Mercy History, Her Issues and Ways to Fix Them (by a Mercy Main)

General Discussion
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Now I’m going to be honest I know there are a lot of thread and posts out there about Mercy, I know it’s a touchy subject that seems to have the community split with some people saying she’s been way to powerful for to long and it’s finally time for her to die, and I get where you’re coming from, but to say it’s ok to have a hero die because they were OP doesn’t make sense to me. Every character in this game should be fun, have an impact, and be Balanced. I get that she still can be played, but not with much impact. So first lets go over her problems and where it went wrong.

The Original Doctor

Mercy when the game launched was the only main healer, with the only other healers in the game being Lucio and Zenyatta. She had her mass rez which was actually under-tuned and not as powerful as it would later become. Since she was the only main healer there wasn’t anything to really compare her to, so she was in a decent spot then, then Ana was released.

July 19, 2016:

  • Ana released
  • Mercy’s Resurrect ultimate changes:
    Ultimate charge reduced by 30%
    Movement no longer prevented upon activation
    Guardian Angel instantly resets upon use

Here it shows that the ability was underpowered at lauch, with Mercy often dying when she used Rez, in fact after these changes it was still underpowered, and not only that but with Ana being released who was and now currently is so much better at filling that main healer role, Mercy kinda fell off the charts, not being picked very often since she had sub-par healing compared to Ana and a much worse ult that would often times still leave her dying forcing her team to fight without a main healer.

The Healing Buffs

September 1, 2016:

  • Caduceus Staff
    Healing Beam HPS increased by 20% to 60hps

Dev Comments:
Mercy’s healing is also getting a boost to solidify her role as a strong, single-target healer.

After this Mercy became a good main healer, being able to keep up with Ana. It also shows that the devs acknowledged that she was not a stable main healer giving her these buffs because she was to weak.

November 15, 2016:

  • Passive health regeneration now activates when Mercy avoids taking damage for 1 second (formerly 3 seconds)

Mercy was also dying incredibly fast. She was very vulnerable and people could take her down in a fight or pick her off incredibly fast. The devs also realized this and gave her a more stable self regen to help with that.

When Rez Became to Much

**February 28, 2017: **

  • While performing a resurrection, Mercy now becomes temporarily invulnerable along with the allies being revived

This is where Resurrect became to powerful, that invulnerability removed most chances of counter-play and made it so it was very easy to get the rez off and stay alive. Before a well timed ult or killing off the Mercy was good way to counter or stop the ult, but once this was put in place the rezed team was able to get to safety with invulnerability.

The Failed Rework

September 19, 2017:

  • Resurrect (Formerly Mercy’s Ultimate ability)
    Ability now targets a single player, instead of every player within a radius
    Radius reduced to 5 meters
    Ability cooldown is 30 seconds
    Mercy is no longer granted invulnerability while Resurrect is active

  • Valkyrie (New Ultimate Ability)
    Valkyrie unleashes the full power of Mercy’s Valkyrie suit, enhancing her weapons and abilities for 20 seconds
    Caduceus Staff: Mercy’s healing and damage boosts beams now affect all allies near the targeted teammate, and the staff’s effective range has been extended
    Caduceus Blaster: Now has infinite ammo and increased projectile speed
    Guardian Angel: Increased range and movement speed
    Resurrect: Cooldown is instantly reset when Valkyrie is activated and reduced to 10s after the initial cast
    Hover: Mercy gains the ability to fly freely, at increased movement speed
    Regeneration (Passive): No longer interrupted when Mercy takes damage

This is where everything went wrong, correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t remember people calling for a Mercy rework. What I do remember is people saying that not being able to counter Mass Rez was annoying and not fun (but there are plenty of “not fun” double standards but I’m not gonna touch that). They made Mercy was to over powered and putting Rez on a cooldown made her impossible to balance.

Current Day

After 13 major nerfs Mercy is now Unfun & Not Impactful.

  • Her ultimate feels like a wet napkin and doesn’t really do much.
  • Her healing output is sub-par and not main healer level
    -Using resurrect is an instant get killed button, and it’s not worth using unless a fight has finished and even then it really doesn’t do a whole lot
The Mercy Hate

I do not understand why Mercy mains are alienated and attacked. This game was made for people of all skill levels, and Mercy’s are attacked for playing a character the “doesn’t take skill”. Even though this may be biased I would say Mercy is one of the hardest heroes to play in the game. Maybe not mechanically, but when it comes to game sense she is one of the hardest heroes. People say she’s easy and hate on her but they don’t understand how hard it is to be a Mercy main in and out of the game with ridicule and having people constantly focus you in game.

Buffing Mercy would make her OP and a must a pick, and the only real way to fix her and make the game healthy is either a Revert or another Rework. Personally I think we need a rework more than anything, This is my idea:

If you have any ideas, please share them, and I would like to ask if you are going to comment please comment something constructive thank you for reading :blush:

5 Likes
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Yes I would really like another rework or revert we need Mercy to be fun again. :sob: Valk is trash now you just enter in spectator mode to watch your team die before your eyes because you cannot out-heal anything. Rez is horrible you move like a slug and everything goes to hell. She is neither impactful or fun. I prefer Mass Rez to comeback! At least it was impactful and game changing!

3 Likes
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Well, this has been discussed to death, I’m Mercy main too, but I have stopped playing her because she’s useless. It will take time to see another update on Mercy.

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You can absolutely still buff Mercy as she currently is and she wouldn’t have to be OP. Undoing the healing nerf or finding a halfway point, just that by itself, would go a long way in giving Mercy more relevancy and compete with other healers more fairly. If that still isn’t enough, there’s enough to Mercy’s current kit that can be tweaked and adjusted that other areas to improve could be found – she could still afford to have an additional mid-game ability on top of having Resurrect on cooldown, if I’m being honest.

A revert is not happening. Jeff has said as much, and there’s very good reason for a revert to not happen. Mass Resurrect and what it did to Mercy is not healthy for the game, it had a slew of problems that the rework successfully solved, problems like how it made Mercy disengage from the action, how it controlled her team’s autonomy and how that in turn pressured Mercy in pick-up games, how it feels inherently backwards to have a team’s progress completely and literally undone by a single use of an ultimate, and how it breaks the intended flow of the game to slows that make for significantly less fun games.

And a second rework is absolutely unnecessary, all that would do is cause more drama in the community and split an already fragmented fanbase. There’s no reason for it in the first place, Mercy’s current kit is one that is suited for the game, and the problems it has are problems any hero can and will realistically face in their lifetime. Just because Mercy needed a lot of nerfs to be brought down a peg does not mean the rework was a failure; in fact, as I noted earlier, this is a sign of its success, because one of Mercy 1.0’s issues was that her kit was too small, too compressed into her ultimate, that she couldn’t before be given minor adjustments without totally throwing her power levels through a loop.

As for “Mercy mains being alienated and attacked”… they’re not, haha. That’s just what the dramatic side of this community wants you to think. The only Mercy mains suffering anything are the ones that spam the forums with the exact same topics, asking for something that they have been told isn’t going to happen, and a large part of the backlash they receive is because what they want would only benefit them and the fun they have. It’s why Mercy threads tend to get so chaotic, we’ve had these same discussions hundreds of times and some Mercy mains persist on wanting to get what they want, with little consideration to everything else.

There’s very little alienation or attacking going on. Mercy players in general seem to get the most support from the forum, and much of it is blinded if you ask me, and stems from our inherent gamer instinct of “respect your healer.” It’s childish, overly dramatic, pretty silly.

Mercy can use buffs and her kit doesn’t need a drastic change from where it’s at now. Resurrect is a balanced ability, and her toolkit is built for what Overwatch is and intends itself to be. The only thing holding her back right now is a lack of relevancy in the meta, combined with other supports simply doing better than her. And even then, it’s not like Mercy is unplayable, Mercy can still be found being used in competitive and achieving modest results for what is considered to be “the worst hero in the game.” There are not as many critical flaws with Mercy currently as people like to think.

1 Like
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Nice thread and some interesting suggestion to fix her. A straight up revert wouldnt be good in my opinion it would need a lot of tweaking. So basically a 2nd rework for Mercy but this time with more thoughts and effort put into it. Because being shafted and trashed like this is not what she or any other hero in the game deserves.

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You can buff her without making her Op again certainly, but that won’t stop complaints about her because it doesn’t address the core of complaints: enjoyability.

Her kit has always been rather dull, just the wonky power distribution in some direction always masked the fact. The msot common complaint from Mercy mains before this rework was how boring they tend to find her because of a lack of an E. The rework was still pretty dull, it was just masked by how powerful it was in the beginning.

Once it got brought in line, it became more clear that nothing really changed, just the “wow” moment she initially had was now gone too.

All of the sudden complaints and support is revolving around making Mercy viable/meta again, but that’s just the latest nerf.

A rework is necessary to improve her overall enjoyability, because any future buffs would just be gated by how much of her power distribution is sucked up by rez. Whether it’s made into a single-target rez, or removed entirely, whatever, I believe resurrect being in her kit is stopping any real improvements from being made because it’s existence would make any meaningful change too powerful

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This may have been true in the past when Resurrect was an ultimate, but I disagree that it’s true now. Resurrect as an ability is balanced, there are counters to it and obstacles Mercy has to consider when using the ability, which is why Mercy nowadays doesn’t get a lot of resses. I think the ability in is a mostly ideal spot, it doesn’t make her kit too powerful since you really have to let Mercy get away with a res in order for one to happen, but it isn’t weak either, since saving a teammate in this way will always have its uses.

I think there’s definitely ways they can keep this current kit and address the enjoyability problem, but at the same time, I think it’s worth noting that what many Mercy players consider to have been fun about Mercy was… Mass Resurrect, an element that is not going to return because of how unhealthy it was. They could do any number of things to Mercy, but there’ll always be a large part of her fanbase that won’t have fun unless Mercy can press Q and instantly revive her entire team. To them, that’s all that was fun about Mercy, and I think people understate to themselves how the rest of her kit is just not as engaging as other heroes, and thus feels less fun. They’re just not gonna be happy with any iteration of Mercy lacking this.

I don’t think she would need a classical “rework” to fit in another ability. Resurrect as it is can function just the same while something new is added to her kit, either functioning as her E only when she’s near a corpse, or using the newly-introduced interact button for the same effect. I personally think a life-link ability would be wonderful, where Mercy eats incoming damage on her beam targets for a short time and only while she has so much healthy. It’s small, has depth, and can be added to her kit without really requiring significant changes elsewhere, especially with the healing nerf she just had.

Or they can just buff her current kit by a bit. A lot of the reasons she’s dragging behind is because other supports also got buffed at the same time as her nerf, and I don’t think both were totally necessary.