After returning to Overwatch a few months ago I remember asking on input on which support heroes to focus on. My aim is very poor, so I suggested Mercy be a better suit for me. Most of the response I got was that Mercy is a poor choice since she has low impact on games. People said I would be flamed in chat once I reached a certain rank. Now, heroes suggested instead was Ana, Koriko, Baptiste and to some extent Illari. Better learn those heroes was a common advice, since they have higher impact on games and can do meaningfull things besides healbotting, which is needed in Overwatch 2.

I tried a lot of those high impact heroes, with moderate success. Not that surprising really, I have a lot of hours on Ana from Overwatch 1, but my aiming was holding me back. So I tried Mercy instead, deleting aiming from the equation to see how that fared. To my surprise my winrate skyrocketed, and I felt I carried a lot of games as well. The game felt almost too easy until I hit a platou.

Now here the knee-jerk reaction for many will be: well of course, Mercy is easy to play, but she has a low ceiling. She won’t carry you far.

I assumed that to be correct until I looked at the stats. At the time of writing, there is indeed one point where Ana gets better than Mercy. And where is that point? Grandmasters. Even at MASTERS level, a level way beyond the average Overwatch players current and future skill level, Ana has worse winrate than Mercy. And even in Grandmasters, Ana is just barely winning more games than Mercy.

And what about Koriko and Baptiste? Well, both are worse than Mercy at Masters and all tiers below. Baptiste is better than Mercy in Gradmasters though. Kiriko is not even close.

For 99% of players, it literally does not matter what some top500 streamer says about heroes. They live in a bubble and are not playing the same game you are. You simply cannot take all of their advice and copypaste it into Gold 4. You can learn a lot about the game on how to play better from them, but you need to be aware of the different environments you are playing in.

By the way, all the statistics above is relevant both recently and long term. Data is from competitive on PC.

What does this mean? I think we should think through who we are talking to, before we are giving advice. Unless stated, we can assume most players will not ever reach Grandmasters. In that case, Ana, Koriko and Baptiste are all suboptimal picks if all you care about is to win as many games as possible. Mercy is a great pick since she is among the easiest to learn and has a good winrate at almost all tiers.

That said, the best advice would probably be to play the character you enjoy the most, since your skill, and not the hero’s kit is the limiting factor of your climb.

I'm trying to find a clip from a big stage map back in what I think was like 2018- definitely overwatch one. It was of pharah ulting on the green illnos map, as she was ulting a Winston bubble was thrown on her and killed her. The pharah player was Canadian and I think had blonde hair.

I've been a Plat support for a little while now, so something I've noticed these last few seasons is that:

• The range of skill in Plat can be incredibly varied. You'll either have a mechanical god(s) and they'll have a bot(s), or vice versa.

On average the games are fair and balanced, but these discrepancies are really odd to me. I think it's probably because plat is where players are starting to get better, especially around mid-plat, so the skill of each person will be varied leading to most teams being carried by one or two people.

I also understand that people have just bad games or can pop off.

I'm by no means complaining, just wanted to see if others have noticed this or have some sort of reasonable explanation for this (phenomenon?).