[Feedback Thread Continued] Mercy Updates - Jan 30, 2018

General Discussion
15335

Ah here we go with the Mercy takes less skill now than 1.0 and is less strategic than then- argument.

I beg to differ, current Mercy is harder to be effective with than Mercy 1.0 (I’m talking about the ranks from bronze-high diamond, where about 95% of the players are).
You still have to be aware of the same stuff you did with 1.0.

examples:

  • Do the enemies have Ultimates? If so, which one are coming up? This is essential to know if you’re planning to use Valk. Do they have a ult that instakills you (Highnoon/Visor)? Do they have a Blade and Grav coming up? If so you’d want to save your ult after those were used since you can’t outheal them. While you can outheal Ults like MoltenCore, Primal Rage, Coalescence, Shatter, Grav if there is no strong DPS ult to follow up, Dragonstrike etc.
  • Does my team have and good ultimates I could combo my Valk dmg boost with. For example Valking and pocketing your blading Genji is incredibly strong. Also Valk + Shatter or Valk + Grav is also a good combo if you don’t have strong DPS ultimates to follow up on those.
  • positioning during ultimate is not easy. Just hugging the skybox doesn’t make you invincible to all damage. If they have a competent Widow or Hanzo you get shot down quite fast. Also don’t underestimate McCrees and S76 players. You need to position yourself so that as many people on your team profit from healing/dmg boost while also not getting shot down.
  • the buff to GA did raise her skillceiling more than people like to think. You can jebait whole Dragonblades and make Genjis life horrible. You can jebait divers to dive you far away and then fly out of their reach so they are easily killed by your team because they are out of position. You can even acchieve people c9ing because you can make them chase you.
  • resurrect is hard to pull off. I see so many Mercys dying everytime they want to rez because they cannot judge the situation right. Their McCree gets sniped by Widow and they just fly there where the Widow sniped him and then get mad when they get sniped too. So many Mercy mains here on the forum claim she takes so much gamesense to play but then die almost always when attempting a rez and call it a “suicide button”. No it’s not, you were just not aware of your surroundings as much as you’d like to think. Everytime you die when trying to rez, it’s 99% your fault (the 1% is when your Rein says he shields you but then drops it to firestrike and you get sniped, happens almost never).
  • out of all Mercy mains I’ve come across in comp on my main and alt account, only about a handful used their mic. Mercy has the best overview on the battlefield, especially when Valking and all this information is lost because they don’t communicate. I’ve gotten so many compliments for good comms and people even told me that my comms prob won us the game.
  • knowing when to battle-Valkyre. With Valk, you have good overview and you can see anything on the battlefield. Knowing when to chase someone low and finish them off or even taking down a Widow/McCree who has been quite annoying and denying your pushes can be gamechanging. A pick can decide between lost and won teamfight. Knowing when to take out your pistol requires quite some gamesense and the ability to read people. Like is my team fine with no heals for 2-3s, is the Widow bad at hitting me while strafing or is she occupied with something else?

Valkyre Mercy needs more strategy to pull off effectively because she is now low risk/low reward. You actively have to put in more effort to be to use to your team. Opposing to Mercy 1.0 which was low risk/high reward. Anyone could hop on Mercy and get good value out of a rez, because quite frankly it’s not that hard to predict the enemy has all ults when they haven’t ulted in 2 mins. And it wasn’t rocket science knowing that you should now stay back and wait for them to ult.
Getting good value out of Valk is harder than getting good value out of mass rez. All the posts saying Valk has literally no impact confirms that.

3 Likes
15336

Can I marry you??
Holy hell I could’ve not formulated it better.

15337

please stop using the word strategy when talking about mass res LMAO

3 Likes
15338

ding ding ding, and yet some people still don’t get this

I have friends who like the new Mercy, that’s cool, I just find it so much less interesting to play.

15340

Hiding and a 5 man rez was skill full? What a joke. XD

15341

There’s almost nothing strategic about Valkyrie, even less so if you can’t or don’t want to use a microphone. She may be played frequently in OWL as someone here said, but from most of the matches I’ve watched that’s generally a niche pick (meaning they damage boost a specific teammate until they switch, then Mercy switches too).

I agree with OP, lets make Mercy great again!

3 Likes
15343

Lets not pretend that pressing Q on a pile of corpses and winning the game was difficult. There’s a reason it got removed.

I do like Mercy, but I came as a competitive TF2 Medic main, and I did find Mercy to be… a bit dumbed down? There’s not really much nuance to her actual healing mechanics. You click and heal. It’s a flat rate. You don’t have to minmax or micromanage.

For the uninitiated, Medic doesn’t have a flat heal rate. Who he heals and when makes a difference. Recently injured players have a heal penalty, and players who haven’t taken damage have a heal bonus. There’s also overheal mechanics which follow the same rules, but have different efficiencies depending on who it is you’re healing. It’s more efficient to overheal low base health targets, but high base health targets have higher max overheal, so you have to weigh up which is more important in a given moment, as well as keep a mental note on what’s going on with the team.

You also have bolt healing, which is higher risk, but lets you heal at range and instantly, so you have to make the choice of when to give up the beam’s reliability to potentially save an injured teammate (it’s comparable to Ana’s unscoped fire).

Medic’s movement is also skill-based vs. ability based. Your ability to survive will come down to things like damage surfing, air strafing, being able to hop on props etc.

On a competitive level, Medics are also usually expected to take on other responsibilities, such as maincalling, uber-tracking, etc. (which you can do with Mercy in OW, but it’s really rare to see someone actually take that initiative)

If people want Mercy to be more engaging, I think these are the areas that need to be looked at. Her mechanics are probably purposely simple so that anyone can pick her up, but that does cause her to lack some depth.

Blizzard shouldn’t copy TF2’s mechanics, but I think they could take some notes on how to make a simple concept more engaging.

3 Likes
15344

Mercy never was a strategist. Mass resurrect never required any real strategy; unless you consider ‘hiding behind a wall or around a corner as a team fight starts’ a strategic move. Which would be as strategic as Hanzo hitting a feet-scatter arrow.

I must admit, Mercy may still not be a real ‘strategist’, but atleast now she has to make a meaningful choice with her rez, and coordinate with her team to execute a succesful rez.

Unfortunately, some Mercy mains on this forum have failed to adapt to this change and just fly in and press E, thinking nothing can harm them.

Also, mass rez was never “high risk”. It yielded high rewards with little risk involved. Just stay behind a wall, or any room as a teamfight breaks out, wait for a few teammates to die, then revive them. Usually it ended up with your team winning the fight, since your enemies would have abilities on cooldown, or have used their ultimates before you used rez.

Mercy could undo entire teamfights without even being present in them. The worst part was that someone would have to go look for her before any teamfight to make sure she couldn’t undo it. Atleast Zenyatta, Lucio and Moira have to be near their team to protect them with their ultimates. Mercy could literally fly in from across the map after a team fight and revive her team with the enemy being able to do little about it.

Yeah, if you had a Mccree or Roadhog you could stun her, but after that 0.75 second stun expired she could still hit Q and resurrect everyone. And if you killed her? Tough luck, she got to keep all her ult charge and could use it for the next fight.

Also, before you call me out for being a ‘filthy DPS main’, i’d like to say i have accumulated over 200 hours on Mercy. I like her, but mass resurrect was simply unbalanced and foolproof; her rez mechanic simply NEEDED a change.

2 Likes
15345

Mercy 1.0 was “hide in the back and wait for team to die on point so I can get potg and use the on fire system to get extra sr”. It was low risk, high reward. There’s a reason why Mercy 2.0 was implemented.

2 Likes
15346

Mass rez wasnt strategic. Valkyrie is more strategic than mass rez.

2 Likes
15347

Interesting post. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who has noted how weak Valk is but still tried to figure out how best to use it effectively.

I still hate the ability though.

1 Like
15348

I’m a (former) Mercy main who agrees with this.

For over a year (well before the rework) I’ve WANTED mass rez to get a few nerfs that made it harder to pull off, in exchange for an E ability that lets Mercy A) mix it up in her base gameplay and B) gives her playmaker potential outside of rez.

I don’t understand why Bizzard wouldn’t even TRY to nerf mass rez, and went straight to deleting it.

1 Like
15350

Mercy still requires a significant amount of game awareness and decision-making, more so than a lot of heroes. When/if to rez, when to Valk, where your GA options are and who to GA to in order to not die, heal priority, when you’re better off whipping out your pistol than damage-boosting someone and hoping they’ll pick off the enemy that’s harassing you…
I don’t know what to tell you if you want even more than that. In fact, there’s more of that in now with the addition of bunny-hopping and the greater risk of Rezzing. Rez was NOT that strategic.

15351

My thoughts exactly😁

1 Like
15352

Ah, hiding, flying in, having a 1 second immunity, and bringing back 6 people instantaneously. Truly high-risk and strategic.

Mercy was low-risk, not fun to play against, and took much less skill to play than even Valkryie.

JUST FIND HER BEFORE SHE LITERALLY RESETS A TEAMFIGHT AND SHOOT HER LAWLLL 4Head HIGH RISK 4Head

2 Likes
15353

Ah great another post filled with haters that never played Mercy and think their character is so much more skillful and rewarding than her. You guys really need to see the truth. This game is easy as a whole. Almost every character has a get out of jail free card and an ability thats easy to use with such a high reward. Overwatch aims at being accessible and that means easy characters will have impact to attract more players. Theres nothing “hard” about overwatch to be very honest. Everything is just practise. Less thought more practise.

4 Likes
15354

Dang bro you must be an Overwatch League player… you’re just too good at this game

15355

The amount of wrong in this post is crazy high.

15356

says the mercy main OMEGALUL

Alright dude.
Im not saying my characters are more rewarding than mercy. I’m saying mercy is incredibly rewarding with little to no skill (incomes “muh positioning”). The thing with mercy is that every ability of hers is a get out of jail free card with high reward and no risk. The only argument you can make is her Rez, which is just as low risk as any other ability if you just pop a shield in front of Mercy. You’re just saying that Overwatch isn’t hard or mechanically demanding to bring every character down to your mains level. Everything requires practice, you dolt, it’s what makes 99% of everything hard, it just so happens that Mercy requires almost no practice and has high reward going along with that.

15357

Valkyrie requires very, very little strategy. How can you people even type crap like this?

2 Likes