I used to love playing Mercy. She offered this unique kind of empowerment that no other hero has been able to come close to replicating:
You could “carry” a match, without ever dealing a single point of damage. You were your team’s light at the end of the tunnel, when all hope was lost. You were the all-seeing eye of the storm, perceiving what others could not and planning 3 steps ahead of your enemies and even your own teammates.
Mercy made me feel like a master class tactition. Staying a step ahead of the enemy and defeating them with “brains over brawn” was the greatest feeling ever.
But then they reworked Mercy, and nerfed her into the ground.
Playing Mercy now doesn’t give me any feelings of accomplishment. I can be doing everything right, be statistically popping off, but no matter how well I’m doing I never feel like I’ve done anything I can be proud of.
To conclude this post, here’s some food for thought:
Main healer’s heal total over 5 seconds
(base healing only):
Mercy: 250
Baptiste: 360
Ana: 375
Moira: 400
Main healer’s healing over 5 seconds (base heals combined with E heals):
Mercy: 250 (she doesn’t have E heals)
Baptiste: 510
Ana: 625
Moira: 780
Completely agreed. I would happily trade rez for more healing output. I wouldn’t need a rez after that. If someone died it would actually be my own fault for not reacting fast enough, instead of me healing to no avail and my target still dying before me.
If you are chasing feelings over balance then find another hero that gives you that feeling.
Feeling is not a relevant reason in of itself to change something.
These omit a few things.
The fact that the other healers can miss with their main source of healing.
The fact that all of the others have finite resource for their main healing be it through reload mechanics or through resource meter.
Mercy’s ultimate is extremely fast to acquire. So much so that it is available almost every fight. Meaning her total healing is much higher in general then you are saying.
Mercy got reworked in the first place because her multirez “felt disheartening to play against”, and the devs “felt it was wrong for a tell main healer to stop healing”.
Mercy has been changed before because of feelings, and she can be changed again.
Her mass rez was reworked because it encouraged a playstyle the dev’s never desired.
The idea of actively trying to get your team to die while you hid was absolutely unhealthy for the game. This is the reason it was removed. Not because of feeling but because there would be many occassions where two teams with mercy rez in their back pocket would PRETEND to fight each other.
Mind talking to me rather then linking a 10 minute video?
50 seconds in btw. “There is a weird behavior encouraged”.
Thanks for proving me right. They changed it due to behavior encouraged by the ability.
Not feeling.
Your assertion of “feelings” is entirely false.
Edit: I can see you typing and I bet I can predict exactly what you are going to say.
Something along the lines of " feelings were most certainly part of it". To which I would point you toward what I originally said.
Meaning that feelings alone are not enough to warrant the change. Many people certainly had negative feelings when it came to mass rez. But it was not the catalyst nor the main reason for change.
What required action against mass rez was an actual unhealthy behavior being encouraged by the ability. Because here is some food for thought: Unhealthy mechanics can produce bad feelings.
In order to actually make an argument for change you need to provide a LOGICAL and MEASURABLE reason for the change outside of feeling. Feelings alone do not grant valid arguments.
You don’t need to watch the whole thing, just 1:30 - 2:08.
It’s sad, really. The devs victim-blamed Mercy 1.0 for her team trying to backseat drive for her, and disregarded how Mercy put in just as much effort as the enemy team in generating her own ult and pulling it off - escaping an ult storm is easier said than done when you’re trying your best not to let your team die before that, and that means staying on the battlefield (and in enemy ult range) for as long as possible.
If they really wanted to discourage hide-n-rez, they would have addressed the factors that enabled it. Namely,
Rolling back the i-frames buff. Before that buff, “Hide n Rez” used to be restricted to a “hail Mary” strat that got Mercy killed before her team finished ressurecting. The i-frames took away that risk, and the counterplay with it
Nerfing multirez so it can’t target souls though walls,
Fixing the SR exploit that encouraged players to use the cheese strat in the first place
Giving Mercy a healing ability on E, so that she wouldn’t have been forced to resort straight to her ult whenever her base healing got overwhelmed
Adding some kind of healing effect to multirez itself, which would have helped with ressurect’s issue of “if all you have is a hammer Rez, everyone else looks like a nail dead person”
Hide n Rez could have been solved in many ways without deleting multirez. But then some high-profile players complained that Mercy’s ult felt frustrating to play against, and the devs scrambled to accommodate them.
Honestly they could just bring her base healing to 54hp per second and it would be fine. She definitely doesn’t provide enough healing to fit the role as a main healer anymore.
No, it was changed because being a tank should be able to sustain and take positions better then other role. That’s a balance and behavioral change. Not exclusively feeling.
Nope, It was changed due to a recognized unhealthy playstyle that caused people to NOT fight or to PRETEND to fight. Telling one of your teammates to stop participating in the fight in anyway and let it resolve.
Once again, no. It was due to longevity of her hack leaving someone open for to long along with the inability to consistent counter hack.
Nope, She was nerfed due to 2-2-2 making bunker comp way to powerful when you combined her with ANY other barrier tank.
These all had LOGICAL reasons for being changed.
Want mercy to be changed? Provide LOGICAL reasons to change them.
Mercy 1.0 did need a rework, but she got the wrong kind of rework to remove the unwanted behavior around multirez.
The Valkyrie rework caused more problems than it solved, both in the short term (moth meta), and the long term - a lack of counters to ult spam = “mash Q to win”, and the game has lost it’s most effective “gateway drug” to bring new players in.
