So you want to play Supports in Overwatch? Excellent choice! You’re in for a wild ride filled flankers diving you while your teammates are too busy shooting into Reinhardt’s shield, salty DPS players upset you stole their Play of the Game, and most importantly, being blamed for every single last thing that goes wrong. Support play is the backbone of every team in Overwatch. At any game above Gold level play, at least two of your six player slots need to be devoted to supports to have a reasonable shot of winning. Unlike in many MOBAs, Overwatch’s Supports are actually really fun to play. I primarily play Supports and have been coaching some friends lately and it gave me the idea to write something a little more tuned to the intermediate level of play regarding the role. There are a lot of good basic guides and a some more advanced guides that get into formations and such, but I wanted to write something more focused on getting you from say Gold-level Support play to Platinum.

Rather than trying to squeeze everything into one blog post, I’m going to break this into three parts: Introduction and Core Healers (Mercy and Lucio), DPS/Support hybrids (Zenyatta and Ana), and finally, Symmetra (for you psychopaths still trying to make her work) and a guide on team composition and for non-Support players to better understand how the role works and how to work with your Supports.

Introduction

Let’s start with some figures:

Now here’s another figure: Mercy’s DPS, which is 100. That’s right: Mercy’s pistol, which most players only break out in emergencies, actually has more per second value the healing any Support provides. Settle down: I’m not telling you all to break out your Battle Mercys. Rather, I want you to understand a very basic concept about Support play in Overwatch: healing is meant to give teammates an advantage in a fight, not make them invincible. You will die under focus fire, even if multiple supports are trying to heal you. This is why if you play Roadhog, stand in the middle of the road while being double healed, and try to tank half the enemy team, you’re still going to die. Also, you’re responsible for your Supports getting wiped out shortly thereafter by the Ultimate you just gave to the other team. Also, you're going to blame me afterward, so screw you in advance!. Healing might be the lynchpin of Support play, but it’s really only where it begins. It also leads to a lot of misunderstandings regarding how to best play Supports, which is why each guide will be tailored to the character rather than giving a lot of general advice.

Lucio

Lucio is the most selected character in both Quick Play and Competitive on almost every platform. Since ELeague play begun, he has been a top 3 pick pretty much every week, sometimes appearing in every team. Lucio is as bread and butter a character as you get in Overwatch. While mechanically simple, higher level Lucio play requires more game sense than possibly any other character in the game. Lucio players are the generals of pro teams. They’re the shot callers.

What is Lucio’s most important ability? If you just said his healing, you’re wrong. Lucio’s primary purpose is to dictate the pace of his battle through his speed boost. Most players learn Lucio the wrong way because the only Gold Medal you’re likely to see as him is total healing. If you’ve heard of the concept of “trash damage,” Lucio can be the king of “trash healing.” Support play is about keeping your teammates alive, not padding your healing stat.

Lucio heals a mere 12.5 HP/second. That means it takes Lucio two seconds to give a teammate enough health to survive one Mercy pistol shot. He’s a pretty terrible healer when it comes to keeping a specific target alive. Many players observe, but often don’t process this when they try to heal 450 HP on a tank, which takes a full 36 seconds minus Amp It Up. Amp It Up boosts his healing to 40 HP/second for three second. That means over 3 seconds of Amp It Up, Lucio will heal more than he will over the 9 seconds he isn’t using it. On the flipside, Lucio’s speed boost offers a 30% increase in movement speed to his teammates and a 70% boost during Amp It Up. To understand how significant an ability this is, an amped Roadhog has faster movement speed than a Genji without speed boost.

The idea you want to ultimately grasp is that while other Supports save teammates through healing, Lucio saves teammates by pulling them out of bad situations before they need as much healing. Typically, you want to get to the point where you use speed boost to initiate combat, position your team, rescue teammates from bad situations, chase down stragglers attempting to escape, and break off engagements. You primarily use healing when Amp It Up is available and during pitched battles where faster movement is less important. Most importantly, you need to learn proper management of Amp It Up, because that twelve second cooldown is an eternity in the middle of a team battle. Proper use of amped speed boosting will actually save just as many teammates from enemy Ultimates as Sound Barrier can.

The advice I have given to better learn Lucio is to stay on speed boost whenever Amp It Up isn’t available to healing when Amp it Up is available. Now this isn’t actually how you’re going to eventually play him, but to improve your game sense on when to use each, you need to really observe in game the moment to moment ways speed boost helps your team.

Further in support of this role is Lucio’s Soundwave, which pushes opponents in the direction you point it at. It is less an ability focused on damage and more about sending opponents into traps and toward or away from your teammates based on the situation. Yes, it’s also the ability used for “knock half the team off the edge” moments on certain maps, but don’t force those types of plays.

Lucio’s Ultimate is fairly straight forward in function: it provides a barrier worth 500 points for your teammates over a six second period, but drains by 100 points per second. Timing its activation is more important than the majority of Ultimates because of this. When you operate in tandem with a Zenyatta, it’s best to have a plan in advance for who will activate their Ultimate when because activating either ability is typically a split-second decision. Sound Barrier is effective against burst damage Ultimates such as Tracer’s Pulse Bomb and increases the time it takes High Noon to lock on while Transcendence is ineffective against these attacks (except for Zenyatta himself). Sound Barrier can even counter a Rip Tire if timed properly, though it isn’t enough to protect most teammates from D.VA’s Self-Destruct. Much like Transcendence, it’s an ability that works best as an Ultimate counter, though can be used to initiate a group battle if timed properly.

Finally, let’s briefly discuss Lucio’s Sonic Projectiles. Lucio has the worst DPS in the game next to Winston and Mei. Never attempt to take on anything in this game one-on-one except maybe an unsuspecting Mercy who doesn’t remember she has a pistol (a good Mercy will often beat you one-on-one). Think of Lucio’s offense as support fire. His projectiles need to be led against smaller targets, so it’s more effective to concentrate on focus firing down tanks and slower characters.

Mercy

Mercy is the spiritual descendant of the Medic from Team Fortress 2.She might be the easiest character in the game to pick up and play. There might not be another character that has the mental impact on an opposing team that a Mercy does. More than any other support, the other team wants you dead because of your Ultimate. Teams often will change their entire comp just to dive your team’s back lines to take you out. I hope you feel honored.

There’s not a whole lot to talk about her basic play because she’s meant to be so mechanically simple. You switch between healing and amping as needed and you pocket your squishier backline DPS characters like McCree if you can. So what goes into advanced Mercy play? In my opinion, there are three key elements: positioning, proper use of Resurrects, and knowing when to break out your Blaster.

Here’s the dilemma of the Mercy player: you have to stay connected to your team in order to heal them, thus you are limited as to where you can position yourself. But if you stay in any particular spot for too long, it makes you a lot easier to flank or dive on. Guardian Angel lets you bounce like a pinball from teammate to teammate, and constant repositioning will make it a lot more difficult for flankers to line up runs on you. This is particularly useful against Genji, who will struggle to burst kill a good Mercy as opposed to a more stationary Zenyatta. It’s also useful against Reaper, who takes longer to set up his flanking routes. I'm not letting you DPS scumbags who don't want to protect us Supports off the hook, but you do have to do your part while playing Mercy to foiling flankers and divers.

Positioning ties right in with her Ultimate ability: Resurrect. While simple to perform, there is a lot of strategy surrounding proper usage of the ability. Too many players will sit on a resurrect hoping to bring back more than one or two teammates thinking it provides “more value.” Too many players want to set up a “Huge Rez” even though it takes a great deal of planning to create those opportunities. And setting up those “Huge Rez” opportunities requires Mercy to actually choose moments to go hide rather than heal, which is a counter-intuitive mindset to get into.

Basically, you want to use Resurrect to salvage a team fight whether that be resurrecting one or five teammates. Mercy’s Ultimate is one of the fastest to charge in the game. Don’t feel you have to always save it for those Play of the Game moments. Wait too long, and anyone you bring back is likely to be put in a six versus two or three situation, which really isn’t of much help. The only real way to learn what those right moments are is to play a lot of matches and develop a good game sense about it.

“Huge Rez” opportunities typically require setup. Basically, if you know the other team is about to hammer your team with Ultimates, Mercy needs to hide and the rest of the team needs to group up. Then, after the team has been wiped, Mercy flies in, pulls off the “Huge Rez,” and thus it nullifies all the resources the other team just put into that battle. These types of situations rarely present themselves by chance.

So here’s where I talk about Battle Mercy. Don’t get too excited: this isn’t giving you the justification to try to earn Gold in eliminations. With that being said, there are a lot more situations than most think to take advantage of the Caduceus Blaster. Mercy’s 100 DPS is actually fairly middle of the pack for the cast. If players hit 100% of their shots, a teammate would have to do over 330 DPS to do more with the amp than Mercy could with her pistol, which is a figure only Bastion reaches without factoring in criticals. The pistol is also fairly easy to aim, making it very effective at close and medium ranges.

I’m not saying you should always use your Blaster over amping teammates. But for instance, what if you and the opposing team are in a pitched battle behind Reinhardt shields? If the other team isn’t flanking you and making you worry about heals, is there really any reason to amp your McCree for less value than firing away? On the other hand, if your McCree is trying to pick off a pesky Pharah, giving him a boost is a little more useful.

Besides the obvious case of self-defense, there’s one other case where Battle Mercy is underrated, and it goes back to positioning. Often times you’ll be in a situation where you’re a little out of range of a teammate being attacked, but flying to them exposes you to danger. In these cases, it might be better to break out the Blaster and try to eliminate the enemy rather than potentially risking yourself trying to get to healing range. I hate to say this in a way that makes it sound selfish, but if there’s one character who has to have a selfish mindset about staying alive, it’s Mercy. Do keep in mind, on PC it’s a lot easier to switch weapons with a flick of the mouse wheel than having to reach down to the D-pad on console.

That’s it for today. Hopefully this was of some help. If you have any comments, questions, or just want to complain about the fact I just convinced your friends to play Battle Mercy, feel free to leave a comment.

Very nice write up, I look forward to the later parts.

I absolutely hate playing as Mercy. Especially solo queuing at this platinum rank I'm currently stuck at. Mainly because people don't disengage to heal and because a competent Genji will ruin your life.

Looking forward to your thoughts on Zen. He's my bread and butter support and I will wreck teams with him, often ending with gold in eliminations.

@frodobaggins: Thanks! Playing Mercy in solo queue can definitely be a miserable experience. Let me tell you my thoughts on D.VA players who move out of the way of Roadhog's hook so the Mercy healing them gets hooked instead...

I love playing Zen. I play him the most of any character these days. That will be a lot easier than trying to explain how to play Ana, i.e. the character for robots and aliens.

No, the payload moves at a speed based on the number of characters on/around it, with it reaching the maximum speed with 3 characters, so the whole team doesn't need to all be on it.

@dudeglove: I must assume part of the problem is quick play. I know personally I use quick play to test characters and generally just mess around. I guess a lot of people are doing the same thing? Like the other day, I was trying to get my head around Genji so went to quick play and even though somebody else picked Genji I still went with him also.

Also yes, I'm pretty sure with speed boost active that the payload moves quicker.

@dudeglove: Couple things were already answered, but I'll say typically the capture/control point itself isn't a good defensive spot on most maps. Off the top of my head, Anubis B and Volskaya B are about the only two points I can think of worth defending on outside KOTH maps. And even then, setting up on points on KOTH is a bad idea on many maps. Usually a good point to defend is defined by a) having high ground and b) firing into a choke so you can concentrate fire. BTW: Even in Platinum-level comp play, most teams will not pick good spots to defend from. Also in general, yeah too many people seem to be allergic to grouping up.

Speed boost does not move the payload faster.

This video might be of some help. It describes the best defensive spots on each attack, escort, and hybrid map. I can certainly write something more in depth on the topic though.

Good stuff. I'm a support player and am looking forward to your Zen/Ana write up.

I main Mercy and I think you did a good job of summing about what I've learned about her without going into maps and specific character combinations. I would caution use of the blaster though. As surprisingly powerful as it is, it still isn't a hit scan weapon so boosting a McCree or Soldier is probably a wiser choice in most situations. I used it mostly against stationary targets, like an ulting Pharah or trying to break the enemy Reinhardts shield.

I've been trying to learn Lucio, and I think this guide will definitely help. I've been trying to get a feel for when to heal/speed and seeing the numbers I have to say I've been healing to much. One question though. Do you think its valid for a Lucio to go back to spawn to get respawning players back in to the action quicker?

I think you're underestimating Lucio's heal a bit. The point is that it's an AoE, which means that if you're surrounded by 5 wounded teammates, the total healing is multiplied by 5, so you're actually healing 62.5 hp/s. Now, that's not going to happen very often, but you'll frequently be healing 2-4 characters at a time, which substantially increases his heal rate. It is also automatic, Lucio doesn't need to search out wounded people, so his heal is more "efficient" in that sense, it's always just gonna work if you're close enough. That's not even counting Amp It Up.

It's like the difference between a rogue and a mage in classic RPGs. They're both high-DPS characters, but in a different way: rogues do massive damage to one character, while a mage does weaker damage in an AoE. If you add up the damage, they will be roughly equal. And playing the game bears that out: in the final screen, the amount healed as a percentage of enemy damage done is usually around the same number for both Mercy and Lucio. I've certainly not noticed either being significantly unbalanced compared to the other.

Great write-up. Maybe I'll try Mercy again...I'm absolutely terrible for some reason.

I should probably use Lucio's speed boost more than I do. Rushing out the door in Nepal is a pretty common sense scenario, and I'll flip it back if Hanzo and D Va use their ultimates to try and help people run away. But flipping in during mid battle feels like a more riskier move. I started to use it more to run away from situations myself, but I don't really use it to help my teammates chase down somebody.

One thing I will say is while his rate of healing is low without Amp Up, if you have control of a point or a team fight just happened and broke up, there is likely to be some downtime before the next one. So if you have 15 seconds between battles, that will heal up your teammates by about 180 points. It is gradual, but with the bulk of character having 200-250 HP, even slow healing like that really helps your team keep on trucking.

And it's been a while since I played as Mercy (I would like to get better as her), but I started to also realize I needed to use her resurrect more. Sometimes I would have situations where one teammate will be down, and I'll wait to see if somebody else is going to die, only to find I'm not near the first body anymore or they already respawned before I could hit Q. I don't wait for the miracle, 5 rez Play of the Game plays anymore, but sometimes I need to tell myself, "I know only one or two people are down, but that's good enough"

@almostswedish:Thanks! Yeah, I think that's some good advice on Mercy's blaster. I certainly don't want to set of a fresh waive of overly aggressive Mercy players lol. I should post the footage of the comp game that led to those really warped Mercy stats. It was a lot of "oh I just happen to be in a situation where I have a good shooting angle on the other team's Reinhardt." I would agree stationary targets and bigger targets (including tanks) are definitely better targets for her.

Using Lucio as the team's taxi is one of the best uses of his speed boost! I'd definitely encourage that. Ideally your team wants to engage as a team (not that this happens in most games), so being able to get the group together faster might mean you get an extra engagement in during a KotH match.

Also (and I'm going to delve into this a bit below where I want to further contextualize what I was saying on speed vs. heal), don't think higher healing stats mean you're healing at inopportune times!

@gkhan: Couple things. I'm not trying to underplay Lucio's effectiveness as a healer. The pros consider him and Mercy the requisite/primary healers, and they're 100% right. And most importantly, if my 9/3 split comment on Lucio led to this response, that was not my intent of it! That's just a method I suggest to others to better learn Lucio and pick up better game sense as to when to use each.

What I wanted to get across and where I'd take issue with your use of healing totals to judge the effectiveness of Lucio play is his healing can be extremely misleading. Like I said, the key to good support play is a) are you keeping your teammates alive and b) are you helping them win encounters. Lucio will typically take Gold in healing if you prioritize it just from his sheer healing output. But you need to further contextualize what went into that healing to determine if you were optimally playing him. Lucio and Mercy for example serve two different purposes. Mercy is about keeping a single target alive. In terms of healing output, she actually lags behind both Lucio and even Ana in that regard. But Mercy's healing is focused and reliable. Lucio's healing on the other hand is good for helping your team recover from chip damage, but when not on Amp It Up, it just isn't enough to keep a single target healed.

Here is maybe the best example to summarize everything I was trying to convey: say you're paired up with a Zenyatta who is being attacked by a Genji. If you were a Mercy, the optimal way to assist would be to start healing them. If you were an Ana, the optimal way to assist would be to start healing them and to try to Sleep Dart the Genji. If you were a Lucio, the optimal way to assist would be to speed boost him out of the Genji's path and maybe try to Soundwave him away. You wouldn't switch to healing in that case until you've helped the Zenyatta reposition himself. Now essentially what you do throughout a match is make similar moment to moment calls based on the situation, and whereas for other Supports you would heal in many cases, Lucio is better off on speed boost.

I record my gameplay using Play.tv (Nvidia has something similar for recording) and look back on it to pick up lapses in my own gameplay and look for ways to improve it. If you have a machine powerful enough to capture video, I'd highly endorse that as a means of judging your own gameplay rather than relying on stats. Yes, I do think there is a lot of value using MasterOverwatch and Overbuff as analytical tools to see if you're improving. I would just also suggest you need to add context to those stats to understand it as well, ex: which of two healers died more often, did your team win or lose as winning teams usually require less healing, etc.

whoa whoa whoa, hold up there partner. As a DOTA 2 player I don't think that's true at all, else I wouldn't have been playing the game for ten years. What games were you thinking of in particular?

btw thanks for the guide! Mercy & Lucio are probably the characters I play the best, so super useful for me. I only trust myself with those two and Reinhardt, Zenyatta, Roadhog and D.VA in competitive atm.

Definitely been using Speed boost more often in competitive lately as a result, seems to have helped. I usually get medals for healing/objective time stuff like that, but I seem to be picking a bronze here and there now for elims, which is weird on a support. And we've been winning, so I ain't complainin'. :)

definitely gonna checkout Overbuff and MasterOverwatch since you mentioned them. I don't feel like the game does a great job of really giving you good info on your performances (blizz seems more interested in making you feel like you played well, rather than actually telling you how you really did) by design.

My personal suspicion is that my skill varies wildly between roles and characters and it'd be nice to know which heroes actually are my strongest, areas I need to improve etc. I don't have any aspirations to get awesome at the game, but getting respectable with a wide variety of heroes across roles is something i think I can and want to achieve.

@slag: I'm just being a sardonic dick with that MOBA support comment. :) Though one of my friends heavily into LoL who is a Support player always described it to me as "I play Supports because nobody wants to."

Glad you found the guide helpful! That's actually a similar set of characters as I use (I can also play moderately okay Winston, Zarya, and Soldier at this point, though try not to in comp). Yeah, I think the one stat where you can see the impact of better use of speed boost is your win rate. It's kind of crazy just how many uses you'll pick up over time by just observing what you can do with it.

The game doesn't explain a great many things: see Mei players who still think the wall is only useful as a delay tactic. Certain skillsets definitely transfer between characters better than others. So don't feel you need to learn all supports or all tanks or something. I will tell you my Ana guide is going to be from the weakest position as I can explain how to play the character far better than I can actually play her.

If you ever want to record some video of any character you're playing and have me take a look for some suggestions on what to practice, just send me a PM with a Youtube link or something.

As someone who has been forced into playing Lucio 95% of the time, I've gotten pretty good with him. When you hear most ults cue up it's usually a good time to pop speed boost so your team can clear out quick. If you're playing on mics, you can use it to call for pushes and retreats. Also, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to skate down weakened enemies and finish them off with a punch to the back of the head. His push is always fun to boop people off of edges, but it's also a life saver when used to send enemies flying when they activate their ults, to push people off of payloads, or to send people flying away from a point during overtime.

Your guide definitely has helped with my Lucio. I at least feel competent when I'm playing him now, and booping an ulting Zenyatta off a cliff is probably among my favorite things to do in any game, period.

@almostswedish: Thanks! My personal favorite is booping ulting Reapers off the edge. :D