This post will be sort of a long one, but I feel the need to make it and bring to light this problem and also highlight and explaining my reasoning for what I say about the hero Mercy for my friends as well as others.
What Mercy is Like Now
We’re nearing 1 full year since Mercy’s initial rework which came out in September of 2017. So since we’ve continued this long with this iteration of Mercy, she obviously has nothing wrong right?
Well, after 10 (almost 11 months) of having Mercy in this iteration, she has gone through 9 nerfs, and her 10th nerf is underway. Mercy has received 9 mega-threads, pretty much all of which hitting 20k posts each (that’s around 180,000 posts about Mercy posted in them, not to mention how many threads had been shut up and thrown into the mega-thread pile). It’s no secret that Mercy is one of the most loved and played heroes in Overwatch at the time of writing this. Mercy has a very simple to use kit that gives an extreme amount of effectiveness even if the player playing her isn’t very skilled. Mercy also has a 30-second rez cooldown, which basically eliminates any thread of skill required to play her at any higher levels than basic. She’s quite boring now in the opinion of a lot of Mercy players.
Why Mercy was changed
Mercy received her rework mostly due to people exploiting SR gains and streamers complaining due to them not taking into account Mercy had a particularly powerful ultimate ability. Putting into many people’s heads that Resurrect as an ultimate made the Mercy “hide” due to their own ignorance and the smaller number of people exploiting the SR gains from performance-based SR (the people who legitimately just hid when they got ult to specifically go for 5 man resurrects and had insane numbers on their players resurrected stat which caused them to gain a very large amount of SR due to Blizzard reworking how Mercy got SR gains as the Mercy players used to not get much SR at all).
Was Mercy 1.0-1.5 Broken?
The short answer to this is no. She wasn’t broken during SEASON TWO. But how did Mercy become broken after Season Two? Luckily I’ll tell you exactly how she became broken. Around February 2017 mercy received a buff to her Resurrect ultimate which made her invulnerable when she resurrected her teammates, this buff essentially took away all risk to her ultimate and made it all reward if used at even a basic level. Then, in August 2017 they applied a buff to Mercy’s healing. This buff allowed Mercy to charge her ultimate just a tad bit faster due to having the extra healing output. This allowed Mercy to have an extremely rewarding ultimate ability that had essentially zero risks to it. The only risk being using it at the wrong time.
Why Mercy 1.0 was better than 1.5
Mercy 1.0 was the Mercy iteration we had in Season Two of Competitive Play. She still had Resurrect as her ultimate ability which did not grant her invulnerability when she used it, which made it very risky to pull off and not die while ulting. She also received a healing buff in September 2016 to solidify her role as a SINGLE TARGET SUPPORT (this comes into play later). During this time Ana and Lucio were thought to be the best healers to use, and they essentially were! Mercy was out of meta but when in the right hands the Mercy player could make her work with the team comp and sometimes even carry their team on well executed resurrects that didn’t end up killing them.
Why Mercy 2.0 Was a Failure and Completely Broken
When Mercy got reworked it was met with a lot of negative reactions from the Mercy community. I will post below the patch notes from September 2017;
Mercy
Resurrect (Formerly Mercy’s Ultimate ability)
Ability now targets a single player, instead of every player within a radius
Radius reduced to 5 meters
Ability cooldown is 30 seconds
Mercy is no longer granted invulnerability while Resurrect is activeValkyrie (New Ultimate Ability)
Valkyrie unleashes the full power of Mercy’s Valkyrie suit, enhancing her weapons and abilities for 20 seconds
Caduceus Staff: Mercy’s healing and damage boosts beams now affect all allies near the targeted teammate, and the staff’s effective range has been extended
Caduceus Blaster: Now has infinite ammo and increased projectile speed
Guardian Angel: Increased range and movement speed
Resurrect: Cooldown is instantly reset when Valkyrie is activated and reduced to 10s after the initial cast
Hover: Mercy gains the ability to fly freely, and increased movement speed
Regeneration (Passive): No longer interrupted when Mercy takes damage
At a glance, these changes look great for Mercy! Well, in the Mercy community and even outside of the community everyone knew that these changes we’re extremely Overpowered. This came to be the case and ever since this rework Mercy has been hit with nerf after nerf, making it extremely frustrating to play the hero consistently. One thing that got removed from the rework was her buff to her gun’s projectile speed and damage. Which brings up the question, why was this even included? Mercy’s purpose as previously stated was to be a sufficient single target healer. She was created to be squishy and her main defense to be using Guardian Angel, and occasionally fire back with her lesser used pistol, but this does not include stopping healing and trying to kill most of the enemy team. Valkyrie was completely broken and pissed all over the fact Mercy was supposed to be a single target healer due to the chain beams. Valkyrie also does all the kiting for you that you used to do in team fights, making it extremely hard for enemy heroes to kill you while you sit AFK in the sky and heal, eventually swooping down and resurrecting your teammate(s). This in recent time has been toned down as much as possible, making resurrect become a 30-second cooldown that is not earned, the speed of Valkyrie has been decreased significantly, and Mercy is temporarily immobile when resurrecting a teammate, ruining the flow of her gameplay. As a community of players, we were promised that she would be back to where she was if she was too underpowered or overpowered. Well, after almost a year of mega-threads discussing how Mercy is essentially a shell of her previous self and the countless times it was pointed out that a un-earned resurrect is broken, how many times have we been even told they were looking at her?
none.
Ignoring Feedback
We as a community have never received any knowledge that the developers of this game are even paying attention to what we’re saying in the huge mega-threads that they use to shut us up. We have only ever been told that the rework was a success. But we all know for a fact it was not, and she still had multiple problems which make her a must-pick and make her ruin the game for other support players. After receiving 10 nerfs, how dare you say that this is completely a success? We all know for a fact that it is not! If she was fine Mercy wouldn’t be receiving nerfs MONTHS AFTER IT BEING SAID THE REWORK IS A SUCCESS. A successful rework would not be going through all these nerfs. Blizzard knows this, we know this, everyone knows this. Another problem we seem to have is the developers telling us that they are “looking into (our) feedback”. When looking at countless of the moderators of these threads and even devs themselves, you can see how many posts they have read. They do not have anywhere close to having a number reasonable of even scratching the surface of reading out concerns and feedback. There are over 180,000 posts, barely any being read by anyone but other people concerned about Mercy’s future. There are also cases of people who make threads calling this behavior out (as I am) who have gotten silenced on the forums due to them, just being told “sorry for the mistake”. Many of these threads are well detailed and are actually quite respectful, or at the very least understandable anger. Our feedback is being ignored, and it always will be unless we genuinely make such an outrage that its impossible to ignore, but the probability of that is very slim.
Why Mercy 1.0 is Better and More Healthy for the Game than Mercy 2.0
Many people will disagree with me (and the popular opinion of the Mercy community at this moment). But I’ll flat out say it, Mercy 1.0 will always be more healthy for Overwatch than Mercy 2.0. Why? Because of the simple fact Mercy is in her solidified category of single target healer and that Resurrect is EARNED, not given for free every 30 seconds. With Resurrect being earned, it promotes Mercy players to actually get the game sense to use it at the correct times that allow them to not die after using it. There is high risk (resurrecting your team without the main healer / 5v6) that has a high reward (resurrecting your team and essentially being able to bring back a team fight in your favor.) Mercy also has to do all the kiting for herself and genuinely has to work to keep herself alive as she cannot run away into the air with instant self-healing. The Mercy player genuinely has to make sure they are the last one alive out of all 5 of their other teammates.
But wait!!! Mercy’s will just hide and rez and its not very fun for the enemy team!!!
First off, what ultimate in Overwatch is fun for the enemy team? Who gets rocket barraged and says “AWESOME, HOPE THAT HAPPENS TO ME AGAIN”. Second off, most of the Mercy’s who did this tactic were abusing SR gains which gave them WAY MORE SR than they actually would have received otherwise, which allowed them to have negative winrates but still be extremely high SR. Due to recent changes to SR gains in Competitive, there is no performance-based SR gains in Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Top 500. The exploiters would have an extremely hard time going anywhere without getting boosted, but being boosted is a completely different problem that doesn’t just pertain to Mercy players, anyone whos willing to get boosted will, it does not matter at all what character the person mains. Also, that disheartening thing where you get a pick the first 30 seconds of the game and the Mercy instantly resurrects the picked player wouldn’t happen anymore. NOW THAT’S NOT FUN.
Nowadays, resurrect as an ultimate actually has a lot of counters, as it did back in the day when it was in game! Hammond and Mei have very potent ultimates to deal with a fully resurrected team. Another good counter comes with being a better player. Managing your ultimates and factoring a Mercy has resurrect available is just part of getting better at the game. The only examples I can give are these;
You are playing Zenyatta and know that Zarya has a grav for your whole team. So, you save your ultimate and use it when she catches your whole team, negating all the damage put into the grav.
or
You are playing Zarya and know the Mercy on the enemy team has Resurrect. You want to wait for her to use it so you can use your grav to wipe. You get lucky and pick off 3 of the enemy team. The Mercy uses her Resurrect, luckily on your team you have Ana and Hanzo, so you combo your grav with a nano-boosted dragon-strike, which wipes the enemy team through transcendence.
In my eyes, when you complain about a Mercy mass-resurrecting you look like you do not want to put effort into becoming a better player and learning how to manage ultimates with your teammates better. You want to just win extremely easily and not have the enemy team putting up a fight.
How to Further Balance Mercy 1.0
This is the opinion of the community and myself, the patch notes would look something like this;
Resurrect
○ removed invulnerability to Mercy herself
○ slightly shortened range of which can be resurrected
○ LOS checks added so you cannot resurrect through the floor or walls.
Removing invulnerability for Mercy encourages high risk high reward as stated earlier, and makes it a more skilled ability to use, having been earned. It also promotes tempo resurrects like the ones we see today instead of massive team resurrects.
Shortening the range of resurrect would be a bit iffy, it can be argued both ways of needing to be shortened or staying the same. (THAT’S WHY THIS IS JUST HYPOTHETICAL IF THEY EVER LISTEN TO US!)
The LOS checks would be added so you further have to run your risk of dying for the high reward of resurrecting your full team.
THE SECOND ITERATION OF MERCY THAT CAN BE A IMPROVEMENT IS THE FOLLOWING, THIS INCLUDES CURRENT DAY MERCY;
Resurrect
○ earned by filling a meter sort of like Torbjorn’s scrap
○ Can hold up to 2-3 at a time
○ cast time out of valk (perhaps shortened), no cast in valk.
○ keep CDs, possible reduction
OBVIOUSLY, these aren’t the opinions of everyone in the community, and if we EVER go back to Mercy 1.0 the most probable changes are removing invulnerability for Mercy and adding LOS checks. If we actually get a Mercy revert (which we genuinely need) I can definitely see them trying many things with it and probably making us even more aggravated since it seems they can’t exactly pin-point the actual problems (i.e the newest nerfs as of July 2018). But hopefully, this post opens up the eyes of everyone, mercy player or not, and makes you understand how actually neglected us Mercy players are in terms of our favorite hero in this game.
IF YOU NEED VIDEOS THESE ARE EXTREMELY WELL MADE AND EXPLAINED
Go to Aria Rose’s Youtube Channel! She has extremely well made videos about Mercy and are worth a watch! Here are two of her videos that I think are probably the most important ones;
“Everything Wrong with Mercy”
“Why Resurrect as an Ultimate Worked”
