Confused about calls for weaker strategist
I’m confused about what some people in the community want from the strategist role. A lot of the complaints seem to boil down to strategists being too capable of defending themselves or their team.
I'm of the opinion that the opposite is worse...
If strategists become too weak, they just die at the start of every fight. Once the support dies, the team loses sustain and the rest of the team collapses. The fight is basically over immediately. At that point the game starts to feel less like team fights and more like constant respawns and regrouping.
The purpose of strategists is to keep fights going long enough for actual teamplay, counterplay, and skill expression to happen. They enable the game to be played instead of fights ending in 3 seconds because one flank got through cleanly.
One thing I think gets overlooked is that strategists are already the priority targets in most fights. If they had weak survivability while constantly dealing with dive, tank, and DPS pressure, the role would feel miserable to play. A support role that can’t defend itself just becomes free eliminations, and eventually people stop queueing for it entirely. We’ve already seen an instance of that happening with the support strike from earlier seasons.
And at the end of the day, strategists are controlled by players too. They deserve to have fun just as much as DPS and tanks do. I don’t think the role should only exist to get farmed so that others can feel powerful. That is not healthy game design.
With all of that said, this doesn’t mean strategists can’t be over-tuned individually. Some heroes may absolutely need balance changes. But the role itself must be survivable and impactful, otherwise nobody will want to play it and matches become miserable.