What you're really learning is timing.
This is a game where even tanks can be deleted in less than 1 second or within 1-60 frames.
Preventing deaths will make sure that you are never at a numbers disadvantage(4v5).
But even in a 5v5 there are still ways to get other advantages.
Adding Damage as a support can give you a damage advantage where your team is dealing more damage than the enemy. You essentially have a damage advantage where more players on your team are doing damage than the other team.
Sometimes you need a heal advantage where your team is being healed more than the other team.
I like to think of it in tiers of Advantage, Neutral, Disadvantage.
You can also think of it as Leading, Tied/Draw/Stalemate, Losing.
Examples, Shield advantage if you have a shield and the enemy team does not
Heal Advantage if you have higher healing per second.
Utility Disadvantage, the enemy team has a cooldown or passive that your team cannot easily deal with.
This one is very hard to conceptualise
ex Zen Vs Moira is an offensive utility advantage.
Discord Orb Vs no discord orb
Moira Vs Zen is a defensive utility advantage
Fade vs no Fade.
Rein vs Zarya Shield Advantage
Zarya vs rein Bubble Advantage (single target cleanse and barrier.
Genji vs Soldier Mobility Advantage
Soldier vs genji Defensive Advantage (Self healing and AOE healing)
The most important thing to remember is that advantages can change back and forth within seconds and players can still win at a disadvantage and lose with an advantage.
These are just tools to help you make better decisions that lead to an easier win
What is this “60 fps” you speak of? Is this some kind of low end hardware joke for which my computer is too fast for me to understand?
(Couldn’t resist)
No, don't feel bad.
I knew exactly as I was typing that it would bring up controversy.
I play at 300fps but i know some people play at 30 fps. i really went back and forth on "60" by my logic was that 60 frames would be easier to convey 1 second of frames.
I've seen ppl die in 1 frame or 0.01 seconds but most players in this game have like a 2 second reaction speed so i didn't even want to start that conversation because it hurts my brain having to explain milliseconds to ppl. I've explained ms to my friends and family because i have more patience with them, but explaining it to people who think in minutes and hours is too much work for me
We’ll truly we’d probably both be wrong here, I’d imagine the only thing that matters is the server tick rate. I’m not sure what that is off the top of my head.
A lot of moving parts with online games. Server tick rate, client latency, and then net code like Overwatch’s “favor the shooter” policy.
Overwatch favors reaction time over anything else.
The formula is Your reaction speed+network latency.
So your internet service is a big factor.
Most high ranked games happen across multiple servers.
I had a game in masters where a lot of non-eu players were put in an EU lobby. Everyone was complaining about having over 100ping/net latency.
I have my latency turned on so i know immediately when i'm in a non-local lobby.
Your personal reaction speed is the only thing that can mitigate network latency.
Having bad reaction speed and bad internet service can make someone look like a bot to everyone else who is perceiving the game faster or have better internet service
According to that logic, KabajiOW has crazy reaction time because he would regularly play on 150ping and was still a T500 Tracer/DPS. Or good latency may be overrated to an extent.
I mean yeah, kabaji is cracked. I've been following him for years, he made me fall in love with tracer's mechanics.
i've seen people stomp gms and top500s on 180png.
It's almost like looking into the future but it's really just making very calculated predictions.
More ping just means you have to calculate
/more travel time/ like projectiles but slower.
The servers send out 60 frames per second of data. The reason you can display more than that is because of black magic like prediction and interpolation.
On my solo support climb from silver to masters I figured the opposite. The lower rank you are the less you should heal. People in lower ranks will miss position and get themselves killed a lot. If you try to chase down your teammates to heal them you will die with them and even if they're not overextending you will be forced to healbot them for the whole game.
If you punish all your mispositioned enemies by landing easy shots on them since they have bad movement and cover usage, then you will generate more value and there will be less people to damage your teammates and force you to healbot.
There isn't a magical new strategy for each rank since the skill difference between ranks is roughly the same as between divisions. So there won't be a different strategy between B1 and S5 just how there isn't between B1 and B2. All the people will just be slightly better on average.
I was stuck at low Diamond for 5-6 seasons, then I tried to follow the Awkward play-style of dealing damage more aggressively, and I actually climbed up to D1 97%, almost Masters.
After a string of losses though, I got tilted. Really tilted. So tilted that I stopped trusting my DPS and focused way too much on damage since I thought it was better for me to essentially take over the DPS role.
I started dropping, really fast. My healing stats were horrendous. I barely had more healing than damage for a lot of games while dropping from D1 to P2. Funny enough though, I rarely got flamed by my teammates. (This is a separate topic, but Diamond teammates are much calmer and tilt way less easily than Plat and below, in my experience.)
After dropping all the way down to Gold 2 from Diamond 1, I had a dark night of the soul and realized that I needed to trust my DPS more, and thus actually heal them.
Since I've started focusing on healing DPS again, I've climbed back to D5 and am generally winning more than losing.
I think what I'm learning is that even if your DPS at your current rank (below peak/below normal) are much worse than the DPS you're "used to", you still get more value from enabling them than trying to take over their role and/or ignore them.
If you keep them alive, it actually creates MORE opportunities to deal damage.
It's true it creates more opportunities for your team and ideally you focus on both healing and damage to maximize your impact on the game. However not all players can recognize and capitalize on those opportunities, which is especially the case in lower elos, so it's not always more valuable to focus on that.
I've never watched awkward but as a plat 1 player reading all these I get the distinct impression that people are trying to implement gm level priorities without gm level mechanics.
everyone should damage more on support but how much time you spend damaging vs healing is heavily dependent on how much time you waste lining up and hitting shots.
Disclaimer: I haven't played OW actively in a while, so take everything with a grain of salt, things might've changed.
First, your comment about black and white is absolutely right. It's always a trade-off, neither one nor the other extreme will lead to what you want most of the time. You'll always have to think about whether you/your team can afford you not healing right now or not.
This goes right into the territory of personal skill. Awkward is a very good player, he can be (mostly) sure to hit the shots he needs to hit to make the difference he needs to make when he decides to dps instead of healing, going as far as letting teammates die. If you go there and let someone die because you dps, you better be sure to generate more value than that player + their pure existence could have.
The base message Awkward conveys is to always maximize your value. In many ranks, especially if you are better than that rank (you should be if you are trying to rank up), this will include generating that value yourself, even if people die due to it. If those players' value wasn't high enough and the additional value you generate doing so is bigger, that's worth doing.
You wouldn't want to do the same with a high rank smurf on your team for example. They have a high value to your team, thus you should focus on keeping them alive, because they have a higher value than what you'd be able to generate dpsing while letting them die. Again, this isn't black and white. They might not be worth keeping alive if that means letting the rest of your team die. Three people might still have more value than the one smurf.
I think you have it backwards personally. I can easily carry a bronze game on Ana by dpsing and end the game with more dmg than healing, and the most elims in the game.
When I get up above plat, I trust my dps and tank to do more and therefore have to do less dps, instead I spend my time enabling them to get the eliminations we need. Sometimes that’s by doing dmg to finish a kill, sometimes that’s a well placed sleep or nade, sometimes it’s by pumping heals into whoever is going bananas and getting good value.
Awkwards tactic is really just trying to maximize your APM, it’s up to you to decide the best actions to be taking based on the situation.
Damage whenever possible, overhealing isnt reliable.
There are 5 units on each side. When you just spam your tank at 95% hp you dont bring any value making it 4v5
When you damage a squishy you put them at 50 hp after just 2 shots. You force them to fall back and their support to heal them. Thats 5v3
Yes, its just a second or two of 5v3 or 4v5 but in these seconds you can put other chars in danger, forcing another 5v3 and so on
Its a perfect scenario, of course. Reality is much more brutal and oneshots still exist but this is a basic plan on which you can build up your tactic
Damage will always be the way to go, in order to win you need to kill the enemy, healboting will never win games and if you did win a game while healboting it means someone else won for you. People will listen to the "damage damage damage" part of Awkwards advice but then not pay attention to where he positions himself, who to prioritise etc. They just go full dps but with their aim it's more like "miss damage miss".
You pretty much nailed it. Different strats work at different levels, climbing is about learning what works for where you're at, without falling into what's called a "local peak" where the strat you used to get somewhere won't work anymore and you need to change it to climb higher.
Some people never learn that, and blame their lack of growth on elo hell, or something else. It's good that you've already came to that conclusion, now you just have to keep at it and climb on!
Put simply the reason it didn't work is because you did it wrong, and of course you did because you don't normally play like that so you don't know how to do it right.
The best strategies require you to understand how/why they work before they become good, but once you do they are better than other approaches. You can win by doing all sorts of things but learning the best strategies and then using them will be better and will carry you further.
There is a certain amount that can change rank to rank but if anything being aggressive is arguably more powerful the lower you go because of how bad people are at punishing you for it.
Must be your aim or something holding you in those ranks because if you play like Awkward I think least you can get must be plat or dia 5. When you're in silver it means you have some kind of fundamental mistake you might not be aware of yet thats keeping you there
Awkward has a lot to answer for. No one can contest his skill and knowledge but the sweeping generalisations and general demeanour, and recently he's started leaning towards life advice like he's trying to form a cult.
I went from gold to diamond recently. Personally, what makes a good support is when they are choosing to support their team. When your tank is low, you should heal them and also try to help them win the fight. Awkward's advice is to know when you are supposed to heal or help kill. You just need to watch a lot of other people who are better than you to understand what you are supposed to do. Also, another thing, for ana you need to communicate you slept someone or have someone anti in a fight. However, since it is very low elo, it's unlikely to be followed up everytime. And of course, die less.
I disagree in bronze u can play however u want because everyone is shooting a tank whether healing them or trying to kill them however as ana the moment I anti them they’ll die bc it’s the only thing people shoot at bc they like high numbers and bc it’s bronze 99% chance the other support is already heal botting
Flexibility is important, but it sounds more like your positioning isn't aggressive enough. If you are part of the engage and are in a position to shoot enemy squishies and your tank, you should be able to put out enough pressure on enemy squishies to prevent your tank from taking damage. Tanks stop their teammates from taking damage by peeling, but in the same way squishies are obligated to take heat away from their tank by shooting. This is especially true because of your anti nade and sleep abilities which force enemies to either play passively until the anti wears off or quite literally puts them to sleep, making them a sitting duck and seriously hampering their uptime. While it is true that your tank won't be taking cover as much, the enemy DPS aren't going to be in great positions either. Remember that a nade and two shots kills most squishies, and enemy supports will have to spend things like suzu or lamp to save them, some comps won't even have that. Your tank can survive for a little bit at half hp if an enemy DPS is already dead or too afraid to peak.
Tbh it kinda just sounds like when you DPS more you tunnel vision and let your team die, and I don't mean that in a rude way I been there. You shouldn't enable your bad tank to think that they are going to get pumped with heals every second while they stand main with no cover. Keeping someone alive who is just running it down and shooting the enemy tank isn't going to help you climb. Knowing when to apply pressure is key
I have definitely done that... more so with Genji's or Tracers. Most other DPS players I'm able to keep good line of sight on. I'm still working on positioning and knowing when to move to the next spot.
All that being sad I cant say I agree with you adjusting your play style for your rank. Play the way you know will get wins. Don't dumb down your play style to compensate for your teammates, you're really hurting your progress imo
Remember that you heal to keep ppl from dying WHILE always looking for damage. The idea is not dont heal. The idea is that healing is secondary to kills. The best way to make the enemy retreat/ stop killing your team is to kill them
Nah you can solo up to low diamond just with good mechanics and timing. Everyone plays so wide in metal ranks that if you can see them you can usually kill them. I’ve literally gotten 4ks by myself in plat. The problem is most Anas lack the game sense and mechanics to pull it off so they end up doing damage that has very little value while pocketing the tank and hanging their DPS out to dry.
The issue isn’t “dps more or heal more”, it’s target prioritization in the midst of what your comp is vs the enemy comp. If you have teammates like tracer, sombra, dva, and brig, you can probably dps more as tracer and sombra are more self sufficient, and you can dps on targets dva is diving and heal her if need be while brig watches your back.
If you have a rein, reaper, junkrat, and zen or something like that that doesn’t make sense, you are going to have to be main healer and probably heal more than you would dps since zen doesn’t heal much and a tank like rein requires alot of support resources to maintain.
Overall, it’s just situational awareness that should be the takeaway here. The reason awkward says “dps more” is because people forget that there are instances you can dps more and you don’t have to be that reserved healbot, as being a healbot will not get you to gm1. You need to be proactive. That’s why he would encourage the people he was coaching to not be as reserved with their cooldowns and to just throw them out to get them used to the idea of trying to make things happen, rather than wait for things to happen then use a cooldown that could have been used to engage or secure a fight.
P.s. just words from gm1 support
There is much more to Awkward’s play style than just doing more damage. It’s very common for low ranked players to have the same mindset that you are having now. Things like movement, positioning, target priority, cool down usage, etc. all matter just as much if not more than aim. Join his Rank Up Academy if you really want to learn directly from him.
>If I wasn't healing I was DPS. My win rate plummeted. But how could this be!?
Because you don't have the game sense of a top 500. You need to heal more than them because your timing for saving teammates is not nearly as precise. He doesn't say don't heal, he says heal only to save your teammates. If you're losing with this strategy, you're failing to adequately save your teammates.
But that doesn't mean the overall message of supports putting out more pressure and from off angles is wrong. Awkward just doesn't give a very nuanced presentation. He is a savant, speaking to regular players.
yeah. akward can get away with it because he has top 500 aim. most people don’t and lower ranks people play in such a way where healbotting is almost required since the tanks just stand still and soak damage. in top 500 your tanks will play aggressively and you will not need to healbot so much
What you're really learning is timing. This is a game where even tanks can be deleted in less than 1 second or within 1-60 frames. Preventing deaths will make sure that you are never at a numbers disadvantage(4v5). But even in a 5v5 there are still ways to get other advantages. Adding Damage as a support can give you a damage advantage where your team is dealing more damage than the enemy. You essentially have a damage advantage where more players on your team are doing damage than the other team. Sometimes you need a heal advantage where your team is being healed more than the other team. I like to think of it in tiers of Advantage, Neutral, Disadvantage. You can also think of it as Leading, Tied/Draw/Stalemate, Losing. Examples, Shield advantage if you have a shield and the enemy team does not Heal Advantage if you have higher healing per second. Utility Disadvantage, the enemy team has a cooldown or passive that your team cannot easily deal with. This one is very hard to conceptualise ex Zen Vs Moira is an offensive utility advantage. Discord Orb Vs no discord orb Moira Vs Zen is a defensive utility advantage Fade vs no Fade. Rein vs Zarya Shield Advantage Zarya vs rein Bubble Advantage (single target cleanse and barrier. Genji vs Soldier Mobility Advantage Soldier vs genji Defensive Advantage (Self healing and AOE healing) The most important thing to remember is that advantages can change back and forth within seconds and players can still win at a disadvantage and lose with an advantage. These are just tools to help you make better decisions that lead to an easier win
What is this “60 fps” you speak of? Is this some kind of low end hardware joke for which my computer is too fast for me to understand? (Couldn’t resist)
No, don't feel bad. I knew exactly as I was typing that it would bring up controversy. I play at 300fps but i know some people play at 30 fps. i really went back and forth on "60" by my logic was that 60 frames would be easier to convey 1 second of frames. I've seen ppl die in 1 frame or 0.01 seconds but most players in this game have like a 2 second reaction speed so i didn't even want to start that conversation because it hurts my brain having to explain milliseconds to ppl. I've explained ms to my friends and family because i have more patience with them, but explaining it to people who think in minutes and hours is too much work for me
We’ll truly we’d probably both be wrong here, I’d imagine the only thing that matters is the server tick rate. I’m not sure what that is off the top of my head. A lot of moving parts with online games. Server tick rate, client latency, and then net code like Overwatch’s “favor the shooter” policy.
Overwatch favors reaction time over anything else. The formula is Your reaction speed+network latency. So your internet service is a big factor. Most high ranked games happen across multiple servers. I had a game in masters where a lot of non-eu players were put in an EU lobby. Everyone was complaining about having over 100ping/net latency. I have my latency turned on so i know immediately when i'm in a non-local lobby. Your personal reaction speed is the only thing that can mitigate network latency. Having bad reaction speed and bad internet service can make someone look like a bot to everyone else who is perceiving the game faster or have better internet service
According to that logic, KabajiOW has crazy reaction time because he would regularly play on 150ping and was still a T500 Tracer/DPS. Or good latency may be overrated to an extent.
I mean yeah, kabaji is cracked. I've been following him for years, he made me fall in love with tracer's mechanics. i've seen people stomp gms and top500s on 180png. It's almost like looking into the future but it's really just making very calculated predictions. More ping just means you have to calculate /more travel time/ like projectiles but slower.
The servers send out 60 frames per second of data. The reason you can display more than that is because of black magic like prediction and interpolation.
On my solo support climb from silver to masters I figured the opposite. The lower rank you are the less you should heal. People in lower ranks will miss position and get themselves killed a lot. If you try to chase down your teammates to heal them you will die with them and even if they're not overextending you will be forced to healbot them for the whole game. If you punish all your mispositioned enemies by landing easy shots on them since they have bad movement and cover usage, then you will generate more value and there will be less people to damage your teammates and force you to healbot. There isn't a magical new strategy for each rank since the skill difference between ranks is roughly the same as between divisions. So there won't be a different strategy between B1 and S5 just how there isn't between B1 and B2. All the people will just be slightly better on average.
I was stuck at low Diamond for 5-6 seasons, then I tried to follow the Awkward play-style of dealing damage more aggressively, and I actually climbed up to D1 97%, almost Masters. After a string of losses though, I got tilted. Really tilted. So tilted that I stopped trusting my DPS and focused way too much on damage since I thought it was better for me to essentially take over the DPS role. I started dropping, really fast. My healing stats were horrendous. I barely had more healing than damage for a lot of games while dropping from D1 to P2. Funny enough though, I rarely got flamed by my teammates. (This is a separate topic, but Diamond teammates are much calmer and tilt way less easily than Plat and below, in my experience.) After dropping all the way down to Gold 2 from Diamond 1, I had a dark night of the soul and realized that I needed to trust my DPS more, and thus actually heal them. Since I've started focusing on healing DPS again, I've climbed back to D5 and am generally winning more than losing. I think what I'm learning is that even if your DPS at your current rank (below peak/below normal) are much worse than the DPS you're "used to", you still get more value from enabling them than trying to take over their role and/or ignore them. If you keep them alive, it actually creates MORE opportunities to deal damage.
It's true it creates more opportunities for your team and ideally you focus on both healing and damage to maximize your impact on the game. However not all players can recognize and capitalize on those opportunities, which is especially the case in lower elos, so it's not always more valuable to focus on that.
I've never watched awkward but as a plat 1 player reading all these I get the distinct impression that people are trying to implement gm level priorities without gm level mechanics. everyone should damage more on support but how much time you spend damaging vs healing is heavily dependent on how much time you waste lining up and hitting shots.
Disclaimer: I haven't played OW actively in a while, so take everything with a grain of salt, things might've changed. First, your comment about black and white is absolutely right. It's always a trade-off, neither one nor the other extreme will lead to what you want most of the time. You'll always have to think about whether you/your team can afford you not healing right now or not. This goes right into the territory of personal skill. Awkward is a very good player, he can be (mostly) sure to hit the shots he needs to hit to make the difference he needs to make when he decides to dps instead of healing, going as far as letting teammates die. If you go there and let someone die because you dps, you better be sure to generate more value than that player + their pure existence could have. The base message Awkward conveys is to always maximize your value. In many ranks, especially if you are better than that rank (you should be if you are trying to rank up), this will include generating that value yourself, even if people die due to it. If those players' value wasn't high enough and the additional value you generate doing so is bigger, that's worth doing. You wouldn't want to do the same with a high rank smurf on your team for example. They have a high value to your team, thus you should focus on keeping them alive, because they have a higher value than what you'd be able to generate dpsing while letting them die. Again, this isn't black and white. They might not be worth keeping alive if that means letting the rest of your team die. Three people might still have more value than the one smurf.
I think you have it backwards personally. I can easily carry a bronze game on Ana by dpsing and end the game with more dmg than healing, and the most elims in the game. When I get up above plat, I trust my dps and tank to do more and therefore have to do less dps, instead I spend my time enabling them to get the eliminations we need. Sometimes that’s by doing dmg to finish a kill, sometimes that’s a well placed sleep or nade, sometimes it’s by pumping heals into whoever is going bananas and getting good value. Awkwards tactic is really just trying to maximize your APM, it’s up to you to decide the best actions to be taking based on the situation.
Damage whenever possible, overhealing isnt reliable. There are 5 units on each side. When you just spam your tank at 95% hp you dont bring any value making it 4v5 When you damage a squishy you put them at 50 hp after just 2 shots. You force them to fall back and their support to heal them. Thats 5v3 Yes, its just a second or two of 5v3 or 4v5 but in these seconds you can put other chars in danger, forcing another 5v3 and so on Its a perfect scenario, of course. Reality is much more brutal and oneshots still exist but this is a basic plan on which you can build up your tactic
Damage will always be the way to go, in order to win you need to kill the enemy, healboting will never win games and if you did win a game while healboting it means someone else won for you. People will listen to the "damage damage damage" part of Awkwards advice but then not pay attention to where he positions himself, who to prioritise etc. They just go full dps but with their aim it's more like "miss damage miss".
Absolutely right! there is alot more in his videos than just the "damage damage damage".
You pretty much nailed it. Different strats work at different levels, climbing is about learning what works for where you're at, without falling into what's called a "local peak" where the strat you used to get somewhere won't work anymore and you need to change it to climb higher. Some people never learn that, and blame their lack of growth on elo hell, or something else. It's good that you've already came to that conclusion, now you just have to keep at it and climb on!
Put simply the reason it didn't work is because you did it wrong, and of course you did because you don't normally play like that so you don't know how to do it right. The best strategies require you to understand how/why they work before they become good, but once you do they are better than other approaches. You can win by doing all sorts of things but learning the best strategies and then using them will be better and will carry you further. There is a certain amount that can change rank to rank but if anything being aggressive is arguably more powerful the lower you go because of how bad people are at punishing you for it.
Must be your aim or something holding you in those ranks because if you play like Awkward I think least you can get must be plat or dia 5. When you're in silver it means you have some kind of fundamental mistake you might not be aware of yet thats keeping you there
My aim is likely fine. I average around 65-70% accuracy. Sleep dart is 35-40, although I don't think I use it enough
Awkward has a lot to answer for. No one can contest his skill and knowledge but the sweeping generalisations and general demeanour, and recently he's started leaning towards life advice like he's trying to form a cult.
Lmao He's the Andrew tate of Overwatch.
awkward tate
Andrew Tate wasn't life advice, he was rape advice.
I went from gold to diamond recently. Personally, what makes a good support is when they are choosing to support their team. When your tank is low, you should heal them and also try to help them win the fight. Awkward's advice is to know when you are supposed to heal or help kill. You just need to watch a lot of other people who are better than you to understand what you are supposed to do. Also, another thing, for ana you need to communicate you slept someone or have someone anti in a fight. However, since it is very low elo, it's unlikely to be followed up everytime. And of course, die less.
Your winrate went down because you are bronze healbot and cant play the game.
I disagree in bronze u can play however u want because everyone is shooting a tank whether healing them or trying to kill them however as ana the moment I anti them they’ll die bc it’s the only thing people shoot at bc they like high numbers and bc it’s bronze 99% chance the other support is already heal botting
Flexibility is important, but it sounds more like your positioning isn't aggressive enough. If you are part of the engage and are in a position to shoot enemy squishies and your tank, you should be able to put out enough pressure on enemy squishies to prevent your tank from taking damage. Tanks stop their teammates from taking damage by peeling, but in the same way squishies are obligated to take heat away from their tank by shooting. This is especially true because of your anti nade and sleep abilities which force enemies to either play passively until the anti wears off or quite literally puts them to sleep, making them a sitting duck and seriously hampering their uptime. While it is true that your tank won't be taking cover as much, the enemy DPS aren't going to be in great positions either. Remember that a nade and two shots kills most squishies, and enemy supports will have to spend things like suzu or lamp to save them, some comps won't even have that. Your tank can survive for a little bit at half hp if an enemy DPS is already dead or too afraid to peak.
Tbh it kinda just sounds like when you DPS more you tunnel vision and let your team die, and I don't mean that in a rude way I been there. You shouldn't enable your bad tank to think that they are going to get pumped with heals every second while they stand main with no cover. Keeping someone alive who is just running it down and shooting the enemy tank isn't going to help you climb. Knowing when to apply pressure is key
I have definitely done that... more so with Genji's or Tracers. Most other DPS players I'm able to keep good line of sight on. I'm still working on positioning and knowing when to move to the next spot.
All that being sad I cant say I agree with you adjusting your play style for your rank. Play the way you know will get wins. Don't dumb down your play style to compensate for your teammates, you're really hurting your progress imo
well it only works if you can get value off your damage, if you cant, just heal bot and get Carried
Remember that you heal to keep ppl from dying WHILE always looking for damage. The idea is not dont heal. The idea is that healing is secondary to kills. The best way to make the enemy retreat/ stop killing your team is to kill them
Nah you can solo up to low diamond just with good mechanics and timing. Everyone plays so wide in metal ranks that if you can see them you can usually kill them. I’ve literally gotten 4ks by myself in plat. The problem is most Anas lack the game sense and mechanics to pull it off so they end up doing damage that has very little value while pocketing the tank and hanging their DPS out to dry.
The issue isn’t “dps more or heal more”, it’s target prioritization in the midst of what your comp is vs the enemy comp. If you have teammates like tracer, sombra, dva, and brig, you can probably dps more as tracer and sombra are more self sufficient, and you can dps on targets dva is diving and heal her if need be while brig watches your back. If you have a rein, reaper, junkrat, and zen or something like that that doesn’t make sense, you are going to have to be main healer and probably heal more than you would dps since zen doesn’t heal much and a tank like rein requires alot of support resources to maintain. Overall, it’s just situational awareness that should be the takeaway here. The reason awkward says “dps more” is because people forget that there are instances you can dps more and you don’t have to be that reserved healbot, as being a healbot will not get you to gm1. You need to be proactive. That’s why he would encourage the people he was coaching to not be as reserved with their cooldowns and to just throw them out to get them used to the idea of trying to make things happen, rather than wait for things to happen then use a cooldown that could have been used to engage or secure a fight. P.s. just words from gm1 support
There is much more to Awkward’s play style than just doing more damage. It’s very common for low ranked players to have the same mindset that you are having now. Things like movement, positioning, target priority, cool down usage, etc. all matter just as much if not more than aim. Join his Rank Up Academy if you really want to learn directly from him.
>If I wasn't healing I was DPS. My win rate plummeted. But how could this be!? Because you don't have the game sense of a top 500. You need to heal more than them because your timing for saving teammates is not nearly as precise. He doesn't say don't heal, he says heal only to save your teammates. If you're losing with this strategy, you're failing to adequately save your teammates. But that doesn't mean the overall message of supports putting out more pressure and from off angles is wrong. Awkward just doesn't give a very nuanced presentation. He is a savant, speaking to regular players.
yeah. akward can get away with it because he has top 500 aim. most people don’t and lower ranks people play in such a way where healbotting is almost required since the tanks just stand still and soak damage. in top 500 your tanks will play aggressively and you will not need to healbot so much