It may be fun, but not very useful. Since issue isn’t for Mercy herself to stay alive, but to do same for teammates. And in that, she is really failing hard against literally anything - two enemies focused some of your teammates? They died. Teammate wasn’t quick enough to escape after rez? They died again.
Agree on Widowmaker and Ashe, even while your ideas are likely to ruin them for most players, who aren’t that skilled.
I get where you’re coming from. This isn’t CS but It is very similar to TF2 and other class based shooters. In fact Overwatch’s main inspiration without a doubt was TF2 with them sharing similar game play mechanics from one another and the Overwatch team even confirming this. Also just to be clear yes there are highly mobile heroes in this game along with differing health pools.
Now that that’s out of the way I want to compare why the Sniper class from TF2, albeit still broken, is way more inline to other classes than Widow is to other heroes.
When it comes down to it it’s really simple. The Sniper doesn’t have an easy escape to close quarters situations like Widow or have any early warning system. The Sniper has no form of mobility nor as much damage as venom mine + primary fire or scoped body shot + melee + primary fire (exception being jarate + melee but that is super risky and easily outplayed) so any one getting cqc with him comes down to landing a head shot to survive or a massive bail out from their team. Only way for him to avoid that situation is good positioning, predicting where enemy flankers could come from, and having acute awareness of their surroundings. Which although not mechanical at all still requires game sense which is still skillful ( and an underappreciated skill might I add.) Think about it in terms of balance, Sniper - Best in the game at long range, pretty bad at close range, must make precautions since it’s punishing, sounds reasonable. Widow - Best in the game at long range, can almost always avoid close range and even go long range in an instant after being dived. It ruins the balance of a sniper character, designing them to just avoid their bad match up with a click of a button instead of having a meaningful interaction between flanker and sniper where the sniper has to work hard to win or survive even at a disadvantage, JUST like the flanker does in closing the distance while avoiding the bulk of the enemy team.
Saying this, I don’t think it would be a good idea to remove grapple since Overwatch IS faster paced. But her grapple is a little too good making it pretty much a get out of jail card. If they made a few changes to grapple to keep it a movement tool and less of a escape ability and either a HP, reverse fall off for body shots, or a Venom Mine nerf, I don’t think she would be complained about nearly as much, and be more deserving of a high skill hero status since she could actually be punished by people getting in close on her. Effectively ending the all aim no brain stereotype since positioning and game sense would now matter a lot more to Widow players if they want to survive.
Agreed with the Mercy thing. Tie Resurrect back to her ult in some way or at least put e rez on a resource meter. E Rez is the only thing holding her back and always has been since the rework. I’ll always be an advocate for bringing back mass rez with the needed changes to make it balanced, but I’d be ok with it just being a part of Valkyrie too.
I agree with Widow and Ashe, they are problematic in my eyes
But mercy i think she is very meh overall
Rez doesnt specifically setup widow and ashe more than it does anyone else…(in fact id argue it counters them?) And she has been in the sidelines for quite some time so i dont think she is a problem, though your suggestion to make rez earned and make mercy take more skill overall (and reward it) is good long-term, im not sure id fiddle with her too much rn
For the changes id do to widow…probably bump up her charge time to 1.5 ish, give a laser to warn you from her shot, and bufff her base kit…
For ashe just reduce her scoped crit multiplier to 1.76 (click Here for the math of why that number)
Is this someone well known? Idk i mostly ignore streamers…
Still calling Mercy problematic in 2020, gotta love General Discussion.
You mean the season 20 nerfs ago?
Mercy is one of the most balanced heroes we have right now.
I don’t care too much who’s the most balanced, cases can be made for half the cast in that regard, the point is that she’s in a healthy state & that’s what’s important. I don’t disagree with OP, I outright proclaim they are just flat out wrong.
General Discussion just isn’t the place to talk about balance I’ve found. Every time I log in, I’m berated with topics exclusively from GD & it’s kinda annoying because rarely ever are they worth any merit. This place is horrible. 99% of topics & replies have little to no valuable thought put into them or when they do they also miss important points or add on completely false ones. Random posts get upvoted to the moon for both sides of any argument even when they’re argued poorly. GD is just an echo chamber but there are 200 voices all screaming something different, it’s just chaos. One person brings up a half-baked concept & tens of people rally behind them as if they’re some god. This place is very disappointing.
Depends you’d have to time it right and on a 30 sec cooldown it’s about 3x longer than anything you’d be cleansing. Res is OP because it essentially reverts an elim and if it brings back the meta linchpin then you’re screwed.
Most people are just lobbying for their hero … they get shot over and over again by widow because they are totally out of position which means widow needs a nerf 
Rezz is not that powerful, it just feels unfair. Anas nade is more powerful than rezz.
Issue is that single rez way too unreliable in terms of reward. Attaching it to meh ult like Valkyrie won’t be an improvement.
Whole “single rez is OP” talk comes from high tiers, where, indeed, one player can be all it takes to change balance in battle.
If you kill someone in a poor position, and then let Mercy rez in said poor position…that’s a YOU problem, not a rez problem.
If anything, you should be happy - you are getting 2 kills for the price of 1. Since resurrected teammate appears in same bad position you killed them earlier, so just shoot again.
Actually this is one of the biggest fallacies that is common in gaming communities, and also one of the best ways to make your otherwise popular mass-market game crumble if you were to do that.
And in fact, much of Overwatch’s current struggles is because for a few years they’ve used that approach.
Balance is quite important at lower ratings. It’s just also very different from higher ratings, which in itself can be a big obstacle, albeit an easy to solve one if one were to be crass about it and just use a separate balance patch production line for the top X% versus the rest.
But more importantly, at lower levels people play heroes not because they’re effective (not if they’re balanced at least, but more on that in a sec) but because they like them. Conceptually. This means that putting a strong focus on identity, gameplay feel and unique concept can make a hero popular even if they don’t perform well. This is the same reason for why DPS tend to be more-than-average popular in any and all games having split roles, conceptually people enjoy shooting stuff and deadening it, even if it were more effective to bring a different role.
Now, there is one other thing: If you balance heroes for high rankings, then you will end up with a lack of balance at the lower end, relying on “git gud” as the sole advise to lower players (which in itself is a flawed assumption as the rankings are based on percentages, we can’t all be 4500+, there’ll always only be 500 top-500 players, etc). This in turn means there are now heroes that have a lower skill floor that are as powerful or more so than heroes with a higher skill floor. Yikes!
At the top rankings, this doesn’t matter. The skill ceiling is what matters here, and that needs to be balanced. But on the lower end, add a Reaper with 50% selfhealing and every team will always have one because tanks can’t play around him and you got a surefire win-100%-of-the-time hero. He’s even partially immune to other DPS just from the insane healing he gets from firing at tanks. Same with a high-DPS Roadhog. He’s trivially easy to survive with on the lower ranks, so giving him high damage breaks any balance in those ranks.
And now you might say “Yeah but those players can just improve!”… true. But then the players at the top - who are numerically far far less so this is the easier change to make - could also play worse and so we’re all on the same stage and balance can be done in one fell swoop. And I hope that part makes the absurdity of the argument clear.
TL’DR: Balance is just as important on lower ranks than on higher ones. It’s just different. It’d be the best way to sink your game to ignore that.
Game is played, how players make it played. Not how developers decided.
I doubt, that you can balance for both high and low tiers, simply because ways they are played are drastically different.
In low tiers, individual skill matters most - one great player can carry whole team to victory. As result, DPS role is dominant, since their skill is converted into results in most straightforward way. At the same time, tanks and supports are failing, due to their results being reliant on someone else.
In high tiers, you have opposite - most DPS already reached their peak in terms of skill, so they aren’t carrying that much impact anymore. Here tanks and supports are more important roles, and teamwork matters more, than individual skill of each player.
Depends on the situation, nade can be blocked and cleansed, res can only be stunned and you can secure them with bubbles etc.
I think its a good write up though i don’t like the mercy rework feel like you are overloading her kit it wil leave other none ana supports in the dust and making future balancing a nightmare.
Would also call out sigma, ana, bap, brig, Mei and perhaps sombra , for having some overloaded kits that makes balancing hard.
They aren’t necessarily overpowered but very overloaded they could get some more focus in there kit by slight adjustments for some or minor reworks/refocus for others.
There are also hero’s that are hard to balance for other reasons like sym , bastion perhaps moira who could use some changes.
Mercy basically can’t move while rezzing … just shoot her. I am a half decent Mercy player but even I sometimes do very risky rezzes because I know most enemies have tunnel vision and will totally ignore me. Mercy can’t rezz in a fight or it’s very likely someone else dies because he doesn’t get heals. Most of the time rezz only works before or after a fight. If you rezz someone before or after a fight it has value if your spawning point is far away … as closer it is as less value rezz has.
Very good and detailed post 