Anyone Else Miss Zen/Mercy or Mercy/Lucio?

General Discussion
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Anyone else when Mercy Zen and Mercy Lucio were considered viable comps? When Mercy could main heal? These comps were both very aggressive/offensive comps with consistent healing and nice utility (Damage amps and speed) and running dive or other mobile/spread out comps with them was super fun.

Now if you try to run these you are basically soft throwing. This week in comp when I tried picking Mercy with a Lucio on my team, the immediate reaction from our other teammates was “Great we have two offhealers gg”, or today in comp when the enemy ran Mercy Zen it was basically a free win and our tank was like “Are they throwing with that healer combo”?

It’s just super lame that you can’t run these combinations anymore due to the lack of healing. They were the underlying healer compositions to a lot of the more fast paced dive comps in the game. Kind of sad seeing the “go to” dive comp being Zen Brig in OWL now.

I was also scanning my Mercy stats in competitive over the last few seasons at a GM level, and they show the slow descent into becoming an off healer.

Season 9, with current Mercy but 60 HPS, I had 11,533 avg healing per 10 minutes and 724 avg damage amped per 10. This was after all her nerfs except for the HPS nerf.

Season 15, with only 50 HPS, I had 9,523 avg healing per 10 min and 1,411 avg damae amped per 10.

Season 18 it got even worse, I had 8,323 avg healing per 10 min and 2,000 damage amped per 10 min.

Every season the healing goes down and the damage amp goes up.
11.5k --> 9.5k --> 8.3k healing
700 --> 1.4k – > 2k damage amped

My average healing has gone down more than 3,000 healing per ten minutes from the HPS nerf and from damage amping so much it’s gone up 1,500.

This is why Mercy players are frustrated, because we can no longer play our hero as a main support as she’s intended to be played, and instead are relegated to picking her as an off support alongside Ana and spending all game staring at the backside of our DPS while we right click them. Sure Widow and Pharah have nice butts but that’s not why I’m on Mercy, save that for the fanfiction.

It’s also interesting because it shows that when she had 60 HPS Mercy actually wasn’t damage boosting a whole lot as she spent a lot of the game healing, you know being played as a main healer, and only damage boosting important ults and abilities. Damage boost was like a fun skill you used when necessary and made the concious decision to do so, not something you just held down all game like you down and then occasionally heal.

Her kit feels backwards now, it’s like her primary function is to damage boost and her secondary is to just heal up her Ana and top people up who Ana can’t heal. And I really, really miss Mercy Zen and Mercy Lucio. Sure, with Echo’s release Mercy is being used to pocket her with an Ana as the other healer, but that just further shoves her into this role as an off support damage boost bot.

I think a lot of Mercy players would be willing to sacrafice some power in rez or damage boost for 60 HPS back. Maybe 60 HPS and 20% damage boost, but keep damage boost at 30% during Valk? This would make spammy heroes like Pharah/Echo/Ashe less annoying when being damage boosted and allow Mercy to be played as a main healer again. Just food for thought.

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Was Mercy Lucio a thing? I honestly don’t remember. I do miss Mercy/Zen comps. They were the most fun I remember having. Dive is actually very fun when I play Mercy. It lets me spread my wings, pun intended. Thought I’d hate to see it dominant again cuz I love playing Ana too

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Wait what? Sacrifice more power in a ability that gets countered even by the wind? Resurrect don’t need anymore nerfs.

I don’t think her damage boost needs nerfs, since burst healing became a thing Mercy is practically useless in healing, a buff to her heals wouldn’t be that bad, even a buff to Resurrect (healing targets around with a aura while you resurrect someone).

But as always some people simply say “she’s easy so she doesn’t need buffs”, while Ana is never a weak pick just because of “aim”. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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A huge no to this. They screwed up when they nerfed her healing down to 50 HPS as an additional knee-jerk nerf to the moth meta.

They messed up mercy, they should fix her. They have more than enough ideas to fix her from 2+ years worth of feedback.

They took away her impact, we shouldn’t be making compromises, but instead hold them accountable for a horrible balance decision that crippled Mercy.

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It was viable/playable and worked really well in a lot of situations, especially on KOTH maps! Speedy dive with Mercy Zen was :ok_hand:

Same! Mercy Zen was a great staple combo, sad it’s unplayable now.

In a perfect world they’d all be pretty viable. I’m fine if Ana is the best, but I’d like Mercy to be a viable main healer when paired with an off healer.

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I’d be fine if they found a way to decrease it’s power level in exchange for more healing tbh

Yeah, but one of the reasons Mercy was so strong even after all the nerfs in Season 9/10 was damage boost. It was making her relevant with sniper meta and Grav Dragon and when paired with Zen was a lot of damage amp.

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Agreed, but I’m willing to make sacrifices :sob: Devs don’t seem to get that Mercy was just picked a lot in seasons 9/10 because of sniper meta/Grav dragon.

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Ehh I kinda miss Zen/Mercy but only because it was the idiot friendly alternative to Zen/Lucio.

…I may or may not have guilt tripped my stack’s Lucio main into playing Mercy for a year

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Well she needs to be good at something, Moira and Ana will still be able to outheal her, so she needs something to compensate for that to be a viable pick again with other healers.

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What do you mean do I miss Lucio? No, I see him EVERY META. With the exception of this Echo meta forming, it’s literally always Lucio as a mainstay. I played Baptiste a lot today, do you know how that feels?

I love Baptiste, but my god he’s a snore when you’re having to bot out on heals.

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talk about rude.

Seriously this has to be addressed at some point. Why is he always free to be meta, I literally cannot stand him.

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theres no meta I want more than ana zen or mercy zen

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:man_shrugging: Won with both of those today and yesterday in masters. Those pairings are fine if your team has a decent amount of self-sustain. Then you play around nuking them as fast as possible rather than long, drawn-out fights. Those pairings won’t work as often as they used to but they still have their place.

Also, I’d really rather have Mercy stay a flex support who mostly supports her damage dealers rather than 60 HPS with decreased damage boost. If more heals is more important than damage boost in my team’s comp, I just won’t run Mercy. No reason to make her fit the same role that’s already occupied by a few other supports, especially since she’s the only one occupying her current role.

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You should add that your experience is based on the PC version before Megadodo comes in and says “I can play Mercy still as a main healer” “Stop console shaming, its the same game”

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To clarify, by idiot friendly, I’m talking about the team as a whole. Zen/Lucio demands tight coordination from the team, and you’re not going to get that in soloq.

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We really don’t need to split the Mercy community over device elitism :woman_facepalming:

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Really? cuz the last time you talked about your winrates on her you said you had a 38% winrate.

I also don’t understand why you think having 60hps will mean she can’t pocket. Pocketing is something that literally any healer can do, it just comes more naturally to mercy and it still will since gaining 60hps wont take anything away from her.

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I miss Zen.
Mercy, not so much…

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Thats funny because literally 2 hours ago, the LA Valiant tried running Zen/ Mercy dive with Tracer, Ball, Winston… and failed.
There wasnt enough healing so they switched the Zen to Ana.
When the best teams cant make Mercy work as a main healer, how am I supposed to do so?

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in all fairness, he’s balanced for the most part. He’s annoying but balanced. I just wish they’d give Zen more healing output and add another support with a defensive ultimate.

Single-target healing is pretty trash now. That’s why you’ll never see Zen-Mercy ever again.