Mercy heals are great but in most games a lot of players just never use her gun because of how janky swapping between weapons is and they end up with basically 0 kills. All my friends that really like to play Mercy feel like they’re not participating enough compared to other healers because they find the weapon swapping frustrating.
In my opinion a good solution would be adding a button that automatically gets her gun out by holding it and returning back to her healing staff on release. This would reduce the amount of inputs needed to get her gun out making Marcy much more versatile.
Rebinding keys won’t change how it works, the inputs needed remain the same.
My suggestion is about reducing the inputs needed and takes into consideration Mercy’s players who play with mouse and keyboard as well those who play with a controller.
Let me get this straight. The character that consists of holding primary on your teammate to heal has too many inputs for swapping weapons? You literally press 1 key to swap, 1 click and hold to start firing, and 1 key to swap back.
You quite literally cannot reduce the amount of inputs to swap weapons. You press 1 key, or scroll the mouse wheel once and she swaps weapons. How is this difficult or janky. Theres no quick time event to swap weapons. You press. One. Singular. Button. and press it again to swap back
Mercy is not built to do damage her gun is a last resort, her damage boost helps teamates make up for her missing DPS, she is a support that focusing on helping her teammates by healing and boosting
Holding which button doesn’t matter, that’s a remapping problem that can be easily solved. One I can think of right here would be the “E” key by moving Resurrect, which is an ability with 30 seconds of cooldown, to another one like the mouse wheel button.
This will work Just like Brigitte needs to hold her shield up to bash it. Hold and release, you won’t need to scroll back and forth or click 1 and 2, simple, easy and faster.
Mercy’s weapon swap is a mechanic unique to her character and (in my opinion) doesn’t resonates well with all the other Overwatch characters that have everything they can do at their disposal without swapping stuff.
EDIT:
Ok maybe not “E” because would impact on her movement with WASD, perhaps “Shift” would be a good trade. Just suggesting, not saying my idea has to change permanently how you play Mercy, this can be added as a optional choice in her controls menu.
I’d argue that scrolling for the vast majority of people is the easier option, and if you wanted to you could remap a mouse button to scroll to ‘next weapon’ if that’s what you’re after (but Shield/Bash work very differently than pistol out/back). For Mercy, the left/right click are best on the beams imo, and holding a key down with your left hand ring or pinky while shooting doesn’t make using WASD any easier. Those fingers are the weakest in your hand, so I guess you could thumb with C or something.
To your credit, you’re right, I’m not familiar of any specific way to use a ‘press and hold to keep using this ability’ with few exceptions, and I guess there could be an argument that said customization should be included in the game.
Reduce the amount of inputs? You press one button to take the gun out, so how could adding a button reduce the number of inputs? It stays one button, but now you have to hold it and aim and shoot.
I’d argue this makes her clunkier since before you’d press a button, and now you don’t have to worry about holding anything down while you’re mercy-ing.