When I quit playing Mercy, I went up 1,300 SR in 37 games. My win rate was at 77% on supports in general up from 60% on just Mercy. I’m having less fun than I was when I played Mercy because comparatively to the strategy that you COULD do as Mercy, the strategy that you ACTUALLY do on other supports is less. Huge Rez was integral to that because with it I was target #1, without it I’m just that annoying moth that can do literally nothing and that no one cares about. Because that fun and manipulative play style was stripped away and I can’t really get the same level of it on anyone else, I quit playing the game. I’m an obsessive completionist too, so quitting before I have gotten everything is still causing me distress, but the game has become so incredibly unfun that I’d rather deal with daily neurotic obsessive distress than play the game anymore. That should speak volumes.
I played Mercy aggressively and actively used her to abuse ult economy and abuse my status as priority 1 to juke and bait enemy ults and bait flankers to “come at meh bruh” until they gave into temptation and figured out my accuracy is across the board in the top percentages (top 6% on Ana, top 3% on Zen, top 1/3 of 1% on Mercy) and learned the hard way why my battle Mercy stats were so high. I’d soak up about 12 ults per game most of which ended up being wasted. That’s 12 less ults that hit my team, meaning far fewer kills for the enemy team. Even though I tempo rezed, and even though I gold heal carded every match, and even though even the enemy team was impressed and complimented my game play, the SR system gave me abysmal SR rewards. I’d get maybe 19SR per match for a win and lose about 36SR per loss.
I was steadily going down in rank but I was having a freaking blast doing it. Then came Valk. I press Q then put a potato on my mouse while I feed the cat. It’s still going when I get back, and it makes no difference if I did that or sat at the desk. Non-Mercy players don’t care about this because they want Mercy and all her player base gone. It’s extremely evident by the way things have gone, and the Devs have made it clear they are absolutely going to oblige and murder Mercy.
She’s so unimpactful that it would take 3 of her to equal the second next lowest impact character in the game, or it would take 4 to 5 Mercys to equal one DPS or tank. The real cost though is not that Mercy got destroyed or that portion of the player base is leaving. Yea, that’s going to hurt the game’s longevity but the real problem is that this type of butchering a player to satiate OWL is now being normalized. Hanzo, Sombra, and Sym are next in line to be murdered, and if the Mercy rework and the developer team’s complete refusal to engage the community in a meaningful way after 7 mega threads with roughly 35,000 posts and 6 months of game ruining imbalance following the botched rework, then we’re all truly hopelessly boned.
#revertMercy not because 1.0 was perfect, but because it admits the rework as it was done was a mistake. Mercy hide and Rez, and the frustrating effect of mass Rez that you couldn’t do anything about would have been 100% eliminated if they simply added a counter into Rez that allowed players to prevent it from completing in order to give it counterplay, and if they removed performance based SR that over rewarded only having massive Rez counts.
I could have eaten a can of alphabet soup and crapped a better balance proposal than the rework we got, and I only did 2 classes on game balance and a couple of very small scale game designs.
