If you’ve tried Overwatch since its release last Tuesday you’re probably hooked; the game’s FPS online battles are fun and engaging and it’s great to duke it out with your team to achieve a common goal. In Overwatch the player is given something other shooters don’t have, support characters. So what’s this all about you may ask? It’s about protecting your freakin’ Mercy!
A majority of players in Overwatch love to play offensively, getting in the action to blow back, blow out and blow up the enemy in order to achieve the objective. The battlefields are constantly littered with Reapers, Genjis, and Tracers vying for glory, which is great because a good team needs offensive players to handle a map. But you know what they need to stay alive? Support. Zenyatta, Symmetra, Lúcio, and Mercy are all at your disposal to help your team stay in the fight. But the combat for these characters isn’t quite the same as the others. A support character’s primary function is to, you guessed it, support.
We’re the wonder bra of Overwatch.
We can keep you healed up, provide tactical protection, and even boost your speed, but in exchange for that support we give up a lot of power. Zenyatta or a Lúcio can rack up some good kills — both characters are mobile and have abilities that aid in fighting/combat.
Lúcio can knock back enemies and his sonic gun does some fair damage, he’s also legendarily hard to hit in those roller blades. Meanwhile, Zenyatta can keep a team healed as well as degrade another player so they take more damage. Even Symmetra can get a multi-kill if you place those sentry turrets in just the right places.
But Mercy…Mercy can’t do that. I don’t want to make this all about Mercy — just because I like her the most — but the lesson you take from her should be applied to all support characters in all games. In her words: “I’m not a miracle worker.”
Mercy can get around the map if a teammate is in her line of sight and she does have a pistol, however that’s not her primary duty. Mercy keeps your team’s health up, she keeps you moving forward and doing damage; to do this she has to sacrifice all her offense, she’s more or less helpless.
Which brings out the ultimate point here if you want to win more matches. Support your support by keeping them alive and making sure that they stay in the fight. And in turn, you are kept in the fight by them. If you show Mercy, Lúcio, Symmetra, or Zenyatta some love, it’s almost guaranteed they will give it back to you. If you protect us, we’ll do the same. It’s why we love to play support, knowing that we’re keeping the team alive and moving forward.
Our least favourite part of being in the support role is being left to hang in a group of enemies after we flew in to save you from certain death and you peaced out the second we healed you.
Support roles aren’t for everyone, which is cool. If there were no teammates rushing in and getting hurt we’d be out of a job. But if you want to win more matches, keep an eye on the healer’s health bar and make sure they’re not getting or about to get ganked. If you can manage that, we’ll return the love with so much support you won’t know what to do with it. So know your support characters, their strengths and weaknesses and don’t just jet away and leave us to die. If you need help, come find us and we’ll heal you or shield you or boost you or just kiss you on the head and send you back into the fray.
Because in the words of Mercy herself, “It’s nice to be appreciated!”
