I don’t believe they hate Mercy but I do suspect that they don’t know what to do with her as they screwed up her character. Past actions with the rework alienated a large part of her fanbase (and caused people to hate mercy players) forcing them to leave the game, further reworks and massive nerfs resulted in general anger towards the company.
Any actions now to correct what they did are too little too late and threaten further backlash from those who think she’s viable and fun to play. They aren’t going to win back all those people who left the game. Nor are they going to salvage their reputation over what they did. So why change her? It’s a fight they lost long ago and they have other things to work on.
If she becomes that, who will be left to be the go-to for consistency and flexibility? We already have super-high-HPS-output supports. I don’t know why Mercy needs to be one, too. I know she used to be but she got some help in the roster since then so now she can be more interesting.
That’s backwards logic, but I’d believe it of them.
They make a change everyone hated,
Then they got more hate for not doing anything to fix the mess they made,
Now they’re… are afraid to fix Mercy because people are mad at them for not fixing Mercy?
But really, I think the real reason is that they never cared what we think in the first place. They bunkered down once they got hit with a s***storm, now they’re carrying on like it never happened. They don’t care what we think, they only care that Mercy’s stats look balanced and that she isn’t causing problems for OWL.
They’d all have good healing, but Mercy would have the best overall. Because she was designed that way, and she gives up a lot to have that crown.
Mercy is extremely team dependent, she doesn’t frag, and if someone’s after her all she can do is run away. Lord Kaplan help you if your pursuer has the mobility to chase you down. Or is playing hitscan.
I should have clarified, i meant since they started banning based on pick rates. B4 heroes like sym even got banned. Thats why i said played enough on ladder+owl.
I like Ana being great for huge single-target heals, Moira being great for huge group heals, and Mercy being great at being everywhere and flexible but mostly supporting the damage heroes. I just don’t see a world where Mercy can keep her flexibility and consistency and still have the highest raw healing. To me, she’d have to have her kit dumbed down a lot and she’d have to lose power to the most interesting and fun aspects of her kit (her mobility and freedom to look around) to justify a healing increase. I don’t want to find myself hanging out in the back line with tanks. I’d feel like a caged bird.
How about one where Mercy’s stats aren’t being inflated by Valkyrie?
The “ult” gives Mercy AoE heals for ridiculously long periods of time, which defeats the balancing point of Mercy’s heals by making them strong but restricted to single target.
Mercy’s already been dumbed down a ton, but that’s beside this particular point… the “healing increase” that people are asking for is a simple revert back to 60hps.
Mercy could main heal when she had 60hps, and it wasn’t causing balance problems. Her hps got nerfed because the devs looked at her healing stats and noticing that they were really high, but never considered that maybe that might have something to do with Valkyrie padding Mercy’s stats with AoE heals for ridiculous amounts of time.
I don’t want Mercy’s kit dumbed down, I want Mercy’s kit smartened up. And that starts with restoring 60hps, so that beam juggling is always more effective than… urgh, pocketing.
I think you’re right that she won’t get a buff. I’ve been waiting for a buff and arguing with people on here about mercy’s healing for almost 2 years. Over this time a lot of people that I’ve argued with who disagreed with me have changed their minds and now think mercy does need a buff, and in general it seems like a lot of people have realized she’s underpowered in recent months. Even with that I still don’t think they’ll buff her. I haven’t heard one word from them about mercy’s balance since that one post from geoff in march 2019. Meanwhile, every single hero has gotten a significant balance change since mercy’s last significant change (I don’t really count the change that made her able to chain heal through barriers cuz I swear that was a bug fix anyway).
I don’t see why Valkyrie is considered to be inflating Mercy’s healing stats when Coalescence and Transcendence aren’t viewed that way. It’s not like Valkyrie just does healing. You can get huge value out of it without healing anybody. Honestly, anyone who spends that whole fifteen seconds holding down the healing button is probably wasting its potential.
I think Mercy’s skill ceiling has only gone up over time as her kit has received much needed increases in depth. I don’t want her to be a heal/resurrect bot and, thankfully, she’s only moved further away from that over time. I want her to flow and be fast-paced with people trying to catch me. That’s when I’m having the most fun. I’d honestly be fine if they nerfed her healing even more in exchange for a higher damage boost but I don’t think that’s a necessary change either.
I promise they didn’t just nerf her at a knee-jerk reaction to her healing numbers. The fact that her win rates are still so solid at 50 HPS (they go up as SR goes up and are above 50% for platinum and higher, she’s also second-highest win rate in GM for the month and third most-picked) says to me that she’s still very strong and doing what she’s intended to be doing now, which is different than what she was intended to do when the game launched.
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