I think Lumi explained it best in his video. Her playstyle has changed where you can no longer be as passive as you once were; and therefore to get the potential from her you NEED to be aggressive and take risks with her.
(I just think to some the change to an aggressive play still doesn’t provide enough of a reward.)
This is basically what I was going for with my “Mercy is fine.” post, but I don’t like typing a lot. 
No. The pre-rework Mercy is the source of nostalgia and the target state that people who want Mercy reverted actually want want her reverted to.
No. As she is right now, Mercy may not be part of GOATS but she’s also not a terrible pick since her Valkyrie healing and ult charge buff. Statistically speaking, she looks pretty… okay, right now. There’s nothing incredibly special about her numbers. It’s not about Mercy’s power level, it’s about how much of her power is actually in the hands of her player.
It did, and that patch galvanized the community response level that we have right now.
The Mercy we have now is objectively less powerful than the Mercy we had before the healing beam nerf. The sum of the changes up to and including the healing beam nerf did not make her more viable than she was before. They are, as a whole, a nerf from her former state.
No. Mercy doesn’t heal enough because she can be played perfectly and her allies still die in a fraction of a second despite her best efforts. In many cases they die because they made serious mistakes in their own gameplay, but those are not Mercy’s mistakes and it’s really disheartening to be continually punished for someone else’s poor decisions… particularly when you know you could have compensated for them if only you had Ana or Moira level healing output. This would be less of an issue if Resurrect wasn’t so stupidly risky.
Mercy does have damage boost, and damage boost is good… but it’s only getting stuff done if your target ally does something with it. It isn’t power in Mercy’s hands, it’s power that Mercy can give to someone else. Again, as with Mercy’s limited healing output, Mercy is punished for her teammates’ poor gameplay more than any other healer. She ends up feeling helpless even when she’s doing everything right.
In general, yes. And that’s a balance problem.
It’s really not. Ana has higher potential impact than Mercy. Even though there are mechanics to keep Ana’s potential in check, even including the ability to block her healing with shields/DM and so on, the fact that Ana has so much higher potential means that Ana will be the default go-to pick any time she can survive with her low mobility. Recent anti-dive hero additions like Brigitte, despite Brigitte’s nerfs, can help ensure that Ana stays alive longer than ever before. Either Mercy needs decisively stronger healing again instead of having to compete with Ana’s superior utility AND healing, or Mercy needs significant changes to other parts of her kit like Resurrect to improve her utility.
Or, perhaps, it could be that Lucio’s aura is the optimal healing source between them for a tightly-clustered team they happen to be playing with. Lucio’s passive aura even without amp blows Mercy’s pitiful 50 hp/sec out of the water when you consider the total healing it can do per second to all affected targets.
It’s true that Lucio should be getting a lot of value out of speed instead of just camping healing aura all day, but likewise Mercy should be getting value from damage boost where possible. Both healers should still heal when healing is needed, and in many team comps Lucio has the superior healing ability.
Definitely not. While DPS-Moira types give dealing damage with Moira a bad name, Moira’s optimal gameplay involves helping your allies confirm kills as much as it involves healing them. Moira’s consistent 50 hp/sec purple beam is consistently more valuable and easier to use optimally than Mercy’s 30% damage boost. The damage Moira deals per-game is orders of magnitude greater than the damage that Mercy contributes with both her blue beam and pistol combined.
Moira definitely does not have a less impactful ult. Coalescence enables Moira to not only heal her team faster than Mercy can heal with Valkyrie, but also deal damage to enemies at the same time in an amount that is greater than what a 30% damage boost affords to non-Bastion heroes. While Coalescence doesn’t let Moira fly, in terms of raw output and by extension impact on the outcome of a fight, Coalescence is plainly the better ultimate.
YES. When used to resurrect 1-2 allies in the middle of a fight, Resurrect as an ultimate was far superior to Valkyrie because you could use it to swing a fight in your favor after both teams lost heroes. Valkyrie lacks the impact necessary to swing the momentum of a fight. You can only use it to press an advantage that your team already has.
Why would you ever use Valkyrie after a team fight is already over? For that matter, why would you waste a Resurrect ultimate when a fight is already decided?
No, for the ultimate Resurrect, it was not a clear signal. It was an opportunity, but it was never a given that a Mercy who had Resurrect charged should use it because an ally is dead, even in cases where there were multiple downed allies.
Resurrecting at the wrong time was a good way to feed the enemy team thousands of hitpoints worth of free ult charge and further delay your own team’s regrouping. There was a massive difference between good and bad Mercy players in the usage of mass res, and a big part of that was split-second timing to ensure both a successful Resurrect of all dead teammates and Mercy’s own survival.
While it’s true that you can tell a good Mercy from a bad Mercy by watching their Valkyrie timing, the reward that Mercy gets for good Valkyrie timing doesn’t even come close to the reward that Mercy used to get for a good Resurrect ult, and because of that the difference between the effectiveness of a good Mercy and a bad Mercy with her current kit is much smaller than the difference was with her old pre-rework kit.
Mercy with Resurrect as her ultimate was a much higher skill ceiling hero.
If you resurrect now and get POTG, it’s because your resurrected ally did something impactful. It’s really their play, not yours. You just enabled it. It’s fair to give the Mercy credit for being the enabler, but she has no significant individual power of her own. That’s why Valkyrie Mercy is bad and old Mercy was better.
Yes, actually, it was… but that’s not because of pressing-Q-and-done, it’s because of everything that used to lead up to that moment. So many people try to condense the Resurrect ultimate into the actual moment of activation and criticize it for lack of depth, but what you fail to see is the complexity in all other aspects of Mercy’s gameplay that existed simply because she had the Resurrect ultimate as an option.
Most ultimates in the game require simply pressing Q once to use them, but unlike Resurrect they are not criticized for being overly simple because people tend to understand that a lot of other stuff goes into the decision to ult even after all the work required to create the opportunity. Mercy’s Resurrect was no different, and it deserves credit for that extra complexity.
All that said, and as much as I want Resurrect back where it belongs, it’s not the only solution. I responded to you not because I want to argue about Resurrect vs Valkyrie (even though that’s most of the contents of this post), but because I don’t think you fully understand what the actual problem is.
It’s all about individual impact. Mass res Mercy had it. Valkyrie Mercy has a lot less, and that’s the problem.
Nice article. It shows that the movement has gotten traction and keeps going forward. It’s just that blizzard refusing to acknowledge it. Maybe if it grows larger someday they will.
Yes. In my opinion the stupid slowdown on res needs to go, I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care if they don’t revert mercy or maybe just remove res altogether, but that slowdown is the thing that made me come to this forum in the first place.
I found it highly unpleasant and jarring that the writer portrayed two of the most caustic, passive aggressive, and hate-filled individuals I know of in the OW player community as being much nicer individuals than they actually are
That said, the article started off with him taking it as a given (which it isnt) that Mercy needs changes, so the bias in the anti-Mercy direction was evident from very early in the piece, so I suppose this was to be expected
Along the same lines, the article failed for the most part to address the fact that many pro-Mercy folks are fine with Mercy as she is
The one thing I agree with was the title of the article, which highlights the fact that the anti-Mercy folks cannot agree on what change(s) they want to make them happy
Overall, a very disappointing and very biased piece
i totally agree. I am doing a survey to gathering data like this right now. data are not enough to statistically prove anything but there’s a trend that proportionally most rant comes from plat. there’re actually more ppl in masters and GM+ wants Mercy to stay where she is. there’s only about 20% people think a rework will help Mercy.
Well, what makes you think you’re neutral and not biased in your opinion? Everyone is biased to their cause, especially people that have something to do with the thing that is debated. You have your agenda to stop the movement, and they have their agenda to push the movement. The reporter just reports it. His bias lies in creating an interesting article that made people interested in it. It’s a given that everyone have their own bias.
But you cant refute that the movement is getting the traction it needed, because people outside there are starting to notice it.
Already being done by slyther. Check below for the result. And maybe put numbers after you have any data to back it.
- 7.1% of players would like to leave her alone for now
- 0.07% of participants feel she deserves a Nerf.
- 17.4% want a simple, flat Buff
- 31.6% want a Rework of some form
- 43.8% of players want some form of Revert to Mass Res (with or without tweaks)
Nothing in a game is ever needed. Mercy doesn’t need reworks or changes because it’s just a game. Mercy therefore didn’t need to be changed from mass rez, she didn’t need valk 2.0 nerfed, and her healing in valk could have stayed in 50. Symm never needed to be changed from 1.0, Hanzo could still have scatter arrow .
Changes are made with the flow of the game , hero design and game design. I think Mercy should be reworked or reverted because as of now, she is lackluster without a niche which I think is bad for being one of three primary healers. Moreover, I think valk is terrible design as is rez on cooldown as a whole for any hero in concept. Mercy has too many exceptions between her cooldowns, ult and kit to be in line with most of the rest of the roster. It takes away autonomy from a mercy player in which case, having a bot can be just as good. Mercy needs more autonomy in order to be a “good” hero which valk and rez on cooldown took away.
Right now, Mercy is balanced because there is nothing she can inherently mess up. She already had a low skill floor mechanically but rez in e lowered it further, and her ult was once where she met her cieling which valk limits. So she has a low skill cieling and skill floor which I don’t think is fair to any hero.
I think a rework is definitely fair to call for both from a game design view, but also from the perspective of people who simply want to feel more directly impactful or fun in a game they purchased.
You and so many others are missing the point. She plays out similar to Mercy 1.0 in mechanical fashion… Sure… But she is definitely not the same hero. Mercy 1.0 had a powerful and impactful ult. Besides people are complaining about other very valid things so stop telling people to suck it up.
I really wouldn’t mind a rework, but I’m also fine if she just gets a healing buff. Not leaning heavily toward one side.
I am not a reporter, who should free him or herself of bias when writing such a piece
That’s what he should do, as a reporter
But he didnt
I don’t see that as bias, I see that as part of his job description, which includes reporting, which should be as free of bias as possible. Instead it read like a propaganda piece for the anti-Mercy side of things. The pro-Mercy side received very little mention. Should been equal time.
How is he biased? He covered from both sides lol. And he doesnt have any reason to pick any side. He just reports what he received. If you want your voice to get heard maybe you should email him too or make a youtube video about “mercy is fine” and give them the link.
Stop accusing him as giving “propaganda” just because you don’t like that #reworkmercy is gaining traction.
I already addressed this
unequally
I don’t know of any valid means to make such a determination, but the bias was evident, regardless of his reasons for writing in this manner
What I like or dislike is as I see it irrelevant to a determination of how much coverage was given to each side
There’s a lot wrong here, like anything mentioning balance being right out the window having nothing to do with this rework movement, so I’ll just focus on this.
First you’re leading with anecdotal evidence. Then telling us to get good? We can’t look at your personal experience. If you posted video, then we could point out just what is or isn’t there. There isn’t a debate to be had with “I carried the team.”
While damage boost is nice, it lacks any input from the player.
You can only activate Valk at 1 time: When the team fight engages. If you’ve somehow lost 2-3 players, I’m sorry to break the news: The team fight is over. If that’s the level of skill we’re talking about, we might as well talk about how difficult it is to time and not pop inside your spawn. Might as well play Ana and Nano mini D.va at that point.
Everything else you just described isn’t Valk play at all; it’s normal Mercy play. Something that Mass Res Mercy had to also consider in equal amounts. Well, with the exception of positioning, and healing target, which where not handled automatically for them.
Rez was about managing a resource. Saying that it’s a 1 off reveals nothing towards this. Mismanage that resource and it has little impact.
“A good valk is hard…” Good grief.
Okay you can say he’s biased and i can say he’s not biased. In the end both our opinion still holds the same weight, even if its near to nothing lol
You can say what you like, as is your perogative.
I can count the number of sentences devoted to each side.
I can count the number of quotes devoted to each side.
I can count the number of named people representing each side
I can note that the article more or less begins with the author stating that Mercy needs work.
I second all of that.
I second all your post but particularly this part. I might not have played for almost a couple of months but I can’t recall hearing anything new in that time that’d make it hard to play. It’s like saying hitting a target with Soldier’s ult is hard. I mean it does basically everything for you.