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BlizzCooper, HOTS Developer on Suppports:
In case you missed our previous discussion, feel free to check out the thread here. In this thread I introduced myself and we had an in-depth discussion about health sustain in Heroes of the Storm.
Thanks to all your feedback, it was clear many players wished to have a discussion about Support characters. So, lets dive right into this next discussion topic: Supports.
We’ve heard feedback from the community that our Supports feel like heal-bots. Let’s briefly explore this:
- Healing is a big part of what makes Support characters feel powerful and fun to play in Heroes of the Storm. These are some of our favorite characters, and we are not looking to drastically change the way they play.
- Not all characters are going to fit your playstyle. It’s okay that Li Li is more straight forward to play, whereas Rehgar has an aggressive playstyle.
- Additional depth and complexity can come in the form of talents. Uther’s base kit is quite simple. However, at a highly competitive level, ‘Piano-Uther’ is seen as the optimal way to play, adding another layer of depth.
- All of this being said, we agree that there is room for improvement. If most of your power comes from standing in the backline and not paying attention to enemy heroes, then this is an area we definitely want to improve. We think we can tackle this through some base kit changes, and future talent redesigns. We will also keep this in mind when designing future support heroes.
We’ve also heard from the community that our Supports are not play-makers, so let’s discuss:
- We agree that Support players should have the ability to make big plays, and this is likely an area we can improve. However, lets define what this means:
- Supports are not Assassins. We do not plan to push Supports in a direction that allows them to quickly mop up an enemy team or secure a bunch of kills.
- Supports bring a ton of value in ‘supporting’ their allies. This often occurs through healing, but could be through a movespeed buff, a well-timed CC, vision, etc.
- Many Heroic abilities including a well-timed Ancestral Heal, a perfectly placed Force Wall, or a clutch Divine Shield can all change the outcome of a team fight.
- We think we can address this feedback with some simple base kit changes. With Lt. Morales, we’re currently exploring changing the way her Displacement Grenade functions; Instead of automatically detonating on the first enemy hero, we’ve changed it so the player chooses when the detonation occurs along its path, exploding automatically at maximum range. Simple changes like this could allow a skilled Lt. Morales player to choose if knocking away the enemy or pushing them toward your team is the correct call.
Other thoughts:
- We want a flexible ‘meta’. We want the meta to vary over time and change based off the map. We like that the current meta allows for 1-2 Support characters per team - we feel this offers a lot of variety in team composition and play experience. We would occasionally like to see some 0 support team compositions, but very rarely.
- It is not off the table for us to retune the total healing output of Support characters. For example, we could decrease healing by 30% and increase health pools by 30%. A change like this likely means that a healer is more about mitigating immediate loss in a team fight, and less capable of constantly topping off their team. While this is a perfectly viable direction for us to explore, I don’t think it addresses either of the core concerns we’ve been hearing regarding making big plays or being considered heal bots.
The floor is now open, please add any thoughts you have below. I’d be really curious to hear where you think we’re currently succeeding with Supports, and where we should be looking to improve and focus our efforts. As always, thanks for your time and help.
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I must say, I like the direction of this, sounds good to me.
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I think their thinking is right. I just hope they're focusing on the word "play-maker" because that's what the community is focused on. I think it comes from other mobas, where every support has super strong, playmaking abilities to help make up the fact that they get no gold. And I just don't want Blizz to tunnel vision on making supports "play-makers" in order to appease people.
All I really think people want is just to make it more difficult to be impactful as a support. The 'heal-botting' problem boils down to - Supports have a large impact on the game just because they can heal - Supports can heal while not interacting much with the opponent (it's easy enough to just heal without actually being in range of the enemy during a teamfight) - Interacting with the opponent is a large part of where the fun and replay value comes from in a moba
I think it's an easy enough problem to solve - If you just took all the supports in the game and cut the range on their healing spells in half and then look to buff other parts of their kit to compensate, you have a pretty decent starting point for de-heal-botting your supports.
But I think Blizzard knows all this. And I have faith that they'll get it right.
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United States4882 Posts
So Dreadnaught went on a huge Twitter rant about this last night, and I actually have to disagree with him. He argues that "nerfing healing is not the answer" and that it would be "detrimental...to the entire game".
I think the clear culprits for most disgusting gameplay at the moment are burst and stun trains, both of which the current iterations of supports handle fairly nicely. The huge base heals on the top 3 supports (Rehgar, Kharazim, Uther) can save allies in danger before they die, making them huge "playmakers" in the sense of timing their heals and Cleanse very well. Nerfing healing on the whole would not only reduce the efficacy of supports, but it would also make burst compositions impossible to practically deal with. In this way, Dreadnaught is correct.
However, that's only the short-term. The long-term problem for supports is that burst healing and key Cleanses will always define a strong support character as long as those things exist in the game on more than one healer. You can add all of the "playmaking" options you want to a support Hero, but if it doesn't have burst healing and Cleanse, they're unlikely to be viable as a solo support. They might still have a role as a utility support, and thus, we also perpetuate double support compositions. The idea that the metagame will become more flexible as more supports are released is a fantasy; no support compositions will be an impossibility, and single support compositions will likely be less effective than double support. As someone said before, we've been in an arms race between damage dealers and healers for almost a year now, and the result is starting to get absolutely ridiculous (i.e. Kael'thas one-shotting Anub'arak through Dampen Magic and Spell Shield, Chromie's ability to one-shot any squishy in the game, the fact that any tank can die in less than 2 seconds without any percent damage abilities, etc.).
We have experimented long enough on changes to Cleanse and sustained vs burst healing on supports, but we haven't really played around with the base healing amounts that much (aside from poor, poor Rehgar). The continual suggestions to buff health and reduce healing made by the community are good suggestions. They solve the long-term problem of burst becoming too strong while also opening up the metagame to new ideas, as each individual Hero is stronger without a healer. Whether or not it ultimately leads to a better future for Heroes, it's still a better experiment than changing things we've already changed before and/or ignoring the core problems with the game.
Blizzard basically redesigned the entire game with the scaling changes and slowly balanced properly around the new numbers. That said, I think scaling down healing, though it might be a monumental task, is doable for the BlizzHeroes dev team. Drop all healing by 30% and adjust accordingly based on the Hero.
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On June 30 2016 21:03 SC2John wrote: So Dreadnaught went on a huge Twitter rant about this last night, and I actually have to disagree with him. He argues that "nerfing healing is not the answer" and that it would be "detrimental...to the entire game".
I think the clear culprits for most disgusting gameplay at the moment are burst and stun trains, both of which the current iterations of supports handle fairly nicely. The huge base heals on the top 3 supports (Rehgar, Kharazim, Uther) can save allies in danger before they die, making them huge "playmakers" in the sense of timing their heals and Cleanse very well. Nerfing healing on the whole would not only reduce the efficacy of supports, but it would also make burst compositions impossible to practically deal with. In this way, Dreadnaught is correct.
However, that's only the short-term. The long-term problem for supports is that burst healing and key Cleanses will always define a strong support character as long as those things exist in the game on more than one healer. You can add all of the "playmaking" options you want to a support Hero, but if it doesn't have burst healing and Cleanse, they're unlikely to be viable as a solo support. They might still have a role as a utility support, and thus, we also perpetuate double support compositions. The idea that the metagame will become more flexible as more supports are released is a fantasy; no support compositions will be an impossibility, and single support compositions will likely be less effective than double support. As someone said before, we've been in an arms race between damage dealers and healers for almost a year now, and the result is starting to get absolutely ridiculous (i.e. Kael'thas one-shotting Anub'arak through Dampen Magic and Spell Shield, Chromie's ability to one-shot any squishy in the game, the fact that any tank can die in less than 2 seconds without any percent damage abilities, etc.).
We have experimented long enough on changes to Cleanse and sustained vs burst healing on supports, but we haven't really played around with the base healing amounts that much (aside from poor, poor Rehgar). The continual suggestions to buff health and reduce healing made by the community are good suggestions. They solve the long-term problem of burst becoming too strong while also opening up the metagame to new ideas, as each individual Hero is stronger without a healer. Whether or not it ultimately leads to a better future for Heroes, it's still a better experiment than changing things we've already changed before and/or ignoring the core problems with the game.
Blizzard basically redesigned the entire game with the scaling changes and slowly balanced properly around the new numbers. That said, I think scaling down healing, though it might be a monumental task, is doable for the BlizzHeroes dev team. Drop all healing by 30% and adjust accordingly based on the Hero.
I don't know if you necessarily have to change supports to fix the problem you describe. The "counter cycle" should be Burst Damage > Sustained Healing > Sustained Damage > Burst Healing > Burst Damage. The 'burst healers are the only good healers' problem could also be balanced by making Burst Damage worse, or Sustained damage better. This isn't really a support problem.
There's nothing worse than non-impactful abilities - and if you drop healing too much, your abilities become non impactful. This only increases the problem of of supports-being-boring-to-play - you're making a bunch of buttons on supports feel that much worse to press.
Again, the biggest issue (and the reason non-pros care about this) is that supports just aren't fun to play and just aren't fun to play against - they're powerful in a way that doesn't really let the opponent interact with them. I think people focus too much on "more play-making" being a fix for "supports are boring". I still think just reducing the range on healing is a better first step in making supports more fun to play / play against than just reducing their healing.
I don't like the focus on "playmaking" or "is healing to strong". Raising the skill floor / skill cap of supports is all you need to do to solve a majority of the negative feelings people have towards playing / playing against supports.
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My only input would be to look at the history and changes of League of Legends; as I recall them having the same issues with some of their supports. In particular, there was a time where Soraka was basically a healbot that just stood behind the hero they were supporting, nearly at tower, and just kept them at full hp and full mana all the time, thus negating the value of any poke against them; and the soraka was unkillable because she stood so far back. The same solutions are undoubtably not always right for HotS; but there should be a large mine of data and changes to look through for ideas, inspiration, and discussion/analysis. Always helpful to look at what other people did when they faced the same issues. One of the changes they did for soraka iirc is to make the heal weaker, but have it give a large temporary armor boost, so it was still as good, (or even a lot better really) at doing clutch saves, but it wasn't an easy keep you at full hp all the time even if you're trading blows and skirmishing.
The HotS paradigm does seem to trend towards supports that can keep people at full hp even with frequent skirmishes.
to me the only other thing that comes to mind as a support problem is when your team is stupid. As a support, if your team is stupid and dives too much, there's often very little you can do that will help, as they're too reckless for clutch healing to save people. Thta may be more perception than reality of course.
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I mostly agree with Dreadnought. If healing is weaker you aren't making supports more fun to play, you are just making it easier to play without a support. It's a fine balance act between supports being too good where they make other classes obsolete, and making them too limited in their healing makes them obsolete.
One alternative approach would be to buff every support to "over powered" compared to the average hero in another class, and then place a one support limit per team. Supports become really powerful heroes more people would want to play, and the one per team limit keeps supports from making other classes obsolete. Of course it does mean no more double support ever which some people wouldn't like.
Or you make all supports work more like Medivh and Tassadar where they have incredible in combat damage mitigation with good timing, but they don't top people off who take poke damage. For example, maybe Reghar's Chain heal, only heals half or less of what it currently does, but also reduces incoming damage for x amount of seconds to those it hits. Those types of changes would make sustain damage much more impactful.
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On July 01 2016 03:00 karazax wrote: I mostly agree with Dreadnought. If healing is weaker you aren't making supports more fun to play, you are just making it easier to play without a support. It's a fine balance act between supports being too good where they make other classes obsolete, and making them too limited in their healing makes them obsolete.
One alternative approach would be to buff every support to "over powered" compared to the average hero in another class, and then place a one support limit per team. Supports become really powerful heroes more people would want to play, and the one per team limit keeps supports from making other classes obsolete. Of course it does mean no more double support ever which some people wouldn't like.
Or you make all supports work more like Medivh and Tassadar where they have incredible in combat damage mitigation with good timing, but they don't top people off who take poke damage. For example, maybe Reghar's Chain heal, only heals half or less of what it currently does, but also reduces incoming damage for x amount of seconds to those it hits. Those types of changes would make sustain damage much more impactful.
I'd argue that supports are already overpowered. I imagine no warrior / no assassin / no specialist comps are better than no support comps (which is why the first matchmaking rules in QM was to enforce that the same number of supports on both sides) . Supports are already super strong, and super vital to a team's success. They're just boring to play.
The issue of "Burst is the meta because Supports are too good at long term sustain" is an interesting discussion, especially for high level play. But I think that's a separate issue. Most people at all levels find Supports less fun to play than other roles. And I don't think that issue is due to some broad meta "what is an acceptable level of healing", and more to do with a lot of support kits just being bad.
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I think it is very rarely better to have more than one support unless the 2nd one is Tassadar or Tyrande. You virtually never see pro teams play double support without one of those two.
What would make supports less boring to most players? Blizzard could keep their healing functionality and give them more non-healing high impact skills like better CC, more wave clear, and/or more damage if they were restricted to a one per team limit so they don't make other classes obsolete. I don't know if it's the answer, but it would be one way to give all supports more play making opportunities without increasing how many supports are picked for each team.
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ugh still this assassins want to play support assassins crap. Guess they'll have to learn the hard way that this will result in rarely played or op characters. But support players are a minority, so we will always lose in a debate like this.
Anyway they just need to bring Zarya to Heroes she is like the perfection of what people seem to want right now. (and it would bring more people to heroes atm ride the popularity wave)
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On July 01 2016 06:14 karazax wrote: I think it is very rarely better to have more than one support unless the 2nd one is Tassadar or Tyrande. You virtually never see pro teams play double support without one of those two.
What would make supports less boring to most players? Blizzard could keep their healing functionality and give them more non-healing high impact skills like better CC, more wave clear, and/or more damage if they were restricted to a one per team limit so they don't make other classes obsolete. I don't know if it's the answer, but it would be one way to give all supports more play making opportunities without increasing how many supports are picked for each team.
I don't like the idea of "make supports better by making them more like other classes".
The people who call supports 'heal-bots' are just people who stand behind their team, casting their healing spells on cooldown (while maybe targeting the lowest health hero). This is boring - you're not making choices, and you're not interacting with the enemy team. But supports are *still* strong enough that even if this is all you do with your support, you're contributing in a very real way to the team. And you can easily play most of the supports in the game like this (everyone but monk and bw?)
The way to make supports fun is to make the 'heal-bot' play-style clearly sub-optimal. I just don't like the focus on 'play-making' or 'less-healing' or 'more damage' as a solution to fixing the heal-bot problem, when there are so many other adjustments you can make: - Lowering range on your healing spells makes it harder to position in teamfights by putting you closer to your opponents. - Giving supports more escape options lets them position more aggressively. - Talents that give supports incentive to be in the fray ('Heal nearby heroes for X% of whatever damage you take' would be interesting on a lot of supports)
There are ways to make support more interesting/fun in ways that would grow their existing niche, rather than borrowing from other classes (damage, CC, seige, wave-clear).
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Top pro support players like Bakery and Merryday are among the highest profile players who have complained that too many support heroes are "heal-bots". I agree that there are other ways to improve supports other than increasing damage/seige/CC/wave-clear, but IF they wanted to buff those areas then limiting how many supports are on a team would be one way to balance them. That being said Blizz stated that they don't plan on making supports better at securing a bunch of kills.
A lot of this entire discussion revolves around making supports fun, which is a very subjective topic. Certainly lower healing range would make healing more challenging and make it much tougher to keep diving melee assassins and warriors alive. Would that make supports more fun, or would it just reduce how many melee heroes get played? What about making healing scale based on distance? So if you are closer to the target you heal for more? Or they focus more on talents that reduce or avoid damage for a short period rather than increasing the amount of healing. For example maybe all supports heal for 30% less with their targeted heals, but heroes take 30% less damage for 3 seconds after being healed with one of those abilities. Changes like that could be used to nerf burst damage and buff sustain damage without changing either one of them. It would also help supports like Malfurion if his heal over time did 30% less healing, but the target took 30% less damage for 3 seconds after it landed so he isn't outclassed in preventing any form of burst when tranquility isn't up. And 30% is just a random number that could be tweaked up or down after play testing and could be different for different supports based on their kit.
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On July 01 2016 11:03 karazax wrote: Or they focus more on talents that reduce or avoid damage for a short period rather than increasing the amount of healing. For example maybe all supports heal for 30% less with their targeted heals, but heroes take 30% less damage for 3 seconds after being healed with one of those abilities. Changes like that could be used to nerf burst damage and buff sustain damage without changing either one of them. It would also help supports like Malfurion if his heal over time did 30% less healing, but the target took 30% less damage for 3 seconds after it landed so he isn't outclassed in preventing any form of burst when tranquility isn't up. And 30% is just a random number that could be tweaked up or down after play testing and could be different for different supports based on their kit.
I like the idea a lot. There are some talents that reduce damage taken for an amount of time but adding this to the general heal could be very beneficial. As you said, hot-healers like Malf would be more viable in our burst meta.
Maybe that's one thing to keep in mind when talking healers. Make all the supports more viable without changing the other classes. This way support players would have more diversity in their hero choices and we would not need too many new supports all the time. I think supports are way more difficult to balance than other classes so this would make balancing easier for the development team as well.
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Interesting discussion. I like some ideas in here, such as: *Make heals reduce damage tagen for x seconds.
Hopefully blizz look at the burst of heroes. The suggestion above is one way to go with it. I dont believe in the "reduce healing, increase health" suggestion.
Anyway, as have been said already, so many possibilities. Really hope blizzard experiments and hopefully they believe that the burst of some heroes are to much and would be more fun if "oneshot" gameplay got removed.
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8713 Posts
I never noticed these issues in HL. I haven't noticed people not wanting to play support. I haven't noticed supports not having a big enough impact on the game either. That all seems to be coming out of nowhere. The only thing I've heard is that some pro player players are dissatisfied because they can't create successful team comps without the same few support heroes. The teams want more diversity. And one guy per team gets designated to specialize in those heroes and ends up having very little variety personally. For HL, neither lack of interest nor lack of impact nor lack of variety seem to be issues at all. In QM, it seems like people are mostly upset when there aren't any supports! They'd rather wait longer than play without support. Or they queue support just to make sure it's a game with supports even though they might not feel like playing support at the time.
That Morales change they threw out there was really cool though. That'd be a fantastic way to bring an underpowered hero up to par in a fun way.
As for health/healing changes, it seems like if you decrease healing, you'd want to increase health only on the supports themselves. That way they can play more aggressively relative to everyone else.
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I agree, I'm pretty satisfied with the state of supports as a role, I just want more of the current roster to be viable, and new supports released. But, I am a support player through and through, so I can understand assassin players not enjoying it.
I think a solution would be giving healing spells a higher skill cap to use, like Kharazim's trait or Uther's W. Supports like Rehgar are more boring because their healing is just single target click (at least the ult requires some minimal sense of timing). Assassins are fun in part because their abilities are skillshots that are tuned to be strong when they're hit or chained, and weak/nonexistent when not. Getting a sick combo off is enjoyable in part because you don't always succeed. A support with a ranged AoE ground target heal, for instance, would be neat because it would require somewhat more mechanical skill and judgement to pull off AND would require the team to more actively play around their support rather than just expecting to get a heal whenever they need one. Another approach might be a heal that works like Lunara's trait: small stacking HoT with an activator spell providing a burst of healing based on the stack amount.
I can understand the appeal of adding more damage mitigation abilities as a way to increase skill cap, but I think it's the wrong approach. It's simply not intuitively rewarding enough. There's a visceral distinction between "oh my teammate almost died, but I just saved him with a heal" and "well, that damage my teammate just took might have killed him if not for my mitigation ability, but I can't really tell". Medic's W requires floating text for the impact to even register. I think people want a really intuitive, rewarding, and instantly recognizable impact from their abilities, so to solve the "boring healbot" problem I think it's better to juice up the healing potency but make them harder to actually use, rather than making them more esoteric.
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To me, this sums up quite nicely why HotS is not interesting as a competitive strategy game.
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Agree with jubil. The heals are in general to easy to use, you wait for their cooldown to go off, then use it insantly. Kinda dull gameplay, no, very dull gameplay. Since its not much decision in it. When i play reghar and take a almost 85% mandatory cleanse, thats how i play him then literally.
Atleast if i can pick that talent which reduces your cooldowns with 2seconds when you attack with ghostwolf, you atleast look how to get most of your heals with a bit better active gameplay. But not sure that would last long either.
They need to change things up and probably compare it to our humans. We have a brain, which is meant to be used as much as possible. Decisions, timing, mechanics all should matter alot. Would be way more fun.
I can only imagine if you could seperate bad, mediocre and good supports alot easier. It would probably mean there is a higher skillcap involved+way more rewarding. Would maybe also seperate some gamestyles to from players.
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BlizzCooper's response on feedback so far:
I’ve read a lot of great thoughts and suggestions in here. Thanks everyone and please keep it coming.
As the long weekend approaches, I wanted to address a few of the topics brought up so far in this thread. Obviously this reply is far from addressing everything though:
- More supports needed: We totally agree. We’re excited to get our next Support, Auriel, out to you guys soon™. I can’t reveal anything about her at this time, but she’s a lot of fun to play and has her own unique powers.
- Fun fact about Medivh: Related to the above, Medivh was originally slated as a Support character. Through much iteration we decided that healing wasn’t right for Medivh and he became what he is now. This is partially why it’s been so many releases without a new Support hero. Sorry about that!
- Creating moments through highly impactful abilities that have a timing window: This feedback came up with Medivh’s shield where it has to be timed very precisely and has an enormous payout when executed correctly. While we love this ability, we’re not necessarily going to do this across the board. In general I think an ability like Divine Palm which has gameplay for both teams works really well. Maybe there are ways to work some of our basic heal abilities more into this space.
- More support like abilities needed: Essentially there was great feedback that powers like Shrink Ray or Malfurion’s Innervate should be more common as these add a unique and fun way to support without providing more healing. We agree with this, but like that these are fairly uncommon so that they can be unique in their own way. As an example, if every Support had Shrink Ray, I think this ability wouldn’t feel as unique. We will look to see where we can do more of these and maybe brainstorm some new ideas here.
- With that said, I think every Support character brings some unique powers which aren’t entirely heal based. With Li Li, she brings Blind which makes her a great pick against a heavy basic attack team. Safeguard on Lt. Morales is another damage mitigation tool, but much better when dealing with burst.
- Cleanse: This should almost be its own topic, but feel free to keep discussing this here.
- Good: We like that cleanse is a weapon against chaining CC effects on a hero. We like that there are moments where a key Cleanse can make a huge difference in a team fight. For the enemy team, we think there is enough counterplay as they can focus the Support who cannot use Cleanse on themselves, or hold certain abilities, waiting for the Cleanse to be cast.
- Not so Good: We don’t like that its considered mandatory at the highest levels of play. Cleanse essentially blows out the talent tiers it is on and other options are not considered at pro level for the most part.
Cleanse is a hot discussion topic internally though, and has been for a while. Like many design challenges, we recognize the good and bad, and there isn’t a clear answer that works across the board.
- Daily Quests: It was brought up that Daily Quests push players into roles they may not enjoy playing – such as with a Support quest if this is not your role of preference. Know that we are discussing this and areas to improve here. Nothing to announce yet but we’re looking into it.
Continue to post your comments and suggestions and I look forward to discussing further with you!
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I don't think making supports more challenging to play is going to make them more fun for most people unless that increased challenge comes with a very tangible increased payoff.
Part of the problem is that supports have to be played as healbots to compete with opposing team's that are playing a healbot support. It's why Medivh isn't classified as a support. If someone goes damage Kharazim as the lone support player for their team you have to ask why they didn't just go assassin or specialist instead? Lots of the talent "choices" aren't really choices at all if you are playing support against a competent opponent.
If they want non-healing talents to be chosen they have to put more talent tiers with no healing talents available. They need more support utility talents that aren't competing with healing talents or cleanse. How about a portal ability sort of like Stitches Helping Hand that teleports team mates right next to you when you click on them? Or like Overwatch's Lucio who can switch between AoE healing and AoE speed boost. Or Mercy who can switch between healing and damage boosting.
In World of Warcraft you have talents that do healing to a nearby friendly equal to 100% of the damage done by their damage spells. Maybe you change some of the DPS talents so that for example Malfurion has a moonfire talent that heals a nearby friendly for 100% of the damage done.
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