Know Your Roles: Supporting in Hero Shooters

In spite of all the debates online about different roles being more mechanically demanding, playing support in hero shooters really isn’t that easy. Dealing with the overwhelming amount of incoming damage, dodging flankers and divers, all while you fight the urge to tilt while teammates spam the “need heals” comms, it’s a lot to deal with. In games like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals, the Support or Strategist role is arguably the most thankless job there is.

When you’re doing a bad job, it’s pretty apparent; it’s a cacophony of “where’s the heals?!” and similar complaints, and when you’re doing a good job, you’re enabling your teammates to play even better, stacking up multi-kills and streaks of their own without always realizing that you helped make that possible. Yeah, they might see a clutch support ult that helps decide a group fight, but they are often too tunnel visioned or focused on their own mechanics to notice you out-healed a small army’s worth of DPS to help them take the edge in the group fight.

In this Know Your Roles, we’re going to break down the role of the support, providing you with a better understanding of how to succeed, or a better appreciation for what your support teammates are doing. We’re probably not going to solve the whole business of it being the most thankless yet most complained about role, but we’ll at least help the problem by promoting even better play from the backliners. Let’s get into it.

What the Support Actually Does

So, we get the basics, right? Supports are more often than not healers, though in some cases, they might offer some buffs as well, but the core of the role is to keep your team alive as long as possible. Simple… but it gets a lot more dynamic than that. Just like a tank is more than someone who eats damage the entire time, the support is dealing with more, and handling more calculations around the macro of each match, than people actually realize.

Supports are not always reactive, sometimes they are proactively thinking to get into position to help a team take space, or they’re identifying that a teammate will need help as they make a play. It’s not just about filling up a health bar, more often than not it’s about reading the play to be ready to heal a teammate that hasn’t taken damage yet.

Don’t think about your healing as numbers and a bar filling up, think about your heals in the context of the amount of time your teammates can stay alive and stay in the fight. Think of your heals in terms of how your team can stand firmly in space or even begin to gain ground. Look for opportunities to make a teammate even more effective, such as when pocket healing an ulting teammate extends the amount of time they’re ulting and the amount of damage they’re dishing out exponentially.

Lastly, think about your hero as more than a heal bot. It’s extremely rare for a hero shooter’s support character to simply pump out heals. They’re often the most targeted and pressured characters on the map, for good reason, so they usually need some tools to give them time to reposition and escape, and those tools are often useful in other situations.

Take, for example, Ana’s sleep dart or Mantis’ sleep, Kiriko and Gambit’s ability to cleanse and buff, Luna’s ice dart, Baptiste’s immortality field, or Rocket’s respawner… There’s so much more that you can use to stun, sleep, interrupt enemies’ ults, buff, debuff, the list goes on and on. Understanding your kit and how to use it beyond the basics is that x-factor that will wow even the most toxic teammate.

The Archetypes Within the Role

Now, it’s important to note that some supports will operate with a different vibe or sub-role. Your support might not be someone who is pumping out solid group sustain or be a hero that can solo heal the team. Some of them can have especially specific jobs too.

You have the standard, tried and true pure healer archetypes. Think of Mercy, Luna Snow, Ana, or Rocket Raccoon. They are keeping their team as healthy as possible within the confines of their core kit, sustaining the team, keeping them alive, and in the fight.

Utility supports bring a different kind of value, and while their main healing output may be a bit lower, their abilities can put the odds in their team’s favor to turn fights. Heroes like Kiriko, Adam Warlock, Lucio, and Mantis, are the sorts of characters that can make a big play to change the entire complexion of a battle. Kiriko’s ability to cleanse an anti-heal or provide invulnerability to a teammate on death’s door, Lucio speed boosting his teammates to contest an objective in the nick of time before swapping to his passive AOE heal, Mantis landing a key sleep and a damage boost, or Adam Warlock popping off a massive clutch group resurrection, all of those things are game changers.

The hybrid support can be a bit, let’s say… up to interpretation, but they make sense when you look at them. Moira and Baptiste, Cloak & Dagger, Invisible Woman, and Gambit are all characters who do a lot of different things. They can often sustain themselves under pressure much better than their counterparts, and they can often contribute meaningful damage when the situation calls for it. Be careful with that, though, as a support who is just chasing down kills is a quick way to catch unwanted attention over VOIP.

As we mentioned in Know Your Roles – Tanks, there are always going to be heroes that aren’t as cleanly placed into these separate groupings, and as new heroes are added to the hero shooter genre, we’ll keep seeing the role evolve, but these are some examples to give you some concepts to use as a framework.

Healing Priority

One of the most common questions… or debates… around the support role is: What is the priority chain for your heals? There’s a general consensus, which we’ll cover here, but there is also a ‘game sense’ answer that is much more open-ended, and we’ll touch on that in a moment.

The general consensus answer in the hero shooter genre, and in other games with the holy trinity roles, is that your tank should come first, by default. They’re the mechanism by which your team can control space, and a dead tank creates a whole host of problems that a dead DPS does not. Which is why the DPS tends to come second down the list. While it’s important to have your DPS alive and contributing, you can still hunker down and survive while you wait for them to get back into the fight. That’s much more challenging when you’re tankless. Detanked, if you will.
Finally, your fellow support usually comes last, as they often have the tools to sustain themselves. If they’re under pressure, they’re usually not healing your other teammates, and someone has to.

Now, all of that said, this is just the default concept of your healing priority, and it’s not set in stone. There’s still so much situational data that you need to consider second by second. For example, if you have the opportunity to toss a heal at your fellow support, and it won’t crumble the rest of your line to do so, by all means, keep them in the fight. If you see your DPS is about to open up on an enemy team and a pocket healer is going to route their entire backline, then step up and facilitate their success.

Look, anyone can spam some heals… that’s the easy part, but developing that game IQ to be able to read the play, see things before they happen, and quarterback your team from the backline, that’s the difficulty modifier of the role that complicates that “support is the easiest job” thing we mentioned earlier. You can elevate and transform the entire role by being an attentive, intuitive support player.

Your Responsibilities Beyond Healing

We’re all in agreement that healing is the foundation of the support role, right? One way or another, we get that, but there are actually a few other responsibilities that contribute to that whole “elevate and transform the role” thing. Think of these as those extra qualities that make you a significantly better teammate on the lineup.

First and foremost, communicating. That’s the quarterbacking thing we mentioned before. As a support, you have a unique view of the battlefield that others don’t. While they might have their own unique perspectives, such as a flanker seeing a weak link in the enemy’s chain or a tank seeing space that’s up for grabs, you are still seeing the most out of anyone, and you can provide key comms and information that will save everyone a ton of stress.

For example, while your tank might be trying to keep up the tempo and push to take space, they can only see ahead of them… they didn’t notice that a Winston or a Venom had leaped over their head and forced the rest of their team back, or that they’re about to cut off the line of sight from their supports. You see the flankers and the divers who are about to crash into the backline, or the Wolverine who is about to kidnap your tank.

As a word of warning, there’s no column on the scoreboard for great comms. It might decide a match, but it’s not the kind of stat that anyone will be able to look at and compare, and unfortunately, there are players who just want to queue up and sit in silence, getting carried to a win without wanting to hear a good teammate, and we can’t fix those players through sheer force of will, so if they start giving you lip for being productive, mute them and move on.

Lastly, you have the ability to make plays, and that’s not just with big fight shift support ults. Those utility abilities we talked about before, those sleeps and stuns, the buffs, those can be used proactively instead of reactively. Mantis can damage boost a DPS who is about to pick off an enemy support, or Kiriko teleporting to a teammate who is flanking to keep them alive as they run through the enemy team’s squishies. It can be Lucio or Invisible Woman booping a tank off the maps to open things up, or Invisible Woman can pull someone through their own frontline where the entire team beats their head in with bike chains and tire irons while your Reinhardt or Dr. Strange uses shields to prevent incoming heals. The best support players aren’t just reacting and healing, they’re thinking ahead and making decisions that shift the playing field.

Helping Yourself Survive

Alright, here’s where we have to get real with ourselves. It’s not just those flankers who are halfway across the map spamming requests for heals who can be whiny; we supports can also do our share of complaining. When supports are under pressure from divers and flankers, it’s easy to start pointing fingers and accusing our teammates of not peeling or helping, but are we giving them a practical opportunity to help?

If we’re being reasonable and realistic, we cannot expect our teammates to drop what they’re doing, spin 180, and run to the backline to grab that Tracer or Magik who are giving you fits. That just leaves them open to punishment without the ability to defend themselves. It can also be a ton of ground for them to cover, depending on everyone’s positioning. You have to think proactively about your positioning in general, but when you’re under duress, you have to think about what you can do to help your teammates help you.

First, lean on that communication we talked about. Calmly call out divers and flankers to your team. That might not lead to an immediate solution, but you’re establishing a problem, and if it goes unanswered, you can reframe the request to ask someone to hunt down the players who are jumping on you. A Namor, for example, can do a lot to help protect the backline and force a swap.

Next, consider your positioning. Are you playing from some strange platform that teammates can’t reach with their hero’s lack of mobility? Are you playing too far back so teammates cannot respond and peel quickly enough? Set yourself up for success by making yourself somewhat accessible for at least some of your teammates.

When a diver is trying to steal your lunch money, where are you going to go? If you just turn around and attempt to run as far away as possible, you’re just isolating yourself. You’re dragging yourself out to deep waters where that DPS who, almost certainly, has just as much mobility as you have, can finish you off and move on to the next target. So run toward your teammates… bring the problem TO them, and at that point, no one has any excuse. Worst case scenario, the enemy has to back off and look for another vector of attack… but best case scenario, you’ve served them up to your team for a quick kill.

It’s also extremely important to make sure that you’re holding on to your escape tools until you need them. Look, we all hate having to run at default speed, and it’s fun to use some dashes or leaps to move up more quickly, but the moment you NEED those tools and they’re on cooldown, you’re going to be cursing your laziness, so think ahead and play responsibly. When these abilities are in a support’s kit, they are tools for survivability, not for funsies.

Common Mistakes

We touched on these in passing, but some of the most common mistakes that support can make are pretty obvious. First, having bad positioning is one of the worst things you can do as support. Bad positioning can reduce your overall healing output, your effectiveness, and your ability to get bailed out of tough situations. Sure, we all want to avoid being an easy target, but there is such a thing as playing too passively, and a support who is too passive is just downright useless to the team’s overall resource economy.

Next, tunnel visioning on a single teammate. This is a bit of the opposite problem of the first point, you might be following an overzealous diver or tank into trouble that neither of you is getting out of. Your team isn’t going to thank you for being a ride or die with your Spider-Man… they’re going to yell at you when they realize they’re not getting healed.

Failing to communicate is another extremely common and preventable mistake for support players. Your teammates can’t see everything… and if they can, you should probably report them for cheating… but, if you’re facing a ton of pressure, with the backline getting crashed over and over by the same divers, and you’re not speaking up about it, you have no one to blame but yourself. Everyone is playing their own game, trying to survive and trying to win, they cannot monitor the obituaries to identify when you are dying over and over again to one Genji or Black Cat. Speak up.

Finally, trying to force your hero to play outside of their role. Hey, it’s a ton of fun to punish some enemy DPS by pulling the “Call an ambulance, but not for me!” move on them and running them down as a healer, but now you’re being irresponsible, especially if this goes on for more than a few seconds. This is even more of a problem if your team doesn’t have another viable support who can pick up your slack.

You also can’t force certain supports into being better healers than they are. Zenyatta orbs can only do so much, and Lucio’s passive heals are probably not going to sustain through an immense burst of damage. Adam Warlock can do a lot, but sustainability just isn’t one of his strengths. Know your roles… pun intended.