“Resurrect has no counterplay.”
Yes, it does. There are five ways to do so:
Kill the Mercy first. There are five heroes designed to move past a team’s frontline to kill their healers, three of which are in every game with how popular dive compositions are. They all have mobility options that allow them to pursue Mercy when she uses GA, and the one that is more limited in doing so has the ability to disable GA entirely. A common counterargument to this is “But Mercy heals when you stop damaging her, and she keeps zipping away from me with GA.” Mercy heals at a rate of 20 health/second, after a 1 second delay from not taking damage. If you deal half of her health in damage before she flies to a target, she needs 6 seconds to recover back to full health. You have plenty of time to attack her again. Hell, have a DVa shoot at her from across the map to disable her healing if that’s what floats your boat.
For reference, Lucio has a healing rate of 12.1875/second on himself without a cooldown upon taking damage, along with an ability that increases his self-healing to 35.1/second for 3 seconds. And yet, nobody seems to complain about him.
Another counterargument to option #1 is “But her team protects her.” First, you’d be surprised at how many teams hardly protect their Mercy at all, second, this leads me into option #2.
Let’s say Mercy flies to her team who protects her and drives off the flanker. Guess where Mercy is now? She’s in the middle of her team. You know those ultimates you were planning on using to wipe said team? Use them. If Mercy is close enough for her team to protect her, she is also likely in range of:
- Rocket Barrage.
- Tactical Visor.
- Dragonblade.
- EMP.
- Earthshatter.
- Blizzard.
- Self-destruct.
- Graviton Surge.
- Deadeye.
- Supercharger.
- Configuration: Tank.
- Death Blossom.
- Dragonstrike.
- Meteor Strike.
Use those team-wiping ultimates you have saved, as chances are you will kill her in the process.
If options 1 and 2 don’t work for you, just save one or two ultimates for the post-resurrection teamfight. You have the positioning advantage, the first shot, and have a few seconds to prepare once Resurrect has been used. A single well-placed ultimate can completely negate a full-team resurrection.
Stagger the enemy team’s deaths in space and/or time. Resurrect becomes useless if Mercy’s teammates’ deaths are staggered.
If you fail to accomplish any of the four options listed above, you can shutdown the Mercy while she is flying in to rez. This is the hardest of the four to accomplish, yet it is not impossible. While flying in to rez, I have been:
- Sniped by Widowmaker.
- Hacked or EMPed by Sombra.
- Killed by Junkrat when he fired once then threw his Concussion Mine at me.
- Hooked and killed by Roadhog.
- Slept by Ana, and then jumped on by the enemy team.
- Killed by a Nano-Visor that was still active (partially my fault).
- Stunned/FTHed by McCree.
- Killed by Tracer + Discord Orb.
- Killed by Soldier:76 + Discord Orb.
- Taken focus fire and then finished off by a Reinhardt, who I had to fly past in order to get within rez range.
- Accidentally sniped or Scattered by Hanzo.
- Accidentally charged by Reinhardt.
- Pulled by Orisa’s Halt ability which canceled my GA, and then killed while it was still on cooldown.
- Mowed down by a damage-boosted Bastion.
Yes, that was a copy/paste.