Making Elf fun to play as support

Hi, Biocelot here. I really love the idea of Elf as a ranged support, and it has so many options available to it right now for that purpose. I would love to main it, dearly, but there's one problem. It's not fun. You don't feel like you are doing anything, at all.


The most glaring problem, and probably the easiest to fix, is the water arrow. A water arrow's radius is marked only by a sprinkling of water particles, which is real pretty, but it might as well not exist.
Many players have particles turned off for better performance. Many players, especially newer ones, have no idea Elf's water arrow both heals AND buffs. And even if they can see the particles, and know what they mean, when you are supporting players they tend to be too focused on PVP to look around or worry about some silly puddle on the ground.

I have two suggestions I think would be great! The first is to have water arrows spawn a Marker:1,Invisible:1 armor stand with a colorful custom name like "Healing Rain" on impact, making the healing aura clearly visible, and obvious in function.

It would also be nice, if Water Arrow had a more rapid effect, or alternatively a bigger radius. As is, you have to stand in one small area for quite a while to get any reasonable effect, and unless you are in the flag room (the most useless place for a support elf to be), that's just not practical, fun or feasible. So either the radius should be larger, maybe limit the max number of players that can use it at once if need be, or make it heal faster/buff harder and not last as long. If there is concerns that will make Elf like chemist with it's self-healing tankiness, unlike chemist, Elf takes a couple seconds to shoot it's arrow and has a very long cooldown, making that much less practical than just, playing chemist. You can't really use it if you are already in combat.


Another problem, is that arrows are much more likely to be blocked by your teammates than actually hit an enemy they are fighting. I understand that Competitive is maybe looking at an update that fixes this... but, I'd really like to see this in casual, also.

These changes don't seem like asking for much, and they would go a long way to making elf fun to play as anything besides a capping class. Here's hoping you like them!