Yeah, no. I spent 9 months totally unable to play Ana in competitive. I gave up completely on the idea of playing support in competitive at all. I honestly never thought they’d balance Mercy. I’m not accepting ANY further changes to Mercy to make her ‘fun’. You don’t like her now, just play Ana, Lucio, Brigitte, Zenyatta, or Moira. Because after almost a year, you finally can.
Now that just sounds petty. 
Well, let Mercy be even worse than she is now. Let her get about 5% down from her current winrate, and have her pickrate go down to <1%. Let her be a joke for almost a year. And then you will finally understand what Ana players have dealt with.
That crosses the line into downright malicious.
“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
I wouldn’t wish “the Mercy treatment” on anybody.
1: Getting a rework that you hate right off the bat,
2: Being the target of resentment and toxicity from nearly the entire playerbase,
3: Begging the devs to change their minds about the rework everyone (including you) hates, to the point where they delete your posts (no matter how constructive they are).
4: Watching your hero slowly be hollowed out until they’re a shell of their former self.
5: People telling you every step of the way that you’re wrong for wanting your hero to be fun again.
It’s been a rough ride. I wouldn’t wish it on you, or anyone else.
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Well, I didn’t mean, literally. I was trying to convey what we’ve been through.
Suffice it to say that Mercy 2.0 has been vastly worse for the other supports than it was for Mercy players. And now we’re finally at a place where it is ok for us. So we just really, really don’t want to give this up so we can meddle with Mercy for ‘fun’ reasons. Especially when a lot of us are extremely skeptical that it will help. I really do think the Mercy ‘fun’ issue is about 40% new coke syndrome (hating new Mercy just because she’s not old Mercy) and about 40% people being used to being overpowered and feeling incredibly weak once they’re not anymore. Another rework will not fix either of those issues unless they screw up and make her super OP again, which I think is a very likely possibility.
Please, please read Titanium’s post. It explains in a lot of detail how Mercy’s skill ceiling has been dropping ever since the first rework.
This isn’t “new coke.” It’s replacing the old coke with a grainy protein shake that tastes nasty, while still keeping the old packaging.
And again, it’s really disappointing that neither of us have any faith in the balancing team to make smart, sane decisions.
Edit: i see you replying. I hope that means you’ve already read Titanium’s thread before I linked it.
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Look, if you want a high-skill character, there are 28 others that are better choices for that.
All I know is this is literally the first time I can go into comp and play my favorite hero and not be sinking my team. Since I started the game. Over a year ago. And you want to roll the dice on that, and take it away from me, because you didn’t like the way one hero changed. I had my favorite DPS ruined. I had my favorite tank completely rearranged. I’ve had a character literally deleted out from under me. Please, the game is balanced for once… just cope. Just play someone else. There’s a whole other game out there to explore.
Skill floor and skill ceiling are two different things.
A hero can have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. Mercy used to be one of those heroes.
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No. She really wasn’t. She was always easy. That’s been the consensus of the game since it begin from everyone else but Mercy mains.
Easy to pick up and play.
Mastering her was a different story.
You’re not the only one who’s gone through upheaval. I loved Dva as a peel tank, until they turned her into a diver. I enjoyed Symmera, until they swapped her out with someone different. Mercy’s not even the same hero I fell in love with anymore. The balance team has wronged us all.
I mean, they give and they take away. Dva is good for different things now, at least. We lost Junkrat, but we got Hanzo. Sym 3.0 is amazing, and while I hate to see Sym 2.0 lost forever at least we got something. You just gotta roll with it.
But that being said, Mercy being overpowered is the worst the game has ever been. I don’t want to go there again. I literally quit for 6 months and played Paladins, it was that bad.
We might have lost Mercy (at least those who liked Mercy 1.0). But now we’ve gotten back Ana, Lucio, and Moira. And they’re all super fun. So I really like this game state.
I don’t want her to be overpowered either. I want to believe that there’s a wonderful, amazing version of Mercy that’s fun and balanced; with a low skill floor for beginners/flex players and a high skill ceiling for people willing to main her.
Check out the “A Solution” tab of Titanium’s post, I think they’ve nailed that.
But I’m reaching the point where I don’t think that the current balance team is capable of such competence. Heroes of the Storm saved their game by remixing their balance team and adding a bunch of new features… I can only hope that they do the same for Overwatch.
I just don’t know, honestly. The problem is that Mercy has an abysmally low skill floor, as she’s designed. It’s really hard to take that, make it valid at high rank, and not make it overpowered at high rank.
Ana players have been saying for ages that ease of use is power you have to balance for. It’s really hard to make a hero that’s so easy to play have a high skill ceiling, too, and somehow not just be better than other heroes that don’t have that low skill floor. I think ultimately it might be really hard to make Mercy viable low, viable high, and really easy to play. We might just be stuck with a Mercy that tapers off in gold, and I think that’s ok (after all apparently it’s ok to have an Ana that is terrible in low rank and on console).
And ‘fun to play’ is so hard to anticipate and judge ahead of time. I think Mercy 2.0 sounds great on paper. As a non-Mercy player, the few times I’ve played Mercy I strongly prefer 2.0. So I think it’s just really hard to judge if a rework would be ‘fun’ for people. And, I really do think the ‘new coke’ effect is a real thing. I think a lot of people will reject any rework that isn’t just Mercy 1.0.
But what about Titanium’s rework? I really want to know what you think of it.
It aims to fix the problems with Mercy’s original kit by turning the old ult into a midfight ult and making the… less savory strats either literally impossible or a suicide mission (that doesn’t even succeed).
Then it adds an E that’s designed to have an inverse slope of viability and ease of use: terrible at the low ranks, but really good at the high ranks. That way, it doesn’t overpower low rank Mercy, and adds much needed viability to high rank Mercy.
![:clap:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/clap.png?v=5" ":clap:")
Say it louder for everyone who didn’t post early!
I didn’t have the energy right now to read that entire book of a post, but I read the gist of the changes. Here’s what I think:
- It offers too much additional strength to mass rez for a tiny amount of counterplay that it honestly should always have had.
- Mercy can’t get 60 hp/s AND an e-ability. She was balanced for 60 hp/s with none.
Basically, while it’s not a bad concept in general (although I still don’t want to redesign her), like all of the redesigns it’s intended to stick Mercy right back on her throne as the game’s designated #1 healer. And I really object to that.
If I was going to modify it, I would say:
- You can have mass rez back, but it gets a cast time and vulnerability for counterplay and NO new abilities or powers. It should have always had them, and it was already powerful enough.
- She stays at 50 hp/s.
- You can have pacify.
#2 and 3 is fine.
The burst heal at the end of the Rez’s cast is to move it into a midfight ult, and to prevent it from being a suicide button (since Mercy wouldn’t get invincibilty from rez anymore).
With old rez, sometimes it was better to wait for teammates to die if they were already on critical health (and you had at least one dead soul to rez already). If you didn’t wait for those critical health teammates to die before using rez, you’d raise a few teammates only for more to die soon after.
Rez got more effective the more teammates were dead. This felt really bad for mercy’s teammates, because it looked like Mercy was PotG hunting. Some healers were, but others were keenly aware that their ult could only help the dead, not the living - so they planned accordingly. A burst heal would remove the incentive to “let teammates die” in order to get the most efficiency out of rez.
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Oh nice how many kills did you get during it also did you rez someone?
Interesting how the people who don’t know the ins and outs of a hero make uneducated assertions on said hero. 
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If she isn’t fun why not play someone who is?