Used it for different purposes, but those usually didn’t matter much. Like having steamroll: three teammates enter last point on Hanamura, and Reaper tries to save the day, gets stunned and killed within 3 seconds. He would be doomed anyway, but damage boost made it a bit quicker.
It was happening enough to force a change. This “It didn’t happen as often as you guys make it out to be” argument is just nonsensical. It doesn’t matter what personal arbitrary metric you think it needs to meet for you to consider it to be too much(which is a silly argument in general since you can’t quantify it as an individual player). It was happening enough that it was common knowledge throughout all ranks in the playerbase and it happened enough that the devs considered it to be a problem, period.
Refer to my post.
Not dying with their team by using valkyrie when they wouldn’t be staggered anyway is a bigger loss than dying with their team and giving a measly 200HP worth of charge isn’t valuable. It’s a great initiation and midfight ult.
Do I miss 60 hp/s? Absolutely.
HOWEVER.
Playstyle is something that needs to be adjusted for this current version of Mercy. For background, I have a group of people I play with regularly, and know their strengths and limitations. Further, they understand that Mercy can no longer sustain them if they push up too far.
So, I have become a dmg-boost centric Mercy and I’ve never felt more empowered. I’ve made clear to my teammates that I’m going to leave dmg-boost on longer than they might feel comfortable so that they can secure the kill–we can always heal up after. As I continue to get more and more comfortable with this style, it’s improving my awareness of where side fights are occuring, and I’m finishing a lot of matches with 70-75% kill participation. This has been incredibly satisfying and empowering for me.
Aiming for a 100 assists in a match now. That’s the goal.
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If my team isn’t dead, I won’t be escaping, though.
True, but this article was also made before overwatch league was a thing, and rework mercy was still in ptr. I don’t see why it would touch on the fact if it wasn’t made before the fact existed?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s possible that with the inferior aim at lower levels, you might be okay just zipping around between grounded teammates. You might even be able to pocket someone on the ground without much worry. Even if this is the case, you have to ask yourself what purpose you’re serving in every engagement. Is it just healing or occasionally boosting DPS? Because that Zenyatta has a fire-and-forget heal on Winston, Orb of Discord on the enemy Mercy, and he’s nailing headshots and raking in some kills. At the end of the day, you’re there for Resurrection.
It touches on that exactly tho.
Though I agree with your premis, the better you were with mercy the less useful ult was… I don’t agree that blizzards solution was to make people not play the game lol. Jokes aside, The problem mercy players had during mass res, was they would fly in and res, then die, leaving their team in another 5v6 without their main healer. They tried to fix that at first, which only was in support of low elo.
No she didn’t? OWL season 1 started in January 2018. Mercy’s rework was already live in late September of the previous year, 2017?
Unless you’re making jest of her constant Regen being invulnerability, but that doesn’t seem right in context. In fact before season 2 she already took some of the heavy nerfs.
Lol yeah, completely understandable. I love the example as well
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If you have one character defining ultimate economy for the entire game that’s a huge problem. Which was the problem with mass res and most of Mercy 2.0’s lifetime.
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I apologize for the long intro but the sad truth is it’s hard to discuss Mercy in a vacuum, but I do sympathize with the OP feeling their hero has been wrecked, as I do for anyone else feeling the same about any other hero.
Seeing a lot of back and forth here regarding what’s acceptable and what isn’t in terms of a hero impacting a given match and it just brings us back to the same old problem: This game has been forced into something it wasn’t designed for. A hardcore spectator-motivated esport.
To get the obvious out of the way: I don’t hate esports, I think it’s a very interesting concept done right. Overwatch as an esport on the other hand… But I digress.
A lot of people are going back and forth here about which abilities “should be” or “should never be” in the game, and sadly I don’t think there’s ever any agreement to be had there. I think the issues surrounding Mercy and many of the other heroes today, and the constant threads demanding nerfs/buffs/reworks are symptoms of this larger issue: The game being retooled towards different gameplay altogether from what it was originally designed for - and more importantly - marketed, sold as and won a bunch of awards in its first year for.
When the game came out, pretty much every hero had some degree of “OP” to them - that was part of the appeal, and it’s what got it on the map, so to speak. It rejuvenated a stagnant FPS genre that for too long had relied on one or two big series iterating, but never really innovating. It also brought in a ton of players who were really put off by what you’d consider “traditional” FPS games, but who were drawn to Overwatch for its character designs and diverse gameplay options.
Back then the devs would step in if something was really out of control, like McCree being able to melt tanks with his right-click, but generally they left the core of the heroes alone in the first year while the player counts ballooned.
When the business model for this game shifted towards OWL (franchise rights, streams, merch, exclusive skins) it’s clear that Blizzard were suddenly much more concerned with the pros and pro-streamers (as in pro players who also stream) as well as the viewing experience.
Those players didn’t like Mercy, or the concept of all the heroes being OP, they came from games where it was the twitchest reflexes that determined who won a match, period. That’s what they were used to, that’s what they promoted, it’s what Activision-Blizzard decided was the most lucrative way of generating revenue from Overwatch.
This has clashed with the original MMO/MOBA roots of the game fairly obviously, notably about how there was suddenly a screech about Mercy’s “gross unfairness” after the i-frames were added in January 2017. I personally believe that was a bad change, as it made getting the big rez off far too easy and thus unrewarding. Regrettably, the negativity festered and because Blizzard were very keen on this particular group of players, (and all their followers) being on board for OWL, they began making changes so the mechanically/twitch-based heroes were in a position to assert themselves more in the game.
Unfortunately, this seems to have driven away a lot of the initial playerbase, because they came to Overwatch specifically because it wasn’t like the other shooters, and the catering towards the twitch crowd raised the barrier and learning curve for this game substantially. A decent player with an aim-based hero can easily dominate now, compared to the first year of the game, whereas before there was a better equilibrium between the various heroes.
Mercy was designed for that old version of the game. Where she was meant to fill the role and fantasy of the pure healer, that’s why she has a steady heal, that’s why she had a potentially game-changing Ult with Mass-Rez. Blizzard tried to make her more appealing to the “twitch-crowd” with the rework, but they severely mis-stepped and well…we got the Moth Meta and the subsequent dismal 10 months where each patch contained a Mercy nerf, which more than likely caused even more players to just give up on the game.
At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone’s really wrong. If you like Overwatch as it is now, great! I personally think it’s coming apart at the seams from being forced into the esports-acceptable mold, and would absolutely love it if Blizzard would just give me the option of playing the December 2016 build of the game, since I can’t reasonably expect them to go back and re-do every newer hero according to the pre-OWL “all heroes are OP so none of them really are” design.
Old Overwatch was about an equilibrium between all the heroes, discovering synergies, planning strategies and recognizing each hero brought something to the table regardless of whether or not they were clicking heads - and most importantly: That the fight wasn’t over until it was over - if you hadn’t killed the enemy Mercy before using all your Ults, well that’s on you, and you would hopefully learn from that. New Overwatch is about as many kills in rapid succession with the twitchy-ness being put as the highest priority as well as just getting the Ults as fast as possible and unleashing them on the team. It’s far more “traditional” FPS in that sense, and if you like that, cool.
But I get the sense that a lot of people don’t, anecdotally my friend’s list has been 90% offline for the past 18 months, because they either don’t have faith in Blizzard, or they’ve decided that this game just doesn’t appeal to them anymore. For whatever this is worth, that makes me sad. Overwatch was a breath of fresh air in gaming for me, and I’ve been sad to see it fall victim to the same old issues that made me quit so many other games in the past. I hoped for something more from Blizzard.
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Not to mention mass rez punished good ult economy by mandating an additional ult after the rez. Your grav dragon combo was a good use of ult economy, but you did the find mercy mini game too early and she had time to respawn and mass rez and how you have to burn high noon
Perhaps not to them.
I mean I use it to boost and pistol rarely to heal because I get more value out of Valk that way.
Some would say I’m wasting heal potential, but I just cannot get the same value from it via healing as I do with boosting and pistoling
The problem was, and still is, ultimate economy no longer exists because Mass Resurrect no longer exists. If you want there to be more heroes in the game to which an Ult economy would be necessary, then I agree. Right now the name of the game is to save a bunch of ultimate’s and then unleash them all at the same time = winning.
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Defensive ults and shields just not designed to withstand that much.
Mercy was given the Invulnerability buff in January of 2017.
Mercy was reworked but the rework was not implemented until half way through Overwatch League season 1.
She had Invuln at the start of OWL season 1, then in stage whatever she was changed to release Valkyrie, which was deemed over powered.
Agreed. I’m not going to defend the solutions the devs came up with because it obviously created a much bigger problem than mass res but people keep repeating the same talking points when mass res was flawed and did need changing…
No, you cannot define a game’s ult economy by dictating that a character be mandatory. There are several wiping ults in this game and to think the solution to that is a character playing hide and go seek is a big no no. Ults win games, comboing ults wins games. Defensive ults exist, transcendence, drop the beat and rally are great at staving off death from enemy ultimates but they have to be used to prevent death not revert it.
Well no, it impedes the long standing virtue of, I have a damage damage ultimate and it should hold more value then a support or tank ultimate.
I would trade rez for a heal boost ability that has a decent CD. Maybe give Mercy some light mode where she glows brightly to indicate her heal output is increased and it only lasts for 5 seconds. CD timer is 14 seconds. Maybe add a small damage resistance as a countermeasure against flankers if you can’t GA to someone or at a disadvantage. It could help those Mercy players who complain about flankers on them and needing another way of defending themselves without need of a teammate.
Note. I just made this concept idea like around 5 mins now and it clearly has some flaws. I’m sure people will know it can be OP and would prefer either rez or another ability they came up with that’s better.
Because you aren’t reading what was previously written, you assume I am all about “hide & rez”. H&R didn’t exist when Mercy wasn’t invulnerable during Mass Resurrect. The fewer people you had to rez the more likely you were to live through it. Blizzard giving Mercy invuln was the problem, not Mass Resurrect. The unfortunate thing called time reduces everyone’s memory to only knowing Mercy after January of 2017.
Ah, the age old “My Q should be better then yours” argument.
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No…
Mercy was already reworked before season 1 OWL started… Before overwatch league started. Again… The rework hit live in late September 2017. Overwatch league didn’t start till January 2018.
https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/pc?page=11#patch-39974
Mercy rework hits live, September 21st, 2017.
Overwatch Patch Notes – September 19, 2017
https://liquipedia.net/overwatch/Overwatch_League/Season_1/Regular_Season/Stage_1
Overwatch league season 1 stage 1 start date:
Stage 1 - January 10th - February 10th, 2018
You have your time frame really messed up. Mercy never had mass res during overwatch league.
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Mercy doesn’t feel empowering compared to which heroes?