Currently, Overwatch (especially the current OWL patch) is in one of its most balanced states right now. However, while a huge variety of DPS and Tank heroes get played the same can’t be said for supports (for the record, i’m not counting Brigitte as a support as she’s almost exclusively ran as a DPS or Tank). Whether it’s dive, death ball, or bunker comps the supports are always Mercy and Zen, with the only exception being Quad Tank or 303 which are pretty much cheese comps. So the question is, why? The answer is Lucio and Ana are totally underwhelming. Moira is in an interesting spot where she is ok but she works best with Lucio who is bad. Lucio has been out of the Meta since the mercy changes first came in and Ana has been gone since season 5. Having off meta supports wouldn’t be an issue if there were more, but since there is only 5 i’d love to see blizzard make them more viable. What do you guys think?
It appears the high pick rate of Mercy and Zen has more to do with their utility they provide compared to the other supports. The utility provided by these two helps win fights. It appears we need more interesting supports with cool utilities, because the current support roster is plain boring.
Hence in the land of the blind the one eyed man’s king applies, to why Mercy and Zen see a lot of play time in OWL. Mercy is hitting 92% pick rate now in OWL, and their are already number of threads debating if she needs another nerf ![:smiley:](https://d1kzxbyyijk9k6.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
. Zen’s got 95.5% pick rate now in OWL, and it’s not like he’s super strong either, it’s just that the rest of the support don’t shine as much as these 2 do. And since Zen can plain out deny Grav + Dragon it’s a great defensive Ult.
Zen doesnt beat grav dragon unfortunatly, if u dmg boost it cuts straight through it
He’s quite strong with it never the less, coupled with some help from mercy they might save the tanks if not the squeeshies.
even with a valk and tranc all the squishies still die
the only way is tranc + ana nade but ana isnt viable
I mostly agree. To me, Lucio is super boring, but so is Mercy, yet she is still picked because of how easy, reliable and powerful she is.
Ana on the other hand, so me is really interesting. She has 2 of the most potent abilities in terms of counters and swaying teamfights. Her issues are as follows:
No mobility, so she is very vulnerable to dive heros
Sheilds counter every aspect of her kit, turning her into a melee bot
It would take a player weeks, if not months of hard work to master her kit, and even then she’s still around about as good as Mercy, who you can master in a few days.
It really just isn’t worth learning Ana
Will be nice if they balanced all the supports around Ana’s power level.
She’s the only support i can respect in this game other then zen.
Rest of the rooster is just mindless op batteries that take no skill and offer little to no risk.
Supports are op, its just that some take nothing to be always useful and others needs skill and have a huge chance of failing.
This is my perfect world for supports.
Mercy - nerfs by far the best support with 100,10% win rate in qp im not sure what blizzard what with her, shes easy and always good.
Moira - She had a bug fix that made her actually have some ways to be punished from shields on the ptr i wanna see how that plays 1st and i more then so welcome it.
Zen - Just a little nerf on discord orb might as well buff his orb of harmony to make up for it.
Lucio - I think lucio is really weak atm something is needed or the other healers can take a nerf as to be on his level.
Ana - just perfect example of what a good and well made healer looks like
Brigitte - I just hate her and i don’t want to make it in a Brigitte rant but she needs to be look’d at again.
Thanks Wicked, however your seal of approval on what you respect isn’t a criteria for the community 
to enjoy this game.
You go about your same stories of having to “aim” to be respectable.
This is just a confirmation of what I stated above. I know you have a soft corner for aim based heroes, that’s not where Overwatch needs to be, simply because the community that plays the game are not ex CS:GO players. They come from all kinds of gaming backgrounds, so making aim a requisite to play this game is plain rubbish.
Im not an ex shooter fan aswell i mostly come from Lol and other games of such.
Still doesn’t feel right to me that some heroes can miss 2 shots trow the fight by doing so and be useless when others can just be useful from mere existance.
I think support for the most of it are fine its just 2-3 big offenders to them with Mercy, Brigitte and Moira that are always useful and can outclass the rest of the supports.
And i dont think supports like ana need a buff let alone this thing they hit her with that lets her heal true full hp friendlys but got her prehealing shot removed.
But if the rest of the support crew is so useful as to overshadow lucio and ana.
Supports are as whole are in a good state because they dictate the game right now if you pick brig zen mercy but yeah i feel blizz need 2 start doing more micro changes 2 supports 2 balance them out so its not always mecry zen even after the mercy meta its not that mercy is op it just the rest is really bad… and also the fact they are killing moira making her worse at brawling… people like 2 say moira has the biggest crowd burst heal in the game but that is only if you have 5 players lined in front of you how many times do you even see that? lucio has the bast aoe heal even though moira has a better potential heal… moira lucio ana really need buffs not nerfs!
Find I find weird about the state of supports atm, is that 2 of them Mercy / Zen has abnormally high play time compared to the rest. I’m not saying either of them are OP, but it appears the rest of the support don’t have the utility to start diluting the hours on these 2.
That’s because the other supports are situational. Zen and Mercy can technically function in any comp and on every map with little adjustment required from the player.