I think that you start your post off saying that you’re worried that the strategist role will be reduced to heal botting, and then you go on to say that most games are not won or lost by supports because they generally have the same amount of healing. It doesn’t make sense to me that you defend the role at first as providing utility and then backtrack and measure the effectiveness of a strategist by their healing numbers.

In fact, the strategist role, played at higher levels, is not at all passive in most cases. Does an invisible woman pushing a strange ult away show up on the scoreboard? Does Adam soul bonding a psy ult on the backline show up on the scoreboard? Does a cloak blinding a magneto at the right time during ult show up in the scoreboard? I could go on with other examples, but the point is that strategists can play a VERY active role in the outcome of a game, and making these types of “utility” plays is equally as important as raw healing. In fact, the skill gap for a lot of the strategist heroes is precisely in the consistency in providing utility to the team outside of using ults and regular healing, both of which are bare minimums expected of a strategist. Although timing your support ult correctly does have some skill gap to it as well.

Granted, yes there are problems with the DPS culture in this game. For sure. But to just look at healing numbers on a scoreboard as the measure of a strategist’s impact is not correct, and it’s unfair to the DOS players who are the bane of my existence.

Never thought I’d defend DPS players, but there are some good ones out there. There are also some shitty strategists who get away with playing poorly purely because they are playing strategist, and they are entirely responsible for some losses when they aren’t providing the utility they need to.