Well Jayne has repeatedly said she doesn’t, so there we have a very prominent and influential professional figure (with a massive public platform) arguing against that point.
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Let’s just do it here Titanium.
And then…
Remember that? So check out what I said about Mass Rez and 1:1-5 in your last big thread. Look at what I’ve said here… And respond.
Let’s talk about it. No worries about hitting a post limit here. And tbh, this thread of yours, pretty much exactly what I was referring to when I said “I see you more eager to pick low hanging fruit, arguing in ways you know most people won’t be able to adequately respond to.”
I think I adequately responded to your original post in this thread. Junk methodology, literally pointless exercise. So. Let’s talk about it.
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I think it does in the context of how Valk is perceived to have solved “hide and rez”
For me it’s not so much the elimination of mass rez, so much as the avoidance of actually addressing the problems being seen.
Define “hide and rez” for me. If we’re talking about what was seen in youtube videos and guides, what was discussed in posts and such… Then yes, Valk did solve that. You don’t see guides about it anymore, do you? So it depends entirely on your definition.
What problems? About how people feel?
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I disagree. And I think Valk fixed nother regarding this trash play.
Honestly community perception is just tragic in this game…
It’s not an incentive because nothing is weighted in favor of rez numbers beyond the scope of an ult having numbers in its capability. This applies to every hero outside of Ana and Widowmaker. Moreover, withholding healing is not a requirement to pull off a huge rez, therefore it inherently is not being incentivized.
my rants about lowered skill floors is long and mighty. I hate hanzos rework >.>
Hiding for the purpose of getting the maximum personal value of rez for Mercy. This idea of “hide and rez” always seems to boil down to the result and not the cause of it. Hide and rez was a bad strat. We all know this. It’s why Mercy was such a low tier hero with mass rez. Huge rez didn’t work. But why was it so coveted? In my opinion, The value of Rez for mercy did not equate to the value of rez for her team.
The problem of Rez being so heavily regarded in the reward for Mercy.
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To be honest, this is my main issue with the cooldown rez mechanic in relation to the devs. They didnt say hide n rez was so frequent they didnt like it… just that they didn’t like it at all. So cooldown rez to me, doesn’t really answer hide and rez as a result beyond hide and huge rez.
What is the max personal value of rez for Mercy? This is very important.
Are you saying that in order to gain the “max personal value of rez for Mercy” she needed to have 5 of her team mates dead, then we have a problem. Not in the sense of me disagreeing with you, but in that value, imho, should not be dictated by the number of dead team mates you have within a certain area within a certain time.
Flanking into the back of the enemy team and just dying is a bad strat too. Flanking into the enemy team as a smurf Tracer and literally destroying the enemy team from behind is a good strat. Things to consider.
Simple. People got a rush off of mass rez plays. It’s an addiction. Why turn your life around, rent an apartment, etc, when you can just shoot dem drugz and feel good?
Because Mass Rez (drug of choice) interacted with the rest of the game, the rest of the world, the rest of reality, in the way it did, it was coveted above all else. Once the source was removed… Well damn, people go a lil crazy.
The parallels are like eerily accurate. Think about it.
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Stat buffs . This doesnt inherently mean a win.
Not inherently. The personal value of rez is the maximum flat number of rezzes. Not the value of the rezzes themselves. This can still be done by say, Rezzing tracer after a team fight ends on Temple of Anubis. The fight is won, defense has spawn advantage, tracer is fast, but mercy rezzes her in favor of boosting her rez stats. It’s safer to rez tracer now than finding an actual value rez midfight.
agreed. Context matters. Huge rez wasn’t always bad, but it wasn’t often a win either.
that’s always been in the game and the pure number rush exists beyond mass rez. McCree waiting around to only use high noon for a six man is just as bad play. That problem tends to dwindle as you go up and wins are supposed to matter more. The Value of Rez in the skill calculation of mercy, made it so flat numbers are the contributing factor. In this analogy, Using drugs tends to make your life spiral. But why stop doing drugs if you are getting a better apartment, got a raise, and still get perceived as doing well? So here, McCree druggies are losing their homes, and Mercy users are getting a promotion. Of Course Mercy won’t want to stop.
So kick her out, fire her, and hold her paycheck. Taking away the drug flat often doesnt work. You have to make them want a change, or else they just find something else to use. In this case: trash cooldown rezzes.
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So stat buffs are what the max personal value of rez comes down to? Hmmm… What stats? Rez stats? Like… Wtf are you talking about?
As an average over game? Do we care about tiers or levels of coordination? What characteristics are we using to determine the quality here?
Cool. And if you lose because of “ermahgerd muh rezz statz” then it doesn’t matter how severely you micromanaged your number of rezzes during the course of the match. You lose. SR lost in the end.
Good good.
Can’t compare Mass Rez to other ults. All other ults… Literally… Like EVERY SINGLE other ult, EVERY OTHER SINGLE ABILITY! Everything else in this game… Requires LIVING players. Capturing a point? Need a living player. DPS ulting to kill someone? Requires living enemies to kill. Hiding as Lucio until EMP? Well SB is only applied to LIVING team mates.
Mass Rez? Totally different.
The Mass Rez drug is unlike all others. Just fact. That’s why people still fiending for it 1.6 years or w/e it’s been after the fact.
Mass Rez interacted with the game in a way unique to it. Thus why there is no substitute drug. Thus why Titanium, someone that hasn’t played the game for however many months, is still making posts like this that are legitimately worthless. As I said, terrible thread.
This stuff is not difficult to understand. Very simple.
Thank you for your hard work and dedication towards these threads. They were so eloquently typed out and quite informative. I always felt like there should be play styles of characters in Overwatch instead of reworks kinda like how you have the choice to pick between two different fighting styles or V-triggers in Street Fighter 5 for example. Give people the option to play as Mercy 1.0 or 2.0. Same with Symmetra and Hanzo.
the stat kept for a mercy player for each game? Just like her healing and dmg boost numbers. Rez is a tracked number. But its value is treated as an a flat ability despite it not being one. Rez interacts with the game differently than traps, storm arrows, or sleep darts. Giving flat value to rez is bad design.
quality should first be win, then rez to ratio of other aspects of Mercy’s Kit. This would include healing, time alive, ally teammate deaths. Thus my meaning that rez is not good as a flat number. It inherently needs context.
micromanaging rez does not inherently mean its the best use of rez. And it inherently will not boost her rez stats. If a mercy with cooldown rez never rezzes, she isn’t buffing that stat.
But how much should be considered. I have at one point lost a mere 5 points for a loss. Similarly, I have at one point lost 100 (I just about pitched an entire fit). Rez numbers taken flat seem to correlate with high rez numbers equating to low loss of sr for mercy, and high sr gains. Yet, not necessarily in correlation with the rest of her stats such as healing and personal deaths.
this doesnt mean that numbers aren’t a high. Numbers high and mechanic high are different. Otherwise, tempo moth meta mercy wouldn’t have been an issue. Moth meta mercy still had many players wanting mass rez back. It’s a numbers high.
Symm has people wanting her old beam and her old TP back. she just has a smaller playerbase. No other hero other than symm and mercy have had their core ult or base kit entirely reworked. It’s not fair to act like mercy players are somehow crazy outliers when she is inherently an outlier.
I doubt Zarya players would be very happy to have grav scrapped in favor of also having mini halt on cooldown, and her new ult is a personal bubble for each member of her team. Or that Reinhart players and people who like Rein on their team, would be thrilled to hear that “in order to move him to be more in line with the other basic heroes Mercy and Soldier, Rein is getting a transformative Ult: Barrier. Rein and symm have switched ults because a barrier is more suited for a tank, and serves Rein’s role as a barrier tank.” I doubt people would love losing earthshatter and moving it to symm.
I argue that there is. Cooldown rez is simply you getting better at hiding the problem. Not fixing it.
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The reason you don’t see guides anymore about it is because it is not wildly exploitable to get stupid amounts of undeserved SR, but the behavior still exists to a lesser form. Not only does it still exist, it exists on other heros too and it is not being addressed because it is less egregious than it was with Mass Rez, and it was only more egregious because of a combination of factors that people outright refuse to acknowledge. Until they do acknowledge it, the Mercy threads will continue.
The devs statements were that they disagreed with the behavior of hide and rez and implied that the notion that she ever be encouraged to do so is not what they want. This means they don’t want her to be encouraged to let the team die to get a huge Rez. Boiling that down further, it means they don’t want Mercy to withhold her healing (her primary job) in order to get bigger impact ult usage. The thing is though, this wasn’t a problem until it started happening a LOT more regularly and it was getting called out by high ranking players. (That is an entirely seperare kettle of fish that I could go on about for hours, but wont right now as this will be long enough as is).
If you recall back to past posts we’ve had, I said the same thing then that I’m about to now; that the problem started and existed with the SR exploit and brought out the worst of the problems with Mass Rez. That is essentially the gist of N7’s essay too. Its the same conclusion a lot of people come to for much the same reasons, and is exactly why these threads keep coming back.
How did people use Mass Rez compared to other ults? In McCrees case you can hide and ult from an area he’s minimally vulnerable to get a huge team wiping high noon but the risk of it backfiring or failing to get much impact is huge leaving your team down an additional DPS until McCree gets back in the fight, and if he’s off and out of position he often would get killed making the ult get minimal impact and harming the teams chances at winning the fight. Or you could use the ult in a some what safe place near a fight with some moderate risk but only aim for hitting a 1-2 person shot, potentially not even killing the ones you want or getting the full value of the ult, but getting enough value to flip the tide of the fight. Mercy you could hide and fly in to ult from an area she’s minimally vulnerable to get a huge team restoring mass Rez but the risk of it backfiring and a team fight where the team is down the main healer usually meant your team got stomped again and your resurrection would get minimal impact and the team fight would be lost a second time giving a massive boost in ult economy to the enemy and wasting a ton of time. At least until invulnerability was added. Or you could rez in a some what safe place near a fight with moderate risk but only aim for getting a 1-2 person Rez and potentially not even the ones you want or getting the full value of the ult, but getting enough value to flip the tide of the fight. The parallel in these things should be pretty obvious.
Prior to the SR exploit, hide and Rez existed but only in the sense that the Mercy would see a fight that they could do literally nothing about changing the outcome of, so they would take cover, just like anyone who knew what they were doing. Anyone who hadn’t been pulled into the inevitable ball of death would do the same because needlessly throwing more bodies into a pile is feeding your brains out. The only difference was Mercy had a way to flip the tide AFTER that inevitable ball of death happened, but at that point you had to make a risky play where you flew in and were vulnerable until the team could move meaning you died almost every time, or just waited for the team to regroup. Prior to the rework announcement, Blizzard didn’t say anything about the “anti-fun nature” of Mass Rez or anything about those situations even though they did happen for about a full year, and in fact had only buffed Mass Rez up until then because the only times it worked was when the enemy team failed to play properly and deserved to be punished. That was why the ult was completely missing from high level play and tournaments; people knew better to kill the supports who could stop huge plays before dropping their ults. Well, most people did anyway.
Similar to how Zen would see Reaper or Genji coming to ult, and instead of popping Trans before the enemy pressed Q, he’d wait until it was too late for Reaper or Genji to stop and had committed the Q. Same with Lucio using Barrier right before a huge spike of damage hits and not before that source of spike damage is committed and Q has already been pressed. Same as a DPS ult that waits for the support ult to be burned or the support to die before committing their ults. Same with Mercy knowing when she could and couldn’t save the team from death, BUT she could reverse that death. The intention in everyone’s case is to get maximum value with minimal risk to swing the fight in their favor, and this intention matters. People try to play their abilities at the right time for the best value. The devs never said anything about that hide and Rez strat while this was the way it was being used because it not only didn’t win games that often, it was far more often than not a poor play to make that prior to Feb 17, 2017 regularly got punished with Mercy getting killed and the team getting rolled again because it was a 5v6, and as such was an extremely high risk with low chance of success with equally as high of a reward when successfully done without Mercy dying and leaving the team out their main healer. But what changed? Why did it all of a sudden become a problem? Because it started being rewarded and the strategy was excessively enabled to happen. So what changed to do this?
Developer Comments, Feb 17 2017: Mercy’s Resurrect has always been very powerful, but it often forces her to sacrifice herself to use it well. There have been changes in the past that attempted to help her in this area, but haven’t done enough to solve it. This change means that once she uses the ability, she will always survive long enough to be with her team again.
(Bolded portion is my emphasis.)
Invulnerability removed too much of the risk of going for additional Rezes or the team rez post wipe. The thing is, the devs notes about “to use it well” means they intended Rez to be used in a situation where you were down multiple people and likely were extremely vulnerable. In other words, they made the change to PROMOTE the use of it after a fight had been lost and after taking cover to then Rez more people. I disagree with enabling that so overtly, but that was the developers choice, not mine. In fact many times I even expressed concern on the forums that Rez had no proper counters to punish Mercy for poor Rez use or to properly stop Rez from completing with minimal time required to initiate it, but I was largely dismissed as not knowing what I was talking about.
On top of the problem with Rez being much harder to prevent or counter, later on Rez count giving more SR became a problem in the form of the SR exploit that over rewarded Rezing. That made the problem much worse and it gave people every possible reason to exploit the ranking system to try to get as many Rezes as they could and the invulnerability buff gave the means to easily do so. Even if people only won 1/3 matches, they would go up because the SR loss from defeat was so small, and the SR gain from a victory was so huge.
Lets go back to that “it often forces her to sacrifice herself to use it well” statement once more for a minute. Tempo rezes rarely got you killed. It was the big ult wombo combos where teams over committed ults that you flew in to reverse where you would always die. Aka, the hide and Rez that SHOULD have failed more frequently than it succeeded, and in fact did fail more often than it succeeded prior to invulnerability. This along with the prior explanation shows either the devs wanted more frequently for huge rezes to succeed, or they didn’t understand the harm it would bring and were just being really stupid.
I don’t think they are stupid. So why the about face? The support players across the board brought up a ranking issue when Orisa launched that caused supports to get far less ranking than their DPS counter parts. It was widely documented. In the same time it was discovered that Rezing gave stupid amounts of fire and SR gains. This was when inflating SR by inflating Rez count was discovered. Bliz said this was a non-issue 3 separate times, then said they fixed it even though Rezes still were giving stupidly high amounts of SR. It never got addressed again until the rework where Mass Rez with variable numbers of Rezes and thus inflatable numbers of rezes were removed from the game.
Truth is, I think they didn’t know how to fix the SR system and rather than sacrificing performance based SR or the ranking system, they preferred to sacrifice the one ability that was breaking it the most: variable numbers of Rezes that were rewarding ridiculously too high. Mercy’s SR issues continued following the rework where playing Mercy and getting more rezes than the prior average meant you got huge SR. After they removed additional Rez charges, Mercys got garbage SR for a while until the averages had settled at a noticably lower rate. Even now if you get a low rez count, your SR is punished heavily by it, even if there is no one to rez because your team solidly stomps the enemy team. This means SR is still impacted by Rez count, and that very function was what led to the incentive to inflate that count. As it stands now though, how do you inflate the number of times you can use an ability when its on a static cool down that can’t be modified? You don’t. Therefore the flaw with how it is valued doesn’t get seen nearly as much, meaning the flaw isn’t seen nearly as much.
In the mean time, because Rez count still matters for your SR reward, you still want people to die. If not enough people die in the match, or they don’t die when you need them to die to use Rez, you’re incentivised to let them die to get that Rez to inflate that Rez count to get better SR. The incentive is just no where near as glaringly obvious when you only want 1 person to die when rez is up compared to when you wanted 5 people to die when rez was up. Much like McCree is rewarded more for 6 man high noon than he is for a 1 man high noon. The only thing preventing him from doing it is that the reward does not currently out weigh the risk. The only reason Mercy was frequently using hide and Rez was the reward out weighed the risk.
You can pretend none of this is reality, but that would be not giving appropriate consideration to the context of the problem. The reason its a sore spot for Mercys is because the core problem wasn’t truly addressed,it was just covered up, and in the mean time we went through a year of misery being OP that we didn’t want, getting hate that we didn’t want, having the hero changed in a way we didn’t want and that didn’t fix the problem, and ruined the game balance, and ruined the feel of the hero we enjoyed so much.
Mass Rez doesn’t have to come back. In fact, there are plenty of reasons it shouldn’t. Just like there are plenty of reasons Valk in its current form should not remain as it is. Current Mercy being balanced does not mean current Mercy’s kit is in a healthy state because the experience of playing this game is about far more than just numerically balanced heros.
Edit: in a more fundamental TLDR of all this:
If you get high rez count, your losses result in far less lost SR and your wins give farm more SR. This gives an inherent incentive to boost Rez count. This was what encouraged hide and Rez. The fact it still works this way means the problem still exists but is just harder to exploit. The same applies to any hero but to a significantly lesser degree than is seen with Mercy. Anyone who accepts this as not being a problem is simply ignoring the problem because its not currently damaging the game enough for them to personally care. Its really that simple.
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Yeah. There’s a lot of complicating factors. Sooo… That considered… What do you mean when you say
Aree you saying the max personal value of rez for Mercy is one that rezzes as many people as possible? If so… That is basically why it was removed. You realize that, yes?
Good. I’m glad you realize that. The original post of this thread though? Terribly ignorant of context. Terrible methodology. It was like watching someone dig up a dead horse just to hopefully beat it to life. Worthless exercise.
Personal performance was removed from diamond and above for all intents and purposes. Those in favor of Mass Rez recognize this. Even less reason for Mass Rez to be in this game.
Every stat outside of dry rez numbers is a result of an interaction that involves LIVING PLAYERS. Rez, and furthermore Mass Rez, are the only things that don’t adhere to that.
Tempo was how you would should do it. Your ability to pull big brain Mercy rez plays was a byproduct of the enemies discoordination. Had nothing to do with your skill tbh. I can erase your entire team as a smurf Tracer due to your mistakes and how easy you make it. Doesn’t mean it’s right or justified. I shouldn’t be playing smurf Tracer at your elo.
I pay little attention to people’s feelings. I’ll consider them, catch me at the right time, but outside of that they mean nothing to me.
E rez is NOTHING like Mass Rez imo. How are you arguing that E rez gives you the same fix? Why?
The reason you don’t see guides anymore is because there’s no point in establishing hiding spots etc. As the way we hid with Mass Rez is nothing like how we would hide with E rez. False equivalency.
Hide and Rez DID win games. There’s no denying that.
I’m going to be honest. This is what comes to mind when it comes to discussing this topic with you:
Me: “I’m breaking up with you.”
You: “Why?”
Me: “You cheated on me.”
You: “So? You hung out with Jane a month ago. Fair is fair.”
Me: “Wtf? I helped her with a project. You slept with someone else.”
You: “So? You intended to spend time with someone else, so I did the same. Fair’s fair.”
Me: “Wtf?”
Etc.
Hide and Rez was definitely encouraged by SR gain, however you still need to win the game in order to even gain SR. Your entire argument is so brutally flawed I struggle to understand why we’re even discussing it.
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That is a gross misrepresentation and over simplification. And its frankly disgustingly dishonest.
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I thought that was what we were doing? Oversimplifying?
Fair’s fair, right?
Only for that specific event / time frame. They need to heal the team in order to build up the rez in the first place though.
You still need to hide to use rez but not in the way you would think. You need to hide behind a teammate’s shield or be protected or behind cover and it actually requires skill and communication. But the entire mechanic of rez is changed making your entire argument pointless.
You make a massive logical leap and over-reaching and use unverified numbers to fit them into a narrative that’s based on faulty assumptions and faulty relation between two propositions.
Anyway, I honestly suggest that you actually play the game. Current Mercy is a lot of fun and she is balanced.
Removing Mass Rez was good for the game because it fixed all these issues:
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Thank you! I’m so happy to see this point brought up by someone other than myself. I’ve always said that any design that needs 14 consecutive nerfs is a bad design, and so far nothing the devs have done has disproved that. Realistically speaking, once we’d gotten to February 2018, they should have stopped and started work on a new Mercy design and really reevaluated their feedback collection process and the data. Instead they kept up the nerfs and I cannot really fathom why, other than maybe as an attempt to save face?
A lot of people say that the game has gone downhill over the past year, and as much as I know a lot of people don’t want to hear it, the Mercy rework was the catalyst for it. Not necessarily because of the changes themselves on a strictly mechanical level but because of how poorly the devs handled communication. They parroted the “hide and res” statement which had been used to harass Mercy players whether or not those players engaged in that behavior and then refused to even implement one single suggestion from the myriad of Mercy threads, or even explain why they didn’t think those ideas would work.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the people I met and became friends with during the first year of Overwatch have left since the Mercy rework. Not necessarily because of the rework on a mechanical level, but because the devs, via their statement and actions essentially signaled that the harassment of Mercy players and/or support players was fine. Now, I doubt that was the devs’ intentions, but actions speak louder than words. A lot of the people drawn into Overwatch by its more diverse and inclusive playstyle, characters and artwork have been driven away as Blizzard have kept on catering to a certain group of players who rage and lash out against anything they find “annoying” or “unskilled”.
And that’s why posts and threads like this still happen. Because there’s a dedicated group of players who want to point out that there were flaws in the devs’ reasoning, and that through their lack of communication and/or critical thinking about the motivation and sourcing behind the feedback they were getting - like “X DOESN’T BELONG IN A COMPETITIVE FPS, REEEEEEEE” they contributed to driving players away, as well as sending the interest for Overwatch as an IP into a downward spiral.
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Now you’re just being petty. I never said YOU were over simplifying the problem, but since you want to do it that way, then I have nothing more to say after this.
Plain and simple your entire problem is that you’re beyond understanding the simple notion that higher Rez count STILL matters thus by the power of the most basic form of logic there is STILL incentive to inflate it. Radical thought, but its a fact.
The goal of the rework was to remove that incentive, and it didn’t fully do that. Reply back when that simple concept starts to make some sense. Then there will be something to talk about. Until then, I don’t need any of what you’re pushing.
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