In my book, being proactive = hiding. Not being a target practice for enemy. As you won’t do anything, if you died early, which is highly possible, when you are one of primary targets.
Blizzard would just add some new hero instead.
Mercy, just like TF2 Medic, isn’t part of your regular FPS pew-pew action they want everyone to participate in. And since Jeff openly claimed, that they want to push game towards FPS more, Mercy doesn’t have a chance, as hero, that never relied on FPS mechanics to succeed.
At best, you can expect her to be reworked like Symmetra - no lock-on beam + some gimmicks, that require whole team to work and just useless otherwise.
Correct. Though I believe, that it was actual intention.
You see, players usually ignore Mercy. It’s like selective blindness, that “something that doesn’t shoot at you doesn’t exist”. Since we can’t fix players, we can make it, so them ignoring Mercy doesn’t matter - no big disasters will happen.
Which brings us back to the sudden need for an Overwatch 2. Because regardless of how they spin it, I doubt a lot of the devs working on the game really find it fulfilling to spend so much time designing diverse characters and playstyles, only for managment to decide they have to be completely sidelined.
It’s not a very good philosophy, we’ll see if things change. Then again, with so many Blizzard departures lately, maybe Dreamhaven will come out with a game that’s “Overwatch as it should have been (without needing to bend to OWL)” in a few years.
I don’t know - it boggles my mind, because Blizzard managed to create a shooter that people who usually hate shooters wanted to play. Loved to play, even. Then they completely threw all that overboard. I guess I understand it from the perspective of just focusing on OWL and everything related to it, but in terms of having a good and fun game for the majority of the players? Not so much.
You’re right. It doesn’t particularly matter when we’re talking about a population of 40 million players. Let me try one more time with analogy. It would be analogous to country of Poland that has a population of about 40 million informing their all citizens of coronavirus restrictions using a webpage that can only be viewed 47,054 times. No other avenues would be made to disseminate the information. The point is that Blizzard is a multinational company that is expected to provide updates to its customers using official channels. Whether those official channels are labeled, blue-name posts on the forums, or company social media accounts, these are the official channels that the 40 million players rely on for information.
We both agree on this. It is clear that the developers base the game on the top 0.00001% of the playerbase just like our government allows special interest to base tax breaks on the top 0.00001%. It doesn’t make either practice right. I’m shocked the developers openly admitted it, though. It’s like the fourth wall has been broken or something. Can you point to where did the developers do state “. . . they balance around GM and OWL”?
This is valuable and thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, there is a worldwide shortage of civility because people don’t listen to one another. We live in a world where you get more bees with vinegar, than honey. With that said, people ought to be able to share their opinion about an iconic support character.
Yes, a 20 year old is a child-influencer. And, every time these child-influencers piss or sneeze, you people come running to the forums to tell us about it. These are the same child-influencers that were on national news for making racist Overwatch team names, spewing misogynistic comments, uttering vile slurs, and even stirring the ire of a specific nation state. So, no, I don’t really care what the child-influencer thinks about the game. Nor, as I’ve stated before, think their opinion weighs substantially more than the rest of the 40 million players who play this game.
You see unlike the child-influencers (and their worshippers), a substantial minority of the Overwatch playerbase have these things called bills - mortgage, insurance, HOA dues, car payment, utilities, etc - that require a job. We simply do not have the time to invest thousands of hours to climb the ranks; frankly, I suspect most of the 40 million Overwatch players don’t, either. Case-in-point: our join date is serendipitously within one day of each other, yet within that time frame you’ve made nearly 8000 posts while I’ve barely eked out 100 posts. That’s about 7 - 8 posts per day, every day, for well-over 1000 days straight. I just don’t have that kind of time to expend on a forum.
This is helpful and thank you for the insight. From my perspective, as a new player to the FPS genre, I had never personally observed the phenomenon. So, when Mercy was changed in 2018. It happened so suddenly and drastically, I was left with a number of WTFs? floating around my head.
Agreed. I made a similar argument in 2018 when Valkyrie was released. Valkyrie’s main job to enhance her left click made it insufficient as an ultimate, but reasonable for a basic ability. It’s insufficient because all other ultimates (1) complement the hero’s ability and (2) have some measure of utility; Valkyrie fails on the first and scrapes by with +flight and +limitless_ammo on the second. I further argued that the adult game design team had it correct the first time: Mercy’s ultimate should’ve been resurrection - it combines complementing her abilities with utility. Currently, as-is, Mercy is an orphan hero with a facsimile of an ultimate.
They decided to do that, once their attempts to put casual and competitive players together failed.
Overwatch was inspired by TF2, which managed to combine generally “casual-friendly” playstyle of public servers(with larger teams and more freedom) and competitive-friendly playstyle for more hardcore players(class limits, restrictions on equipped weapons and other custom options).
But, for whatever reason, Blizzard refused to follow that path and attempted to mix both “as is”, forcing competitive restrictions on casual playerbase. Mix ended up very unstable.
It’s more about climbing ranks being generally unpleasant experience. I have no doubts, that there are quite a lot of people, who wanted, at some point, to climb ranks, but general hostility made them rethink their decision. I have a lot of time to spare, but I wouldn’t want to spend it on something, that gives no joy.
No…they weren’t. Those were INDIVIDUAL people. More like person, xQc isn’t the entire top end of the playerbase. This is a fallacious claim, especially when there are 200 OWL players and probably 4x as many contenders players, yet only a tiny handful have gotten in trouble for poor behavior.
Well I do when they are the best player in the game at said hero. That’s an expert opinion. Clearly the Devs do as well which is why they have a special Discord Server with top OW players, pros, and hero representatives/content creators in it to discuss balance and QoL features.
It’s from their official Reddit AMA. One of many places they communicate with us on.
Not only does your post hold…less than accurate claims about Hide and Rez only being an issue caused by the SR system, when in fact it was a real strategy used to WIN fights and games regardless (as shown by it being used both before invulnerability was added, before the SR exploit became known, and after it was fixed), these claims about the current state of Mercy are quite false.
Mercy DOES have playmaking abilities that show off her skill. Much more than original Mercy did. E rez offers her an extreme amount of potential impact and playmaking ability and relies on you using your map knowledge, movement, and teamwork to pull off depending on the situation. Things like superjump rez, falling rez, ducking behind corners and cover while rezzing, etc. are all playmaking moments that swing entire teamfights and thus games in your favor.
Valkyrie puts your mobility and survivability in your own hands. It allows you to pull off extremely high risk high value rezzes you otherwise can’t ouside of ult due to the regen, freeflight, and faster movespeed. It lets you heal spread out teams due to the doubled GA and beam length, and turns you into the ultimate support micromanager for those 15 seconds. You can pocket, mass heal or mass damage boost, or go and secure kills on enemy backline snipers or supports which is invaluable in a fight. Just yesterday I won a comp game in overtime because I popped Valk, flew 60m across the map, killed the enemy Widowmaker who was assumed to be aimbotting and had been holding my team hostage for 3 minutes, and went and rezzed my own widow before mass damage amping my team to secure the payload. Old Mercy could never do anything independent or high impact like that.
And let’s not even get started on Mercy’s mobility now. Slingshot and superjump and the various tech that come with them have given her a level of independence, survivability, map presence, and mobility that old Mercy couldn’t even dream of achieving. You can reach highground when there is no ally there, you can superjump rez through windows, you can backwards superjump up and away from Genji blades. You can also more reliably use movement as a tool to screw with the enemy and bait out ults and resources like hook, shatter, etc.
The amount of times I’ve been told “Mercy you carried” “Mercy nice rez you’re insane” from my team or had the enemy complain “Mercy you’re so slippery it’s not fair” or “Mercy just die already you’re carrying” by the enemy team…old Mercy didn’t have a shred of the current skill expression that current Mercy has when looking at their kits as a whole.
If she gets any buffs she will almost certainly be OP and broken considering how strong she is right now. Also if that’s the only way you find your Valkyrie turning out, you should reflect on how you are using it wrong. Get better timing and ult usage. I’ve saved my teams from blades, Reaper and Soldier ults, gravs, etc. with Valk plenty of times. It’s also invaluable for countering coordinated dives to keep your entire backline alive and mass damage amp them to overwhelm and kill the enemy.
Also, 55 HPS is great. If I can peel for Zen against GM flankers/divers even with all the damage powercreep in this game, you can make it work. Stop relying on only using her heal beam and maybe look at using the rest of her kit too. Other supports don’t just heal all game either they have utility, damage, etc. to swing fights and save allies. Mercy does too.
If you need help learning how to get high impact on Mercy I reccomend Elezhau’s videos
In the second clip on Anubis she rezzes Winston 3 times in one teamfight and uses her mobility tech to stay alive throughout the entire minutes long fight while providing sustain and damage amp and using Valk to sustain and amp spread out teammates. High impact.
It wasn’t necessarily about OWL. Pros used ult rez the same way we use current rez - to bring back one person. The pros are actually good at this game and could easily play around mass rez, so Mercy players would get maximum value from tempo rezzing.
Well for one thing that depends on what you’re talking about, tbh.
“Pros” didn’t mean the same thing it does now. There was no OWL, no real organized tournaments on Blizz’s end, mostly community or Org-driven tournaments. Mercy only had like a 5% (out of 100) pickrate in those because she was generally considered bad at the top end for her lack of midfight value. She was only used with Pharah, and lived to pocket her and her alone (especially since she lacked the mobility tools to effectively do anything else with her team on the ground in a dive meta) and she often just used rez to solo rez the Pharah. Sort of had to since they relied on her to stay alive and get value. It was like current E rez…but having to spend her entire ult charge to do it. Not always, of course.
But in the top of ladder, top500/top of GM, the actual players who MAINED Mercy and were the best at her (Yuno, Vale, Kaz, EeveeA, etc.) utilized hide and rez and larger rezzes quite often, because they were playing Mercy in all sorts of comps and not just in Pharahmercy dive 5% of the time. They were playing her as a main, teamwide healer. More akin to what real Mercy players do. I think that’s more representative of the larger Mercy playerbase and also “Pro” Mercy players as they actually mained the hero.
Mercy may be “balanced” now, she may be in a “good spot” with “good utility”
But that doesn’t change the fact that she still kind of feels like garbage to play and main. Even when you win, you get the feeling that you pretty much got carried, even if you played her as optimally as you could have thought to.
Resurrect only depends on 2 things now, a binary yes/no decision and the other 11 players in the match. Of course, there’s the “superjump res”, but it can be tricky to pull off, and even that won’t save you a lot of the time. There’s also rezzing around ledges/corners, and that, of course, depends on whether your teammate had the forethought to die near a ledge or corner for you, so… again, lack of agency.
There’s no healing spike other than Valkyrie, which is… an ultimate, as opposed to a cooldown ability like Biotic Grenade or Healing Orb. And as an ultimate, its defensive potential is rather subpar compared to Transcendence and Sound Barrier, or even Rally. (Yes, I’m aware that healing/defensiveness isn’t Valkyrie’s main value and that it probably isn’t intended to be)
Damage boost… is largely unchanged, but the one change to it (Damage boost only affecting projectiles when they’re fired) leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Sure, it makes more sense, but it takes a tiny bit of agency away since you now have to just have a crystal ball and predict that, for example, your Rein will use their Firestrike or your Moira will use their damage orb instead of boosting it as you see it. It also feels a little weird for Mercy’s current main value to come from damage boost, considering her identity as this pacifist angelic healer.
The pistol… honestly, having infinite ammo in Valkyrie only makes sense if you’re going to be firing more than 20 projectiles within the time span, which is a pretty unwise use of her ultimate unless there’s a particularly vulnerable target to kill that your team can’t/won’t kill (And this is enabled by Mercy’s flight/regen, not by the infinite ammo - it doesn’t take more than 20 shots to kill a half HP widowmaker standing still on the high ground unless your aim is that bad). On the other hand, I can see why her damage and projectile speed wasn’t increased, as it was in the PTR of the rework. I’m honestly in support of removing the infinite ammo and increasing the firing rate - allowing for some increased DPS but only if you can hit your shots, and at the cost of having to reload more often since you’re emptying your clip fast. This may also slightly decrease the TTK on Mercy’s target, allowing her to get back to healing/boosting her team faster.
news flash, everything about balancing a game is subjective, overpowered and underpowered are subjective, they can be slightly explained with certain stats such as pick rates but it’s still a matter of opinion as to what stats matter (does rank matter? do we balance around GM or the general population? does every hero deserve to be equally viable?) and what an ideal version of those stats would look like. maybe respond to some of the reasons that i listed in that post instead of zeroing in on the stated position and saying “boo, you have an opinion”
There is no requirement in the forums that one respond to every part of a post
The part I had issue with was where an opinion was described specifically as if it were a fact when it was (and still is) not a fact, and as such, thats the part I responded to
I wont be responding further on this specific item in this thread
Clearly the Devs do as well which is why they have a special Discord Server with top OW players, pros, and hero representatives/content creators in it to discuss balance and QoL features.
