[Guide] Healing for Dummies - Support Theory and how to be an effective Support player

Hey there.

I see a very common complaint posted to this subreddit, as well as other mediums, talking about how people hate playing support, because it feels like their team is always letting them down. This spawned an idea for a guide, a grand guide, one that would detail very clearly how to actually play support, how to get value and impact your games so that your skill shows through, and to have success (and fun!) playing support.

This is going to be fairly long, (over 5000 words!) so buckle up, this keyboard's loaded.

Chapter 1 - Why play support?

I mean, why though? Why do people enjoy this role? The answer? Helping. Generally, support mains like to help people, and see the success of others. They get happiness from enabling others to do well, through their own performance.

Supports in OW have it really nice. In other games that have a concept of "support", their support is generally defanged, harmless, cursed to eternally be a walking healthpack. Meanwhile, OW supports are extremely powerful, not just in healing power, but also their kit and even their gun's power. In the right hands, a player playing support can be just as dangerous as a DPS, or a tank.

However, sadly, the majority of support mains beneath the high ranks play the game like they're playing those harmless walking-healthpack supports from other games, and it leads to lost game after lost game, which can be frustrating. In this guide, I hope to open people's eyes to the world of playing support in a new way, a powerful way, that will both recharge the fun you have playing support, but also win you a lot more games.

Chapter 2 - The difference between supports, and healers

OW doesn't actually have any healers. Not a single one. All those dudes and gals to the right of the other heroes? Those aren't healers, no sir. They're...supports.

"Okay, but what's the difference?" you say, looking at your screen questioningly. Well, healers are what I described earlier: Defanged, harmless, walking healthpacks, that can do nothing but sit, heal, and hope they get carried by someone who actually has agency over the game.

Supports make impact. Yes, they heal, but they don't heal for the sake of healing, they heal as a means to an end. They do damage, they look for value with their abilities, and they put every last inch of effort into genuinely trying to fuck over the enemy team. They support not just by healing, but by going that last little inch, finishing that kill, applying that stun in the right place, coming in clutch.

"Woah there Gangsir, it sounds like you're telling me to DPS as support. Isn't that throwing?"

Nope. Throwing is throwing. Being ineffective is being ineffective. DPSing as support is DPSing as support. It's only when you do it wrong that it becomes bad play. In the coming chapters, I'm going to explain how to do it properly, to where your team will be glad that you're DPSing.

Chapter 3 - Healing

The most important part of playing support, healing. Mastering the art of healing is key to climb into high ranks. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that healing is simple, but it's one of the things that slips under the radar often.

Being able to efficiently apply healing, to the right people, at the right times, and only for as long as necessary is extremely important. Fail any of these, and your team will struggle.

Supports require the highest APM of all roles to play effectively. What's APM? Actions Per Minute, it's a rough measure of your overall reaction speed and speed of switching tasks when multitasking. It comes from RTS games like Starcraft, where generally the more actions per min you can apply, the more effective overall you'll be.

You might've found yourself in a situation in the past where multiple people on your team got low at once, in different places, and in your struggle to get everyone healed up, some people slipped through the cracks and ended up dying.

How can you prevent this? Well, by changing how you heal. Most supports in mid ranks and below heal by finding a person that's low, and investing all of their healing into that person until they're full health, then moving on to the next person that's slightly higher, healing in ascending health order until their team is full health.

To prevent getting overwhelmed, you have to heal to stabilize, not to cap health. What does this mean? You stop healing when a person is no longer at risk of death, and move on to stabilizing the next person.

People can be missing health and be fine. I see Anas/Baptistes healing people missing like 10 health, while someone who's a lot lower could benefit from that same shot (that would've taken the same time) fired at them instead, and just leaving the other person at 190 health.

Now, of course, if you have time, you should heal people to full. This is an optimization you can make when things are hectic, and multiple people are missing good chunks of health. Do this properly, and you'll find your ability to keep people alive will dramatically increase, and contrary to common thought, your team's perception of the reliability of your heals will increase (because you're always healing everyone at least slightly, rather than having periods of no healing because you're focusing heals on one person to cap them). DPS especially will like this.

"But Gangsir, what does 'not at risk of death' mean?" Well, this depends on your team and the enemy team. You should adjust this up and down depending on the heroes you have (if you have 600HP tanks, they're safe until they get pretty low, I'd heal to 400), and the heroes the enemy has (if they have a widow, nobody can ever drop beneath 300/120 health and still be safe). Generally, I heal people to 3/4ths of their health pool when it gets hectic, adjusting down if they have small packet DPS like tracer, and up if they have a bursty comp.

Chapter 3.1 - Healing priority

If you have multiple people around the same level of danger, there's an "extended healing priority" you can follow. Personally, here's mine, in descending order of priority:

• Anyone who's actively part of the win condition. This means Zaryas with Grav, Zens with Trance, Bastion in general, etc.
• Anyone who's actively ulting, provided that their ult doesn't inherently give them resilience (eg winston)
• Frontliners and whoever's imminently about to take damage, or is currently taking damage
• The other support
• The main tank (Zarya at high charge being the exception, if so, equal priority to main tank)
• The main DPS (non-flanker, heavy damage, etc. If you're running double flanker, whichever's more in danger)
• The off tank
• The off DPS (Flanker, sniper, etc.)

This is of course going to differ per rank, so adapt this to what you feel makes more sense for your games.

Chapter 3.2 - Exceptions to the rule

There's a few situations where I would deviate from standard healing priority and rules. This includes pocketing, preemptive healing, as well as times to not heal, and either let people die, or change to trying to kill things.

"Pocketing", to define the term, is when a support focuses entirely on a single person, putting the full power of their kit into them. This has it's time and place, such as when someone asks you to (high tier Zaryas will commonly say "I'm high energy, keep me up", this means "pocket me for a bit so I can make use of this good fortune"), when someone ults and their ult is the win condition (such as a nanoblading genji), a rein who's being hard-pushed, etc.

You can also pocket for synergy (Pharah being pocketed by Mercy is a huge one, as well as a Lucio speeding a Reaper around, or a Brig throwing packs to a Doomfist).

However, while healing is nice, it's also really, really important to learn when to stop healing. One of the really bad things I see supports doing even into diamond is healing lost fights. Why is this bad? It encourages several bad habits, as well as causes a lot more feeding of ult charge to the enemy.

It's more or less a habit from low ranked play, where random bull can happen where the last person gets pocketed and ends up clutching the point. "I can't stop healing, what if our DPS pops off?" You have to compare the chances of that happening, VS you staggering and forcing that person to feed.

If people are healed during a lost fight, you're telling them that the fight isn't lost. They'll stagger, waste ults, etc, because "I'm still getting heals, so our supports must think I can clutch this". Not only that, but by extending their life, you'll cause them to feed a lot more (instead of feeding their healthpool, they'll feed that plus every last point of healing you put into them), and you'll force them to stagger and become misaligned from the rest of the teams' spawns.

When a fight is for sure lost (you're down net 2 people, or your win condition (eg a person with an ult) dies, etc), then you should say "fight is lost, pull out" and then stop healing. The remaining teammates will die quickly or escape, reducing their feed factor, as well as discourage them from using their ult (low ranked players might still panic ult, but you'll discourage non-panic-prone players).

I've had games where I've literally stood still on point so they'd kill me as fast as possible in order to regroup and not stagger, only to have our Ana try her damned hardest to extend my feed. Don't do it.

Chapter 4 - Damage

And here we come to the yang to balance the yin of healing.

Supports get told, again and again, focus on healing, don't DPS, don't shoot enemies, just be a good little support and heal. It's a whole load of baloney. This advice is born of bad experiences with supports in the past that only DPSed, and didn't heal. It's a nasty habit, and it afflicts some percentage of support mains, just like "pure heals only 24/7" is a bad habit that afflicts another percentage.

The highest power and agency over a game depends on both. Get you a support that can do both. Fear not, I'm going to give you a piece of advice that will explain exactly how to balance it:

Look for opportunities to land damage in a safe manner, that doesn't endanger yourself or others. Look for what I like to call "free damage". This accomplishes several things:

• It increases pressure on the enemy supports, as it's like your team has 2.5 DPS
• It discourages shenanigans and punishes mistakes. If you see someone flanking, or out of position, shoot at them. I'll do this all the time on Ana. If you're a junkrat or whatnot that's just hanging out in the open with shitty positioning, I'm going to 3 tap you. Taking you out is safe (you can't do anything from sniper distance), takes very little time (about 3 seconds), and results in us being up a person, and a major source of damage being removed from the fight, making my healing job a lot easier, in turn leading to me being able to DPS more, in an infinite positive feedback loop. Even if I can't kill you and your healer bails you out, I've now just made you require resources and increased the stress on the enemy healer. If you're flanking as Doom without properly using cover, I'm going to annoy you by making you take healthpacks along the way, slowing your flank down, and even killing you. It's remarkable how easy it is to kill a doom that's just trying to close distance to you.
• It charges your ult faster. Support ults are some of the most powerful in the game, and you're missing out on free ult charge if you aren't shooting enemies when your team doesn't need healing. Do it right, and you'll literally constantly be charging ult, leading to significantly higher ult uptime than your enemy counterpart. If you're hanging around exposed as roadhog, I'm going to be constantly shooting at you for ult, just like a DPS. I'll never forget the time a teammate said "Ana how do you have nano AGAIN!?" Farming out of position people. You haven't seen tilt until you've seen a team that keeps hearing "I'm coming for you all!" every teamfight. I'm not saying this to flex, this is literally the power of dealing free damage.

"But Gangsir, every time I think I'm safe to DPS someone ends up dying! How do I keep track of that?"

The trick is to not tunnel on doing damage. Tunnelling on damage is the natural, automatic response when supports are told to do damage, from what I've seen. Any damage you deal should generally be non-committed pot shots, unless you actually see an opportunity to quickly kill someone. While doing damage, every few shots look around at your team, and check on things. This also helps you not get blindsided by flankers or snipers.

Now, all of this is with the caveat that you stay safe. Free damage is only free if you don't get punished for it. If the enemy team has snipers, you need to be very careful in when you decide to try damaging, lest you throw by exposing yourself to a headshot before a teamfight.

Chapter 4.1 - Utility and Impact

You can tell the mark of a good support by how they respond to different stimuli during games. Take lucio for example. As you climb in rank, you'll notice that lucios tend to have less and less healing/10. Are they getting worse? Do better teams play split, or take less damage? Not necessarily, it's because they're using their speed more. Offensive assists.

Bad lucios respond to being up a person or two by staying on heals, and hoping that their team pushes while they stay full heals, and be a mobile healthpack. Good lucios switch to speed, amp speed, while comming "Amping speed in, speed on 'em", and then watch as remainders of the enemy team get ran up on and destroyed. That lucio could stay heals and push, slowly, agonizingly, hoping their pitiful heals is enough to keep people up, or they could switch to speed, and end the fight decisively. Give no time for bullshit to happen.

If you want to climb on support, you need to use your utility to enable your team, and punish the enemy team. Watch like a hawk for mistakes, and punish them. Tolerate no bullshit. Hog flanking? He's getting slept and antihealed. Enemy supports exposed? They're getting shot at. Lucio trying to go for a cute boop? Blasted. Look for idiocy and punish. Unless you're in a really high rank, there'll be plenty to go around.

If you don't know what to do to get value out of your abilities, you need to experiment. Think back to past experiences, and form an "If A, then B" chart.

Take a scenario of a winston diving in. You're lucio, and your other healer is Ana. Bad lucios will switch to heals, and amp heals, hoping that someone can kill the winston before he kills you and your Ana. Good lucios connect the dots, and think outside of the box, reasoning through it. "My heals aren't good enough to outheal for very long. I need to get my ana out of the situation. What if I booped winston away, then switched to speed and sped her and myself away?" That would work, right? And it just so happens that that's the primary way Lucio peels. He doesn't peel with heals, he peels with knockback and speed.

Find uses and use common sense to identify value you can get from your abilities. Think beyond the surface level.

Chapter 5 - Positioning and risk

Speaking of exposing oneself to headshots, let's talk about positioning. Positioning is the second most important facet to playing support, and one that is extremely critical to nail down.

Bad positioning as support means unnecessary deaths, which means healing downtime, which means slower ults, which means reduced team power, which means lost games. I've seen entire games lost because the enemy support couldn't stop positioning like they forgot DPS exist.

Unfortunately, it's a bad habit that doesn't naturally solve itself with playtime, because you'll be totally okay with sloppy positioning....until you aren't, and people are punishing you for it, but it's too late, you're losing this game because you can't keep yourself alive against the widow that just keeps deleting you, because your positioning is ass. I've played in every rank silver-diamond, and 80% of "smurf widows" are just widows that know to look for people with trash positioning, and punish them. As soon as I started using cover and respecting sightlines when positioning, I suddenly stopped dying, and we started winning because our healer (me!) stopped dying like an idiot and throwing the game harder than the other people could carry it.

This is a really insidious problem that isn't obvious at first, because you'll have no problem until they actually start punishing you for it. You can't learn if the enemy lets you get away with mistakes. Thus, you have to purposefully practice good positioning, even when you don't need it, so you can do it and are in the habit of doing it when it matters. That game with that good Widow could be a loss if you were still in your bad habits, but now your positioning is good, and she has to try harder to kill you, meaning the healing doesn't stop.

What I did for this was to set a recurring timer for every 30 seconds, to make a sharp ding sound. Every ding, I would snap out of whatever I was doing and check my positioning. If it was bad, I'd move to correct it. Immediately, my winrate rose. I suddenly struggled a lot less, died a lot less, and ended up providing a lot more value, which resulted in lots more won games.

Doomfist and Hanzo are big DPS I see people struggling with as support, and it's almost always due to the bad positioning of the player rather than the skill of the DPS. They're essentially collecting you as free value because it's so very easy to do so. You want to position to make yourself much harder to kill.

"But Gangsir, what is a good position? How do I judge when I'm in a bad position?"

As a general rule of thumb, you want to have line of sight to your team, but only limited line of sight to the enemy. Anyone who has range and can realistically kill you should be blocked by the map or a shield. You should stand near walls and corners, rather than out in the open. On top of that, preferably stand near a healthpack. Also, stand in a spot that provides you a route of escape if your team gets pushed back. Make sure you don't have to cross any open ground to escape, as that'll get you deleted by snipers in higher ranks, which will turn "we're backing up a bit to let them come in" into "we're just gonna wipe like bronzes".

If you follow those rules, that should get you into a place where you're okay. The trick is staying in good positioning as fights devolve. A common thing I see is healers starting out in great positions, but as fights devolve and things get chaotic, their positioning completely falls to pieces and they run out into the open, only to get deleted by the hanzo who went "Oooh, look, free value!" and killed them. Try my timer idea, or find another way to remind yourself to continually stay in good positions. Rotate correctly and safely, etc. Unless you keep an active eye on it (until you're practiced) it's very easy to get "sucked" onto the point, or into open space. Resist it and remember your positioning.

Chapter 6 - Aim

The third most important facet of playing support. Yes, supports exist that don't require aim, but their flexibility is limited, and you need to be able to play mechanically intensive healers like Bap/Ana/Zen if you want to be a support main. Being constrained to only Lucio/Moira/Brig will hurt your chances at climbing.

Support mains should be practicing their aim just as much as DPS mains. Seriously. Why? Because, when you do play those aim intensive healers, some of the biggest value you can obtain comes from having good aim. With specifically Ana, your power to heal and damage is directly tied to your aim. With Zen, your aim is tied to your ability to charge your ult and defend yourself. Etc.

Seeking to do damage is great practice for aim. I see a lot of Anas with sloppy aim because of Ana's hitbox boost on friendlies, and it hurts their ability to do damage and take out squishy targets. Play Ana paintball, play FFA, practice your aim.

Without good aim, your ability to playmake and deal with issues will be greatly reduced, which will lead to frustrating situations like "the pharah is rolling us and nobody can kill her". Why don't you switch to Ana/Bap and kill her yourself? "Oh, I can't aim well enough..." See the issue? When you rely on your team to carry you, you won't climb.

Chapter 6.1 - Dueling and Combat

Speaking of doing damage, often you'll find yourself with a duel between you and another player.

One of the most important things to consider when learning how to offensively support is realizing that not every duel has to be taken. It's possible, and wise, to simply decline to fight someone.

Low rank supports commonly make the mistake in believing that every threat is their problem. Widow grappling to high ground? Better take potshots at her. Hope she's bad and doesn't blow my head off while I try to land 3 shots on her. Oop, I died, and now our team has only pitiful lucio heals, guess we wipe! Darn, if only I wasn't matched against these smurf widows, smh.... When the whole time, that duel should've never occurred. The correct response to something like that is "Whelp, that's not my problem, better call it out and take cover". Because right now, your winston just watched that widow grapple up there, he's preparing to dive her, and he's really hoping his ana isn't boosted from bronze and knows not to peek her. Oh, she did, and died? Guess what that winston now thinks of you. He's probably gonna go make a post later about how he keeps getting matched with trash anas that don't know to not peek widows, while you go and make a post about how the matchmaker is broken and you keep getting smurf widows in your games.

Sound familiar? A little too real? Well, it's a situation that plays out, time and time again, in the middle ranks, and especially high plat, where random DPS possess mechanical skill far above their rank, but not gamesense. They can be negated by simply not peeking them as much as possible. Can't shoot what you can't see.

When you find yourself in a fight that's disadvantaged, you're outgunned, etc, instead of taking the fight and losing it, just don't take the fight. Just say to yourself "That's not my job" and don't peek it. If you take every duel you see, there's 2 negatives and 1 positive outcome. Either you die, your team dies, or you win the duel. Tons of supports get infused with big dick energy and take stupid duels. Sometimes they win, sure, but they lose a lot more value when they lose compared to winning. If you don't take unwinnable or low-chance duels, there's only 2 outcomes: Your team fails to respond to the threat, or your team handles the threat. You've completely removed the option of your death, and thus, you can truly say it was your team's issue.

I've seen so many games thrown by supports who can't understand not to peek the enemy snipers. The rest of the team is cognizant of the threat, but the Ana just keeps dying for no reason, and it all collapses from there. Don't be that person.

So then what about duels you should take?

It's generally okay to take duels against other supports (Ana killing the enemy Ana can happen), or with DPS that lack range from afar, such as Junkrat or reaper. Look for these opportunities to try and take out a key target for free, or increase pressure on the enemy healers. Even peppering them with shots can distract them and break their focus, which gets you value. Plus, there's the ult charge factor.

Chapter 7 - Choosing the right support

Another common question is "How do I choose the right support for the situation?", which is pretty important.

Generally, supports have "weak situations" and "strong situations". Ana, for example, is effective with ground-based comps (Like ReinZar), and is weak if the enemy comp is dive heavy. A competent Ana can deal with a single diver, 1:1, but if multiple people dive the Ana, she needs protection to survive. Lucio prefers brawly comps that get on top of people and blast em, like ReinZar, and also can work with dive tanks. He also synergizes well with short range DPS like Reaper, but ONLY if he uses speed frequently.

As there's thousands of combinations of teams, it's hard to detail an exact set of rules that you can use to select your healer. In my opinion, you're best off going through this short checklist:

• Can I effectively and reliably heal most people on my team? Certain healers struggle to heal certain targets, eg Bap trying to heal Pharah.
• Will I be safe enough to do my job without having to spend time fighting? Even if you can fight off divers, that's still time where healing is interrupted.
• Do we have enough healing? Running Zen and Brig won't work, you need a powerful source of healing at the very least.
• Do we have too much healing? On the counter, running too much healing is bad too, as you'll cannibalize each other's ult charge. Running Ana & Moira is common in plat, as the great number of heals can compensate for mistakes....until you get antihealed or ulted on, and have no counter to it. You should generally have some kind of off healer, like Zen, Brig, Lucio, etc.
• Does the map support my hero choice? Lucio is good on maps that have horizontal distance so his speed can get value, and also favors maps with death zones because boops. Ana likes maps and points with super long sightlines, so she can provide value from far away to avoid divers, etc.

So long as you check that checklist, selecting a hero to play shouldn't be too hard. Personally, I play a lot of Ana and Bap, so I'll start off on one of those two and see what my other support does. If they also pick a main healer, I'll usually go Lucio or stay Bap depending on the map and our comp.

Look for synergy and ways you can help the team effort.

Chapter 8 - Comms and coordination

Speaking of synergy and team effort, another powerful way to help your team is to make callouts.

Supports are granted the best view of the battlefield, and thus typically will have the most information out of the three roles. If you don't communicate that information, you're only hurting your chances at winning.

Personally, I'm a very talkative support. I call out things all the time, things I see, ults I foresee coming, as well as minor engagement details ("we're up, push in!").

If you're looking for "call priority", I'd have to say it's the following, in descending order of priority:

• Heal availability (Can you heal? How many healers are alive? Give people info to judge how much healing they have available. EG Anas should call LOSing ("Can't see you X") as well as reloading during action, Lucios should call types of amps, etc)
• Abnormalities (Call people flanking/behaving oddly (they're probably trying to pull bullshit), missing players, the like)
• Player:Player status. Basically, call the state of the fight, are you up, are you down people, etc. I personally call 6v4 as "We're up 2, push hard", 5v3 as "We're down 3, missing <important role>, get out or wipe", 4v4 as "we're even, missing <important role>", etc. For healers, I call "You have one healer, only <healer>" or "No heals, play safe/die quickly". You can adapt this to your own style. Just get the info across.
• Ult predictions (Call ult status for the enemy team if you're tracking it. If you're really good, make estimations as to the time of their ult, eg "Reaper looking to ult", "Rein's gonna shatter soon")
• Key cooldowns you notice ("Mei no ice block", "Genji no deflect", etc. These help your DPS to find kills.) Like stated earlier, you can assist when you see these, I like to potshot genjis without deflect.
• Calling pockets ("I've got you X, go in", "Pocketing Zarya, go in", etc. Tells the person you're targeting it at that they have your full heals (and thus can play hard), as well as explaining reduced heals on others.)

Of course, all of these are contextual. Find the one that'll most help your team.

Chapter 9 - Wrap up

Thanks for reading! I hope this cleared things up, and contains actionable tips you can apply to your benefit. If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns, don't hesitate to drop em below.

Submitted October 17, 2019 at 12:40AM by Gangsir https://ift.tt/31mZsYO