Did you ever stop and think that maybe this is intended? Maybe someone taking heavy damage is supposed to die and the enemy team deserves the kill? Maybe Blizzard wants heroes to be killable outside of Hanzo and Widow oneshotting them? Shouldn’t the tanks be soaking and protecting anyway?
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I think you’ve missed the point of my post. I’m not arguing about how much Mercy should be nerfed or what rank she should be balanced around. I’m saying stop nerfing Mercy’s power. Instead, buff her power and nerf her consistency. I’m saying that with a Mercy rework which accomplishes that, it is possible to balance the game so that Mercy is as effective as Ana at all ranks.
She’s the only support with a ressurect. And on 30s cooldown at that. That’s better than any kind of healing.
I don’t really see how that’s possible unless you plan on giving Mercy a difficult to aim heal beam.
Build em up, Break em down! Maybe they’ll make mercy so un-fun to play as that they will actually rework her in a fun and balanced way.
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I already listed several ways to make Mercy’s kit less consistent in my previous posts. A straight up revert to her pre-Valkyrie state wouldn’t be perfect, but it would at least be a positive gain toward the goal of decreasing Mercy’s consistency.
I think this was the wrong nerf, but come on. 50hps does not make her an off healer…
I don’t think the devs want to make Mercy difficult for low rank players.
I think they specifically want her to be the entry-level accessible healer.
Zen’s healing is even more accessible than Mercy’s healing. Mercy’s healing beam does not have to be changed to make the value of her whole kit more variable. It seems like you are stuck on the idea that there is no solution to the problem rather than focusing on how to come up with a solution.
There are an infinite number of specific ways that Mercy could be changed to both make her maximum potential difficult to reach and keep her healing easy to use.
Nah, it’s more like I’m mostly fine with how things are now, and with how much stress that the Mercy rework had been through, I don’t see the devs doing a radical redesign of Mercy.
There’s just not enough emotional bandwidth left for that.
Yep. Yesterday, I played as Mercy with a Lucio on my team for about 5 matches in a row - Lucio ended up with gold healing each time.
“You’re probably playing bad” for the first game or so? Yeah, probably. But 5 games in a row where I’m outhealed by Lucio is… something.
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There’s not enough emotional bandwidth left for some players to keep playing the game. I’ve pretty much run out of excitement for my favorite hero. A new rework would be welcome. It’s getting to the point where anything else would be better than what we have now, and I would be a lot more excited to try out a new rework/revert than I am to play any other hero right now.
Back at game launch, Lucio had lower healing but had a 30 meter range on his healing, and frequently out-healed Mercy as a result. I’m not surprised that the buff to his range and the direct nerf to Mercy’s healing back to its old value from the game’s launch has resulted in Lucio overtaking her healing output in many games.
Yeah, me neither. I’m just saying the shift these changes caused - if it were just the Mercy nerf it wouldn’t change much I think, but that’s not the case of course.
I’m happy Lucio is doing better though - looking forward to playing him again.
Well, the three rework ideas I came up with would be.
- Rez to be available only during Valk, on Q, negotiable cast time, and maybe create a brand new E ability.
- Two ultimates that share one meter, Mass Rez on Q, Valk on E
- Two ultimates on two meters, with Valk on Q, and single rez on E
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.
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You should check out this thread. Specifically, the rework proposed under the Solution section of Titanium’s post.
That rework incorporates most of the elements I have been requesting myself, especially with regard to how Resurrect functions as Mercy’s ultimate. If I changed anything about it, I would prefer a Valkyrie that enhanced pistol damage over the proposed Pacify ability on E.
Well, I may be wrong, but from my perception, any rework that starts with “Valkyrie: Removed.” It’s probably dead on arrival in the devs eyes.
Don’t try to overexaggerate it. Yes, it’s 20%, but 60 down to 50 is not that big of a downgrade. Making 600,000 compared to 500,000 dollars a year? They’re both livable wages.
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She still brings rez to the table and her pocket healing was way too strong. There is no reason she should be able to completely negate Winston’s damage. I’d love to see Valk get some slight buffs but I like where she is at.
I could understand that perspective, considering they’ve spent resources creating art assets for Valkyrie. That’s why my own rework suggestions always involve moving Valkyrie to E, so that they could re-use all of the art assets that they already created.
That said, they’ve already shown their willingness to simply erase certain changes that required new assets to implement, such as removing the “I will watch over you” voice line and replacing it with the old “Heroes never die!” Personally, I would forgive Blizzard for deleting Valkyrie in its entirety and never speaking of it again.