Why do supports heal so much?
To answer this question, we need to ask what makes Heroes of the Storm the game that it is. Most would agree that shared levels, talents instead of gold and items, shorter games, and objective spawns are the key attributes that differentiate this game from other MOBAs. Nerfing healing to try and increase the play making ability of supports compromises several of these attributes.
Harder to end with weaker healing
Let’s address the biggest problem first. Why does nerfing healing increase game time length? To see why, it is instructive to think like Wade “Dreadnaught” Penfold does, and look at the game in terms of win conditions. By nerfing the healing of supports, it makes it harder to end the game after winning a late game team fight, because a low health team will be less likely to be able to count on their support to heal them through the core damage and any damage done by any surviving enemy players.
Damage level of assassins
This should come as no surprise to anybody - assassins and specialists do lots of damage because game designers are taking into account the fact that supports do a lot of healing. If they didn’t, players dying in team fights would be really rare. Therefore, if the healing output of supports was nerfed, the result would be an increased number of deaths, people needing to hearth more often due to being low on hit points, and shorter team fights.
All of this makes contesting objectives extremely difficult - and since contesting objectives is one of the core attributes of Heroes of the Storm, this creates a huge problem. What if we nerfed assassin and specialist damage to compensate? Well, remember point #1: win conditions have a huge impact on game length. Decreasing damage across the board further increases average game length because it makes it harder for the team with a numbers or objective advantage to end.
What about play making support abilities?
On the surface, this sounds wonderful! People will be excited to play support! The only problem is, anytime a class of heroes receives a huge buff relative to the other classes, team compositions will be adversely affected. Double Support compositions, assuming one of the supports is Tassadar or Tyrande, is already fairly common. If all supports had huge play making potential, without healing being nerfed, double support compositions would literally become the meta. It would be absurd to play a game with less than 2 supports, because each support would have a larger impact on the game than any other class of hero.
Since both teams would have two supports, and only two damage dealers, kill counts in all games would fall precipitously. The only solution to this newly created problem would be to buff assassin and specialist damage, leading to shorter games (higher damage, higher healing) and an even more burst oriented meta.
The Bottom line
None of this means that Blizzard won’t do things to make playing support more interesting in the future. I’m sure they plan to release new support heroes that are potentially very different from the ones that are currently in the game, and they could impact the meta in ways none of us can currently imagine. But “fixing” the support issue will not happen overnight - most of the current suggestions that people have for making the support class more interesting will have massive unintended side effects on the health of the game.
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