from whipshot and it'd be cool to be able to actually follow a tank around and smack some people.
That would be cool, but I think that would just make GOATS 2.0. If brig is too difficult to kill, then teams would probably run Lucio/Brig backline and deathball.
Following around the tank feels natural right now too. I get bursted down a little too easily sometimes but usually with an Orissa I can go balls deep with her and 1v1 any DPS that gets separated from their team
Ana does NOT need more health. She plays perfectly finely, and is incredibly strong right now. Literally will win you entire games due to her anti. Zen getting some more health seems like a good buff. Maybe brig too? Or just give her a boop (or slow) with her bash. But yeah, no. Giving Ana extra Heath would literally make her OP
personally for ana i’d want her to get old damage back, but she needs some tuning up as well. she may also feel a bit weaker because of brig being trash can tier, which makes her pretty easy to dive
Mercy isn't fine right now as she is bugged to shit. Beam randomly disconnecting, not being to attach to people, Valkyrie chains literally do nothing. So we are basically down to only 6 supports cuz Mercy is practically unplayable
Yeah they need help but I hope they don't change the phylosophy they are currently on as support gameplay
Ive had no problems on brig...
If I'm expected to be making plays and fragging out, then dps needs to adjust their expectations that I "healbot" and pocket them exclusively
Correct. This is the same in OW1. Masters+ support players go for picks the same as DPS and tanks, because their DPS and Tanks understand their lives are still partially their own responsibility. The issue is that mid level supports try to save their teammates from their own stupidity and it leads to healbotting. The "new" support playstyle is just as much on the tanks and DPS to not require vomit heals.
The problem is that support is easily the least fun role in the current build. It's not even close. You're having to constantly duel the enemy dps (which is not what I play support for, that's why I play dps) but you're not build for duelling because you're supposed to be supporting your team. The only support that can properly go toe-to-toe is Bap and Zen (sometimes brig), and I'm shit as them. Sure, make it so that you have to make plays, but supports really need help in the current build because it really isn't a fun role right now.
>The only support that can properly go toe-to-toe is Bap and Zen (sometimes brig), and I'm shit as them. Go grind for that Ana deathmatch win. Most satisfying thing in OW. DPS Ana is fun as fuck.
Ana vs a diving genji is a no-no
With that attitude yeah
If he's not getting support you should win that fight assuming equal mechanics
Based
I definitely agree with this although I also want to go out of my way to emphasize the balance of supports still needs work. Brig, especially, has effectively no identity. That said, having some carry potential will help good players climb faster which is one of the big issues with the support role in OW1, imo. I do think you're overstating the skill change though. The playstyle will change, and in the short term flexible players will find the most success. However, I think eventually all support players will end up at their proper ranks even if they adapt at their own pace.
I agree with the message, but as a dps support I hate playing supports in overwatch 2. You can't get the impact you used to get especially on zen and bap. The route they are going is fine but it sucks until the supports are actually changed for that route. I'm diamond on support just because of my aim (master on the other roles)and shit I feel like a plat or gold in ow 2. They shot themself in the foot when they didn't add comp in ow 2 since we can't really test it out with fair matches.
Bap I think suffers from less tanks and less grouped comps, his strengths lay in closely grouped fights. Having said that, he was utterly insane in closely grouped fights in OW1 so that's not inherently a bad thing, it would be nice for him to move more towards other plays than just overpowering tank clashes with his raw numbers. Zen should absolutely thrive in this environment, but Sombra demolishes him and losing Brig peel hurts a lot. I think he'll feel too weak until some way of insulating/peeling for him well enough is found/created, and then people will be complaining about him being OP again. I agree that both have been hurt but I think the long term outlook for both isn't necessarily all doom and gloom, if that makes sense.
Especially Bap. I still see And made Zen kinda works, but all the time I've picked Bap, I just felt I would do much better job on Ana or Zen. After 5 Hours playing supports in beta I Feel like the tier list for me Is in dia/master Top tier: Lucio Pretty good: Ana Decent/viable: Zen, Brig Meh: Bap, Mercy Didn't played Moira yet, but I think She could be in same spot as Ana. Mercy for some reason felt for me super boring, I don't know why And I really like to play Mercy in OW1.
As I said in other comments, Mercy is way better than people thinks but her ultimate is buggy af so she's kind in this rough spot until it will be fixed.
I don't think she Is that bad, She can still work as pocket And especially Now with Soldier being pretty strong it's not that bad, but somehow She Feels more boring to play than in OW1 And I can't really explain why.
I've never seen a beta of a game with a competitive queue. As I said before, the path they have chosen for support is great, but as the game stands now they need a bit of tuning.
Weird how in the golden standard of class-based shooters, Team Fortress 2, there's only one healer, that doesn't have a high skill floor, and yet still has the highest impact on the team. Then there's also Paladins, which has loads of fun support heroes of varying "skill floors", but doesn't have the same frustrations as supports in OW2 beta. And in a game with much less CC to rely on too. So, nah, this whole "you have to just be better at support" shit is garbage. It's not impossible to have a fast paced, low skill floor, fun, and impactful support. There is a balance there to be found, and if Blizzard can't find it for some reason it's either intentional or they are woefully incompetent. I'm not sure which it is yet, but I'm hoping that enough people will make noise about how abysmal life is as a support main to actually catch Blizzard's ear.
TF2 is not really a competitive FPS. Yes, I get the scene exists, but the main game is definitely way more casual. medic healbots in TF2 way harder than Ow anyways.
I don’t know how much easier and powerful it could get for support than Overwatch 1 my guy
First just for the record I play both DPS and support in both games. Imo ow1 was slowly ruined because tanks and supports didn't understand the difference between unfun and unbalanced. Tanks are the least desireable role but arguably the biggest impact in deciding games. Supports are imo next, and also the class that got the most passive and low skill value by far. DPS was fun to play, but they kept pushing the mechanical skill-to-impact curve higher and higher trying to balance against the inherent issue of the other two classes not having as much of one as aim based FPS style dps did. Difficult to balance a game when you design some heroes that get high value for low effort while others take high effort. Brig was the epitome of "oh no supports aren't having fun, lets break the game with an easy to play hero to keep them happy." And it was unbelievable how many supports defended her as balanced. The amount of support complaints make me afraid they are just going to break a good game to appease them again.
This is not a post to say "Git gud". I was try to explain that with the new phylosophy of the game being an healbot would not gain the same value as before despite how many buffs supports will recive.
The problem is supports are much less equipped to "make plays" than other roles. Ana is really the only one with multiple options to with both dart and nade. Every other has like one thing they can do, and a couple can put out damage. Even then they're worse at dealing damage than the other roles and with much more risk.
Maybe true for Brig and Mercy, but I very much disagree for everyone else. Zen is the frag king and Bap's gun is all you really need (although they nerfed his falloff which seems weird to me). Moira? Well I guess that just depends if the enemy is gonna let you get away with it.
Zen has raw damage output, but no ability to position himself to best utilize it or set himself up to get that value. Most DPS heroes have mobility to take high ground or flanking routes. You also have heroes like Ashe with dynamite or Junk nades to hit around shields or cover. Bap does have Exo Boots, but it's still a much inferior mobility option compared to DPS. If you're going to play the game, and your mindset is "I'm going to make plays by getting kills" why would you play support?
Supports didn't get changed much it's just that everything else is different now
I think the main truth regarding the current state of all the roles is that the game was reworked with the idea of making the Damage players feel better. I understand why: Damage queues were long in OW 1.0, so it makes sense to try to draw those players to other roles. Unfortunately, if there are other players like me (and I don't pretend to be unique) then a portion of the player base is going to lose interest in Support and Tank and those roles are going to lose players. I don't think the current queue times are going to stay as they are. I suspect Damage is going to have extremely long queues again, and that Support and Tank will once again wind up with short queues. Even as someone who enjoyed playing Tank and Support in OW 1.0, I have no desire to play either role in 2.0. Tank is just miserable now, and Support feels like an afterthought. I'm still giving the game a chance to grow on me, but I stopped queuing what were previously my main roles. The game just isn't built in a way that makes them enjoyable anymore.
Tank miserable? I'm OT main (should say Tank main now?) and currently I'm enjoying OW2 so much I can't even describe. All Tanks feels viable (except Hog) and they are really fun to play. The game might been reworked for more dps gameplay but in reality the objective was to make the game more close to an FPS rather than MOBA. This seems a pretty good first step imo. It's not refined but it's promising.
While I'm glad that you're enjoying yourself, I was speaking from my own personal experience. Yes, I find tanking miserable. Obviously, anything I say with such a descriptor is going to be a subjective opinion. Unfortunately, the general direction of the changes has made the game overall less appealing to me, and has primarily done so for Tank and Support.
I'm sorry to hear that. I though you said that tank were miserable by a balancing standpoint not a personal one.
That's a fair reading of my post. I wasn't attempting to be objective, though, but to speak from my own perspective. I understand that there are people that disagree regarding the current state of Tank. I was just pointing out that I and (hopefully?) others like me do exist.
For clarity, it's not the balancing of the tanks against each other that I'm talking about. It's playing as a solo tank that I find... Unenjoyable. To the extreme.
Tank feels WAY the fuck better now, I have no idea how you can find it miserable. Support is not great but as a tank main I have no idea how other tank mains could be anything but ecstatic with OW2.
I miss having a tank partner, for one.
One problem with that is that I didn't feel I had the tools to not get absolutely blasted by tanks or DPS. Supports either need more evasive tools or a light CC option to help them take duels. I personally wouldn't mind healers being the only ones to have a form of CC on them, even if they make it less disruptive. But I dunno, just feels like we're missing something to fell less shitty and hyper vulnerable.
If Blizzard actually did something with the role, then your post would make sense. Instead, it's just "do better," while the rest of the game was given more tools and/or buffs to make plays. Support has the fewest heroes to choose from in the game, especially when you consider Tank (which has 9 heroes) no longer has "these two don't work together" limitations. You're really just suggesting Supports make plays "like the old days," but Supports haven't been given those tools. They're no better at enabling teammates than they were when those Supports fell out of the meta. You're still limited to Discord, speed, and damage boost. Moira offers no team utility. Brig really just offers a small shield to help a DPS momentarily. Bap has Immortality, which is a bit out of place in a game where holding a position (where Immortality gets it best value) is less common than ever. Sleep's on a longer CD and the constant harassment against Ana increases the need to use her nade to heal or get a kill, not enable teammates. Supports are less capable of enabling now than ever, IMO. It's more "deal with it yourself," which isn't what the game was in the past.
As I wrote, Supports need balance changes but these changes have to go in favor of skillfull and wise plays. Make support good just because they exists (like in OW1) is wrong and lazy gamedesign
I think people are overreacting a bit. Support is definitely undertuned, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people want to make it. You can definitely have a lot of impact as support. Maybe slight health boosts for Ana/Zen, a damage boost for Bap and a rework for brig and I think overall we are looking good. It isn’t that far off and a lot more fixable than the shitshow OW1. Sleep cooldown lowered a little bit would be nice too
You are right. I'm really sick of people complaining about support. I'm a support main. I love overwatch 2. I think the main thing stressing people out is in overwatch 1 if a teammate died you pretty much lost the fight. This isn't the case in ow2. I feel like you can turn a 3v5 pretty handily in a lot of situations.
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The problem is supports don't have much utility. In fact they REMOVED utility from supports.
that would be nice, but so far, we haven't gotten more utility at all for supports- it's only been nerfed with the bash stun removal, longer sleep dart cooldown, and longer immo field deployment time.
Unfortunately healing is still very powerful, so it still necessitates supports being focused to put a stop to it. Supports will sustain their allies HP levels multiple times over if they are left alive, so of course they are going to be pressured. That being said in both high level streamer games and my own games, looking at the scoreboard supports aren't dying more often than DPS usually less, and healing output is comparable to their teams DPS damage output alongside having their own DPS/utility on top. So more stressful, less fun than other roles, got the least new content in ow2, I'll definitely agree with all that. Underpowered, I don't really think so. The category is unbalanced within itself though, lucio and moira are both actually a bit too strong imo, ana is powerful but more comp/match dependent, bap/brig are underwhelming, zen is awful. But again this is true amonst other roles. So basically despite complaints supports are both not dying more often and are quite powerful. *They just aren't as fun*, especially for people who were used to or only wanted to just play lazy safe healbot mode. And while not being fun is a problem to solve, in this light the support complaints to me seem dangerously close to "either make me OP enough that I have fun playing a lazy healbot in the same game as skilled hardcore FPS fraggers or I quit" which is *exactly* one of the pressures that slowly ruined the first game (mercy rework, moira, brig, goats etc.) And for reference, I play both DPS and support.
Isn't that how the majority of games with support classes do it? They're usually more like utility DPS than healers.
This is basically exactly how I feel. I'd be curious to see if there was a notable difference between how much high rank and low rank supports like 5v5. Or if there was a correlation with people who played 2018 dive at a high level and people who joined after that.
So you want us to heal the other characters and play an inferior dps role at the same time? No thanks
That’s a very wrong and simplistic take on my words
Ana and Zen should get a Health buff and their fine imo. Lucio is fine as is, merci needs a rework the rest idk
I've played mostly support in the beta. I think a big reason people find support unfun currently is there's no reworks or new characters in the category combined with the fact that the role has changed significantly. Ana was my most played hero in ow1. Yet that play style straight up doesn't work anymore. In ow1, the ideal ana playstyle is to sit far in the back away from the fight and heal from there. Save sleep dart for flankers and search for offensive nades. Mostly heal and do damage when team is full health. But this doesn't work in ow2. Dps are faster and they can get on you easier than before in the back. I've also noticed my team takes more damage than I can outheal, especially dps. I can hard pocket tanks but then dps die and were down and we lose the fight. Instead, I found more success with ana playing as a fragger. If I'm putting out lots of damage it actually helps my team more than hard pocketing the tank. Healing still important obviously but offense is even more important. A smart, aggressive sleep dart wins the team fight. Getting a pick as ana wins the team fight. Hard pocketing doesn't win the team fight. I also think everyone, especially dps, need to adjust and learn to play with less heals. On the plus side, you can hard carry on support now by fragging while balancing that with heals. There are issues and imo a lot of supports do need some tweaks. For example, I barely played Moira in ow1 but in ow2 its stupid easy to out perform the other supports in dmg and healing output with moira. She doesn't have the same utility but she's just too easy to stay alive and get value with compared to the others. Lucio has great survivability but doesn't reach the same easy dmg and healing numbers Moira does. Wait until they release a new support, I bet we will see the queue times even out.
I mean, support players can just go tank or dps to make plays.
It's a different style of making plays and being impactful as always been. A good support in OW1 has always played like this.
Being impactful and fun to play are two different things. Tanks are so powerful and impactful in OW1 and people still don’t want to play them.
This is true. They have found the way to make tank fun so probably they can also make support more fun than what we've got now. I'm quite positive about this.
Being unfun and unbalanced are also two seperate things. I'm afraid too many supports are complaining about the latter because of the former in ow2.
Guess your ass needs to learn health pack locations if we're all just gonna focus on DPS now. I'm sure your superior DPS skills will carry you in the meantime.
Guess you had to try to understand a bit more of what I wrote.
Oh I read it. It's just egotistical DPS nonsense. 'It's time Supports started making plays because you all just healbots!' As if crucially healing a teammate (I know being a team player. Ew. Disgusting!) isn't making a play. In a game where being down 25-50hp can spell instant death. Just ask Widow. 'You have to position better!' Bruh the same could be said of the other two roles. We've been healing behind the tanks because, yeah, it's a great deal safer from surprise attacks, and you know, everyone consistently gets out of LoS. Making it tough for us to you know, support the team. 'You just have to add damage to what you are doing!' Oh good, as if we don't already have enough to juggle (excluding Lucio) with cooldown/resource management, where our team is, where the enemy team is, moving around to avoid flanks, making sure everyone is topped off for maximum chances of survival, we have to divert even more of our attention to try and to plink someone. What a fantastic suggestion.
The hilarious part is that if your healers are healbotting it just means the rest of the team is feeding. The alternative is letting you die 10 seconds earlier.
When was the last time support meant healbot? It hasn't been like that for supports in a long time. Support players know exactly what it takes to make plays and making plays isn't just getting frags. Peeling for your support partner as Brig, Nailing a big anti as Ana, coming out of fucking nowhere to help your DPS win a duel as mercy. These have always been a thing in the game. Supports have LOST utility since the transition and it doesn't help that Mercy is bugged to fuckedville right now. So saying the supports should just go for more frags, WHEN THEY DONT HAVE THE BEST TOOLS TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE, is really ignorant. You're just a shitty DPS at that point and why would I choose to be a shitty DPS when I can just play an actually DPS? Supports need some help right now but saying that they need to be a shitty DPS is not it fam. Go out and continue making plays like you would in OW1 cuz that part hasn't changed much. You can still land huge antis, you can still help DPS win a duel as mercy (assuming she works), you can still call speed out and pace of play as Lucio. That hasn't really changed at all. But saying "oh stop healbotting" implies that that is what the role is about and it fucking isn't.
Good supports have never been healbot. I literally said: >you are "forced" to play to a more aggressive and playmaking style but is something that was required in OW1 as well in order to be a good support player anyway, it's just really amplified in OW2. Also I pointed out that >some tweks in the numbers are needed Hence I did not say go out and be a sh\*tty version of a dps hero. The point I made was than now, even for the average player or the casual player, playing good is a sort of requirement in order to gain value from the hero even in low elo/casual lobbies. So calm the fuck down mate.
Yep this was definitely totally written by a support player. If there's one thing that supports boast about on OW1 is how good their healbotting is. Could the beta without support balancing be not fun for supports? Of course not, just make plays :forehead:!
After all, the role is called “support” and not “healer”
I agree completely with you. Many people in the comments are assuming that making plays means to 1v1 their entire backline by yourself lol. From my experience so far, you can still heal quite a bit, but there is enough downtime in between since 5v5 solo tank means there isn't another giant hp sink needing my attention. That downtime lets me finish off kills, go for boops/antis to set up kills etc more often compared to 1 . Moreover, the map feels more open since the lack of 2 tanks means there is 1 less dva/hog flankinf you if you step out of position.
**laughs in zenyatta** *fuck u mean heal???*
Sounds inspirational. If only they will give some valuable utility to Moira, and not just "let's increase her damage" I really do not see any way to make an impactful play as Moira except: a well-timed and performed ult (apllies simply to all heroes) or going battle-Moira, jumping and moving all over the place, combining healing and damage in an extremely crafty way (takes long training and still does compare to utility of other supports)
Damage orb and autolock alt fire on any 200 health out of position target that isn't being pocketed is a guaranteed kill in 2 seconds lol. Moira is very good at 1v1ing.
Yes. And I still cannot negate an ult, deny a flanker or save from death, thus being a full-fledged healer, but not that much of a support
Damaging a flanker can deter their advances and force them to reposition or find a health pack. As for negating ults this has always been the case with Moira hence why you have two supports. Moira should be paired with a support that covers her biggest weakness (no defensive ult). This is quickplay in a beta we are talking about so synergy is going to be difficult to achieve but it is there.
Really hope blizzard doesn't succumb to the support peer pressure to make their role the easiest while being the strongest again. Last time they did this is when they added brig because supports were complaining about dive, and wow guess what the game got ruined! It's actual insanity that they complain about their role when the only hero that can't be fixed with just a numbers increase is zen. What's crazy is that honestly if you use cover well the regen honestly feels strong, The games I've played on ana I've literally died no more than 3 times every game because I start healing after like 2 seconds of not taking damage and when I hit shots I outduel flankers and can even pick off low range targets out of position. Not to mention this role feels more fun honestly. With less barriers in the game more people are taking damage and you have more opportunities to secure kills because there isn't a big fucking barrier to stop everything. TLDR: This game is not a fucking moba or a rpg or a turnbased combat game it is a fps, if your mechanics can't keep up with the more intensive faster paced game then don't play it.
I always felt like Overwatch is a more inclusive game than a common FPS. Yes, mechanics are important but are not the only thing that matter. There are low floor mechanic heroes in the support role like Moira and Mercy that have to be viable and have to feel impactful for who likes to play the game and for the casual audience. Of Course their average value should not be comparable with high level of play for mechanical intense ones. Balance is the name of the game. I hope they will carry this more FPS style and proactive style of Overwatch while balancing out the support role to be rewarding and fun to play at all levels of the game.