Mercy confuses me

General Discussion
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I seriously cannot be the only one that feels this way, but i have to admit that mercy as a hero in 2020 overwatch just confuses me.

What is she supposed to be, what purpose is she supposed to serve as a support that isn’t provided by other supports in a much better fashion?

Moiras healing is just way better than mercy’s, hands down. And while mercy’s gun does more dps than moiras beam, mercy’s projectiles are slow af and hard to hit while moiras beam connects instantly and has quite a forgiving hit box.

Ana has so much utility that even if she isn’t outhealing your teams mercy, then her sleeps, anti nades and nano boosts are enough to carry a fight over mercy’s god awful 50 healing.

Lucio has aoe healing, CC with his (i forgot the official name, but his boop), and his speed boost which has made him meta for like 900 seasons. Not to mention his sound barrier is probably one of the most powerful ultimates in the game. AND EVEN if we disregard all of that, lucio can stall a point for an obnoxious amount of time.

Zenyatta’s healing is really weak but that is more than made up with the fact that his discord orb is essentially mercy’s damage boost but applied to the whole team with much better range, not just one person. Not to mention zen can have his healing and discord orb up at the same time AND also be doing damage. Mercy cannot heal, damage boost and have her pistol out at the same time. Forget all three, she cant even do two at the same time. And his ultimate transcendence can single handedly make everyone on your team essentially undamageable while healing them for 300 HP every second giving it immensely high teamfight carry potential.

Brig has terrible mobility outside of her cute lil’ shield bash she does, but she has 250 HP, a 200 HP shield, her primary healing is AOE so even if she doesn’t use her repair packs, her just being present in the fight will provide around the same heals as lucio. But her repair pack already has more HPS than mercy but it also OVERHEALS giving temporary armour which is more resistant to incoming damage than the normal HP that mercy provides.

We have baptise who has the same healing as mercy (50) but is AOE and can get more than one shot off in 1 second making his hps more than mercy’s. Not to mention he can layer that healing on his aoe shift healing ability. His immortality field is good, we don’t need to get into that. Even tho his immortality field is probably poorly used in most situations, AT LEAST ITS AN OPTION.

So now we come back to mercy who is almost 100% team reliant. Her primary healing is so freaking weak compared to the other main healers (moira and ana). But then all of her utility is either too weak (damage boost is a dollar store version of zens discord orb) or too situational (rez is loud, predictable, requires babysitting, makes you so vulnerable) that she can’t be considered an off healer.

You run mercy+off healer ? Low healing output, You run mercy with a main healer ? No strong defensive ult. Mercy has both a low single target healing output and a very weak defensive ult. It’s a lose lose to pick mercy.

So mercy is just confusing to me. Isn’t mercy supposed to be the games main healer ? But now she’s become less of a healer and more of an accessory to ashe and pharah.

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More of the fact the game has moved on to be something that really doesn’t fit her playstyle.

She’s always been pretty team reliant but with the push for more individual power she’s been left behind.

Mainly because last time she had individual power she was a complete broken mess.

Pretty sure the devs gave up on her since that rework and the fall out is still “fresh” despite being…what 2 years ago?

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I agree. Mercy in her pre-rework state was a bit too strong, but there were definitely a million other ways they could have approaches this rework without gutting her. And when i say “gutting” i don’t mean brig style, where they just nerf everything about her serverely.

They gut mercy in very weird ways that left her in a strange limbo of not being too weak of a healer to be an off healer, but not leaving her too strong to be a main healer. Which is worse than full on just making her an off healer. And while they didn’t straight up nerf her stats as severely as brig, this in between state is probably a lot weaker than she would be if they nerfed her healing more and buffed her utility to make her an off healer.

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To be Mercy reliable again, devs need to combine her beams into one and replace the pistol on right click. Done.

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I don’t think combining the 2 beams is the right way, but having the ability to immediately shoot when pressing M2 sounds pretty interesting.

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Um her Pre-Rework state was Mass Rez-ie her “throw pick” era. I’m talking about when she had Valk 1.0 (not to be confused with Beta Valk).

I mean she’s more usable then she was with MR, but yeah she’s in that limbo area of not really a main or off healer.

Run her with off healers, you don’t have the healing output and your tanks can suffer.

Run her with a main healer and you lack a defensive ult.

Heck, she got muscled out of Dive when that came back briefly–by Brig!

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Sorry if i wasn’t clear but valk 1.0 is what i was referring to aswell, back when she could Valk and pull off 2 rez with invincibility frames.

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Moira will eventually run dry and cooldowns will be counting away, Mercy will never run dry, period. That’s an advantage that no other Support has at the rates that Mercy heals at.

Oh, 50 healing per second is god awful now? Must mean that Lucio’s healing aura and Baptiste’s healing are terrifyingly bad and should be deleted from the game, right?

Just god-absolutely-awful. 50 healing per second, for free, at no cost. Just terrible, absolutely terrible.

A lot of false information here. Transcendence does not stop damage, Zenyatta is immune, but everyone will die to Self-destructs, Meteor Strikes, and headshots from Widowmaker, and similar.

But 60 healing per second in area effect greater than Lucio’s is terrifyingly bad, awful, and worthless. Clearly, Mercy is at a disadvantage here to such a degree, why, not Brigitte can outdamage Mercy’s healing. So useless, gotta remember how absolutely awful Mercy is.

It’s lower than Mercy’s actually, but you don’t factor in travel time ever. Nor ammo, nor reload times, or the possibility of missed shots, or the possibility of only hitting one target. Clearly, Mercy is more terrible.

30% damage boost versus 25% defense down. Clearly Mercy is terrible here. No cost damage boosts are always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS bad and worthless. Clearly.

Clearly, again, 60 area effect healing per second virtually free for 15 seconds is not defensive at all. You’re not even mitigating right? Terrible.

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I mean 60hps doesn’t really heal through much anyway. She was bumped up to 60hps and that was before we had:

More Burst Healing
More Burst Damage
More CC
More Healers
More Tanks
2-2-2

Healing Valks are some of the worse too. No flash an no real substance. And can be mowed down with focus fire.

Personally I run her like a off healer without an ult and just focus on Damage Boosting.

Valk is basic, but wouldn’t call it terrible. Lackluster definitely-and some just get more use out of it by treating it like a cooldown than an ult.

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You do realise that moira can actually refill her healing right ?

yes 50 single target healing for a main healer is god awful in comparison to moira who can do 130 aoe heals with her orb+primary and ana who has 70 per shot and can use her nade

Also again, you clearly didn’t read what i said. Lucio is an off healer. Yes his healing is naturally weaker than mercy but it’s ok because his utility makes up for it. Read what i say before spewing this none sense.

Completely ignoring the part where i said essentially. If you don’t understand what certain words in the english language mean, search it up on google, don’t just act like i never said them. Of course you’re damageable… i said ESSENTIALLY. That’s why most smart people don’t waste their cool downs attacking people being affected by trans. Wow you literally read one word of each of my sentencws and draw conclusions from that.

Again, you’re just being silly here. my exact point was the fact that it’s okay for off healers to not have healing as strong as moira. because the rest of their kit makes up for their poorer healing. Mercy’s doesn’t.

I assume you’re talking about valk? Yeah 15 seconds of the match where you provide less than half the healing of moira is pretty bad if that’s the ABSOLUTE BEST HEALING A “MAIN HEALER” IS ABLE TO PROVIDE. Your ultimate is supposed to be your strongest state, it’s just a bit laughable that mercy’s strongest healing state in her ult is weaker than both moira and anas primary fire. Forget nade and forget healing orb, mercy’s aoe healing is still weaker.

i mean, yeah, with all of that considered mercy is still a poorer support. everyone knows and accepts it. She’s not a team healer like she should be, she’s a dps pocket which isn’t what she was designed to be.

Ok 5% difference, sure. But mercy needs to be near her target to damage boost which makes her vulnerable, zen can stick an orb on an enemy and have multiple people focus them down. So tell me again how damage boost is better than discord orb ?

Again, mercy is designed to be a main healer, yet in her highest healing output state, provides less heals than moira can provide with her primary ALONE. Let alone her orb, or orb+coalescence. That is poor.

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I think you really oversimplified what Mercy does in a match, but your premise is not wrong.

As you say, the other Supports are any of: burst healer, AoE healer, offensive threat or utility provider. Mercy is certainly none of that, but that’s because her role is specifically as a primary care physician, the lifesaver. She is the only single-target, dedicated, sustained healer, whose job is to be at other heroes sides with 100% uptime. Her heals have no cooldown, no resource meter, no reloading, but she can’t fight.

To your point, and the points of others who posted here, Mercy’s playstyle is just too weak for a game that is a high-burst dps race. She relies on teammates being defensive-minded (avoid damage, stay in range of healer, fight off flankers), which you know never happens because the game is a gibfest. Even tanks will stand there soaking up massive damage to chase a kill because they are expecting big burst healing to recover it, or help from that support killing the enemy. Mercy does not provide that. If your team DOES work well together, it can be a crazy good win, but as we know… yea that ship sailed a few years ago before all these new supports came out with much more appropriate kits.

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See, this is difficult to fathom unless you’re applying value to specific match ups (3v2 for example). If Mercy is healing in Valkyrie for at 60 healing per second against two enemy targets (let’s say Soldier), who average accuracy tends to be around 40% at the high end, then Soldier’s output is around 70 damage per second, plus another enemy target (for example, another Soldier) with the same exact accuracy, would be 70 damage per second. Thus, the total output of both enemy targets is 140 damage per second. If Mercy is healing in Valkyrie Form at 60 healing per second, that damage is reduced to 80 damage per second from two enemy targets. If it’s one enemy target, the sole Soldier, then that damage is reduced down 10 damage per second.

Either way you look at it, that is a significant amount of damage reduction provided only by one healer against one or two targets. There is no cost associated with Mercy’s healing. She can heal forever, and ever, and ever, and Valkyrie provides significant amount of healing return to a full team of heroes.

I don’t think you understand basic math here. Because no healing is ever going to out-heal full on damage from a Damage hero. We can’t have situations where stalements continue for minutes on end, and Mercy is providing A LOT of healing and mitigation that few Supports can provide as equally.

As for this…

This is not true. Ana was healing more when she was first released.

Also not true, damage hasn’t gone up. Damage has remained static or trended slightly downward.

Has nothing to do with healing.

Each new Support has been power creeping over the course of the game’s life. That’s also what led to GOATS and why heroes like Moira, Baptiste, and Brigitte got reductions in healing output. There still needs to be more done to fix some issues with Supports.

Tanks have likewise seen power-creeping over the game’s lifetime. Fortify-effects didn’t exist on Roadhog until after Orisa. Barrier tanks have doubled, and as each new Tank has been introduced, more crowd control effects have become a way of life in the game.

Standardized the composition and furthered tilted the balance towards Tanks and Supports. Many Damage based heroes have lost relevancy in this compositions - not to be confused with viability. I suspect we won’t really see some drastic reworks until OW2 is released to further balance the composition, but we’ll see.

Doesn’t change the fact that Moira will run dry and will have cooldowns off, whereas Mercy will remain active forever and ever.

Blowing extra cooldowns and ammo to produce more healing output. Clearly this strategy does not exist on damage-based heroes or Tanks. This is clearly, brand-new information that’s never been thought about before.

What’s next? Using Cooldowns in conjunction with ultimates? The shock and horror of when that happens.

Ah, but see you’re also forgetting the fact that Lucio heals 50 healing per second for 3 seconds every time he AMPs in a small area affected by his aura. Clearly ignoring a lot of things here.

Essentially, Transcendence heals at 300 healing per second. Essentially, low-end damage over time is rendered ineffective. Essentially, one-shots and burst damage must be used to counter the effects of Transcendence OR utilizing Ana’s Biotic Grenade. Essentially what I said was correct, and essentially, you’re failing the English language with your hyperbole.

Let’s do some math…

Mercy Valkyrie heals 60 health per second for 15 seconds across five targets is 4,500 healing.

Moira’s Coalescence heals 140 health per second per target for 8 seconds, or 5,600 healing.

Valkyrie costs 1820 ultimate points. Coalescence costs 2380 ultimate points.

Valkyrie also allows Mercy full flight and infinite ammo, in addition to faster traveling blaster fire.

Coalescence allows Moira to deliver 70 damage per second per target in addition to its healing effect, just slightly higher than Winston’s own LMB.

Both of these look pretty balanced to me.

Maybe you could argue that Valkyre could have a shorter ultimate duration in exchange for a higher healing per second, the sum return would be the same, (4500), but would be delivered in less time.

But you didn’t argue for that. Instead you whined incessantly about how awful and terrible Mercy is.

More hyperbole and false information.

Zenyatta requires line of sight to maintain his Discord Orb on a target, as does his Healing Orb. Failure to maintain line of sight on the target means failing to maintain Discord Orb on a target.

Mercy’s Damage Boost effects on the single target it remains on. Mercy does not require line of sight of the team mate, and the team mate’s damage is boosted regardless of the target being shot at it, whereas Discord only applies to one target at a time. This is sufficient balancing, furthered by Zenyatta’s lower healing output and higher damage per shot and its simultaneity.

And again, Mercy’s healing is free, and remains consistent and lasts forever. There’s is nothing else to argue here, it’s balanced. Moira HAS TO heal more BECAUSE her healing has a COST. Mercy does not have a COST to her healing output and it remains very high and very competitive with other Supports.

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But you forgot to mention Moira and Bap who-although have been nerfed still have greater healing potential due to their AOE heals over Mercy’s single target.

If you really wanna think that way you can. GOATS and Double Barrier became a thing because of the need to survive the damage we have now.

Yet it does have something to do with survival and sustain in a fight. CC can prolong a teammate from getting out of line of fire.

And yet Mercy thrives in heavy DPS comps due to their lower health pools and ability to spread out more.

I mean I get it, you think she’s fine. But you gotta see the other people see her struggling. And when Pros and some of the best support players OW (people who have a greater understanding of the game than you or I) have also state that she’s in a bad spot…I’m going to take their word on it because they know how to play at optimal efficiency.

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There was only one month, that Mercy was actually a good character. That was in Sep 2018. Now she is just a dead person.

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Well, this is what happened with Mercy.

On release, Mercy had an ultimate that was incredibly powerful, incredibly satisfying, but slightly questionable from a design perspective (Mass Resurrect). After that Ultimate got invincibility frames (still don’t know why), people started complaining mightily and justifiably so.

The Devs wanted to get her to stop hiding and be an active member of the fights so they gave her a rework that was a massive blow to her raw power but a significant buff to her personal survivability. They overshot by a spectacular amount, partially because of a bug that they decided to incorporate into her actual kit.

So, post rework Mercy was completely and totally uncounterable. Because she was uncounterable, she was beyond broken. Now, how did the Developers fix this? Did they do the sensible thing of reducing her personal survivability? No. Instead they lopped off more and more and more of Mercy’s ability to effect games she was in. They did this about 14 times, until finally people stopped using her in every game.

Because of all that, today we have a Mercy who is still insanely difficult to kill or shut down, but who is so weak that ignoring her completely is a perfectly valid tactic and is honestly probably your best tactic for dealing with her.

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Mercy + Lucio with a dive is the only way I’ve been able to successfully run her as main heal lately.

But as an off heal she works great, assuming you have the right dps that can benefit. Plus, with her high survivability and relatively high (compared to other off healers) healing, she can compensate if your main healer dies early and still let the team win. And Valk is a good initiation ult, though I’d personally prefer a defensive ult if she’s going to fill the off healer role more often.

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Rightly so, this works at times because people are just moving around way too much to take enough damage for mercy’s poor healing to actually be apparent.

Mercy was designed to be a main healer. We shouldn’t be in a situation where if we want to run mercy + zen for example, we have to pray that our dps is able to disable their team before they do ours because our heals are too unreliable for a drawn out brawl. If a main healer is picked, they’re picked BECAUSE of their massive heals. But let’s be real nobody picks mercy because they want massive heals, because she can’t provide it.

Yeah, she can get gold heals for keeping her healing attatched to a reinhardt that is getting damaged the whole game, but ONLY the reinhardt is getting heals. So when people say “oH bUt gOlD heAls” it’s not really truly representative.

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that would make her even easier to play though,and we need more skill ceeling not less

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To OP: I personally feel that by these two statements alone, you are not the only one who feels this way about Mercy.

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As someone who is a doctor, I have to say this is wrong.

If Mercy was like a real doctor, she’d see a lot of patients in a relatively small period of time.

She would be focused on only a single patient, but her healing would be excellent.

Pocketing with low healing output is literally the opposite of what she should be.

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