Matchmaking and ranked is broken for Solo healer - even worse with season 5

Competitive Discussion
1

It happens again. I don’t know if it’s the extended population we usually get at any new season beginning but the MM has become unbearable once again if you are a solo healer.

at the beginning of season 5, I stayed away a little bit from the comp since blizzard wreck the audio of the game (gg. no fix yet. and the 3d audio is broken), but I got bored of doing only QP, so I get back to comp.

I got 2 rounds of fairly balanced games (5-2, 5-4) and then I got into the classic train wreck. 7 losses in a row. Then another 15 losses in a row.
I am bad? maybe. B
ut I can post screenshot of all my game in the last 3 days to clarify to anyone doubting that I’m not biased in what i’m saying.

In any single game I played as a solo healer, there was a slightly or significant tank difference but mainly it was one dps in my team to be completely out of league.

You see they are out of league even when the profile is private:
-literally half of the dmg compared to other 3 dps and tanks
-usually twice the deaths and a 1/2 K/2 ratio
-no game positioning, lots of useless solo feeding and staggering
-no character switch/adaptation to the game. Stuck with one character, no matter what.

As a support, unless you are so pro like master/gm level with DPS that you can carry alone the game with ana/bap/kiriko doing purely dmg, there is not much you can do.

if you are a diamond player like me (and I am, not pretending to be better than that or deserving master or whatever) you can try to compensate for these games inequality by counterpicking (eg bap/ana for phara, brig for sym/tracer/genji), but you won’t compensate a 11/22 k/d dps when the average deaths for any player in both teams is 9

My current suspect is that DPS queue are so long as of now that at a certain point you just get thrown into a game no matter what if you queue as a DPS.
Sometimes it happens to the other team, sometimes you get a loss streak for happening to your team.

BTW the game experience is still completely broken and highly inconsistent, at least for an healer.

Yes, you can outrun in the long run if you are a streamer or someone who can really play a lot, but if your window is limited to 1-2 hours per day, you cannot wait 1000 games for the game to statistically balanced himself.

You get 3 losing nights in a row when you are playing great, and you start reconsidering all the time the idea to uninstall and spend your time in something more valuable and where the programmer are better than blizzard.

And the crazy thing is that it all happened to me already:
at quite the end of season 4, I got a +15 loss streak (including 6 DC in my team. I’m keeping stats on an excel file) and went from diamond 4 to silver 1.
And then got back to diamond 5.

There are 2 possibilities for someone to lose 2 leagues and gain them back in 1 week:

  1. I got a temporary memory loss or something similar. I forgot how to play for 2 weeks and then suddenly remembered
  2. Blizzard can’t balanced a MM in a game that has more than 7 years in the market…

The depressing thing for an healer is that the game is not rewarding at all for your effort and improvements:
I play 10 times better than when I began. I play 2 times better than 2 seasons ago.
I learnt how to play ALL healers so that I counter the enemy team.
I got coached by master and GM friend playing on PC (but we can’t rank together), I learnt how to position, how to use CD, how to counter, what to do

All of these doesn’t matter for Blizzard MM.

I get loss streak due to dps inequality up to 15 loss in a row.
I get win streak due to dps inequality
My contribution to the game is more than marginal even if I’m playing great

I get it’s a team game, but this shouldn’t be penalized for queuing as solo healer.
Especially after 7 years of MM in this damn game. If it ain’t work, then remove the option to queue as a solo Heear, Blizzard

It is incredible to me that Blizzard didn’t learn how to balance the game in 7 years.
My suspect at this point is that they look at the majority of the player base (dps and tanks) and screw up game for healers.

If you don’t believe me, I can link my profile, the excel where I’m keeping track of all the disparities or simply the screenshots of my last game (but blizz won’t allow links, here)

I ended up all my game with less deaths of all the other players, usually more or the same healer, a good dmg (a lot of times even more dmg than dps, while healing). All of these had zero impact on the game outcome.

I guess it’s a goodbye once and for all

1 Like
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So unbelievably true. I play between high gold and low dia and I am shocked at what I have to witness every single game. It is unbelievable what kind of people, mostly, like you said, dd or tank get into the game. You can see from their positioning and feeding that they clearly have no idea about the game and Blizzard allows them into plat matches. This has been bad since the start of Overwatch 2 and this season is just the pinnacle of it all. It is really close to becoming unbearable for me as well. Most of the games I feel helpless. People just start dropping like flies before a round even really started, standing in the open, never taking cover, refusing to take cover even if advised via VC. This has become just a huge joke. If any of this would happen in sports nobody would watch e.g. football any more. Luckily I have 2 weeks of vacation now. If I come back and this will be the same, yes I will name it for what it is, “sh*t show” as before I am outta here.

And we all know Blizzard does not care. Yes guys, I have bought WC3 Reforged and you did nothing to fix the broken state of the game for 2 years. You basically killed it. And if you continue like this, this will happen to Overwatch as well. But I guess you have Diablo IV now to cash out your share holders so who cares about Overwatch, right?

3

So true. That’s why I can’t get out of bronz/silver. It is just sad seeing tank going in with 100 HP or DPS playing one character the whole game. I’m trying my best with an average 15k healing almost every game and still lose. I think it is almost imposible to rank up in support queue. 5/1 = rank up from b4 to b2. 5/3 = from b2 to b1? And 4/15 really great time from s4 to b2. I mean this is awfull. Other reason is leavers. It’s really dissapointing that you are doing really great for once as a team and then somebody leave and you lose. You don’t have the motivation to play this game anymore because of this. And they count it as a loss so deal with it.
I think as a supp main you should play as a duo with somebody. You can’t carry even with 20k healing when it is tank diff.
I feel like this game is a real dissapoitment because of this. Ranking system, Bugs, Leavers, Smurfs etc…
They just want our money. They don’t care about anything. They have only money from battle pass which is the worest BP in a whole gaming world and they will add PvE which will cost another money.
Thank you really much for every second in this bad game.

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I refuse to play comp now, because the technical state of the game doesn’t seem to be very good. But I used to play some comp back in the day in OW1 and the strat for getting to higher ELO usually isn’t “enabling”. People who are let’s say gold/plat, so they are decent, but far from godly (roughly where I am imho), can’t really get there by enabling people who are truly bronze, because they won’t get things done. Honestly it’s probably even more the case for godly people, because it doesn’t matter how good you are at keeping people who can’t hit alive. So if you are tank or healer in bronze, you must pick something that can do more than just create space/clutch heal. For healer, I’d probably go with Kiriko and/or Bap and get some kills early in the fight myself. Bronze DPS is not going to do it for you :smiley: . “Healbotting” as people usually call it, is unlikely to rank you up.