Because contrary to what a lot of people think the devs aren’t completely bonkers. Mercy already struggles to climb, and blue beam is how she does it. If you ruin that you literally kill her. The only viable compensation buff is to allow Mercy herself to do damage and that is just as fatal because if Mercy mains wanted to pew-pew they could be playing another support.
They’re trying to give GA less uptime so you can play around her CD and punish her, and they gave her some compensation buffs at the same time because I really doubt the data even supports a net nerf.
If she’s genuinely ruined we can at least be fairly certain that she will get adjusted mid season, or for Season 4. Given the frequency of these balance patches personally I’m all for the devs doing a little experimentation.
This patch was a vast net gain for the entire player-base. Even Mercy one tricks have to be happier with the earnable credits, unlocked skins, match-making and comp adjustments, and many other things that just make the game objectively better.
Nah it wouldn’t. Tracer blink to 5s (technically, if you really wanted to be brutal with the comparison, Recall would go to 20s CD) would make Tracer a throw pick, no matter how you compensated her, unless you destroyed her identity in the process.
I’m not flying in to try and triage someone with 45 healing on tap. And if they are below 50%, and I need to GA to them to connect a beam, then they are most likely dead, or it would just be better to let Ana, Bap, or Kiriko throw heals out at that distance than for me to dive in with my shorter healing range.
And even if I flew in and saved someone low on health, the moment I break the 50% mark, I am back to crap healing at 45 again, while they are still engaged in a fight, so at best it’s a risky effort with little return. Again, Ana, Bap, Kiriko can all heal for more, from a greater distance, so I will leave that to them.
The best move sadly is just going to be sticking around whomever is near the back line, be it a support or dps, damage boosting, healing, and protecting (pocketing) them.
We’ll see how it goes soon enough. Might be good, might be bad, who knows?
I predict Tracer, Winston, and other highly mobile characters are going to have a field day murdering Mercy.
Holding the backwards directional input and canceling the ability with Jump now moves 20% slower
Caduceus Staff
Healing-per-second reduced from 55 to 45
Healing is increased by 50% for allies under half health
Regeneration Passive
Regeneration Passive removed
New Passive: “Sympathetic Recovery”
Mercy heals herself for 25% of healing done with the Caduceus Staff
Developer Comment: Replacing Mercy’s Regeneration passive with a more interesting interaction was something we wanted to do after all support heroes gained a similar version of it through their Role Passive.
For the Caduceus Staff change, this will empower Mercy even more as a triage healer and enable her to more often save low health allies. The overall time it takes to fully heal a 200-health hero from 1 hp is about the same as before.
For Guardian Angel, the cooldown increase is necessary to reduce the greatly increased mobility resulting from the recent rework to the jump cancel. It enabled Mercy to quickly launch herself long distances in any direction and be overly evasive for such a short downtime.
They gave her like two nerfs and two buffs. The nerf is minor. The buff is pretty signficant. Especially when other heroes got nerfed.
Tracer would get a power rework. You are just focusing on the nerf, but the changes were taking power away from mobility to put it somewhere else.
Mercy had the most mobility out of all the supports. Being able to effectively fly across the map every 1.5 seconds. Nerfing that to 2.5 seconds isn’t so bad especially with the compensation buffs given. All it stops is her spamming it so much. Like if you depended on that for everything they can make other adjustments like extending her beam linger range/ range of initiating beam.
If heroes are going to be changed every few seasons this is the sort of stuff we can expect in ow2.
I could barely murder a mercy in season 2. So I will see. It looks like some dive tanks got buffs like Sombra/Hammond interaction. They did say they want seasons to feel different. So them nerfing mercy and buffing other heroes mean other heroes may get the limelight in season 3. Season 4 I think brings a new hero? So they will proably get the limelight.
It means that she can’t reliably use her LOS bending on her beam for movement anymore. (cuts off after 2s)
It means she has to loiter around for nearly a whole second after a rez before she can dip, which will drop her rezzes per match at higher ranks from 4 to… like… 0. (Rez takes 1.75s)
She can’t maintain vertical height reliably anymore without constantly moving away from her team to make sure she has a full superjump when GA comes off cooldown…
I think most of those healers can out-heal even the <50% buff to heal beam, right? Like they all average in the 70-80+hps range. And someone under 50% is likely under fire, and GAing to them would just end up with two people feeding the enemy instead of one.
I forsee future battles being Pocketed Sojourn vs. Pocketed Sojourn. Whoever kills the other’s Mercy first wins.
I always found I had to time things juuuuust right to keep ahead of a capable Winston with the current GA cooldown. With this new delay, I suspect it will be nearly impossible. Same with a good Tracer.
As winston you just got murdered by her team mates. But I mostly flexed queued and played as Moira since support seems to be the worst for most people.
I really hated going against pharmercy. Her GA spam with that hero… she was untouchable. lol
Except the mercy problem you know and hate won’t go away. She’ll just be pocketing harder now, reserving her GAs for escape more than anything else.
They could have brought Mercy into line (if mercy was indeed a problem; I still think that Sojourn is the main issue) without these insane nerfs to the core of her kit.
I’m an idiot i’ll admit that. I just see these changes more so to encourage pocket healing not even damage boosting that much because thats how she’ll heal herself. Sure She can DB while not dmged or behind cover but she’s becoming a heal bot and nothing else. Like I said i’m an idiot just my take on the changes.
Yes shes still going to do that but it will happen less often and be more impactful.
She also does more healing, a nerf moira my most played character in ow2 due to flex queue.
67 hps vs 50 dps is more of a loss lol. She can save more people now especially with Valkryie healing now going up to 90 hps aoe.
Certain match ups will be harder with sustain nerfs.
Like junkrat got nerfed and his burst potential was hit hard. With healers like mercy pumping out more healing.
I think she will still be strong especially with the rein buffs.
Damage boosting that fireshot will be more deadly for example.
Hitscans also didnt get nerfed and some got buffs like soldier she’s still going to be strong. Rein looks like hes going to be meta, being able to 2 shot with firestrikes and one shot with his charge I predict he’ll be the new hog.
First off, 100% promise every good Mercy will still ping pong. That will be the optimal way and that is an absolute certainty. Maybe low ranked players will struggle with it but the way good players will play Mercy is unlikely to change in that regard. We bump this in 2 weeks and while the nerfs may or may not (likely not) change the ratio of her beam usage the fact that the reaction you have to being dove will not change… at all. The idea that it will is probably the irrational take I have seen about these changes.
Nerfing ping pong will make her more of a target but considering that she was not really a target before except by one shots, going from nothing (because unless you were Winston or had a one shot you did not really go after Mercy early) to something is not really the end of the world.
So basically is Mercy less mobile? For sure yes. Will Mercy stop ping ponging when dove? Absolutely not. Will these changes overall affect the ratio of heal/dmg beam? Unclear but I would suspect no.
Arguably that was unnecessary since new passive was healing her because widow was taking damage also. But it was not that it was just ‘spam for spam’ situation.
Niandra and Skiesti (both GM Mercy mains) agree with me, that this pushes her in to more pocket playstyle and discourages ping-pong.
But yeah, they are not good players i guess
It will change how you use GA. Now you won’t be using it as often, and you will save it to save yourself.
It is, since this is the only way for her to stay alive. Unlike every other support, that can use a defensive cooldown and shoot their way out of bad situation. She can only fly away… And consistent flanker wil go after her…
Absolutely yes. one second is a long time in this game.
