Mercy breakdown - what do people want

General Discussion
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Mercy is a very touchy subject. The goal of this post is to try to get an understanding of what people want of her and how do they want her to succeed in her role. This is not where we should get into specifics. We should breakdown who we want her to become and how that relates to other healers…

IE. a very quick rough overview of other healers and their roles
Ana- Utility sniper healer than can completely deny enemy ultimates with sleep and grenade. Can greatly boost team heals
Brigitte- an in your face support that punishes people who get too close. Big single click heals. Close range shield support. Only reliable heals at close range
Lucio- Utility healer with good environment potential. Very hard to catch and takes fire off of other targets. aoe aura.
Mercy- Best healer to keep a single target alive. Can bring teammates back to life.
Moira- highly mobile healer that requires resource. Sustain is not her strong suit but is good against flankers.
Zenyatta- hybrid healer/ damage dealer. Capable of dishing out tons of damage and a set and forget healing orb.

We have healers that excel at dealing damage, surviving, provide utility, secure kills, big aoe heals.. Every single hero heals with at least two abilities (technically one with lucio but burst heal on activate) other than mercy .and then…

We have a single target healer that excels at healing one target and keeping them alive which should be mercy. But she only has her beam. There is nothing else you can do for gameplay other than hold left click, be aware of your positioning and theirs. This is why she can be “boring” to play and why these healers feel helpless. Most people don’t care if she sucks, as long as she is fun.

Mercy needs something in her kit that provides extra healing. Her ultimate does not count because it does not provide additional healing to the same target. It only adds to the frustrating of - I popped my ult, there is nothing more i can do besides heal/ damage boost.

Resurrect will never be balanced as a basic ability, (my opinion, others will disagree), but you can help by looking at it in a different direction. Right now her resurrect is the only thing that’s keeping her at her current state. You can’t buff her more because res is too impactful and you cant just make it a longer cd or longer to resurrect, it would be near useless. So. Make it harder to res a target. If blizz is so bound by making resurrect a basic ability then make it so that her staff provides a lingering soul effect. Only targets that have been recently healed by mercy within the last 5 seconds can be res’d.

Now you can start making it so that she is more balanced. You could half the time it takes to res someone but make it so the aura only lasts 3 seconds instead of 5. This will make mercy more difficult to play but have a bigger impact on focusing healing on targets who are about to die. This ENFORCES the opposite of hide and res. Now her ultimate directly helps with resurrect in that regard too as healing will provide the lingering aura.

At that point you can still tweak numbers and get a desired balanced result between impact and risk vs reward. However, we are still left with the same issue. She cannot provide more healing than 60 hps. I would propose a change that gives her a second ability that “charges” her staff.

new basic ability: Caduceus Surge: Mercy charges her staff, able to heal an additional 30 hps to her main target. The first initial heal of her staff after winding up will give the target ADRENALINE - remove cc afflicted to target ( - does not prevent cc. (does not branch off during ult.)
-1 second wind up - can be interrupted
-cannot heal, damage boost or switch to her pistol while winding up.
-lasts 5 seconds
-does not affect chained targets through valk
-adrenaline does not provide cc immunity only removes it.

There has to be cons associated to an extra ability and her resurrect should be hard to pull off. It should feel REWARDING resurrecting a hero. Not just, oh it’s on cooldown sorry, wait till next team fight.

I’m just spit-balling the idea of adding an extra ability, as long as her ult provides more healing, with a reduced duration, it would provide more impact and help keep her in line with other healers.

7 Likes
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And, ya know, she starts solo healing effectively. But I like the lingering soul effect, but what on earth would you trade for it? Higher damage boost makes widow one shot on body shots, higher healing boost makes her solo heal way too well, and better valk… well you saw the reaction to that.

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The goal of this post is to try to get an understanding of what a few people representing a portion of the mercy community that also happens to post on forums want

IFTFY

4 Likes
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the only thing that i can say is that she needs something that gives her boosted single target healing for a short duration at a cost.

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Amp it up goes up to 47 hps for 3 seconds only, how is that burst healing?

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baja can you provide feedback on the topic above. if you disagree state why. posting what you did doesnt provide any value to this thread. If you have an opinion, please elaborate and support your ideas.

Thank you

2 Likes
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Well most of us would be having a lot more fun if he skill ceiling was increased.

its fine that shes easy to pick up and play but we would like it more if she was hard to master as atm its pretty hand holdy with e being given to us on a silver platter,valk taking away beam juggling for 15 seconds and flying makes positioning trivial as you will just hide behind a building or die before you can make use of your ult.

Her base kit of her staff pistol and ga would be fine if she had 60 hps which is what most people feel is the baseline for a main healer.

Option 1

so going by this theres afew ways to proceed we can rework mass rez, give it los,short cast time, and remove invuln on mercy, perhaps give her some e to compensate for these nerfs since in 1.0 she struggled to mass rez without dieing.

Option 2

We turn valk into a single target beam that gives boosted healing, but for damage boost it keeps its aoe chain beams since tweaking mercy damage beams is pretty finnicky.

Super jump into a feature and rework rez on e or scrap it for something that doesn’t way down mercy’s base kit as it will only work on ulti.

Option 3

We drastically rework mercy and replace her e and ulti to something that better reflects her hyper mobile main healer role.

Option 4

Make Mercy into a fallen angel mutation/monster having been brainwashed by talon and experimented on and make her into a hybrid support/dps.

This one is abit more out there but hey it could be interesting to see an ingame lore progression, especially with someone like mercy who’s just been so devoid of lore.

Those are afew solutions to the problems people are having with 2.0

4 Likes
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in his case it’s burst healing because he is tripling his healing output. It’s basically a mercy ult at slightly less healing.

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Yes! Give Mercy her skill ceiling back and make her more strategic again please.

1 Like
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What do you mean by “give it back”? Are you asking for her to be reverted in some way? Because hiding without LoS and mass rezzing an entire team you yelled at to all die on the point wouldn’t increase her skill ceiling whatsoever – it would lower it even lower than it is now.

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Thats not how I played her ever at all. Some people abused that for the broken SR gains and Blizzard should have fixed that way earlier.

Reverting would be the easiest way I think. They already have all the stuff and only need to tweak that instead of making something entirely new. By giving back her skill ceiling I mean the strategy behind mass-rez and yes it had one if people can accept that or not. Here is a thread explaining it better than I ever could.

2 Likes
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Ideally, Mercy would be a hero who is picked for her ability to consistently and effectively heal teammates through sustained damage.
I know OP doesn’t want to get into specifics, but it’s hard not to bring it up when talking about what I’d like to see Mercy’s role as. Ignoring resurrect, I thought 60 hps and 30% damage boost Mercy was perfect for this role. However, resurrect gives her so much utility that she can’t heal that well without being an OP monster, which isn’t what I (or most Mercy mains) want. Seeing a teammate in danger and flying in to save them was why I played and loved Mercy, but now it just feels like you’re prolonging their death rather than actually saving them.

2 Likes
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I want:

More chances for skill expression. To me, this means having an ult (and preferably also an E ability) with a wide range of impact (which extends into the ability/ult backfiring if misused). The better you are with gamesense and thinking on your feet, the more impactful you’d be with mercy’s kit.

QoL tuning to Guardian Angel and angelic descent: I want the superjump to be made official, and a “contextual” GA targeting option that combines the behaviors of the default “Guardian Angel prefers beam target on/off” targeting modes. I also want Angelic Descent to be a proper glide instead of just a featherfall.

Restore the high risk/high reward skill ceiling. While Mercy should maintain her skill floor of “play it safe for guaranteed value”, her maximum value should only be attainable by demonstrating a mastery of gamesense, strategy, and risk/reward assessment. Just as a godlike Widowmaker represents the pinnacle of FPS skill in Overwatch, a godlike Mercy would represent the pinnacle of MOBA skill.

4 Likes
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I want a kit that promotes aggressive play.

When my Genji dives in, I like diving in with him. let some other ho babysit Pharah

1 Like
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People think they say they want mercy to be fun but people write stuff like “she shoudl be the strongest healers” “shes a throw pick” etc which are all unrelated to how fun something is. Jeff was right in his analysis. A lot of people want her to be the best- they just dont realise they do. Shes not in a bad spot at 50hps, and with the valk buffs, if jeff thinks it will make her OK (it prolly will ngl) then anyone asking for some reallly extravagant buffs wants her to be OPAF.

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What I personally want with Mercy is simple. I want her to be brought back to where she was truly engaging, impactful, rewarding to play, and balanced. I want a Revert + The tweaks. :blush:

~Sincerely Yours xoxo,
a Lover of True, Fair, and Fun Balance.
xavvypls :blue_heart:

3 Likes
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AGREED
That would be Ana’s job anyway but instead she spends the time shooting her down.

4 Likes
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Which is interesting because apparently, at 50 hps she is literally more effective than lucio while in valk since she doesn’t need to be anywhere near the fight and the branches are pretty close to Lucio’s range (lucio is 12m, chain healing on valk is 10m) yet somehow people call her “trash” when compared, specially with her buff to 60 hps… nevermind the fact that it lasts 4 times that of amp it up and that Mercy herself is being healed a ton more than what Lucio heals himself

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yes but we are comparing lucios basic ability to mercy’s ultimate.

Isn’t that kind of odd? Lucio has arguably better evasiveness than mercy in valk.

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and as you’d expect, Mercy’s is more powerful when looked at numbers-wise and her evasiveness is still pretty high considering you acquire movement on vertical axis plus GA speed is increased while in valk

So while yes Lucio’s ability cuts close to Mercy’s ult, it still falls short