[Long post] Mercy's current state (And an alternative kit)

General Discussion
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Yesterday, I started a thread where I asked you "Why do you think Mercy needs changes?"

The thread now has nearly 200 replies.
Thank you everyone who posted their opinion there.

Although I personally think that Mercy doesn’t need any major kit changes at the moment, I’d like to post my thoughts here on Mercy’s current kit, what I like about her and present my potential Mercy rework, if it was going to happen.

First of all, I should introduce myself.

I’m a GM Mercy player with around 350-400 hours on Mercy across multiple accounts.
Season 3 was the first season I participated in. Placed 2100-ish, ended 2900.
I’ve managed to reach GM in seasons 5, 10 (Huge jump from season 5 to season 10, I didn’t play Mercy during that time because I didn’t like her OP/mustpick state), 12 and 13. (Season 13 was my last season before I completely stopped playing Overwatch due to being burned out)

Why should you listen to me? Well, you shouldn’t if you don’t want to. I’m not here to change your opinion or to manipulate you. But I think that I have a lot of experience with how players and heroes behave on the basic competitive ladder, mainly with Mercy.

Before I start with the main topic, I’d like to share my view on the removal of mass resurrect

While the feelings about mass resurrect have played their role in its removal, it’s definitely not the main reason it was removed and most definitely not the only reason.

Mass resurrect had many balance issues. I’ve seen many threads suggesting that Blizzard should bring back mass resurrect with a cast time, a line of sight requirement and other tweaks. Do you really think they didn’t test that?

Another problem is that mass resurrect as a concept simply doesn’t really work for all levels of competitive play.

  • Players in lower levels lack general “skills,” (game sense, awareness, mechanical abilities…), mass resurrect is problematic in lower ranks because people there don’t know how to play around it.

  • On the other hand we have the highest levels of play, where players know what to do to stay alive as long as possible, know how to play around an enemy Mercy and such… Mercy’s old ultimate simply wasn’t any useful.

Now back to the topic of this thread…

What Mercy is now…

Mercy is currently presented as a “highly mobile and effective main healer.” Mercy is very mobile, no doubt about that. Effectiveness lies in the hands of the player, so I’m not going to use mine or others’ personal experiences as an argument.

However, the playerbase has created 2 subroles for each role. Main (insert role) and off (insert role). While the main/off subrole for each hero changes depending on the currently ongoing meta, it has never changed for Mercy until quite recently.

Mercy went from an (arguably) effective and consistent main healer, to this weird spot in between being a main and an off support.

  • If we want Mercy to be a proper main healer, we have to take some power from her utilities and push those powers onto her healing.
  • If we want Mercy to be a proper off healer, we need to focus on making her utilities and damage output more effective than her healing or to be on par with her healing. Which doesn’t make sense since she’s the only “pure healer” in the game, meaning she’s mostly focused on supporting her allies.

Mercy is mostly effective with mobile (dive), low healthpool compositions, where her job is to be literally “on multiple places at once” to support her allies. AND static (cheese) compositions, where she completely relies on her utilities to be effective.

Mercy can still be versatile, but she’s going to have a much tougher time than before, because her healing is not as strong as it used to be. It’s safe to say that the 50 HP/s healing nerf degraded her to this weird role.

As of right now, her main purpose should be damage boosting, whether you’re juggling from target to target or pocketing a single ally, anything will work better than focusing on “having a gold medal for healing.”

Why do I like her as she is right now? (My personal thoughts)

She’s unique. Her current role is what defines her the best than the previous iterations.

A “pure support,” who partially relies on her teammates, (yes, partially) and is able to quickly switch to being an effective mindplaying machine. Here’s my point;

While Mercy is not the most mechanically skillful hero there is, she most definitely is one of the most “game sense, brain” requiring heroes. That’s why I like her. Playing her almost feels like solving a puzzle, it’s a feeling that I’ve never felt when playing her previous versions.

What’s good and what’s bad on the current kit.

Let’s start with the good things.

I absolutely love the encouragement Blizzard are pushing on us to use our pistol more frequently. Not only it can be a fight-winning factor, but it also gives you the satisfaction and the “hero moment” we all so crave for.
Another thing is her superjump feature (yes, feature. If it was a bug, it would’ve already been fixed by removing Mercy’s “slingshot” ability, because super jump is based on the whole mechanic.)

And here comes the bad thing…

I believe that Resurrect’s powers could be used somewhere else. Resurrect holds too much power for being just an ability. That’s why she might feel like a lackluster to many people (and also why it has the longest cooldown in the game.)

…and what Mercy could be

Before I get on presenting my potential Mercy kit, I’ll post a few notes I made from your contributions in my last topic.

  • Mercy should be a main healer.
  • Mercy should be more single-target focused and less AoE focused.
  • Mercy’s healing output is lacking.
  • Mercy’s skill expression capabilities are too low.
  • Valkyrie is a low effort ability or too safe to use.
  • Resurrect holds too much power.
  • Resurrect should be on a resource meter/part of ultimate.
  • Resurrect interrupts the flow of her fluid, fast-paced gameplay.

(Not saying I agree with all of them, but I won’t let my own thoughts influence the changes I’m about to “make.”)

  • Caduceus Staff
    • Healing per second increased from 50 to 60

Comments:
Mercy’s underwhelming healing output has put Mercy in a spot where other supports are a more viable choice than Mercy. She was degraded to a position where she doesn’t really fit well with any composition where an ally tank’s healthpoor is bigger than 500. This change should help her get back to being a viable healer in more compositions.

  • New secondary ability: On call
    • Replacement for Resurrect
    • Duration: 4 seconds
    • Cooldown: 12 seconds
    • Activate to gain chain damage boost on a resource meter
    • Upon activation, Mercy recieves a resource meter worth 4 seconds of chain damage boosting.

Comments:
Although very situational with just 4 seconds, chain damage boost is what makes Mercy very effective nowadays, so I decided to reintroduce it as an ability on cooldown. The reason why I decided to place it on a resource meter is to allow her to quickly heal an ally in need while maintaining the ability’s duration.

  • New ultimate ability: Resurrect
    • Replacement for Valkyrie
    • Ultimate charge required: 2350 (Worth 31.3 seconds of constant healing)
    • Duration: 7 seconds
    • Activate to gain 2 resurrect charges.
    • Each resurrect charge has a 0.65 second cast time (Same as Sombra’s hack) and a 30% slowness debuff while casting.

Comments:
Many people see Resurrect in the place of a casual ability as a limit to Mercy’s other abilities’ powers. New Resurrect gives Mercy back her fun decision making and makes for an impactful ultimate ability.

EDIT:

  • Replaced Dual beams with On call.
  • Reduced the ultimate charge required for Resurrect.
  • Increased Resurrect’s duration.

EDIT 2:

  • Buffed On Call by making chain damage boost based off of a resource meter.

I want to thank everyone who read the whole post and to everyone who participated in my last thread.

See you later.

~ A Mercy enthusiast

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I honestly don’t want to lose the power and versatility brought by Valkyrie, and I dont want to have any form of rez in the game except for single rez

sorry dude, I do appreciate the work that went into this…

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Nice post, it must have taken a good while to gather all the data.

I think the 60HPS will help her somewhat and is a worthwhile start to re-balancing her.

Single resurrect should certainly be removed. However, I would replace it with a shorter version of Valkyrie on her E. Something like Torbs Overload. Too many people like playing Battle Mercy to ditch it now.

Having multiple resurrect charges as an Ult would work well and was fun before she was trashed. It would need tweaking to stop her being OP. Possibly 3 charges rather than 2 to give it real impact.

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Excuse me? That’s an absolute no.

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I applaud your decision to to restrict personal bias as much as possible from your post. It’s very informative, and reads very professionally.

Before I continue, I should probably identify which camp(s) I’m in concerning Mercy. I agree with everything in your list:

But I also have some additions:

  • Mercy’s E should do something completely new, that doesn’t have anything to do with beams or mobility
  • Mercy can function just fine with a 50hps beam, but only if her E ability provides clutch healing in times of need. It would provide some engaging cooldown management, too.
  • It’s okay for Moria to surpass Mercy in healing output, since Moira has no utility at all. Moira has snatched the “go-to for raw heals” crown from Mercy, and that’s okay (and even healthy for the game) for Mercy to be forced to find a new niche in the healer roster.
  • Mercy would be the ideal healer to become the game’s go-to counter to cc comps, which is a niche that hasn’t been filled yet (and desperately needs to be). Angels give blessings. Doctors cure illnesses. Mercy is both, which makes her uniquely suited for the role of guarding her allies against nasty ailments and status effects.

On the topic of mass rez: I liked rez as an ult (or as I prefer to call it, “multirez/AoE rez”) for how iconic it was, it’s high risk/reward factors (it could even backfire if misused), and how it could counter ult spam.

I’d prefer a form of AoE rez to come back, but with appropriate counterplay that makes it feel fair to play against. The old multirez’s simultaneous biggest strength and greatest weakness was how much it relied on the element of surprise: it worked so well in the low ranks because it was easy to surprise players who don’t pay very good attention, while it was much weaker in the high ranks where it’s extremely hard to surprise anyone.

I currently favor a “proactive rez” ult idea that has Mercy cast a blessing on living teammates, and if they die with the blessing active they’ll revive. Exactly how this is done, and any additional effects is completely open for discussion.

I want Mercy to have more opportunities for skill expression, in the areas of gamesense, mindgames and timing.

I want a lot of that to be offered in Mercy’s ult, but I also want this skillset for Mercy’s E. As mentioned earlier, I want a healing ability on E to supplement Mercy’s base 50hps. But I also think it’s reasonable for it to provide some additional utility (namely anti-cc), that can be valuable if used at the right time.

My current favorite idea for an E ability is Cure. It cleanses an ally of status effects, then provides a few seconds of HoT and cc resistance (reduced duration on cc timers).

The HoT (heal over time) effect can be stacked with Mercy’s beam for a burst heal effect, which lets Mercy handle tanks even with 50hps base healing. However: it’s important to note that a character buffed with cc resistance can still get stunned out of casting abilities.

I’d love to hear your opinions and feedback about “proactive rez” and “cure”. Would they mesh well with your Mercy playstyle?

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I don’t think “pro-active” rez is a good idea, simply because it’s just another form of immortality. Makes the targets not worth killing for a short period of time, because tey’ll get rezzed anyway.

But I can see how this would become much more annoying than classic AoE rez for others.

We’d have to see it in game to judge, though. Although I can already tell that this would be as useless in higher levels as old mass rez.

That’s one of the reasons it was removed.

While Cure sounds like a cool ability that a lot of people have been suggesting, I think it would make Mercy a bit too good. She’d be the only support with an anti-cc ability and considering that 19 out of 30 heroes have some sort of a CC ability (stuns/boops…), she’d be picked just for this one ability.

We’d have to come up with something completely new or something we already know. It has to be a very minor thing, considering that her healing in this iteration back to 60 HP/s and some powers have been shifted to her ultimate.

The point of this iteration of Resurrect is to use it as a tempo rez.

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Agreed with this one.

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Thanks for making this, it’s an excellent post. It’s good to see the debate handled well.

A few assorted random point:

  1. Once the community created the sub roles, it’s unhealthy for a hero to be in a weird space between them. Heroes that don’t fall well into prescribed roles tend to be pretty bad. My guess is that the majority of the Mercy player base prefer the main healer play style. This is also the play style that Blizzard seems to have in mind for her. I think she should be balanced accordingly.

  2. Mercy is not great in the current meta. Part of that is due to the fact that her not being great leads to metas where dps aren’t played as much. In order for a dps comp to gain relevance, it needs tanks and healers that work well with it. Mercy and Zen are the natural candidates for the healer slots, but in order for that to work they have to be good enough to heal such a comp. For instance, Mercy should be able to keep someone up when they’re being attacked by Winston (who is currently keeping dps strongly in check in the anti-GOATS match up). Instead of buffing the whole dps roster, it would be simpler to buff their enabler.

  3. All that being said, I don’t think Mercy is very far from where she needs to be. All she needs is a bit more healing, either directly or indirectly. I would prefer a straight up hps increase (maybe with a compensating nerf to res), but there are other ways of going about it.

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Also making her into a main healer is the only solution here, since she’s the only pure support in the game.

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One thing that I would really want (and that I think would benefit this type of discussion) is a better definition of what consitutes a main healer vs. off healer, and what constitutes a pure healer vs. a hybrid healer.

As far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any strong form of consensus about these terms. I think the clarity would help, and would also help people evaluate heroes better. It’s hard to evaluate a kit in a vacuum, it’s much easier to do so when you judge it in relation to a specific role.

Whatever the definition of the roles is, I hope it ends up being functional in the following sense: a comp consisting of 2 dps, main tank, off tank, main healer, off healer, 2 dps should be Okay regardless of the choice of healer pairing.

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This was way more thorough than your other posts.

Good job!

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Well, that’s not something the devs decide. It’s about how the playerbase decides to label the heroes.

But nowadays;

  • Main healer
    • A support capable of consistently sustaining the whole team alone or with little help in exchange for providing less utility
  • Off healer
    • A support providing helpful utilities to their team in order to get more value in team fights
  • Pure healer
    • A support who’s focus is to mainly support their team. Their own offensive abilities are a second thought/last resort.
  • Hybrid healer (2 options, depending on how you look at it)
    • A support who can fill in multiple roles
    • A support whose offensive and supportive capabilities are on par

Thank you!

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I agree that this is something the player base decides, though I think it does end up influencing how the devs think about new heroes. I think that this is a good start for these definitions, but I’m not convinced about them yet.

Right now there’s reasonable disagreement whether or not Mercy is a main or off healer. I think, according to these definitions, that a separate question can be raised about Ana. She certainly provides helpful utilities to her team in order to get more value in team fights, and I don’t think she trades utility for higher sustain. A separate question can also be asked about Lucio.

I think one problem is this - when you say “A support capable of consistently sustaining the whole team alone or with little help”, it doesn’t mention the composition of the rest of the team and it doesn’t mention what sustain is. This ends up being a problem for all the main healers.

For Mercy, the issue is that she can struggle doing this when there are two tanks. It’s certainly not impossible to do that with her, but it can often feel like her throughput just isn’t sufficient for that sort of comp.

For Ana the issue is different. Ana has very high variance on her healing. It can be insane, and it can be negligible. To compensate for this she has amazing utility and decent damage for a healer. The problem begins with the fact that Ana can mitigate her variance by having her team go tank heavy. This happens every time Ana is in the meta. It’s almost the equivalent of Widowmaker being able to choose which heroes the other team chooses so that she has an easier time landing shots.

I don’t have a better definition myself aside from a functional experimental one. By playing many games on randomized 2-2-2 comps, and seeing whether the average healing for the various healers falls into two large groups.

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That’s basically the TF2 medic so I like it

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See? This is why overwatch needs to allow mods

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Not sure what mods would achieve other than testing things out when PTR isn’t.

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Exactly, if there are mods then the people who want for example old mercy with mass rez can just hop on community servers and play it and the people who hate it don’t have to. Instead of begging the devs to force EVERYONE to play with it. It’s a matter of having multiple versions of overwatch with changes to please the people who really want those changes while giving the ones who are against it a choice to play a version without it. Instead of forcing everyone to play one version that tries to comprimise and please everyone at once, but just ends up pleasing nobody.