It's apparent that the devs struggle to rework heroes. They need to focus more on balancing

General Discussion
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Blizzard would absolutely prefer to just tweak heroes and make smaller adjustments; it’s more cost effective, it’s easier to manage, and the community is relatively less hissy. However, sometimes that just isn’t possible, and bigger sweeping changes need to be made in order to correct heroes so that their kit is in a better place.

Yeah, sure, because no one gave feedback on how to tweak Mercy before the rework. Blizzard skimmed through the entirety of forums, searching for some help, but didn’t find anything! Oh poor them, forced to do a rework of a hero they effed up themselves while no one pitches them ideas! Oh wait they do, no one gives a yuck about them though.

Mercy got reworked because Resurrect as an ultimate was extremely unhealthy.

Oh man, tons of ultimates that can wipe the team entirely are fine, but as soon as there is one that revives the whole team - everyone loses their minds. Talk about double standards.

Not only did it encourage bad playstyles and strategies that grinded games to a halt,

Bad playstyles? Bad playstyles of hiding somewhere to get POTG you mean? Gosh that surely doesn’t remind me of snipers, Junkrat, Reaper, McCree… Yea, only Mercy did that, sure.

but it compressed all of Mercy’s power in a place that couldn’t be easily tweaked.

Her ultimate was easily tweakable, don’t be silly. Adding invulnerability broke it and made her OP - instead you could just add cast time. But no, rework happened and now she’s no fun at all. Well at least her NEW ultimate is very well designed! Chain healing and spectator mode, which means you can be focused by literally the whole enemy team! Wooo, what a fantastic new ultimate!

Note here that it isn’t because Mercy 1.0 was considerably unbalanced, she was a little on the underpowered side, but they couldn’t make Mercy better in any regard without having to draw that power out of an ultimate that was just badly designed. She was stuck in a place where either everything about her was focused on Resurrect, or Resurrect would become too unintuitive of an ability that it would be more frustrating than rewarding.

Maybe because the whole character is about resurrecting? This is what makes her special! In a similar way Rein’s playstyle rotates around his shield, Zenyatta’s playstyle is all about his save/kill balls, Sombra’s playstyle is around invisibility. The hell are you talking about?!

Sym, Hanzo, and to an extent, Lucio, all got reworked because their kits were not fitted for the game.

Um, no, notice how their ultimates (except sym’s) weren’t reworked. Hanzo was “reworked” if you can even call that a rework to give him more mobility and remove the scatter arrow which everyone whined about.
Lucio was reworked to make him heal more in a shorter radius so he’d be with his team more and not somewhere far away
Sym was reworked because… Yuck if I know.

Passive ultimates like Teleporter and Shield Gen are too low of an impact to regularly have on any team.

Teleporter was a yucking GODSEND, the only unimpactful thing about it was that you couldn’t charge it while it’s already standing there.

Hanzo had a similar issue to Mercy where so much of his power was in Scatter Arrow, both for defense and offense, and it was healthier to expand Hanzo’s kit into something more rewarding, less overly punishing.

Ya, except Hanzo’s whole character didn’t revolve around scatter arrow. Mercy’s character revolved around her res though.

These changes brought these heroes more in line with what Overwatch currently is and strives to be, whereas before their kits were outdated for a game that was significantly slower and where your only main tank was Reinhardt.

So you’re saying Overwatch is striving to be a game for DPS mains and fans of OWL? Agreed, they showed a big “yuck you” to the uncompetitive community long ago

All of the reworks have been for the better of the game’s health for one reason or another. There are some bumps along the way, that’s bound to happen when you’re essentially reconstructing a hero.

Yeah, it’s all for the better, which is why people are leaving the game.

The primary problem that comes with reworks is that a big part of the fanbase will simply despise the change, purely because it’s change, and refuse to adapt. It opens up tons of doors for free complaints; “If Blizzard had enough time to do THIS, why didn’t they try out my idea which totally isn’t flawed and they definitely didn’t consider?”

First of all, the fanbase despise the rework because it’s yucking GARBAGE. And it’s not hate out of nothing, it’s hatred of players who tried the new character and hated playing it. Mercy is absolutely unrewarding right now. Her ultimate sucks, res on E sucks, slowdown on res sucks, losing your E when you’re picked sucks, her healing sucks - everything sucks. Maybe that’s why people hate it? You don’t see people hating on Bastion or Hanzo reworks, maybe because they were good?
And no, making what Blizzard did with her rework is a one day job. As someone who works as a full time programmer - I know what I’m talking about. Which is why I have no yucking idea what these people are even doing in their seats.
And yes, many fans’ ideas are flawed. But they’re much better than what Blizzard did.

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A recurring theme you have brought up in all of your points is hide and rez. You mentioned that while not every Mercy player used it, some people did and therefore it should be changed. You should not base reworks on what a very small % of players are doing. You also seem to think that 5 man rez was unbalanceable, which shows your bias against this ultimate. It was clearly balanceable, there are countless posts on it.

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They shouldn’t rework anything imho. Just change values. That’s it’s balance.

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They shouldn’t rework nothing imho. Just change values. That’s it’s balance.

Yea, revert to before and then tweak the values.

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You underestimate what this “small percentage” is, and I’m gonna make the call now that neither of us have exact numbers in the first place.

Here’s what I can say on a personal level: Nearly every game where I played Mercy, I was at the mercy of my team’s whims. And often times, it was them that wanted to die on point and get the mass res. It’s a solid strategy, drain out enemy resources while contesting the objective, and then make a huge comeback with full health + all abilities, and flip that team fight. It didn’t matter what I wanted to do, I was yelled at and directed what to do by my team because this strategy was safe and secure, especially for a pick-up group team. If I failed to hide and I was spotted, it was my fault that we lost.

This was a viable strategy. People did it. I don’t know why Mercy mains want to deny this like it’s some conspiracy but it happened in all of my games. “Mercy, go hide, just come out when we need to be ressed.” “Someone find the enemy Mercy, why doesn’t someone just shoot her?” The entire playstyle that Resurrect forced on both teams was not good, regardless of how you (or a “small percentage”) played Mercy.

I’m not going to be tricked into having another overly long conversation about mass res and why it was unhealthy. This is just one of many problems the ultimate had in conjunction with other problems Mercy was facing, namely a total lack of mid-game strength and having no way to achieve impact moments outside of her ultimate, and in general having too passive of a kit when considering the general philosophy used to design other supports (who also got tweaked/reworked to be more in line with this philosophy).

Countless suggestions made by people who only play the game and do not design it. Countless suggestions by people with no concept of game design or game theory, and regularly made with critical biases. Countless of very awful suggestions, ranging from “just add a LOS restriction” to “she resses people one at a time very slowly” to “you cast it before people die and then they get ressed.”

I don’t see how me finding an ultimate to be unbalanceable is somehow a bias against the ultimate. That’s just my actual view of the ultimate. And I wouldn’t even say it was “unbalanceable,” the problem isn’t with its balance – not that it’s too strong or too weak, but with what it promoted and the effects it had on the game, specifically with how it tied up Mercy’s power values. Again, just like you won’t make an argument for me to counter because it’s been said countless times, I won’t post an argument either, because it’s been said countless times. We’re not having a very new conversation.

Players can make literally thousands of suggestions on how to balance anything in this game. A majority of them have about five minutes of thought behind them, whereas the Overwatch devs puts hours upon hours into actually testing many of the things people suggest, devs that have years of experience under their belt and the general wisdom of what to avoid. If you really think a horde of upset fans can somehow better balance this game than the game developers can, then shoot, that’s what you want to think, but I would hate to play that game. Many of the things fans suggest are things Blizzard did test on their own servers, and if there had been some magical solution that would have kept Mercy 1.0 as she was but in a healthier state, I guarantee you they would have just done that. Mercy’s problems, just like all the reworked heroes, run deeper than just the surface level “this hero isn’t strong enough/is too strong.”

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Good post ^^

20charas

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