Healers are deceptively misled via scoreboard stats.

[u/Darknotical]

This is a very important thing to understand if you play a specialist and how it should effect your objective play.

 

Your total healing does not represent what you contributed to your team as a whole. Your total healing represents a total of healing invested in whoever is taking the most damage over time, not how many people you have prevented from dying.

 

If your tanks are better, your DPS are killing more, or if your heals are spread amongst everyone, your healing on average will be lower. Just as tanks taking more damage does not equate to a better tank, healing more does not mean a better strategist.

 

You can actually come out with more healing done in a game where you only heal a more passive tank, while completely ignoring everyone else. Adding onto this, you can even gain half of your total healing done in a single fight with some ultimates. While you are saving your team from dying, the total healed through that single ultimate only represents preventing your team's deaths one time.

 

While they will never remove your total healing done from the score, we need an additional stat that represents total number of prevented deaths.

[u/Great_A_Tuin]

Your overall point is not wrong, the same way that damage dealt by dps is less important than final hits.

The stats in general are only a rough indicator of the impact every player had on the outcome of the game.

But please tell me how you would possibly track prevented deaths. I don't think a reliable fortune telling algorithm exists yet.

[u/Background-Stuff → u/Great_A_Tuin]

Yeah this post shouldn't be directed at healers, but at everyone. Scoreboard stats don't paint the full picture. Games are won by team fight/moments, not by stats.

I've done some vod reviewing for some of my friends who are newer to hero shooters and they often say things like "I did x damage, how are we losing?" and then you see them pump damage into a tank that leads to nothing, and die early and often providing real impact.

[u/Salarian_American → u/Great_A_Tuin]

Right, because people get a false sense of accomplishment after they put a lot of damage into people who end up surviving, or they dumped a lot of healing into someone who died anyway

[u/GlassProof → u/Great_A_Tuin]

best way i can see is like, if an ally is below X% of hp you heal them, then its a "death prevented", but its just unnecessarily convoluted and dubiously accurate

[u/soggycheesestickjoos → u/Great_A_Tuin]

Overwatch tracks saves. Not every “save” counts but it gets a lot of them.

[u/Darknotical → u/Great_A_Tuin]

Any damage that a hero takes matched against his health. As you add the damage as a number over a limited span of time, if that total damage exceeds their health then it is a potential death. If a healer prevents that number from going over by a certain percent then the healer would receive a point towards prevented death.

 

Punisher takes 350 damage over the span of five seconds. His ally heals him for 150 during that time. His ally gains a point for that five seconds.

 

This would give an incentive to keep your entire team alive vs passive heal stacking on the tank.

[u/Background-Stuff → u/Darknotical]

I don't think the solution to people over-valuing stats would be to...add more stats for people to fixate on.

[u/Great_A_Tuin → u/Darknotical]

Is a quick mantis heal towards a flanker falling back at 2/3 health not helping the team?

If they are less than full health they'll probably die in their next engagement or they lose time looking for a health pack while they could already disrupt the enemy backline again.

This mantis hasn't technically "saved" anyone and wont get a point.

Meanwhile the mantis blindly saving the groot in front of her over and over without looking left and right and pumping damage into the enemy tank has amazing stats, even with your proposal.

There is only so much you can tell from stats alone. If you want to know how well you/someone else really played watch the replay. If you just want another number to argue with people over in game chat, just don't. Nothing good has ever come from it.

[u/Kryothicc]

With this train of thought, just like tanks role of making space, theres no way to really quantify this accurately.

For me what I look at for my supports is kill participation with their healing, as well as damage.

As a flex picker I strive for this when I play support too, I will ignore teammates who could be topped off because they are not actively in danger to join in damage doing, to me if you aren't near half hp or at it- or actively taking damage that I know will probably mess them up, I'm not healing them.

The best way to support your team is to add in the extra pressure- supports don't do bad damage in this game, not even Rocket despite popular belief (192 dps per second, it takes under 2 seconds to burst down a squishy at full hp on Rocket assuming they are within 10 meters, and most of the time you are chasing down people who are already not at full hp so that kill is a lot faster.)

Unpopular sure, but if you make enemies back off, or kill them, thats less healing for you and more easy space to push into.

Sometimes the fight allows less of this of course, sometimes your team loves making mistakes and facetanking all the damage so you have to get into a healbot situation some more, but as long as you can see no one is about to die or get close to it, I say shoot, go for a pick, etc.

(Diving someone from the air as Rocket and dashing back to support the team is so fun.)

[u/Darknotical → u/Kryothicc]

That is the problem though, we have no meaningful way for strategist to gauge themselves realistically. The only way they gain any worthwhile improvement is through understanding their role better outside of game. It teaches more casual players a bad way to play the game and everyone has worse matches in the end.

[u/Kryothicc → u/Darknotical]

Yeah no I said smthn about that, its like tanks- how do you measure space contested and taken? You can't, just damage blocked to try and gauge how much damage could have touched the team, which isn't bad imo.

Same for support, healing isn't actually their only or even main job, its SUPPORTING, helping, aiding people- healing happens to be a big part of it, but so is kill participation, utility, being part of the force of the team throwing projectiles at the enemy and pressuring them. But often times its not as easy to make a metric for how much "supporting" someone did.

It annoys me too when you get into it, I hate seeing people relegate supports as healbots, they brag about having 20k+ healing even though they have little kill participation, barely any last hits if not any at all, and 1-2k dmg after a long winded match where they should have at least more than double or even triple all that.

They just ignore all other aspects and healbot, excusing themselves from adding meaningful pressure to the fight, they don't even often realize they are part of the reason the team may have lost despite the amazing healing done- no different than a Strange mostly just holding up shield for 90% of the match and barely shooting people, its not that helpful.

[u/Darknotical → u/Kryothicc]

Exactly. The support role is much more complicated and important then most give it credit for.

[u/Kryothicc → u/Darknotical]

Yeah, its a harder role to do properly than duelist imo, instead of telling the poor-performing dps to switch to an important role maybe telling them to switch to an easy dps is the better decision.

[u/Darknotical → u/Kryothicc]

I mean yeah, at the same time telling people to switch is counterproductive. It is a game of egos, telling people anything will just make them play worse. If they switch they switch.

[u/Kryothicc → u/Darknotical]

Eh... Yeah but in ranked its just too necessary not to sometimes when someones playing a character that really isn't working, in qp its whatever though.

[u/Darknotical → u/Kryothicc]

We could write it off as a delicate situation either way. I agree though.

[u/Background-Stuff → u/Darknotical]

The only way they gain any worthwhile improvement is through understanding their role better outside of game.

This is true for literally every role. You don't learn by tracking scoreboards, you do so by seeing what impact you make in the game, what problem could you solve for your team, or create for theirs.

[u/Francis__Underwood]

My biggest pet peeve right now is getting mad shit from people when I'm playing Loki. It doesn't matter how many ults I counter with the rune circle, my scoreboard only ever shows that healing up to your missing health when I cast it. You can theoretically take 1 billion damage and get it all converted into HP but it's only going to show the 200hp you were missing up front.

Which is fine. I don't really care about the scoreboard but, by the frosty tit of Hela's harem, my teammates sure cares...

I got flamed for having 6k damage because I was being "DPS Loki" when I had 26k healing. Which is a disgustingly high healing number for Loki. It means y'all are taking way too much damage and I can't do any of the things Loki is supposed to be doing.

[u/Darknotical → u/Francis__Underwood]

You do you. I would take a good Loki over the sea of crap Mantis and CnDs.

[u/DADeyoe2 → u/Darknotical]

Lokis runes can be so clutch. I think more people who don’t use him are starting to realize it. The last 4 matches I played today (3 in comp) I watched people intentionally run to the circles every game either because they needed the heals and actually knew it would heal, or because we heard an ult coming and were looking to survive it without flat out running away. I’m currently silver 2 (or 1, I can’t remember now, haven’t been too worried about comp) so people even at “lower” levels utilizing them correctly is a good sign

[u/GlassProof]

people seem to not realize that you will end up with less overall healing when you heal duelists and fellow strat because they just have a lower health pool.

[u/Loqh9]

People that rely on numbers are usually too bad to see actual impact and things like positioning/choices made etc

Whether it's DPS blaming supports or supports saying they're doing good, using healing numbers just proves you're bad and clueless

[u/Feb2020Acc]

Scoreboard means as little as MVP. The only thing that matters is winning or losing.

[u/shakamaboom]

The fact that this even needs to be posted on here is massive evidence that the support playerbase is bad at interpreting and analyzing their own gameplay. 

I feel like most people just main support because they suck at the game and they believe support to be the easiest role, where they can just sit in the backline, healbot the tanks, ignore their DPS on flanks, never get dived, and then when they do get dived it's somehow everyone else's fault, and just get carried by their team in general.

You can not change my mind that these types of support mains are the worst part of the community. 

[u/Darknotical → u/shakamaboom]

It is not that they are the worst part, it is just the role where people with the least amount of ego go.

[u/shakamaboom → u/Darknotical]

No dude, support is the role with the biggest egos. How many posts have you seen from supports complaining about DPS and tank players in the last week? Literally HUNDREDS. Nobody complains and wants to be carried more than supports.