In general, support is a more difficult role to play than damage as it requires more awareness, game sense and the dual responsibility of keeping teammates alive but also attacking alongside them. And if you’re in the lower ranks, you have much less carry potential than damage players. Your value is directly dependent on the ability of your teammates to take advantage of your plays.
As Ana, you can hit the best sleep dart of your career with a growing Genji, nano-boosted with Dragonblade – but that means nothing if your teammates keep spamming and waking her up that. As Lucio, you can read the flow of battle perfectly and skim to finish off retreating enemies or pull out of an engagement to reset – but it’s all for naught if your team can’t figure out what’s going on and you follow
But if you’re committed to playing support for battle checkpoints — if you’ve been forced into it by roleplay — here are some tips for scaling the competitive Overwatch 2 mountain as a support player.
Your title is Support, not heal bot. Killing players is part of the job.
A mistake many new support players make is treating the role as a healer in an MMORPG. As a support, you should also dish out a good amount of damage. Overwatch is a battle of inches, and every bit of damage counts. In a game where dying heroes can be fully healed in seconds, securing kills is extremely important.
So be aggressive and remember that, in some cases, offense is the best defense. If no one needs urgent healing, join your team in harassing enemies out of position or completing kills – all while maintaining safe positioning. The enemy cannot damage your team if they are dead.
A good rule of thumb to start with is to keep your healing to damage ratio at 2:1; for the amount of healing you do, you must also do half of that to the enemy team’s damage. The only exception to this is Mercy, who provides combat value by buffing a teammate with her damage boost beam.
Train your target using custom map codes
This tip is easy: Work on your goal. The most efficient way to do this is through custom maps designed for the target practice.
From the main Overwatch menu, go to Play, Custom Games, Create, Settings, then Import Code under the Overview tab. Enter the workshop code of your choice from any of these maps, then return to the Create Game menu. Click Start when you’re ready to workout.
This may seem like a big investment, but trying to improve your aim by marathoning a bunch of games is probably a bad idea. You’re not good at swinging a baseball bat by playing a bunch of back-to-back games. You get good going to the cages.
I guarantee that spending just five to 10 minutes on an aim map will improve your skills much faster than playing six games in a row. Try it as a warm-up or in between your turns.
Dying to save a teammate is almost never a good idea
I mentioned this in my previous Overwatch tips guide, but in the vast majority of cases, sacrificing a life for a teammate is bad play. If you follow a teammate on a suicide run, you’ll both end up dead. It’s almost always better to let that teammate die so you’ll still be around to carry the rest of the team.
There are exceptions to this, such as if you’re about to die as Ana and decide to throw your Biotic Grenade to keep your Reinhardt up while he pulls off a team kill. As your sense of the game develops, you’ll get better at recognizing the moments that warrant martyrdom – but you’ll also find that they’re rare.
You are the player who keeps everyone else safe, so staying alive should be your top priority. Take care of yourself before you take care of others.
You have the strongest ultimate skills in the game. Use them wisely.
Despite being the role with the least potential, support heroes have some of the most crucial ultimate abilities in the game. With Transcendence, Zenyatta can shut down an enemy team using two or sometimes even three attacking ultimates at once. Ana’s Nano Boost is a huge damage and defense buff. All support ends soon, so they are available for frequent use.
That’s where the pickle lies. To be a good support player, you need to keep track of the enemy team’s ultimate charges so you know when to save your ultimate for a counter and when to burn your ultimate to help your push.
Conventional wisdom is to have a support hero with a defensive ultimate like Lucio and a support hero with an offensive ultimate like Kiriko to balance the scales. This is an ideal team composition in the higher ranks of the game, but it doesn’t apply so well to the rest of the ladder, where coordination can be a mistake and almost every team you end up with will change from the meta.
Pick the hero you feel confident in, or pick the hero that’s best for whatever odd fight you find yourself in. If you’re crushing the enemy team as Zenyatta, but your support partner is Brigitte, who cares? The only thing that matters is that it’s working and you’re winning.
If your team’s damage heroes are failing, pick Zenyatta or Baptiste
As a support, you’ll eventually find yourself in mismatched games where your damage buddies are struggling to get kills. When this happens, play as Zenyatta or Baptiste.
Of all the support heroes, they both have the most carry potential thanks to their huge damage output. With Zenyatta’s Orb of Discord and Baptiste’s Amplification Matrix, they are able to destroy enemies with a few well-placed hits and are absolute powerhouses in the right hands.
As a Baptist, don’t be ashamed to use your Reinforcement Matrix selfishly. Most of the time, you’ll be behind and reloading quickly anyway. You can use it to take out most damage and healing heroes in just two fire bursts if one of your bursts hits the head.
If you’re playing Zenyatta and you know an enemy is going to come through a door or corner, use your secondary fire to charge up and send a volley of orbs crashing into your enemy’s face. You can also spam it to hold down a choke point. Aiming with Zenyatta’s orb can seem tricky at first, so be sure to practice like that on an aiming map. Zenyatta’s kick also deals massive damage and chokes opponents in Overwatch 2, so don’t forget to hit it on any enemies that try to get too much recognition.
