50% damage boost and any kind of damage reduction outside of the mechanics of armor are reserved for ultimates, namely Nano Boost and Supercharger.
To have Mercy have that on a constant beam with no cooldown will make other supports too useless, which is exactly what we want to avoid.
Why does it seem that Mercy will never be satisfactory to some of you unless she completely craps on every other support?
Bastion’s Ironclad, Roadhog’s Take a Breather and Orisa’s Fortify say hello.
My bad, my mind wasn’t working properly. However, each of these heroes has a good reason to have those. Giving it to some other heroes via Mercy makes the game unbalanced, and will instantly make Nano Boost trash.
Does giving healing to other heroes via Mercy make the game unbalanced because they wouldn’t otherwise have healing? The entire point of a support is giving your teammates something they didn’t have before to make them more powerful.
Nanoboost has a 50% damage reduction and a 50% damage boost and a 300hp heal, and Ana gets to use the rest of her kit at the same time while its effects are active. Mercy’s blue beam is a 30% damage boost and I am proposing adding as little as 25% damage reduction to that, and it requires Mercy’s undivided attention and line of sight. She can’t heal at the same time like Ana can or fire-and-forget.
With damage reduction added to Mercy’s blue beam, Nanoboost would still be objectively more powerful by a wide margin.
The 30% boost is very, very exact.
It doesn’t increase your TTK for slow-shooting heroes on purpose. It does, however, reduce your TTK on all heroes above and below the 200 HP threshold.
For heroes that produce a constant stream of damage, the 30% boost is pretty much exactly the amount it reduces their TTK by.
What’s more, damage boost allows your team to make more efficient trades. If both teams have a McCree that get one shot off on each other while poking, the McCree who was damage boosted got more ult charge from that trade. Before a fight breaks out, the team with a damage boosting Mercy is simply generating more ult charge than the other team, despite being in contact for the same amount of time.
Nano Boost is an ultimate requiring a lot of charge and lasts a few seconds.
Mercy’s beam is no cooldown and no reload. Sure the numbers might be less, but that alone would make it have more impact and use than Nano Boost, since it can be used for potentially infinite time. Too strong.
Orisa’s Fortify and Hog’s Breather last for a very limited time and have cooldowns. Bastion’s ironclad is there when he has the most severe disadvantage possible in FPS games, and he is still trash.
Mercy already has Rez, the most powerful ability in the game. She doesn’t need to be the universal healer who has everything any other support has or wishes for.
Damage reduction doesn’t seem bad on another support though. Brigitte kinda does it already.
Reinhardt deals 75 damage per swing, or 97.5 when damage boosted. He can’t even kill a 200hp target in two swings while boosted, let alone a 250hp target.
The rest of your claims are accurate… however, all they serve to prove is that damage boost has a significant effect in specific cases. A effect which is significant is still not necessarily powerful enough.
Moira’s right click used in place of Mercy’s blue beam does a much better job of reducing the TTK of all of her teammates by adding an easily-attainable 50 dps against any focused target. Moira can kill people all by herself, making it actually worth stopping healing as Moira to go do exactly that. Moira’s right click is not only powerful, it’s near-guaranteed power in the hands of a skilled player thanks to its generous hitbox. Best of all, it depends only on Moira’s player doing Moira’s hybrid job of healing + damage.
Mercy’s job is keeping people alive. Adding damage resist to the blue beam would help Mercy perform her own role as a pure healer, in a way that is dependent upon her own player’s skill instead of relying entirely on the skill of her teammate to make use of the damage boost when she gives it to them.
Damage resist on blue beam is a way to increase Mercy’s ability to keep her team alive in a way that requires more skill than simply buffing her healing beam back to 60 hp/sec. I expected that more people would see the suggestion as a good idea.
Nope. Damage is borderline OP, so adding anything to it, even just 5% more damage(35% would push Widow headshots to 405) or whatever amount of damage resistance you want would push it over to OP territory.
Also, it’s more skillful for DB to be the way it is. Since the boost is only applied at the instance of damage, you can keep the heals on and switch to boost just as the damage is being applied then switch back to heals. The better the Mercy is, the more heals she can supply without sacrificing damage boost.
If you applied the damage resistance buff, her job becomes even easier as the optimal play would be to sustain the blue beam until a certain HP threshold then switch to heals. And no, knowing the threshold is not more skill than knowing the timing of your beam target’s damage output.