Best Practices on Support I’ve Learned as a Player Climbing out of Lower Ranks

This article was taken from a post on Reddit by Kairo273

So I’m not sure how many can really benefit from this, but I’ve found myself blowing easily through silver after being in bronze/low silver for many seasons and I’d be surprised if I don’t get through gold or plat by the end of June. I’m playing support right now, trying to climb, and I thought I’d share what works for me and what doesn’t.

DISCLAIMER: Although I will try to make the advice as general/universally applicable as possible, at the end of the day this is what worked for me. The specifics of all of this may be different for you, especially if you main supports other than Ana and Baptiste (my signatures). Also, as I’ve said, my highest at the moment is silver/gold range on support, I simply feel like I know a lot about playing support and climbing is now a matter of having my skill match my knowledge and just playing more and more games.

So let’s get into it:

General Tips:

1. Do not neglect mechanical skill

It is very easy to think “haha damage orb go brrr” when playing as Moira or “just hold left click lol” when playing as Mercy, and to be completely honest, these characters + Brigitte are not mechanically demanding in terms of raw aim. However, there are still certain mechanics/concepts on these low-aim characters you need to make consistent (You may focus more or less on one or more of these depending on who you typically play):

Moira: Fade jump (jump as you exit fade), Orb angles (understanding the way the orb bounces around the environment), Orb Coalescence animation cancel

Mercy: Super jump (Not INCREDIBLY necessary at very low ELOs but still useful to know for later on), understanding how Angelic Descent interacts with Guardian Angel and using them to maintain optimal height in the team fight

Brigitte: Consistently hitting whip shots. Other than Shield Bash, it’s her only form of CC, so you need to get the most value out of it that you can every time.

All of the other supports on the roster require not only character specific mechanics like those mentioned above, but also just raw aim mechanics in general:

Ana: Aiming with her Biotic Rifle; understanding the difference in feel between Scoped (Hitscan, limited FOV/movement speed, bullet tracer) and Unscoped (Projectile, full FOV/move speed, no tracer) and when to use each, understanding the arc of her Biotic Grenade and how to find flaws in enemy positioning/shield placement and exploit them with a well timed nade, understanding the fast projectile nature of sleep dart and working to hit them consistently, especially if you are under pressure by yourself, and understanding when/how to best utilize nano

Baptiste: Understanding the feel of his three round burst, the arc of his healing grenades/immortality field, when to use Regen burst, and optimal window placement/timing

Lucio: Projectile aiming, boop timing/direction, proper beat timing (hint: it’s not always RIGHT at the start of a team fight)

Zenyatta: Projectile aiming, movement going into/while in Transcendence

For the non-aim intensive characters, practice those specific mechanics and find out about more. Unfortunately I cannot provide a step by step guide on how to practice these because I play the aim intensive characters much more often.

For those characters, if you are not getting better just by playing, a dedicated aim training regiment is your best bet. Find/buy an aim trainer (I personally use Aim Lab), input your sensitivity settings, and peruse through their tasks until you come up with a regiment that is manageable for you but still challenges you to improve.

Practice this regiment EVERY DAY, pushing yourself to become better at it every time. I personally use it as both practice and a warmup for that day of matches. When starting out, it is much better to focus on improving general accuracy and then building speed from there.

Eventually, assuming you are improving, you will hit shots that you never thought you could as if it’s second nature.

2. Staying Alive

Obviously, losing a person early on in a team fight is detrimental to your chances of winning a team fight. This is doubly so for a support, and triply so for a main support (high heals, comparatively low utility). As a support, you cannot just kill everything that opposes you as a DPS or even some tanks can (not without leaving your team with no healing anyway). As a result, your resilience comes from your positioning and consistency in hitting your CC abilities. Position in a way that allows you to make aggressive plays while still minimizing the potential damage you can take.

Ex: You’re playing in a frontline heavy comp on Rialto first Defense as Ana. It can be tempting to have your team play on bridge and you playing on the high ground behind in order to keep the enemy as much in their spawn as possible. However, generally, it is better to position your team just before the bridge (reducing the likelihood of boop kills) and have yourself positioned around the corner behind the building, standing in a spot where you can both see your team around the outside corner and through the door frames of the building to the enemy on the other side. This allows you to heal your team around the corner with unscoped shots because of the short distance and also use the open door frames as a means to lob a fat anti nade or crucial sleep dart to slow the enemy down while minimizing the potential damage you take, assuming you don’t peek the door frames when not necessary.

The ideal positioning to perfectly balance aggressive play and low likelihood of taking excess damage is incredibly subjective and depends on both your and the enemy’s team compositions, map/game mode, and who is on attack or defense. Actively think “What can I do in this position and, assuming I get absolutely zero help from my team, what can the enemy do to me?” Change positioning accordingly.

3. Do Not Auto Pilot

It is very easy to just go through the motions of a match. You know the bare necessities of how to play your character, but that is not enough to improve and climb. To the furthest extent possible you must think “What am I doing right now?” “Is it enough?” (chances are there’s more you can do), and “How can I push the envelope without comprising my safety or that of my team?”. Active thinking encourages innovation with play making and overall strategy. Some questions to ponder include:

What can we do with our current pool of ults? What synergies exist between our team members? What tendencies do the enemies have and how can we exploit them? How can I position myself to do my job while also protecting myself from enemies that I cannot directly fight?

Hero Specific Tips (All of the general tips apply to all specific Heroes; to avoid redundancy they will not be restated):

Ana

1. Aggressive Nade Use

Generally, it is better to go for an aggressive play style with nades, as in hitting 2+ enemies with it every time. Anybody with eyes and half a brain will see that and push them in (I know those two things may be in short supply at low ranks but it’s better to use it aggressively then to use it to heal yourself or only a little damage on your team.

Hitting these big anti nades often wins team fights singlehandedly. Once you pick off the target(s) that got hit, you are at a numbers advantage and are in the middle of an aggressive push; use the ensuing chaos to pick of other members of the team, and the rest will eventually have to choose between running or dying.

2. Sleep dart Use

Sleep on the other hand may be better off kept as a defensive/shutdown ability, especially if the enemy has divers coming for your neck often. If you can consistently hit sleep darts on diving targets and reposition so that they don’t threaten you easily anymore during the 5 second sleep, you put yourself at a great advantage even if you don’t kill the target. If the enemy team does not have divers/anyone that can aggressively push you alone, it is safer to play further back and use sleep aggressively to throw a wrench in the enemy push. Generally, if you don’t absolutely know whether to use sleep aggressively or defensively, keep it for defensive use.

3. Nano

There are several ways to use nano boost:

• Combo: With another offensive ult or other powerful target (typically a tank)
• Peel: Use on a target that may not be extremely ideal for the boost inherently, but using it anyway to save them from an enemy threat and even allow them to turn the tables. This should be one of if not your very last resort, as nano is an incredibly valuable ult whose value you should look to maximize every time you use it
• For overwhelming fights: Every Ana (or support in general for that matter) has been in a team fight where damage is flying everywhere and you’re struggling to keep everyone alive. Using nano to greatly heal a target up, reduce any additional damage they take, and allow them to more easily remove enemy threats will greatly reduce the difficulty of keeping everyone alive

Baptiste

1. Weaving Damage with Healing.

Baptiste has some of if not the highest healing numbers in the game. Proper management of his healing abilities makes it incredibly possible to seal considerable damage in between healing allies up, allowing you to incredibly increase your APM. Understanding the regenerative nature of Regen Burst as well as how much your grenades will heal allies allows you to perfectly time a few three round bursts to pressure the enemy frontline/squishies. Generally, however, this damage should be in tandem with your healing, not at the expense of it. The ONE exception is if a threatening target is incredibly low and nobody else is finishing him off, and after you deal with them you should immediately go back to healing.

2. Proper IF use/Squeezing

Proper use of Baptiste’s Immortality Field is the best example of the benefits of squeezing, or waiting as long as absolutely possible to use an ability while still getting optimal value out of it. This concept applies to Beat and Transcendence as well, but we will specifically talk about lamp here.

Let’s say you hear a Junkrat send out his tire. Instinctively, you’d lamp the ground below you immediately. But the enemy will notice that and burst it down immediately, or even if they don’t, the Junk will wait until your lamp disappears naturally and kill you/your team anyway. A player that is squeezing their lamp will hear the Junk using tire, pinpoint exactly where it’s coming from/the route it’s taking, and lamp right before the Junkrat blows up what he thinks is an incredibly exposed team. When timed and placed properly, everyone in your team will be saved, especially if you can quickly heal up the damage that they still took. This idea also applies to grav dragons, Fluxes, Shatters, High Noons; any ult that either takes time to wipe the team or requires follow up to get value on it.

When not using it in this way (protecting against great burst damage), it is most ideal to use it behind natural cover inaccessible to the enemy, giving allies the immortality effect for longer

3. Proper Window Placement/Timing

Timing is everything with Window, and even with it’s new 4K ultrawide LCD dimensions, it can be difficult to place it in a proper position.

Timing the window should be soon after the enemy actually begins their push; you see them physically advance, pop the window at the midpoint between the two teams.

For positioning the window, it should be placed in a way that 1) The majority of your team can take advantage of its damage boost and 2) There are a decent number of enemies behind the window to actually take the damage. Another way to position it is when using it reactively to heal your team in particularly lethal team fights. This can also lead into using it for the first purpose: once you get everyone up to a reasonable health level, use the lethality of the window to close the fight.

Oftentimes, if the enemy respects your or your team’s lethality they will see a window placed right in front of their push and then back off. Although you should aim to consistently get 1–3 picks with window, it can still get value as a zoning tool in this way.

A “perfect” window will have all of these things in equal parts; sustain for your team, zoning part of the enemy team away in fear of getting picked, or straight up picking off 1–3 enemies. In practice though, only one or two of these will happen consistently; I would aim for having the third and first happen most often in that order; the reason being that Bap has insane healing numbers even without window, so the situations where you have to reactively use it to sustain your team should be few and far in between.

Brigitte

1. Inspire Proccing: Brig thrives in close range brawl comps and/or when fighting against close range team comps. Be with your team and aim to proc inspire as often as possible without heavily feeding. Making use of shield dancing and your CC abilities will allow you to stay in the fight longer and keep yourself and your allies alive for longer.
2. Shield Dancing: You are not Reinhardt, and even if you were similar to him any good Rein doesn’t have his shield up ALL the time. This goes doubly for his squire. Mastering the weave between keeping your shield up to block damage and keeping inspire procced is paramount to staying alive as Brig. The two ways you can approach it are keeping a general rhythm to block trash damage, or keeping an eye out for high burst damage and actively thinking to block THAT damage above all else. Assuming you keep inspire procced and don’t get your shield broken, you should very easily stay alive, especially against lower skilled teams.
3. Shield Bash: Use it to throw a wrench in an enemy push and/or stop burst heroes (Reaper, Hog, etc.) or divers (Tracer, Genji, etc.)
4. Whip Shot: Primarily used to create distance between yourself and enemies that thrive at close range. Secondary uses include finishing off VERY low targets and proccing inspire when no enemies are within flail range
5. Rally: Use at the beginning of a push when your team is together. Ensure that you avoid CC or bait it out beforehand so that it doesn’t immediately get canceled. Keep up inspire/shield dancing to make yourself nearly unstoppable except by massive CC or burst damage

Lucio

1. Wall Riding: You don’t need to be flashy with this, just master it enough to where your movement is unpredictable and difficult to track. Rollouts are fun and let you get back to fights quicker, but they won’t be what wins you games
2. Primary Fire: Only useful to provide slight pressure or when 1v1ing a squishy. DO NOT go full Reddit on Lucio ever; you should still be in range of your allies while dueling 99% of the time. If a duel is not won soon after you take it, don’t force it. You are a support; it is much more important that you provide healing and utility to your team than that you add to the teams damage.
3. Boop (Right Click): Use to displace enemies, prevent them from retreating or secure environmental kills; not much else to it.
4. Crossfade: Unless your main support needs additional help healing or has died early, you’ll want to stay on speed early on in the team fight. More mobility typically leads to less damage taken, which is effective healing that you don’t need to work nearly as hard for. You will want to use healing aura as your team takes more damage, then go back to speed for that improved movement.
5. Amp Up: Unless your other support randomly decides they want to play DPS for a few seconds, do not full amp heal ever. Full amp speed is much more useful in practice; again, effective healing. If you truly feel like your team is taking excess damage but not enough to where they’ll die soon, half and half is a good balance. For speed amps, timing is everything. Do not speed boost out of spawn; it is much better to normal speed aura up until choke, then, once you see an opportunity, communicate to your team that you want to speed boost, and do so THROUGH choke to overwhelm the enemy.
6. Beat: Like with Baps lamp you want to squeeze this ability as much as you can; it is better to use it right before the dragon in that grav dragon actually hits your team than the second the grav hits. This makes it more likely that some of the beat will be left over afterwards, and makes it more likely that your team will survive in the first place because there’ll be more beat for the enemy to break through.

Moira

1. Primary/Alt Fire: To heal up minor wounds you only really need to tap targets rather than spray. Balance your damage and healing so that you don’t run out of juice. Pro Tip: put scroll wheel as a secondary bind to her damage fire. If you’re not low on heal juice you can stick to holding right click; it does more damage and gives you more ult charge. But if you’re low on juice and need to recharge quickly or anticipate using a lot of it soon, scrolling to alt fire gives you juice more quickly at the expense of dealing less damage and getting less ult charge. In short, hold right click to kill someone, scroll wheel to juice up.
2. Orbs: A less understood aspect of Moira is the yin and yang of her kit. You anticipate or see a lot of damage being taken but don’t see any key targets being picked off? Chuck a healing orb at your team to keep them up and suck an enemy to death while they get topped off. You see that your team has minor wounds at best and that they need a bit more oomph to their push? Chuck a damage orb at the enemy team and use your primary fire to top off any minor wounds your team suffers. This is the dichotomy of Moira; the downfall of many Moira players is leaning too much towards either side of her kit and ignoring the other entirely. A damage bot will just leave their team to die, while a heal bot doesn’t do anything to add power to their team’s push.
3. Fade: Save for defensive use to escape danger; if you consistently find yourself having to actively use fade to get close enough to an ally to heal them or an enemy to damage them, it is a problem with your overall positioning or with either teams comp. I know Moira is the go to in lower ranks because she seems MUCH easier than other supports to learn, but she isn’t ideal in or against every team comp.
4. Coalescence: Use offensively at the beginning of a team fight to aid the push. Learn to animation cancel an orb into a coalescence (using the appropriate type for the situation). Know if you are going to use it primarily to heal allies or damage enemies beforehand. If you’ve finished your primary objective with it, switch to the other until the primary one becomes relevant again, repeat.

Mercy

1. Guardian Angel: Know who is safe to GA to and who isn’t. Learn to super jump but don’t get trigger happy with it without reason, especially against good hitscan players.
2. Res: Know if it’s safe to res someone at all and if the danger of doing so is worth the value the ally will give once they are brought back. Due to its long cooldown you MUST get great value out of res EVERY TIME.
3. Staff: Again, don’t be a healbot. Heal when necessary, but honestly default to damage boost. It’s more effective to more easily pick off sources of enemy damage then to heal damage once it’s taking, only as Mercy you take a much more passive role in this (what I mean is, don’t start blasting everything with your pistol). I want to make excessively clear, although you should focus a bit on upping allies damage, DO NOT IGNORE HEALING IN FAVOR OF IT. Like with Moira, it’s a duality. Poor players will excessively favor one over the other.
4. Pistol: If everyone’s healed up and no allies nearby can benefit from damage boost, MAYBE use it to finish off a very low target. If you cannot GA to safety when getting dove/pressured, use it to pressure your attacker. Other than that, ignore it.
5. Valkyrie: It is not a defensive ult; stop treating it like one. Use it at the start of a fight, again defaulting to damage boosting your whole team potentially. If one or more targets get below half, briefly switch to healing, targeting the most critical ally. Once the problem is solved, go back to damage boost. Also, just because you CAN fly into the skybox, doesn’t mean you should. Any good Widowmaker, or hitscan in general, will be able to outright kill you or at least pressure you heavily to where you need to back off/hide anyway. The whole point is that you are a great boon for your WHOLE TEAM for a few seconds; protect that boon like you would any other. As Orisa you wouldn’t place your bongo in open space if you could help it, nor would you place your turret as Torb in the same way, etc. etc. Keep yourself safe while still powering up your team.

Zenyatta

1. Healing Orb: You typically want to keep this on a diver, other squishy, or a target that is in the thick of the fight. That extra sustain will help that target immensely.
2. Discord: Whoever you put it on, call it out so that your team knows who to focus. Aim to put it on targets that are out of position and/or overly aggressive to kill them or at least get them to back off. For the second purpose, putting it on a DPS will likely reduce the enemy’s damage as that DPS will play more defensively or die. If put onto a support they must do one of those things as well, and that time spent repositioning can cut into healing done which cuts into the teams overall sustain, even if just briefly.
3. Transcendence: Like beat and lamp, you want to squeeze this. What’s better, to use it the second you hear an ult voice line and only have it until the second the ult goes off, or to not use it until right before the ult hits, heal through it, and keep that uber healing up afterwards to close out the push/defense? Do not use it for ults/plays that can one shot, it will be ineffective. Have yourself and your team be mindful of Ana’s nade, which can cancel the healing, and CC/other positioning orienting abilities (boops) which can potentially knock allies out of the radius. Also keep in mind where you are when it ends and how you can retreat to a safe position afterwards without dying.

Hope all of this helps. Again, I myself am (currently) a silver/almost gold player sharing what I have learned that has allowed me to go (in just a few weeks) from consistently bordering between bronze and silver to pretty consistently winning games in silver and being well on my way to gold and probably beyond very soon.

I learned what I learned from various high level sources. Not sure how streamers are looked at as learning sources here, but ML7’s unranked to GM series on each support is incredibly useful for learning the real nitty gritty of each character individually. Beyond that, consume as much sources of education on this as you can as consistently as you can. Finally, VOD REVIEW YOUR GAMES. It is one thing to know what constitutes as a mistake when playing your character(s), it is another thing entirely to be aware of the mistakes that YOU as a player tend to make and then work to iron them out.

I’m sure many of these things seem obvious to long time players or those that are already actively working to improve, but I want to cover all my bases here. Let me know if anything helps, is confusing, needs further clarification, or if you disagree on some points and think other strategies are viable/optimal. I’m not here to be right or the smartest person here, I’m here to learn and be the best student I can be when it comes to learning Overwatch. I hope that many of you approach it the same way.

Thanks everyone, enjoy the climb!