I give context below but I am getting to the point right away for people.
Make her the primary healer like in MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People often bring up the argument that revive would “undo hard work put in and break the game cycle loop”. I’m not here to argue this (I could, have and may eventually argue it again. But that’s not for this post.).
So I propose bringing revive into the rest of her kit and making her the literal embodiment of the main healer. Preventing death outright instead of needing to reverse it through revive.
I will trade in revive TO BE THE PRIMARY HEALER OF THIS GAME, and I do NOT mean adding more hp/s to our healing beam.
We are talking about Blizzard, the company that created WORLD OF WARCRAFT ITSELF. The game with healing classes like holy priest, restoration shaman, restoration druid, mistweaver monks and the like.
For me, I see Mercy as being most like a Holy Priest from WoW. A dedicated healer that doesn’t mix in shields or CC or the like. So I’ll be linking Holy Priest skills beside EACH skill suggestion.
Make Mercy the primary healer of this game by incorporating the elements of the holy priest from WoW into her kit.
- Keep the healing beam exactly how it is now (or sure maybe add 10hp/s more because tbqh 50hp/s is a joke).
This beam is most similar to the priest elementary ability “Heal”.
- Give her a “torbjorn armor” like mechanic where she can earn a SINGLE TARGET BURST HEAL. This is similar to MMORPG healers that have a high cost heal on a large cooldown. Difference is, Mercy needs to EARN this heal and it may not be spammed.
The similar Holy Priest skill is “Holy Word: Serenity”.
- Give her an AOE burst heal to heal all allies. AoE healing is something Mercy dreadfully lacks. For a primary healer who is dedicated to healing, this is pretty shocking she lacks any real form of AoE healing on her own outside of ult.
The similar Holy Priest skill is: “Holy Word: Sanctify”
(Where Moira and Ana have fantastic options for AOE healing with other effects. Such as Moira’s adds a HoT ontop of the healing and is accessible at any times as her secondary fire. Ana’s adds an anti-healing debuff. Mercy’s would be RAW HEALING..)
4: Give her a single target HoT that would be able to be stacked with her healing beam if necessary or let her give an ally some healing from afar. This would allow skilled Mercy players to mitigate some damage (but clearly any form of burst > HoT) from distant allies or to stack this with her healing beam to get a tank through a massive chunk of damage.
The similar Holy Priest skill is “Renew”
So there. People want to remove revive? Let’s Make Mercy THE defacto primary healer.
I think that revive does have a place in this game, but so frequently do I see people disagree and think it has no place in this game to have an ability that happens “after a fight”.
Fine. If that’s the case and this revive is too hard to balance then let’s shift our attention to Mercy 3.0.
I want her to be THE DEFACTO PRIMARY HEALER WITHOUT PEER.
We can’t deal damage and heal, we can’t boost damage and heal. We are literally focused onto a heal beam and it’s not cutting it healing wise. Give us the full primary Holy Priest heal kit then.
I’d trade revive in for this ability set.
Contexts:
So a lot of people don’t want mass revive to return in spite of many threads showing it was balanced, rarely talked about and hide-and-res was one of the worst strategies one could employ.
But I digress above. This thread is WHAT ABOUT REMOVING REVIVE.
Blizzard’s statement: Mercy is the main healer of this game. So she is the primary healer in Overwatch. Some have even speculated that she can be looked at as being similar to a holy priest in WoW.
So what about removing revive? Yes. I said it. What about removing revive outright from her kit? Mercy 3.0. Me as someone who has been VERY ADAMANT about how we should return to mass revive, why or what would cause me to go back and say to perhaps outright remove revive as a mechanic.
a. She is not the main healer of this game at present. At all. I don’t care if people come in saying she supposedly is. She is by far outdone by Moira and Ana in that category and even Lucio now with his increased AOE area can easily overtake Mercy for gold healing. Yes really.
b. She is dedicated to healing and needs to literally completely focus her ENTIRE attention to healing. To do ANYTHING else requires her to completely swap out modes. She literally puts her staff away to draw out her pistol and NEEDS to swap back to go back to healing or damage boosting.
c. Her current playstyle is literally latching a healing beam onto a party member. (Crickets) Yes. That’s about it right now. You latch your single target healing beam onto one target party member and heal them.
She isn’t shooting at the same time. She isn’t adding CC at the same time. She isn’t adding debuffs at the same time. She isn’t adding buffs at the same time. She is literally ONLY HEALING WITH THE BEAM.
That’s all.
And that’s not fulfilling, that’s not skillful, that’s not interesting. That’s oversimplified and many people widely criticize her as being boring for it. And I can’t disagree.