Time for another rework imo, at least a soft rework that can give her more free agency to make plays, less team reliance, raise skill level, and disregard the cancerous growth that mercy mains are becoming more and more lenient with each passing day, that is pocketing, ie become the staple healer of the game like she is advertised to be, shes on the verge of losing that identity
But OH SHES BALANCED RIGHT GUYS?
I would love for Mass Rez to make a comeback.
It was an issue for many people. Just because we disliked a stupid ability w little-to-no counterplay doesn’t mean we “lack strategy”. I love strategy, that’s why I main Mercy and love the rework giving me more tools :).
Mercy mains like myself who disliked being yelled at to hide with ult or screamed at to solo rez or screamed at FOR solo rezzing. Promoted boring gameplay and encouraged not properly healing my team.
Mercy’s teammates who disliked having their support leave and hide during fights and tell them to die on points.
The enemy team who had to go send people into every room around the point to find the Mercy who was standing still…or who would watch their teamwipe that took actual coordination and skill be completely reversed by a Mercy who just flew out of spawn. Such as this POTG I got a week before the rework:
Such a stupid ability that promoted a stupid playstyle. Flashy and felt cool to pull off but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for the game or the hero. Especially not when it promoted toxicity all around both on her team and the enemy team.
I’m so glad that she was reworked and is now more fun, more skillful, and has more decision making and tools in her kit to have impact. 
Maybe mass rez will be a PvE talent in OW2 and all the people who only enjoyed Mercy for Mass Rez can go live in PvE mode.
Never happening. Multiple Devs said it’s not ever going to happen at least 5 times throughout the last 3 years. OW2 trailer and UI screencap shows OW2 Mercy using Valk and E rez in both PvP and PvE.
Maybe it will be a PvE talent tho for PvE modes
Mass Rez for Overwatch 2 PVE.
I get the whole mass rez thing, but I still dont like 2.0 either, the only thing I like about 2.0 is GA techs and the general survivability improved, yes, but they went about nerfing the wrong things and stripping any identity she had as the big franchise doctor character of the OW universe.
And all I want is a juggle main healer playstyle to come back instead of pocket n peel, tired of it.
I have 0 complaints with them doing more changes or reworks to her, but I will always stand by my stance that going backwards to 1.0 is going backwards in both fun, skill, and balance. Any changes to the hero should be moving her forward. More skill expression, more agency, more things to do and manage.
R abilities, shifting her towards main healing and away from DPS pocketing, soft ult powershift, whatever
Oh yeah I agree fully, though I HAVE TO ADMIT, there is nothing more dopamine triggering in this game in the support role than getting that 5 man rez, what a hit.
All I want is more free agency, and less team reliance, because climbing solo Qing with mercy is probably the worst experience I’ve ever had to do in a competitive game since youre literally at the complete and utter whim of your team performance.
Tbh I personally found double instant rez valk most fun haha, especially since GA speed was way faster during it. Popping Q to Dolphin dive down and do drive by instant rezzes past souls was amazing 
Still not a fan of new Mercy to this day, but i’m sure thats a unpopular opinion nowadays
it was a really, really rocky road but she’s in a much healthier spot now
op valk mercy was a dopamine rush though
While we’re pining over unhealthily OP heroes, let’s bring Bastion’s 1000 hp barrier back or maybe Zarya’s 4 second, 50 energy bubbles.
Beta/launch McCree can stay dead, though.
that video proves that all mass rez ever needed was
That’s it. That’s all. She literally didn’t need anything else. But for years they sometimes seemed to prefer radically pulling teeth in the balancing rather than just trying to give them a thorough cleaning, even if there aren’t any cavities yet.
I’m not even a mercy main, and I was shocked at how they went about dealing with it. I know a lot of people who I miss who left that year.
I was around for the beta weekends and launch, as well as the whole mess surrounding Mercy’s rework. With the benefit of reflection, Mass Res wasn’t actually OP, not in a game where a good tank or Lucio could easily outplay the aim-based DPS characters, if a person was good enough at the kit. I liked that style of gameplay, it was fun, original and it made Overwatch feel diverse on more than just the characters’ visual/audio design.
Mercy and the other characters who’ve since been reworked are all victims of Blizzard’s decision to cave to that certain group of pros and streamers who DEMANDED that the aim-based “kill more and kill faster than the other team” heroes and strategy be the only one really allowed to decide the outcome of matches.
I can’t really see any other good reason for them insisting that Mercy’s rework was a “success” given the response from actual Mercy players for so long after the rework and during the PTR phase. The 14+ nerfs she got, just so Blizzard didn’t have to admit to making a mistake, so they could claim she’s “balanced” (read: can’t effectively interfere with the “kill first/kill faster” players)
And I suppose that’s ultimately the issue: Overwatch is a far more…conventional game now, has been ever since the decision was made to make OWL the reason for the game’s existence. I don’t like that, it feels too much like all the other shooters I outgrew years ago, and it caters primarily to that one kind of gamer who only defines any sort of worth based on how quickly they can move their crosshairs.
Lots of the ongoing issues stem from the fact that characters clearly designed for that older vision of the game, are being forced into this current one. Blizzard’s trying to fit square pegs into round holes, which is also why I think Overwatch 2 suddenly became neccesary. They need to have a reason for a big, sweeping redesign of pretty much every hero and gameplay system, and sadly I don’t think it’ll mean a solid return to what made Overwatch unique, but a far more conventional shooter, which is a waste of this IP.
As for Mercy, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t really want Mass Res back per se. What I do want is an Ultimate that properly offsets her fairly basic healing/boosting kit with something BIG - something that legitimately has the potential to flip a match by direct actions of the Mercy player and not just as the pocket bot they’ve now turned her into. I think a lot of the reason why people bring up Mass Res fondly is because it provided that. You KNEW that a Mercy was good, when they were able to flip a fight due to good Ult use (talking before she got invulnerability frames here). You don’t have that now, and since Blizzard will never remove Ressurrect, it does need to go back into the Ultimate slot somehow. I’m not a gamedesigner, so I leave that challenge to Blizzard, but it’d be nice to get at least some indication that they actually understood why just leaving her to rot and claiming it’s “balanced” isn’t actually viable. Same goes for any other hero that’s been given the rework treatment, really.
Nice post OP. Truly fun to see this!
I am still on disbelief as to how some people have literally said in the past that Mercy 2.0 was a throw pick (I will not give any names lol).
She was clearly far from being a throw pick. More over, I hope the same people watch these videos and then dare to say the same lmao
She went from being a good meme to disgustingly op. Then from op to balanced, now she’s going to from balanced to pretty hard meta atm. Pocketing strat is seeing too much play and its pretty uninteresting gameplay imo.
Good cause resurrect ult was not thought out, like at all. It really is like Jeff simply doesn’t understand people and thought everyone would be jumping with with a Q on one teammate who got cought in a chain of CC for that rez save. Must’ve been huge shock for Jeff when people would charge Mercy ult and hide, waiting for a teamwipe and then just negate all the coordination the other team had. It is a cheap strategy yes, but that’s what the old ult was best at,
Cheaper, the better. Especially when your teammates most likely are just fooling around.
Saving one teammate never mattered, when it took only tiny effort to undo that attempt.
New Mercy is best for pocketing, ugh. Which means, that now saving others doesn’t matter - we went from one extreme to another.
Oh well, at least now you don’t have to concern yourself with maximising number of teammates your resurrect covers, since now you know exact teammate, that gives you maximum value for your damage boost. As for everyone else - none of your concern, saving them would be a waste of ability.
It hardly matters. If you have to ignore 4 out of 5 teammates to maximise your value, so be it - you do what you have to do. No mercy for less proficient teammates.
Error of devs was assuming, that Mercy mains would be aggressive, combat players. They are not. We fly, evade and strafe to stay away from combat.
But, to be fair, I am grateful to Blizzard for that. They took away your ability to achieve “strength with numbers” to make teammates win with no effort from their side, so now you can concentrate your efforts on that one teammate, that matters, with no distractions.
Be careful when you say Mercy is meta.
I said the same a few weeks ago and Mercy mains jumped at me to cut off my throat… Then again numbers do not lie lol
The best part about the rework was that everyone and literally everyone on the forums thought she was trash and unplayable after the rework went through.