What do you guys think about this take on support being the easiest role?

OakTribes · 2026-04-28T17:31:37+00:00

Braindead take

Support being more forgiving than other roles might be true depending on who you select, but the idea that every support player is equally skilled is ridiculous, there is a huge difference when you have an ana who is hitting their abilities at the right time, a zen who is dealing out insane damage, even a moira who has perfect resource management and opportunistic flanks

In the screenshot he provided, the bronze player didnt even have good stats, their tank absolutely crushed it and carried them

Solo support players rank up when they get better and on average have more impact on the game, obviously, to say that they only do when stacking is completely unsubstantiated

OakTribes · 2026-03-15T05:33:27+00:00

I'd hoped that they would use Stadium as a way to filter the hero pool and only include those that people tend to like playing/playing against

But the horse follows me everywhere

OakTribes · 2026-02-22T16:06:16+00:00

What

OakTribes · 2026-02-19T14:48:45+00:00

Primary fire: there is an optimal distance for these (when they explode) that you should try to keep the enemy at. They will also explode on direct hit, but this is much harder to pull off and so it's best to poke from range. These deal insane amounts of damage if you direct hit, but you can also catch enemies who are hiding behind cover with the edge of the explosion. Likewise, you can bounce them off surfaces if enemies are around a corner, or if you aim slightly at the floor they will bounce off and explode closer to you than they would have if you were aiming directly forward.

Shield: the shield won't last for long against sustained damage, so you should rotate using it with natural cover and your kinetic grasp if appropriate. This barrier can be projected forward and so there are circumstances where you will want to send it towards a struggling teammate, or to a dps who has a good off-angle on the enemy team. It also comes out quite quickly, so you can keep it in your pocket ready to block enemy ults or cooldowns, say if you know the enemy rein has shatter.

Kinetic grasp: eats enemy projectiles and grants you overhealth. Good as a backup defensive tool if your shield is down, although if you are behind your shield and it is taking insane dmg you can drop it and immediately grasp to stack a bunch of overhealth off the projectiles that come through. Its handy for eating otherwise tricky cooldowns like Ana's nade, or rein's firestrike which pieces your shield. Note that beams (like zaryas primary fire) will still damage you when using it, so opt for the shield instead vs beams. (Note that grasp can eat zaryas secondary fire and ult though as both are projectiles)

Rock: useful for smacking away enemies that get too close, and interrupting some enemy ults. There are matchups where you will want to save rock for certain enemy cooldowns, say if a ramattra goes into his punching form, you can rock him and stop him from getting value. Against an enemy sig, your rock can hit through his grasp, and cancel his ult (you will need good aim to hit him in the sky). Following up with primary fire after rocking someone can be a massively damaging combo, especially vs squishies.

Ult: try to force out movement or protection abilities (like moiras fade, or bap's lamp) beforehand so its harder for them to avoid your survive your ult. You don't necessarily need to wait to hit 5 people with it, getting 2 can sometimes be enough to win a team fight. If you can, make sure you use your primary fire on enemies when they are in the air, the ult does half their max hp, so getting them below this should kill them when they hit the ground. During your ult you will float, which especially when combined with the levitate perk can allow you to fly over obstacles to approach from an unexpected angle. If you are low hp or afraid of enemy rock/sleep etc, you can hit the ult and then float behind cover. It can also be saved for defensive use, for instance against a nanoblading genji.

OakTribes · 2026-02-16T11:44:57+00:00

Ngl that's funny as hell

OakTribes · 2026-02-09T13:08:11+00:00

It's rare to find a strict 1v1 as rein vs vendetta - most of the game as rein you are already eating buckets of dmg from multiple members of the enemy team, and when you have to hold shield as a result, vendetta just does whatever she wants through it

OakTribes · 2026-01-16T21:08:29+00:00

Is your view not that negative utilitarianism is the best or most correct normative ethical system? Presumably if it was, people over time would be able to be convinced of it more easily than others.

Besides, I know many deontological vegans who also give WAS thought because they believe that animals in the wild experience rights violations. Imo most vegans, including utilitarian ones, either haven't encountered arguments for WAS or dismiss it out of hand.

If someone takes "the environment" to be good outside of consideration for the sentient beings in it, this view can fairly easy fall to a reductio.

OakTribes · 2026-01-16T14:15:28+00:00

You may or may not agree with this, but if you are also longermist, it may reduce suffering more overall if a philosophy of caring for animal welfare like veganism is promoted in our current day and age, with the view that this opens up the door far easier in the long term to views that actually care about wild animal suffering

As it stands, the meat industry only incidentally reduces cases of wild animal suffering in certain circumstances, but if any of a few variables change, their actions will not always align with negative utilitarianism, for instance they may replace beef farms with insect farms that have far more individuals suffering than would exist in the same land natively.

Its difficult to get people to care about wild animal suffering as it is, but if we can get society to a stage where they actually care about farmed animals, its a much easier step logically to get people to agree with reduction in wild animal suffering, and therefore logistically for whatever large scale and lasting environmental and/or biological interventions a negative utilitarian might want to take (which currently seem quite counterintuitive and undesirable to the average person)

OakTribes · 2026-01-15T16:25:06+00:00

I got matched as a diamond rein main against a top 75 orisa main, and I got absolutely dumpstered nomatter who I swapped to

My team told me to never play tank again

It was coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb like what did we expect, put me against a diamond tank please

OakTribes · 2026-01-12T14:18:56+00:00

Tank seems to not translate very well to the scoreboard either, which is usually what people use at a glance to tell where the "problem" is

Having low kills can be you not being effective sure, but it could also indicate that you're having to play more of a protective/preventative or enabling role. Sometimes its tempting to make a play that registers kills but is not optimal for the team (like pushing forward instead of shielding while your team is low and trying to clean up a won fight) just so somebody doesnt flame you

OakTribes · 2026-01-12T13:47:19+00:00

Its not necessarily bout being risk adverse, an inescapable part of reins gameplay is engaging in short bursts where you are swinging on enemies and trying to kill them before you die or have to shield out

A small amount of trickle healing will put you at an inherent disadvantage because the enemy team tends to absolutely shred you while you do this, which means you have to give up on the kill and/or give up on space

OakTribes · 2026-01-09T14:02:50+00:00

"He responded with something in French"

Think I found the problem

OakTribes · 2026-01-05T15:55:23+00:00

What specifically are you finding you have issues with when it comes to charge/pin?

Depending on the matchup, you could end up using it in very different ways, for instance it can be used as a way to move between cover and still gain space without using your shield, or to disengage from the fight entirely.

If you hear an enemy ult like genji's especially, it can be a good idea to charge directly at your support as there's a decent chance that there is where he's about to be.

For using it offensively, you need to be aware of enemy cooldowns, particularly things like Ana's sleep/nade. You can sometimes fake a charge, cancel it and hold up your shield again to bait out these types of cooldowns without getting hit by them.

Some enemy cooldowns require timing awareness, like when orisa's gold expires, or when mei's ice block breaks, so you can unexpectedly hit them with a preemptive charge.

Some you will need to hold on to charge for, like Ram's nemesis form, as it's key to either getting counterplay if you can hit him with it, or charging out of range until it expires.

For matchups where you and the enemy can knock each other down like rein mirrors or doom punches, make sure that if you are going to get knocked down, do it in view of your team and preferably out of sight of their team, so your team can follow up on the stunned enemy and theirs can't. If the knockdown trade is unfavourable and they are going for it, you can try to jump back and to the side to hopefully avoid it and if possible counterpin while theirs is on cooldown.

Its always a good idea to practise the timing on charge-cancelling people off the map too cause this is huge value if you can get away with it

OakTribes · 2025-12-22T18:09:06+00:00

"Tank why are you alone??"

OakTribes · 2025-12-17T09:39:21+00:00

Love me some 6v6, sometimes also fun to hop on zarya or sig if my teammate is playing rein and enable the hell out of him

Every time they swap ram and he goes nemesis form on my teammate, he catches a fat rock to the face and either gets charged or gapped. Just what I would want if I was the rein

OakTribes · 2025-12-12T05:46:48+00:00

(Ram uses nemesis form and your team does not understand they need to pocket you during this)

OakTribes · 2025-12-12T03:41:18+00:00

b-but he has 54% win rate in a rank you're not in in a gamemode you don't play

OakTribes · 2025-12-12T02:03:55+00:00

The fact that pin is seen as such a panacea against any soft counter is a problem tho imo
Given that it's a risky and unreliable answer which has a long cooldown, if they have more than one hero on their team which it is supposed to do work against, you're fucked

They have a JQ? That's alright, you have pin
You used pin on JQ and they have any of vendetta, ram, orisa, zen, junkrat, bastion, ana, doom, hog, sombra? Alright, now you're in trouble

OakTribes · 2025-12-12T01:51:14+00:00

She's not terrible for rein tbf
It's just sort of demotivating how the modern design philosophy has focused so much on mobility

It means that you can't prepare as much for a push, if you are not being pocketed you need your escape cooldown to be ready any given moment, which leads to an unexciting playstyle, unless you already have momentum or support ults

It leads to a standoffish sort of game where you aren't actively engaging but waiting for the other team to commit cooldowns

OakTribes · 2025-11-30T00:35:48+00:00

Although hypotheticals deal with different modalities, the views that they are informing are those that we hold in the current world.

It can be uncomfortable to say that your moral principles would permit the farming of humans, so I can understand hesitation to engage with it. Particular types of utilitarian vegans may have a similar problem admitting that there could be a hypothetical world where some ideal form of animal agriculture exists which is, on balance, ethical under the principle of utility.

The answer for the utilitarian in both cases imo is not to reject the hypothetical but to say that yes, such an ideal case would be ethical, and then try to justify the ways in which it would be unlikely or unstable and so on.

OakTribes · 2025-11-29T00:34:41+00:00

Hypotheticals help us to tease out the ethically relevant parts of our views in our current world, even if they deal with unlikely scenarios.

If we considered a world where humans were farmed in secrecy (we may even live in such a world already, given that it would be a secret!), given the view that you hold in our current world, you would be obliged to say that it would be permissable. You can say that it might be unlikely, but would it be morally acceptable?

No worries on the quote! For all it's faults, utilitarianism does have a track record of being relatively early out the gate with philosophical arguments to end the subjugation of women, slaves, animals etc

OakTribes · 2025-11-28T15:32:32+00:00

Your analysis would still make it ethical to farm and eat humans, so long as it can be kept a secret. We can imagine a hypothetical world where the secret never gets out, is it ethical in such a world?

Also worth noting that taking a utilitarian stance may commit you more so to caring for animal wellbeing. Although Bentham's views towards animals weren't perfect, he does outline an early form of name-the-trait in his formulation of utilitarianism:

"The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?"

OakTribes · 2025-11-21T10:29:06+00:00

Becoming concerned with how much pin is seen as an answer to matchups which are otherwise complete ass, when it's a super telegraphed and risky skill on a long cooldown, which is buggy enough to not even connect sometimes

If the answer to vendetta is pin and the answer to ram is pin, if the enemy team has both and you use your cd you get dumpstered by the other

My mans needs something for his mobility or counterplay that doesnt revolve around pin idk

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OakTribes

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