💖 Its time to fix Mercy!

General Discussion
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READ THE BOLDED TEXT TO SKIP ALL THE DETAILS! :blush:

Mercy is on the cusp of being perfect but some parts of her kit can make her playstyle feel awkward.
QOL improvements to make her feel incredible without truly buffing her:

  • Let Mercy melee without her beam disconnecting.

If you’re healing and try to melee an enemy in your face, or melee your ally for fun, your beam will disconnect for a split second. Sometimes the beam will fail to reconnect. Its disorienting.
As the only healer who cannot deal damage or do anything else while healing, at least let her melee!

  • Prevent Damage Boost beam from disconnecting when using the communication wheel.

When Mercy tries to say things like ‘thank you’, or ‘group up’ while using her damage boost beam, it will cause the beam to briefly disconnect. This seems to be a bug with her Damage Boost beam specifically. Both beams sometimes break when Mercy says ‘Hello’ (Mercy will try to wave).

  • Stop the beam from disconnecting when activating Valkyrie.

For another split second, her beam disconnects from her target when activating Valk. Her ult has a ‘0.5 second cast time’. She loses a whopping 25 total heals during this time. Its disorienting to see your beam vanish for no reason and sometimes fails to reconnect.
The cast-time can remain! If stunned/killed during the cast time, her ult SHOULD still be canceled, but please stop the beam from disconnecting!

  • Let Mercy change weapons faster.

Again, as the only healer than cannot multi-task… at all, it would be nice if she had little to no delay between tasks/weapons. As the lowest damage dealing support at an avg 500dmg per game, it would be great if she could feel less guilty using part of her kit.

  • Separate sensitivities for pistol and staff.

Not everyone has DPI buttons to change their sensitives on a whim (or know how to). Lots of Mercy players play on high sensitives to do tight maneuvers with GA, but the fast sensitivity is hardly suitable for shooting.

  • Adjust Mercy’s on-fire rate.

She has the lowest on-fire rate in the game at 2%. It hasn’t been adjusted since her rework and yet she can’t do nearly as much as she used to.

  • Let Mercy cancel Resurrect by pressing ‘e’ again with a 15 second cooldown penalty.

For example: if someone asks you to stop rez’ing because they plan to change heroes. Or if you plan to bait out enemy cooldowns. The cooldown will prevent spamming rez attempts.

  • Hybrid version of GA prefer beam target On & Off.

Many Mercy players like certain elements of both options. It would be nice if they were combined to expand the skill ceiling of her Guardian Angel ability. What it would do: If Mercy is looking at an ally, she will fly to them regardless of who her beam is connected to. However if she isn’t looking at anyone, she will fly to her beam target.

  • Let Mercy end Valkyrie early by pressing ‘Q’ a second time (similar to highnoon).

Valkyrie is a 15 second ult, one of the longest in the game. Sometimes the entire duration is needed. But sometimes, the fight is over in 7 seconds… then you spend the next 8 seconds hovering mindlessly. If Mercy could end her ult early, she could start charging her ult again instead doing nothing.

  • Fix her Resurrect Animation.

Its not smooth like it should be and it has a jerky animation. It became like this many patches ago… It would be nice for it to be fixed.

TL;DR Overall it won’t really buff her. It will just tie her kit together and make her more smooth to play.
It will give her more choices with her movement, 25 extra total healing done per valk, the ability to melee while healing, use her entire kit with less guilt, have more choices over how her weapons are handled, give her more control over rez (it doesn’t change how often she can rez, just lets her stop if she decides to… like sym can destroy TP and torb can destroy his turret), and will let her have more control over her ult.

That being said, I do believe she needs 55-60hps to allow her to be ran alongside Lucio/Zen/Brig without forcing her to be a healbot (she needs a higher healing rate in order to use her dmg boost in a comp like that).
And give her ult charge for rez’ing. Of course nerf her ult-charge rate by 15%-20% to compensate for it.

But truly what I want most is the QOL changes and maybe a hps buff.

Things to consider as to why so many players want her buffed or adjusted despite being ‘statistically balanced’:

  • Winrate: Mercy’s winrate in many ranks is heavily altered by the fact many Mercy players will often duo with a competent DPS.
  • Pickrate: Mercy’s pickrate is heavily skewed by how popular she is.

Currently she’s used as a pocket healer. However bringing back her ability to heal the team efficiently will allow her to be ran alongside supports like zen/lucio/brig and open more comp possibilities without taking away her current playstyle which many players have come to love.

Thoughts? I understand no one wants Mercy meta back, and I don’t want that either. I just want her kit to feel more cohesive.
Edited post: added a bug fix!

165 Likes
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Yes to everything.
Gimme dem QOL changes.

37 Likes
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What a thoughtful well worded post. You get my vote.

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wibble wobble my head will bobble because of how much I agree with all of this

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Yes please! Someone mail this to Blizzard!! PRIORITY MAIL!

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One of the best Mercy posts I have read. Kudos.

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God i wish i could! I just pray that they will see this and at least consider some of the changes! :sob:

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Eh how about we fix bastion first hes been left in the dust and neglected for years

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These sound good. I’ll admit, I prepared for the worst when I click on this topic but I was wrong! Well done.

Mercy could do with buffs too, she’s been in a rough spot for a while and 2-2-2 just made it worse.

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This is a post about Mercy as a player who wants Mercy fixed. I wanted to draw attention to the little bits of a hero that I’m passionate about, I guess.

Bastion players should be making thorough and detailed posts with examples and suggestions too (but not here hopefully)! :blush: besides just because one hero is bad, doesn’t mean we should silence ourselves over other heroes if something doesn’t sit well with us

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As an offmeta rights activist, this is my duty.

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We appreciate your service! :star: lol

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But he is that tricky case where low level players want him buffed and call him a throw pick, while the high level players where they can use him properly say he is OP and needs to be nerfed. So in summary I am just confused about which direction he needs to go right now. It seems that if we buffed him for the lower ranks - he is already considered OP by higher ranks. Nerfing him might make him even harder at lower ranks, but better for the higher ranks… Bastion, what can we do with you?!

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Bastion, Symmetra, Torbjorn, Mercy, Moira, Brig, etc are all heroes that are hard to buff/nerf/adjust because the slightest thing could easily make them unstoppable in the right hands.

I think heroes like Bastion need a full rework whereas Mercy just needs QOL changes and a tiny buff to solidify her role in the game

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This is not an issue.

This is not an issue.

This is not an issue.

This is not an issue.

This is not an issue.

Cast time is a pretty bad mechanic but being able to cancel it might go some way towards fixing it. I would rather that they introduced a mechanic to have res be earned via a resource system, pushing the skill requirement onto the acquisition of the res in the first place rather than trying to balance it with a contrived cast time mechanic.

This is not an issue.

No, what she needs is a way to increase her healing output for situations that require it. Like a healing boost ability, preferably on her “R” since she doesn’t have to reload her staff anyway. This would give her healing output regulation which is something that every other healer in the game has, except for Zen. (But no one cares about Zen). Flat healing output buffs do not inject any potential skill expression into her kit.

A lot of the changes you suggest are just attempts to push her more towards being a battle Mercy, and that’s not the point of the character. It’s good to have a hero that doesn’t focus on shooting. However, currently most of the skill expression is tied up in movement. I would look towards injecting ability management skill expression into her kit before moving her more towards a shooty shooty hero, because we’ve already got an entire roster full of shooty shooty heroes.

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Saying ‘its not an issue’ to pretty much my entire post is counter productive because all my suggestions are exactly that. Quality of Life changes. They’re not meant to do anything. They just feel good to have :blush:

This game does not need more burst healing, it needs less. Mercy’s whole gimmick is being steady&consistent. And ‘rez’ on ‘e’ IS her burst heal. If you want Mercy to have both Rez and a burst heal, you’re asking too much. If she gets a burst heal, rez needs to go.

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They’re not issues. Perhaps you didn’t read my entire post.

They do something. They change the power levels of the character and whenever you give something that increases power level in balance, you must also take something away. Also, they work towards making the character into something she’s not. A shooty shooty hero.

Steady and consistent isn’t a gimmick. That’s just the absence of a potential avenue of skill expression. It also creates many situations where the player feels like they did everything correctly (because they did) and yet they still lose their ally. This is of course true for all healers because healing can always be out damaged, however the difference is that with those other healers they can do things to try to mitigate the damage spike, which is an expression of skill and also creates a feeling of causality. There is often little causality with Mercy because often times players time their beams perfectly and still lose their allies. That can happen very often with Mercy, because her movement skill expression only serves to keep her alive.

Not at all.

You can balance numbers via testing, but good design is more fundamental than that. Giving Mercy a healing boost mechanic can be off set by reducing her healing when she isn’t boosting it. Therefor the overall healing output is the same, but there’s actual causality in how she heals, which increases the potential skill expression in her kit, which increases the gap between a bad Mercy and a good one which is really the key factor in good design.

There’s other things you could do with that, like introduce a resource system to power these healing boosts and perhaps store them. Then you could make it so casts of res also use this same resource. That’s when things get very interesting because then the player needs to make decisions. Decisions like not using healing boosts during times when regular healing suffices. Then when an “oh :poop:” moment occurs, you’ve got the healing boosts. But wait, maybe you should save that resource for a cast of res. You’re juggling and timing things correctly (or incorrectly!)… That’s causality. That’s good game design. Holding down LMB and hoping your ally doesn’t take more damage than what you can heal is… well… it’s serviceable design, but it’s not great design.

Again, you just want to make the action of switching to the shooty shooty gun easier, but that’s not good. That’s just pushing her more towards what the rest of the roster is, various variations on shooty shooty. Mercy is unique in that she isn’t the shooty shooty girl, and a great designer would want to retain what makes her unique and make it work. Mercy does work in her current state, but she could be better. Those are the TRUE issues that should be addressed.

Earlier I :poop: ed on your suggestion that “steady & consistent” (lack of spike healing via abilities) was her gimmick and said that it was actually just an absence of skill expression. I’m also fully aware of the potential irony and hypocritical status I might incur in then turning around and saying the same thing about her lack of shooty shooty aiming skill expression being something to keep. The truth is that they’re both lack of skill expressions, but I’d definitely argue that we should focus on giving her skill expression via an ability rather than on her shooting… again, because the entire roster has some variation of shooting skill expression. That’s TRULY what makes Mercy unique, and yet you’re advocating diminishing that unique aspect. It’s a bad path to go down imo because it dilutes the hero from what makes her special.

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These ideas sound amazing. Def would be cool to see some of these go through.

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I really liked this idea it will be a viable survival escape velocity <3

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worth mentioning that if Mercy gets to be a staple pick and not a niche pick anymore, she needs an actual hard counter.

Currently the closest counter to Mercy that there is is Winston and Ashe dynamite. She might not be meta but she also enables carry DPS HARD and furthermore I don’t understand the concept of “her winrate is skewed by Mercys duoing”. Skewed how? That’s LITERALLY playing to Mercy’s strengths. You Mercy mains want a world where she is viable soloQ with random DPS players playing Junkrat and Reaper and if you duo with a good Widow/Cree you get to hold M2 win 80% of games and say sassy words in chat. That’s not balance lmao. We saw what happened in Widow meta which Mercy was a HARD enabler of. Literally without Mercy Widow Hanzo would never have been meta. McCree would also probably drop a tier in most ranks without Mercy in the game.

No, clicking her head as Widowmaker mid GA is not a counter and something even top 500s can’t do.