I just haven’t gotten around to doing a whole post on that, since work has been busy and we got a new patch coming in tomorrow.
MERCY
+10 HPS on teammates on/near the ground (indicated by an arcane circle below the teammate)
No beam disconnect when casting Valk
GA can target teammates behind walls (But not fly through the wall)
Flying to a teammate gives a little burst heal to a player on the ground. Between 20-40hp depending on GA travel distance. (indicated by an arcane circle below the teammate, that does a glowing pulse visual)
Comments:Brings Mercy closer to that “Former Main Healer” status she used to have by giving her 65hps on grounded teammates. While also giving an easy way for devs to balance PharMercy later. And some big frustrations with Mercy players are Valk beam breakage, and slowly dying off a cliff begging a teammate to come to the edge. It also opens up a whole new realm of movement, and selfpeel for Mercy. The fun stuff. The burst heal is also nice, and encourages a more “Ping Pong” style instead of a “Pocket” style of healing. And this can be adjusted later if it’s popular.
BAPTISTE
More horizontal movement speed while in the air during Exoboots jump.
Comments:Movement horizontally is great for retreat, great for offense, and is just really fun.
ANA
Speed boost for 4sec after throwing a Biotic Grenade.
Comments:By making both of her cooldowns give her SelfPeel, it doubles the amount of situations she can deal with an attacker.
ZENYATTA
Base damage increased by +10.
Ult charge cost reduced by 10%.
On a 4sec cooldown, if Zen kicks a wall, Zenyatta knocks him backwards a significant distance.
Comments:Basic buffs, and something just pure Fun.
My big issue here is that I do not believe there is a way to get “more” Mercy players, in the sense of: Bringing in new people (non support players) to play the support role and her specifically, Keeping the existing Mercy players content, and bringing back old players to play her that previously quit.
People either play her because they feel forced if the meta and team comp calls for it or if they genuinely enjoy her playstyle. But there is rarely an in-between.
My point is, people who play Mercy will keep playing her as long as her playstyle doesn’t change and people who do not play her will not play her as long as her playstyle doesn’t change or they do not feel forced to.
Which is why it’s already too late to undo damage and bring back Mercy players, that quit game. She can be made even broken at high ranks, but as long as she is pathetic at low ranks, it won’t work.
As far as I know the only stats we have are:
A. Looking at T500 (which is dominated by Kiriko and Mercy)
B. Overbuff (who literally tells you not to trust their own stats right now).
C. What Blizzard tells us.
The support role is ridiculously strong at the moment though. There are some outliers and tweaks to be made, but there is no real issue on the balance of supports as a whole. Damage is too high, OHKs are a huge issue, and the team taking too long to balance (generalized) are what makes the role feel like dookie. But it’s pretty good when those things line up. Making the role too strong (when it’s already really strong) seems silly. I’ve been playing OW since OW1’s closed beta tests, all the way through to now, and am a GM support player…they really feel better than they have in a long time, if you consider them as an island. The things that are too strong need tweaking, but the supports don’t need buffing to compensate that…that just forces power-creep.
The gist of the OPs whole crusade is basically that it doesn’t matter if you make the game worse as long as you don’t have to wait in line to play it. Because apparently more people hate waiting in line than they do a lousy game.
Which… doesn’t really square with common sense if you’ve ever been to a theme park, but I dunno what to tell you.
They still would have to buff support afterwards as compensation. And while they probably would do it eventually, they couldn’t even get 5v5 done properly, so they would try to fix it first, before giving up and switching to 4v4.
