If you’re typing the list again, I read it.
I’m saying the only one of that list I’ve actually seen you make is the heal nerf.
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Well, I made this post. Which fundamentally was allowing Junkrat to use mines for both attack and mobility, without having to sacrifice either of those, by having more mines.
Overwatch Forums
A week or two later, this happened.
Two problems:
- Most of the suggestions you made aren’t really so original that we can pat you on the back for them. The idea of giving Junkrat more than one mine was suggested (unsuccessfully) as far back as Sept of the previous year. The person there even suggested it would be useful for giving him mobility against Pharah–a use that Jeff actually stated in his developer update.
- This also goes for things like Mercy’s healing nerf and taking away Mei’s icicle dropoff. And the “making as many heroes as viable as possible” bit has literally been their balance philosophy from day one. I really do not understand that being on the list at all.
- Many of the changes, once made, were failures. And not failures like Mei’s where they simply weren’t enough to make the Hero viable. Mercy’s change (and almost all of Hog’s) actively made the character worse.
But you did show another example besides the Mercy change, at least. So I retract my point on that.
Well, the Mercy one was interesting because I felt like I was the only one in the forum using those healing per game by rank charts, and also suggesting 50hps.
As for Mei, she’s probably close to about as good as she can get because her equipment is so annoying to play against. She’s viable. Decent. Not great, but definitely not F-tier. Maybe some slight tweaks but not much more.
Pretty sure I was the main person talking about frost blaster piercing, and I did make a 54k views reddit post on Mei’s icicle dropoff a while back that was frontpage for a day or two.
As for Roadhog,
PTR buffs are
- Cancel momentum on hook
- Consistent spread pattern
- No increase in shotgun damage
- Reduce hook cooldown, by nearly 2 seconds if it’s a long range hook
- Start pulling hook target much sooner after hooking
Notice any similarities?
🐖 Hog fix, without buffing shotgun
I sure do.
Granted, you had a lot more points that ended up being used in the post you linked, but you have a lot of hours on Roadhog. I don’t doubt that you would have an idea what his issues are, just like I have ideas for Hammond that I could list that may or may not get used (and I’ve only got like 40 hours or so on the hamster). My point is, none of these suggestions are so far out from what other people have asked for.
If you toss a die and call a number over and over again, eventually you’ll get that number.
Either way, I would argue I’m decent at guessing 
And overall, Mercy players would be better off by trying to understand the developers perspective.
Instead of trying and failing to bring the devs to their perspective.
Like I said, easy to be good at guessing if you guess enough times that eventually you’re right.
How many suggestions have you made that weren’t used?
You can’t compare any of the changes you’ve suggested to other heroes to what’s going on with Mercy, though. Your suggestions with Hog fix basic issues with his kit that prevent him from doing his job in whole. The problem with Mercy is that her kit itself is the issue for her players.
Mercy had the main thing that people enjoyed playing her for (saving her entire team all at once) gutted to focus on the less0-thrilling aspects of her kit. This would be like if we removed Hook entirely and instead buffed Hog’s healing and shooting to the point that he was a fatter Reaper.
I haven’t touched Mercy in ages because of that. I don’t find the promise of being a flying angel as appealing. If other people do, I’m not going to spoil their fun.
Any suggestion I make for Mercy would be a return to the “grand hero moment” that you spend an entire match setting up.
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Changes:
Valkyrie 1: 75 - 90 HPS + 35 - 40% dmg Buff (the numbers would have to be tested)
Valkyrie 2: 80 HPS and 35% Buff combined in a single beam. No split beams.
Rez: earned ability; for X healing, Mercy can Rez 1 Team mate. Can be stacked up to 2 charges. Cast time 1.5s, no movement reduction, 3m radius
Healing beam: back to 60 HPS
Why these changes? If Mass Rez is no option:
Valkyrie
Valkyrie could be a good Ult, but what it lacks is impact. Increasing the HPS makes it an actual support Ult that, if used right, can be used to keep your team from dying. It won´t outheal a DVa bomb or Tire for example, but at least basic damage so “Heroes never die” is no joke anymore. For the second version, having combined heal and damage with chain beams could be OP, and since Mercy is supposed to be a strong single-target healer, the second version would strenghten her role. Also, beam juggling would be important again, making her a little more difficult again. No more “afk” Ult.
Rez on a static CD is horrible for both Mercy players and also the enemy team. You just… have it. No matter if you´re playing like a headless chicken or are godlike. Making Rez earnable means amazing players can get it quickly, while really bad players rarely have it.
The slightly shorter cast time, no movement reduction and decreased radius allow for counterplay (seriously there are enough stuns and burst damage abilities to stop her) but also stop giving Mercy players the feeling of being a sitting duck.
60 HPS as basic healing isn´t too much. There´s so much more damage in the game now that 50 HPS is simply not enough. And with the latest buffs every other support got, giving Mercy 60 HPS back won´t be OP. It makes her viable again.
These changes together would make playing her impactful and fun again without making her OP. Especially with the Rez changes - having it on a static CD is just too much.
I look forward to seeing what positive changes come to Mercy, whether a rework or minor buffs, minor nerfs (she doesn’t need anymore nerfs right now) that bring her to a more balanced state. I just fear her surpassing the other supports esp with how awesome its been to see each character in certain scenarios that calls for them.
Well I think what happened with Mercy is the devs, for whatever reason, didn’t want a capability like Mass Rez in the game. So they were looking for ways to take it out.
Their replacement idea was horribly overpowered though. Which I will agree was a big mistake.
Afterwards though, I think the overwhelming response from Mercy mains only caused the devs to become overly cautious and slow about making further Mercy changes.
I also think the nearly singular focus of the Mercy community saying almost nothing else but a variation on “Gimme MultiRez” did nothing but cause devs to tune it out, and even mass censor it. And overall communicate less with all Overwatch players in general.
That said, the devs have been taking a lot of good actions since July. And the Mercy changes, which I advocated for, were mostly just placeholder changes to make Mercy technically balanced while the devs work on other heroes that have a more urgent need.
But the devs are getting down towards the bottom of the list. No overpowered heroes (below Masters at least), every hero besides Bastion and maybe Sym isn’t a trollpick.
Soon enough, the devs are going to have the luxury of focusing on quality of life issues, instead of having wildfire balance issues.
I mean, the overwhelming response was there BEFORE the changes went through. I, for one, was against it for the simple fact that I felt it’d open the floodgates to people complaining. After all, if complaining about Mass Rez got it removed, then what else can we complain about to get rid of?
That’s what happens when you completely remove what made a character fun to appease the fun of everyone else.
As I said, it would be like removing Hog’s hook from the game completely because people complain about it being unfun. You’d always have Hog players utterly furious that it was removed.
As I said, the problem with Mercy isn’t just her balance, but the way she feels to play. No matter how balanced she is, you’re always going to have a contingent of former mains who don’t like to or refuse to play her because they’re just not a fan of the playstyle.
This isn’t unique to Mercy. Look at Symm, and she’s one of the least played characters in the game.
It’s easy to call any suggestion that doesn’t work a “placeholder” suggestion after the fact. Any buff or nerf is already technically a “placeholder”. With the devs’ stated goal of making every character as viable as they can, anything that doesn’t work will be tweaked until it does.
The rest of your post seems overly optimistic to me, but I don’t want to be a naysayer. All I can say is, “we’ll see”.
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Incidentally, I suspect devs just didn’t like the idea of their games usually hinging on something like this.
Except more like,
- “Is the Mercy dead? Is the Mercy dead? Is the Mercy dead?”
- “Yes!?!!! Okay go-go-go capture the point”
- “Too late, she respawned”
Similar to how they nerfed Dva’s defense matrix in the same patch for similar reasons on Ult usage.
The problem I have with that argument is that it focuses on making the game more about microplay reactions than macroplay strategies.
Microplay is your bog-standard “if-then” tactics. If Genji Ult, Transcendence. If Zarya Gravs, eat it. If Mercy is alive, then don’t use Ults. It’s about playing well over a short term, and it’s the most obvious type of play to master but also the more difficult–which is why people always conflate it with “skill”.
Macroplay is about playing well over the entire course of a match. Avoiding small mistakes and making incremental gains in your strategies. Having played a lot of Mercy myself during the time of Mass Rez, the main reason I liked it was because it forced both Mercy and her opponents to play well over the course of a match. Such as putting so much pressure on Mercy that she couldn’t heal and build charge or focusing on meaningful damage instead of scratch damage that built her ult.
If Mercy played badly, she didn’t have a Rez to use except maybe once in the round. If the enemy played badly, Mercy always had a Rez.
Over time, it seems Blizzard’s been more and more focused on rewarding microplay instead of macroplay. If people want to know why GOATS–the most unstrategic comp of all time–is so powerful right now, that’s why. GOATS doesn’t care what your long term strategy is. It just beats your head in.
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Huh, nice phrasing.
But yeah, I don’t think devs liked Mercy having such a big impact on the game at a Macro level.
Such that the game essentially boils down to Mercy hide-and-seek-whack-a-mole than teamfights.
Which can be fun for the Mercy player.
But everybody else is waiting for permission to start having fun.
They already did a 16,000 post “portfolio.” What more does Blizzard need?
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Give credit to Jayne. I’ve always said this, but he’s the one who defined the terminology for me.
And really, hide and rez was a Frankenstein that both Blizzard and the pro community created. When demonstrated at launch, Blizzard always showed being able to hide safely and Rez her team as a feature of the Ult, and not an “unintended” bug. XQC used to rage onscreen at Mercy players who didn’t hide when she had Rez because he (and other players) didn’t want to babysit her since the enemy team all wanted her dead. The idea of “hide and rez” being a bad thing didn’t come until the same players suddenly realized that if the enemy Mercy did this, they’d actually have to find her.
Again, the main reason I hate what Blizzard did to Mercy is because it perpetuated all the toxic BS that was heaped on the character over the course of a year. It’s just a constant cycle of people complaining about any ability that makes them think, followed by complaints about how brainless and/or useless its replacement is.
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Well, hide and rez may have been less common.
But respawn and rez happened all the time.
Well, typically at the end of the match, where the team is trying to stall.
I’ve always said that they need to make the final point further away from the spawn on payloads and 2CP.
We could probably philosphize forever on the thought process that went into the change.
But I think MultiRez more of an academic “what-if”, than a “here’s a realistic possibility of what the devs might do in the future”.
That said, the best approximation of what I guess the devs would go for that’s similar to the old playstyle,
is a fast single rez, and some version of Valk, then likely another ability like a healing boost to fill in the gaps.
And that alone could have a ton of different configurations. (Especially if you consider R is an unused button for the healing staff)
I would be fine with giving Mercy some other ult-based (or otherwise earned) “hero moment” that isn’t directly related to healing or damage-negation. Because Lucio and Zenyatta have already pretty much cornered the market on that.