The support Endorsement thread

I'm using

gold health gen,
Silver armor,
Bronze crit

What do my fellow healers suggest?

I would suggest Gold being skill increase since you will be using your skill more than anything. after that just health or speed since if you're playing support the way its meant to be played shooting will be the last thing you should be doing. Less you can crit heal then i dunno.

To be honest I was planning on playing Support as my primary and having multiple custom classes for it, the issue is that the three endorsements that the default class has (Skill Recovery, Armor, & Health Regen) are actually perfect. As the Heal/Hurt Gun does not have a magazine it will not benefit from the majority of the weapon-based endorsements. *I am curious if rate of fire has any effect however and will need to test if it heals/hurts faster or not.

Anyway, as the Support needs to be able to deploy a Firebase and Hack often having Skill Recovery as Gold is almost mandatory; having a decreased cooldown on Air Strike doesn't hurt either. For the remaining two endorsements you could use Juice Effect or Speed but Armor and Health Recovery are just as useful if not moreso. Sure, you could build a custom class but the default one seems just about perfect.

*Let me know if anyone is able to test rate of fire. If not, I'll have a friend help me out doing side-by-side heals on the same type/level turret or firebase to see if there is any difference.

Here is a full list of Endorsement categories and I'll list what I think are their pros and cons, feel free to do the same.

Armor: Overall quite useful and would easily fill in a Siver or Bronze slot if available.
Clip Size: Pretty Pointless as only the Shotgun uses ammo. I doubt I would ever use this endorsement category as a Support player.
Critical Shot: Again, very limited in terms of return for a Support player since the Heal/Hurt Gun auto targets allies/enemies in range.
Health Recovery: Again, this could be useful as a Silver or Bronze slot if available but I would rank Armor higher overall.
Juice Effect: This could be game breaking as the Support player is the only class that can fill their Juice meter without ever having engaged the enemy. Depending on whether or not this increase duration or just damage/speed this could be very good for Support players that rarely die.
Reload Speed: As with Clip Size and Critical Shot this is less than useful as only the Shotgun would have any benefit.
Rate of Fire: If, and this is a big if, this allows the Heal/Hurt Gun to heal/hurt more quickly this could easily be a Gold or Silver slot endorsement. I'll confirm this later and let you know my findings. If it has no effect then pass just like the other weapon bonuses.
Skill Recovery: Gold, Gold, Gold. In most cases having your skills ready means everything for a Support player. I could see possibly moving this down to Silver but it should definitely stay in the top two slots at all times. Note: The only exception would be if you had a Gunner/Tank partner and your sole job was to keep them healed. In that case you could possibly pass on this category.
Speed: Never a bad thing to have but a Support player should never be alone for long so Speed is not mandatory. Might be fun for the novelty or using on a larger map to get setup quickly (then swithcing to another endorsement setup).
Weapon Accuracy: Do I even need to comment? Skip it like the rest.

I would love to know if RoF affects heal/hurt.
Hopefully uber can shed some light on this.

Gold = Skill Regeneration
Silver = Armor
Bronze = Juice

Like the above posters have said, skill regen is the only one you're guaranteed to need since you'll be using your skills more than anything. I chose armor as my SE because living that last little bit always helps. Your BE is a throwaway in my opinion. Just put whatever works for you. I chose Juice because I fill the meter at least 4 times every time I play Support.

I'm still making mine up. Does fire rate increase heal rate?

I think you need some speed so you can catch up with your team or retreat to fix a turret.

Pm'd uber staff. Hopefully we'll get some light shed on the RoF issue.

Critical Shots are a completely different mechanic than in most games. Critical Shot endorsements (and certain classes) have a random chance of drastically increasing your damage. As such, it may be useful for getting healing bursts, or even for your firebase, but thats something we'd have to ask staff about.

I've been running with this setup:

Gold: Armor
Silver: Health Regen
Bronze: Skill Recovery

I find that my abilities are up most of the time when I really need them and I don't like dying, so I don't mind sacrificing some skill recharge for more survivability. My k/d is around 4.5 and I actually didn't lose a game all day yesterday. I'm at 43 or 44-0 right now. I was by myself for 22 of those games, then joined one friend for the rest.

Ech,
I'm dying for an answer.
I swear I'm doing more damage with RoF, but it could just be in my head.

ya I need to know. I will take rate of fire as my gold endorsement if I know it will let me heal faster. please answer dev's or can someone test this. I would but have to leave for work

ForesTheWood just confirmed that ROF endorsement does impact heal/hurt gun.

A whole new ballpark.

Gold rof
Silver armor
Bronze health regen

I most def would love to use skill regen, but running a great kd ratio with armor and health.

That's interesting because I tested it in Blitz mode using a level 3 Shave Ice Turret and it took the exact same amount of time to overheal it. Perhaps it only affects healing and not the bonus +50%, or maybe it only affects players? Regardless my testing had a custom Support with Gold level Rate of Fire and compared the times to the default one and both took ~10s.

We really need to figure out exactly how this works because I am not noticing a difference in my Blitz testing.

I just did a quick test on Rate of Fire with the heal gun. I went into exhibition blitz and built a level 2 rocket turret. I timed how long it took to fully overheal the turret with each level of the rof endorsement from none to gold. I also checked to see how long it took to fire a full clip of shotgun ammo with each level. The times are all in seconds, here are the results:

No RoF: turret - 6.749 shotgun - 7.189
Bronze RoF: turret - 6.754 shotgun - 6.432
Silver RoF: turret - 6.732 shotgun - 5.839
Gold RoF: turret - 6.727 shotgun - 5.178

This is obviously far from a scientific analysis, but the results are pretty clear. There was less than a 3/100 of a second spread between the highest and lowest turret heal time, most likely due to me hitting the stop button at slightly different times. On the other hand, there were obvious significant improvements in the time it took to fire a full clip of shotgun ammo. As far as healing turrets vs. players or regular healing vs. overhealing, I see no reason why the devs would make RoF work on healing, but not overhealing or players, but not turrets. I don't think the rate of fire endorsement works on the heal gun. If someone else wants to do a different test on it, it would be nice. I'm not trying to be mean, but I'd like to see some evidence of it working before I just take a developer's word for it.

Edit: I see someone did a similar test to mine already, so that's good that we agree there.

So what you're saying is that while RoF does something, it's fairly negligible?

Just addressed by another member of staff, after reviewing the game's code it does NOT intact effect heal/hurt at this current date. Issue is being fixed.

Just to save someone 2 minutes of loading arenas:

Standard shotgun clip: 8
Gold: 16
Silver: 12
Bronze:11

I've been doing a bit of blitz and this has come in handy.

Gold: Rate of Fire
Silver: Skill Recovery
Bronze: Health regen.

Works wonders against gremlins :lol:

I've been wondering if Health Regeneration stacks with the drain effect of the heal/hurt gun 'cause if it does this + the RoF fix will make supports ridiculous tanks.

Edit: Same would apply if you healed people faster if they had Health Regeneration as an endorsement.