- Granting ult charge for healing was a horrible mistake because it means that dealing non-lethal damage is a liability for the attacker. The worst part is that Blizzard aren't completely ignorant of this -- it's almost certainly the reason that damage grants ult charge at a 1:1 ratio while healing only grants ult charge at a 5:4 ratio. (How many of you already knew that? )

It's just that this is a completely inadequate solution because a) successfully dealing damage shouldn't be disincentivized at all and b) 5:4 is not nearly enough to make up for how much better support ults are than everyone else's ults.

- There is no limit to the amount of healing that can happen in one engagement. This means no real possibility of fighting a war of attrition, and makes every fight revolve around killing the healers as a priority. This is why dive comp keeps coming back over and over, and why the game grinds down to tank-heavy stalemates when dive is nerfed: everything comes down to whether you can bust through healing NOW, as opposed to over time, which means that a wide variety of strategies that might exist in theory can never work in practice.

If healing cost an ammo-like resource that regenerated slowly -- more slowly than the demand for healing -- that would really open things up. Another possibility is to change how healing works for the recipient, making it so that, for instance, armor can't be healed, or each hero's life bar is divided into segments and if their health drops below one of those thresholds they can only be healed UP to that segment until the next time they respawn. This would make target priority much more fluid because now non-lethal burst damage on a specific target has a permanent effect, meaning fights are less drawn out, switching targets is more frequently correct, and there are paths to victory that aren't just "kill the healers and then mop up."

This would also mean that you could actually buff healers in other ways -- right now, healers have to be extra vulnerable compared to other characters because if they weren't, fights would never end. If there are alternatives to killing the healers, they can be more mobile, more able to win 1v1 fights, more survivable, etc. without causing horrible problems. I can't speak for others but I would have way more fun playing support under those circumstances.

- The mechanical requirements for healing are far lower than the mechanical requirements for dealing damage. This is another reason why the 5:4 ratio isn't really enough -- healing is almost guaranteed while damage depends on aim.

Even Ana, who is by far the best-designed healer and a model for how healers in general should work, has super-forgiving hitboxes when aiming at allies. Zenyatta has fire-and-forget healing and a well-balanced gun, which is less good than Ana but still pretty okay because his HPS are so small it makes up for it. Lucio is tricky because on the one hand boops are cool, his gun is cool, but his most important mechanics (speed boost, amp it up healing) are practically freebies; all he has to do is stand near his team. Mercy has fairly demanding movement abilities (and moreso post-rework, which is good!) but all of her healing and rezzing capabilites are push button, receive value, and she has less reason to use her gun than any other healer -- and this is potentially more of a problem than Lucio or Zen because of the sheer amount of healing she pumps out.

This also contributes to the problem of how hard it is to balance Mercy. Heroes that scale with aim tend to be weaker at lower ranks and get progressively better as you go up in rank, which is ideal -- comparing like to like means heroes are more likely to be balanced relative to each other at every skill level. The "flatter" a hero's power curve is, the worse it turns out when you try to balance them for any particular skill level, like so:



Now, aim isn't the only way to improve a hero's skill curve -- you can also give them very demanding movement abilities, or really hard decisions -- but it's so central to FPS gameplay that leaving it out creates a huge deficit. Just giving a no-aim hero the same level of positioning / ability use decisions that everyone else has isn't good enough, you need to go above and beyond.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Nov 1, 2017

• Splash damage that detonates on contact, or bounces and lingers for a few seconds after firing, yet it's still just as deadly as if he shot it in your face. His primary fire lingers on the battlefield and doesn't have any drop off in damage.
  
• Two mines that he can use interchangeably between giving himself more air time, or a jump and a powerful explosive throwable, or two powerful explosive throwables.
  
• Speaking of those mines, Junkrat has a triple jump using them. Jump, mine boost, mine boost. He doesn't even have to exploit a wall climbing glitch to do it.
  
• Junkrat doesn't damage himself with his own grenades. He can also use his ultimate and explode it right next to him to kill everyone around him except himself, making it so the only punishment for poor ultimate positioning is another player being able to kill him before the RIP-Tire goes off. Unless Junkrat ults in the middle of a team fight and right in the crossfire, he gets rewarded for using his ultimate anywhere.