On Moira it’s called managing your abilities and the passive of Moira’s spray. She has a heal over time for even the smallest of heal spray that hits anyone that if used properly can be kept going most of the time, and her orb can either heal or damage. Throw your heal orb to sustain the team healing and damage the enemy with biotic grasp to restore healing resource. Shoot the whole team with either small amounts or large amounts of healing resource but never fully heal up with it because of the heal over time aspect. If you’re trying to finish out the team fight and need the extra damage on someone not within the death ball your team is fighting, throw the damage orb to finish them off and heal up your team, or throw the healing orb to give a powerful spike in raw healing per second. Moira has choices and she can both spike the largest healing per second for a short time, and she can spike huge very respectable damage, or spread them out over time. Managing that in the middle of combat is her greatest utility. You should in general never have a point in time where you are completely fully capped on healing resource and have your orb off of cool down otherwise you are just not using Moira as effectively as you could.
As far as Ana goes, she heals and damages with the same shot, so while not specifically at the exact same time, Ana takes far less than Mercy’s 1.2 second swap off her staff to bring out her weapon, then trigger time to fire, then the 1.2 second swap back, then trigger time to start healing again. To fire a shot and swap back on Mercy, thats almost 3 seconds, or almost the same time to reload twice as Ana. Ana simply needs to hit the target she wants to heal/damage and its automatic. Ana still needs some help in her damage/healing output, but she’s right on a razors edge of being too powerful if they boost her healing or damage too much, or boost her nade too much, so I don’t have an answer to bring her into perfectly in line with other supports without bringing back the unyielding supremacy of Ana that we saw after her release until she got wrecked.
Now, I’m not going to get into the topic of which healer heals more based on theory crafting versus actual game performance versus ideal situations because that is an impossible moving target and a strawman. I’m simply going to point out that Mercy’s been said to intentionally be able to do the most healing over the match. She no longer does. The reason this is important is because design wise, Mercy is the most pure support and as such her healing should be overall on average the strongest over the course of the match outside of niche situations that play to other healers strengths more beneficially because she does less damage and less of anything else other than healing. (Not touching Rez in that, because we all know that it’s a hot mess because the developers refuse to balance it.)
Now, as stupid as it may be, I’m taking that stance because I’m going to take this at face value:
But who on earth is the lead designer to determine the design of the heroes in the game? I mean obviously the community knows better than the dude who leads the hero’s design how they’re supposed to be designed and function, so big whoop if the healer who is supposed to pump out the most heals over a match no longer pumps out the most heals over a match? I’m sure that’s not a problem. /s
The fact that she no longer does the most over a match and contradicts the developers statements, it seems like it’s time to either admit that this is Mercy’s role and to quit laying into those that play her for trying to do exactly as she is stated to be intended to be doing, or let Mercy no longer be tied to doing the most healing at the expense of doing so little damage.
I mean, it’s not like Battle Mercy’s wreck people silly in PTR (yes we did, and B.R.U.T.A.L.L.Y did so by the way), so what on earth does anyone have to fear if Mercy can do damage and heal at the same time if her player base is supposedly so unskilled and if she’s going to be pushed more towards the efficiency and potency of an off healer? I’d take that trade off just to force everyone to shut up about the “lack of skill it takes to play Mercy because she doesn’t have to aim”.
Moira does significantly more damage than Mercy does, and can heal the same in most matches that Mercy can heal for. Brig gives CC and protection at the cost of healing effectiveness but gives only a couple thousand less total health than Mercy when considering both armor and healing combined and the damage reduction from the armor. Ana gives the freedom to heal/damage and buff/debuff enemies with minimal switch time in addition to being able to shut down via sleep dart, and mass boost healing or mass deny healing through her nade, and heal more than Mercy if you remove barrier blocking. Lucio gets wall ride for self reliant independent mobility, plus permanent regen or speed as well as giving healing or movement to the team while still being able to damage at the same time, not to mention a defensive ult that can stop team wipes. As implied by Geoff’s post, they are all intended to heal less over the course of the match, and looking at damage/boost on Mercy versus damage and offensive stats on other healers, it dwarfs Mercy. There is a clear correlation, so it’s logical to assume flexibility comes at a cost of specialty. If Mercy is no longer going to be the healing specialist that you can count on to reliably get the most healing, she needs the flexibility afforded to other healers to do more than just heal.
Who am I kidding though, you clearly don’t care about this or about Mercy being actually and fairly balanced; only about her being weaker than anyone else. Otherwise I wouldn’t even have to explain this.