Questioning my value
We played a game in which I was soundly out-performed by the other healer (but not to smurf-suspicion levels), although we took the win. This led to pondering whether I had contributed much to my team.
Principles of Life-First
Wanting to be sure I brought good value to my team, having made the resolution to focus on keeping my team (myself included) alive, I seem to have hit a sweet-spot of what Bronze needed from me this session, and I had a nice little win-streak.
One of the handy incidentals of Moira is that she has an easy “you’re done healing” marker. When she runs out of “healing juice” it means that it is time to do some damage and get more. Likewise, it is a very handy rule of thumb to never die without having emptied your healing juice at least once this life.
I have found three things that make dramatic difference when playing the healing-support game.
- Hitting your orb timings for liberal healing orbs
- Not leaving Healing Juice unused
- Not Dying!
In fact, these are probably good points for any kind of game, although you might swap damage orbs for healing ones if you are better serving the team by playing DPS, and on DPS you will die more (making those inevitable deaths count is a different post, and a skill I definitely don’t have yet).
Fruits of Bronze Choosing Healing First
There were more wins than I am accounting here, but there were some highlights.
Numbani: cart maps are usually good for Moira
In general cart maps do good things for narrowing team spread in Bronze. Since everyone is nominally gathered around the cart, Moira’s splash healing excells. Numbani has the added benefit that with its twists and turns, there aren’t maddeningly long sniper LOS like on P1 of Junkertown or P1 and P3 of that one map for which even ArX chooses a better ranged support in order to bring value without getting instantly popped-off when trying to bring value to the team. But credit must be given to our Mercy this game, who knocked it out of the park. I still felt I earned that Endorsement, though, by the number of eliminations I scored (well below the hardhitters on my team, but higher than anyone on their team). Yes, I was the benefactor of a major team diff in this case; it’s nice to be on the positive side of that imbalance sometimes.
Winning Streak
Focusing on life is certainly not a forever-plan for a valuable Moira, who requires better distinction at high levels, but it bears huge benefits in Bronze-world. Combined with the benefit of having warmed up (which makes a huge difference for getting my fades right, in both aim and timing), the win-streak was almost as big as the loss streak from which I was emerging. I consider it success in my perma-bronze adventure if I am able to be better than at least 60% of others in Bronze.
