The justification Geoff gave for the current Mercy nerf is that Mercy heals for too much. My strong suspicion is that the nerf was picked in order to balance hero pick rates and not out of some grand plan regarding how much the different healers should heal, but I figured I’d take a look and see what the numbers were. The numbers tell an entirely different story.
I’m taking my data from overbuff, competitive data (all ranks). If anyone has a better source, I’d be happy to see it.
Overbuff has the average heals in competitive games as follows:
- Mercy: 12,113
- Moira: 10,560
- Ana: 8,484
- Lucio: 8,352
- Brigitte: 7,243
- Zenyatta: 7120
So, a 17% nerf on Mercy brings her below Moira (not the #1 healing spot they claimed she would still have). But judging a healer based off of these numbers alone is silly. Zenyatta is clearly not the worst healer. A better (but still imperfect) way to look at it is to look at total hp contribution. For Mercy, this is healing + damage + damage boosted + resurrections, which are harder to evaluate. I’ll estimate them at an average of 250hp each. If a character had things that I could not quantify (like Lucio’s speed boost, or Ana’s anti heal) I put them in parentheses next to the number to indicate that those abilities were not being taken into account. Here are the results:
- Brigitte: 17,561 including armor but not including 3,744 damage blocked (plus the fact that armor is more valuable than hp, plus the cc value of her stun and knockback).
- Moira: 17,421
- Zenyatta: 16,965 (plus the value of the discord orb)
- Mercy: 14,873. 1,555 of this number is in resurrections.
- Lucio: 14,688 (plus the value of speed boost, boop, and damage blocked by sound barrier)
- Ana: 12,809 (plus the value of anti heal and sleep dart and damage boosted in nano)
These numbers tell a completely different story. Ana and Lucio are still on the bottom (though by how much depends on how much you value their intangible contributions like speed boost and anti heal). Brigitte and Zenyatta are the best characters in the class by quite a bit (and they have the higher win rates to show for it).
Mercy doesn’t need a buff, but she certainly doesn’t need a 17% heavy handed nerf to her healing, which is the core of her identity and of her contribution to the game. A 17% nerf would put her total contribution squarely in the last spot, well below Ana (whose intangible value was not accounted for, and who is getting a buff).
Let’s not pretend it’s a small nerf, or one that is justified by the data. It’s entirely motivated by pick rates. Anyone who tells you that they know for sure why Mercy pick rates are high is lying. No one knows for sure. What we do know is that it skyrocketed past the rework, so the 30 second res probably has something to do with it. Not the healing, which was the same before the rework.
A MUCH better way of changing her would be what everyone has been saying for a year - take res off the 30 second cooldown. Maybe give her one charge of res whenever she uses Valk. The charge itself could be used outside of Valk, and you couldn’t store more than one.