I figured out the one and only strong counter to gravdragon

General Discussion
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DRUM ROLL…

MERCY: Heroes Never Die!

Edit: Zenyatta is also a strong counter but mercy is played way more in comp so :stuck_out_tongue:

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Mercy damage boosting dragon goes right through zen ult. Everyone still dies. Sad.

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Okay so yeah… this proves my point. Mercy is (or was) the strongest and reliable counter to Zarya comboes.

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uh… teleporter online

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“Heroes never die!”
-Resurrects one player

Both the player and the Mercy dies

That’s a counter, ladies and gentlemen!

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Lol your so pessimistic :confused:

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yea, 2 years of this game’s competitive mode did that to me

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I feel ya. Still though, thinking about it logically, Mercy’s mass ress was the only reliable counter to comboes like gravdragon.

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i knew that ult was in the game for some reason…

well, what’s done is done - time to rework Zarya!

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…except she says that when she uses Valkyrie now.

In all seriousness, mass resurrect would be healthier for the game than any iteration of Valkyrie Mercy has been, including her current state now after countless nerfs. Simply put, Resurrect on a cooldown is more consistent than ever and consistency is what makes Mercy valuable. It certainly isn’t her maximum healing output, because she’s flat out beaten by both Ana and Moira in that department.

Mass resurrect made Mercy’s value inconsistent, just as Ana can be inconsistent by missing shots. There was no guarantee that Mercy would still be alive for a 5-man res. There was no guarantee that her team wouldn’t immediately wipe after using res on a single target. It was up to the Mercy player to read the situation and make an impactful and incredibly heavy decision to either use or not use her Resurrect ultimate.

With Resurrect on E and a now mostly worthless ultimate, it’s not a complicated decision. Either you will die for trying to res and you should avoid it, or the res is safe and you should res. In Mercy’s current state, it is easier to play her to her maximum potential than ever before because relative to her original concept with mass res, it is too difficult to make a mistake and mistakes that are made cost your team only one Mercy’s worth of ult charge for the enemy team instead of 4-5 heroes’ worth of ult charge like it used to with a bad mass res.

Ultimates should be powerful and exciting to use. Hanzo’s dragons are powerful and exciting. Zarya’s graviton is incredibly satisfying to use. Valkyrie is… meh. Resurrect was just better in every way, and support ultimates shouldn’t be any less potent than their damage-dealing counterparts.

I know this thread will probably end up in the trash heap with everything else in the megathread soon enough, but it gives me just one more reason to say: Revert Mercy. Rework her again from there, certainly… but Resurrect needs to be her ultimate. It was more fun to play, more exciting to play against, and more dependent upon player skill than that thing we have now who’s taking up Mercy’s character slot.

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Wait, is gravdragon really an issue ? Ever ?
It’s super hard to pull off and requires the other team to be stupid in their positioning.

Honestly something that requires two ults to be used PLUS the other team being stupid doesn’t need a counter.

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Have you every played season 10 before? Gravdragon comboe is as common as brushing your teeth in the morning.

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Ha… haha… ha… wait, are you serious?

Gravstrike is so easy, Hanzo can complete the combo from anywhere on the map the moment he hears “Fire at will!” from Zarya. It goes through walls. It takes zero communication or planned coordination from the players. All it requires is for the Hanzo to have patience instead of randomly shooting dragons.

It takes more skill by an order of magnitude for Reaper to get a team kill with Death Blossom than it the skill it takes for Hanzo and Zarya to gravstrike, if you add both players together.

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I’m like so triggered that they gave mercy Valkyrie her old voice line. Goes to show how much care was given into reworking her.

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If the other team has Zarya and you keep bunching up to allow it then your team failed. Simple to avoid, don’t stay in one group.

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Don’t group up?

That doesn’t seem like very sound advice.

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My brain cells are receding. It would be particularly hard on some maps to just split up e.g: when your pushing the payload on watchpoint Gibraltar underneath the bridge. Also a team won’t just randomly decide to split up because they don’t know when the zarya will have ult.

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GravDragon was never a problem before now I agree Hanzo has lost all his skill but hanzo’s change never made GravDWAGON cuz well OWL used it and that patch only had brig no new Hanzo so that means that the patch that brig was in was the patch that created Gravdwagon

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The only way to avoid grouping up and still be effective is to pick a team comp with a bunch of long range heroes. There are a few problems with that, but among them two in particular stand out:

  1. Hanzo is one of those heroes.
  2. Your tanks are on their own.

If your tanks must stand alone for extended periods of time, Reinhardt is the obvious choice for your main tank. He can’t be overwhelmed as easily as Orisa, but still provides a shield that can take tons of punishment and can endure being the sole target of the enemy team.

Now you have a Reinhardt and a Hanzo. Let’s go over healers. You need healers who can move around quickly to reach each of your spread-out teammates, or who can spread out themselves and stay far away from the tanks. That means Moira is out because of her limited range and mobility. Lucio is out because his range is awful now. Brigitte is a maybe if you run triple support, but ultimately there are three supports who can fit the team comp for the first two supports: Mercy, Ana, and Zen.

Mercy is a given here because of her mobility. If your team is spread out, it becomes incredibly difficult for the enemy team to kill your Mercy. So now we have Hanzo, Reinhardt and Mercy, and you probably see where this is going already.

The meta is Hanzo/Reinhardt/Zarya/Mercy/Zenyatta/X. X can be any DPS or Brigitte, but it’s usually Widowmaker. The best counter to this meta is spreading out, but you still need those tanks on the objective and you need Zen to counter the other team’s graviton surge… which means the best counter to this meta is simply running a mirror comp.

That is why this past season’s comp games in top-tier play were Hanzo/Zarya comps comboing graviton surge with dragons all day, every day, and the main reason I held out to finish my placement matches until the last minute and didn’t otherwise touch competitive since I play in Masters. The game isn’t fun when it’s the same six heroes on every team, in every game. Moth Mercy Meta was much healthier than what we have right now. At least it was just one guaranteed hero pick instead of six, because in her first iteration Valkyrie Mercy still had enough resurrections to counter gravstrike in most realistic scenarios.

The game needs a healer who can counter gravstrike consistently, and that healer was Mercy 1.0 including the ability to use Guardian Angel to fly out of Graviton Surge as she used to do.

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Heroes never die doesn’t work if the Mercy is caught in it too, but lets ignore that part.