I was doing some research, and I found something that slightly disgusted me and made me just a tad bit angry. Vale, one of the best Mercies and a top tier Mercy made a post on twitter about Mercy’s state. https://twitter.com/vale_NAOW/status/1034631354879627265
Viewing the replies to that post, someone made a comment saying https://twitter.com/CocoFKO/status/1034779321876013056 “Agreed on some points but complaining about a 49.64% overall win rate is stupid lol. «Omg this hero is 0.36% below the « perfect balance » winrate must rework blizz pls wtf » meta changes just go with it and stop being a crybaby everytime y main get nerfed (apply to all heroes)” They say this implying that since Mercy is close to a 50% winrate, she’s in a good spot or rather they are stating that a 50% winrate on a hero shows that they are balanced. ALRIGHT! HERE’S THE TEA!
For the past 6 months (Before mercy got her 50hps healing nerf and before ana got her changes). Ana’s winrate was 53% and Mercy’s winrate was 54%. Yet people said ana was in an underpowered spot even though apparently 50% is the “Perfect balance” winrate for a hero? Explanation???
The last 3 months as well (Before mercy got her 50hps healing nerf and before ana got her changes). Ana’s winrate was 54% and Mercy’s winrate was 53%. Although Mercy’s winrate was technically very slightly lower than ana’s and ana had a 54% winrate, people still said that she was in an underpowered spot even though she had above the “Perfect balance” winrate.
The past week, Mercy has a 49% winrate and Ana has a 54% winrate. some people still say Mercy is more powerful than ana and that Mercy is a strong hero?
So let me get this straight. 50% is the “perfect balance winrate” and when ana’s winrate is above that, she was not in a good spot and she was underpowered. When Mercy’s winrate is below that, she’s in a good spot and still overpowered?
k.
(these are stats from grandmaster where the devs seem to balance the game from)
Mercy doesn’t require mechanical skill to play. Ana requires very high mechanical skill to be effective.
You cannot have a hero that requires no mechanical skill whatsoever have the same (or actually higher) output as a hero that requires quite a lot of mechanical skill. That is poor balancing, the latest changes address that and in the right direction.
What would be the point to pick up a hard mechanically skillful hero when you have a character that does the same or better with no mechanical skill whatsoever?
I wish I could see a month into the future and see if Mercy’s winrate and issues etc evens itself out.
Like how people complain about a change and call it broken but it turns out those people didn’t know what they were talking about a month later in retrospect.
The only mechanical skill needed for reinhardt is fire strikes. Other than that, it’s all about prediction, gamesense and swinging. Yet he is the most effective tank and the most picked that has a winrate just one percent below one of the hardest tanks, Wrecking ball
Not to mention there is one mechanical trick to GA that is very difficult to pull off consistently
I’ll tell you why her win-rate is going down. Because everyone overexaggerates everything on the forums. People make everything sound worse than it is. Influencing others, leading to more people not playing Mercy all because someone on the forums said she is the worst support. Her pick-rate is going down because everyone thinks she’s broken, and so her win-rate is going down.
This is not a correct parallel or analogy. Comparing two tanks is nothing like comparing two supports.
Wrecking ball is also not incredibly demanding mechanical skill-wise, his difficulty comes from understanding level design. Shooting targets as they go up in a predefined trajectory requires the most basic, rudimentary tracking.
Regardless, both require some semblance of mechanical aim. My argument is between a support that literally has zero mechanical requirements and a hero that has very high standards for that requirement to be played well.
EeveeA has 3.6k hours on Mercy and about 20 or so on ana and can still play her effectively. Aim is not the most difficult skill to learn as even I can play ana effectively but i don’t find her very fun in my opinion with 57 hours on her
Ana wasn’t underpowered as a hero people just think shes underpowered as a healer which i also strongly disagree with ana was never the worst healer. Ana kit can literally stop a team of triple heals from healing entirely how good of an ability is that? People just cant see that mercy is a true healer while ana zen and bri are atttack/def/healers. Mercy doesn’t really have the options other healers in terms of protecting themselves so she rightfully should have the best healing and i think it was a mistake to take it to 50hps.
EDIT: also mercy isn’t braindead like everyone says she does take skill, you have to know your opponents and watch your positioning alot since despite what everyone says mercy becomes the biggest target when she’s in the game everyone is gunning for you.
You said she requires “High mechanical skill” to play effectively, her skill is aim, and that’s not the hardest thing to learn What argument are you making then?
This has no relevance whatsoever, because this isn’t how balance works.
That’s why Ana can output healing, damage, utility, CC and has a strong ultimate. Mercy has meh healing, damage boosting, 1 insanely strong ability, mobility that relies on your team and a weak ultimate. Ana can also do her job from long distances, while Mercy has to get close. Mercy also trades off mechanical skill for consistent healing, and as such, her healing is fairly weak.
‘High skill’ heroes shouldn’t be the only viable heroes in the game. Otherwise, you may as well remove all the ‘low skill’ heroes. All heroes should be viable, and all should have unique strengths and weaknesses, meaning that switching heroes is encouraged.
Say you’re playing Ana, but the enemy flankers keep applying a ton of pressure to you. You should be able to switch to a ‘low skill’ healer who has more survivability, and not be absolutely useless to your team because “high skill heroes are more effective”.
For one, you’re making assumptions based on how 1% of the total playerbase plays. For two, you’re assuming this 1% is where Blizzard focuses their balance.
Blizzard balances their game for everyone. That’s their ideal vision of the game, making everyone happy at all times. To think they only balance the game for the top 1% of players is ludicrous, there’s no way anyone at Blizzard would think it’s a good idea to design their game so only 1% of its players are having a good, balanced time.
And we see that they don’t balance the game like this either. We hear it straight from the devs, when they say they don’t want a hero to be too strong or too weak in one range of play. Jeff on a dev update video even said they want to “have their cake and eat it too” when it comes to balancing the game for both professional and casual players. And we see that they strive for that in all of their changes to the game, it’s why a hero like Bastion was reworked so that they wouldn’t destroy lower ranked players all the time while also trying to make them more viable at the middle and upper ranks – at least as best as possible.
The stats you’re looking at, where Ana barely exceeds over Mercy? That makes sense and should be the case. Ana and Mercy aren’t too comp dependent, they tend to fill the same role and can swap places pretty easily, but one is clearly a more skill-oriented hero while the other is made for easy access. If the high skill hero isn’t beating out the low skill hero at the highest level of plays, and by a fair margin, then something is clearly wrong. Clearly the skill you need to put into the high skill hero isn’t receiving an equivalent reward, thus making it a waste of time to play that hero when an easier, simpler one gets better results.
Look at all ranks of play when figuring out hero balance. The game is balanced with everyone in mind, so it’s silly to only look at what a relative handful of players are doing – those that play in the most extreme corners of the game – and decide from there if a hero is too weak or too strong. You wouldn’t pull up Bronze stats and say “See? Clearly Mercy is waaaay overpowered, all this evidence from 1% of players says so.”
That all require exceptional mechanical skill to pull off. Mercy has decent healing that requires zero mechanical skill, strong damage boost that requires zero mechanical skill to use, Rez which is incredibly good for a number of reasons, incredible mobility that allows her to literally dominate the battlefield and make her hard to kill and has an incredibly strong ult (calling valkyrie weak is just laughable, I mean you are delusional if you think valkyrie is weak).
High skill heroes should be viable. That wasn’t the case for the number of months where Mercy was literally undeniably broken OP.
Yeah, and that’s why Mercy was nerfed. So other heroes can be viable.
» meta changes just go with it and stop being a crybaby everytime y main get nerfed (apply to all heroes)” They say this implying that since Mercy is close to a 50% winrate, she’s in a good spot or rather they are stating that a 50% winrate on a hero shows that they are balanced. ALRIGHT! HERE’S THE TEA!