Mercy is a Juggler, not a Pocket Healer

General Discussion
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Back before 2-2-2 when Mercy still had 60 HPS, she was still a main healer and could often even be run as a SOLO healer with triple DPS. She would be constantly flying back and forth multitasking all while staying evasive. It was incredibly fun, engaging, and skillful.

But with only 50 HPS that playstyle got a LOT harder because you healed a lot slower. You had to linger on a target for a lot longer so you just couldn’t juggle back and forth as effectively and that playstyle died along with everyone on your team.

People don’t know if they should call Mercy an off healer or a main healer. All Mercy is good for anymore is pocketing a single DPS with damage boost and occasional heals. It only caters to the wrongful mentality that Mercy is a no-skill braindead character.

That’s not who Mercy is supposed to be. Its sad and its pathetic. If people wanted to call “Hide and Res” an “unfun play pattern” than pocket healing is even worse.

How the hell did we get to this?

So why do so many Mercy mains want 60 HPS back? Its not for the consistency, its for the speed. We don’t need more TOTAL healing, we just need to apply it faster so that its relevant.

55 HPS on the Experimental Card has made Beam Juggling as a main healer MUCH more viable again, and I think that the Devs should ABSOLUTELY lean into this. Make her the Tracer of Support characters, an evasive but fragile, highly mobile hero with powerful, single target, close range bursts of impact. Same for damage boost.

As for Res, it NEVER should have been a cooldown. Take it off E, and make it part of her Valkyrie again. Give her 1 charge with a 1 second cast time. Make Valkyrie more like a Pulse Bomb instead of a Transcendence, faster building but lower impact. The more you maximize your healing and damage boosting, and then get rewarded with small burst of impact with a single Res. Then you open up her E ability to give her some other form of utility. Something defensive, something offensive, some kind of healing, a cleanse, a boost, something, anything.

81 Likes
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It also means I have more time to switch to my pistol and plink away, since I can heal up targets quicker and have more of a safety net when I switch back to healing. Yes, yes, I know, it’s sub-optimal, but it’s more fun than the blue beam.

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The “pocket healer” term is often misunderstood by a vast portion of the community. I quite often get people thanking me for “pocketing” them or opponent team complaining that “your Mercy pocketed you!”, when in reality I’m just healing/dmg boosting who ever needed it most at the time. A good Mercy can make it feel like you’re being pocketed when in reality they’ve got an eye on everyone. Playing Mercy is like that game where you’re keeping 5 plates spinning on polls. Sure, if all the plates are incompetent and decide to fall at the same time then you’ll have trouble, but that’s on the team as a whole.

So that’s how I play her and as far as I’m concerned she has been/is viable in that role. I’m not one of these raging people who claim it’s all doom and gloom. This latest buff will just make things a tad easier all around.

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I think it is more optimal than blue beam on most heroes.

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You haven’t seen my accuracy stats. :wink:

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It really is. Just putting more bullets in the air so that its more LIKELY that they get hit is better than an extra 30% to the couple shots that do hit. They don’t even HAVE to hit, just peppering extra bullets into the air is applying more pressure than blue beam will.

The only use blue beam has is for those high damage thresholds like Widowmaker, Pharah, and Ashe, which is why she’s not even that great with Echo. Echo doesn’t need blue beam, she has Focus Beam.

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So more evasion? I glady take that if they would tweek also Valk to be faster. Did not think about that…

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50 HPS isn’t much of an issue if you have Mass Res to back it up. What you can’t heal, you can revive. That was why we were never bothered by it, plus with Death Balling and Reinhardt leading the charge, people weren’t charging in and dying straight way or taking mass damage so the push it wasn’t like massive damage taking brawls.

My take on this is that the problem lays with the Tanks and DPS, near the time they were about to release 2.0 I started to seriously look at why people were accusing Mercy of Hide and Res, in fact people didn’t really complain about Mercy until it was publically announced that Mercy was doing this type of ‘hide and res’ and then everyone was bias!

One of the core problems with Resurrect was the Invulnerability aspect. For an ultimate, make it cast the effect at the beginning of casting means it cannot fail, but the problem was Invulnerable, it allowed Mercy to survive every use. Which fair enough, it’s better than just dying.

Original res left Mercy exposed and usually when she went in for Res, she often came out dead… so that engagement becomes a 2nd chance/final chance… Invulnerable Res meant Mercy went in, survived, healed, cast, rinse and repeat.

That prolonged the matches, but the BIGGEST culprit was the Tanks and DPS. Back then it was all about the Ult counter because you needed an ult to counter another ult like res, which is competitively strategic! But often, the Tanks and DPS tunneled vision and ignored Mercy.

Mercy got away with healing and Ult building because no one kills her! She can be standing right next to you and you would ignore her. Even now, with her res nerfed, people would exhaust themselve killing her healed target and once they win, because they ignored Mercy, Mercy just sneaks in and res and then you die…

The scale of the damage has been reduce, but the problem still persist. Mercy is useless when she is dead.

A dead Mercy is a Useless Mercy she doesn’t gain ult charge when she is dead and her main asset is healing and managing the whole team. So if her co-support is strong like Ana and Moira who steals healing, Mercy gains less value as she thrives on healing.

4 Likes
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Then you dont “pocket” someone. A pocket-Mercy is somthing like Pharmercy. So most of the time with the pocketed hero?

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Yes, that was the point of my post. Other people thin–… Oh whatever… Read it again. :sweat_smile:

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Nah, I was bothered by it. 50 HPS at launch felt bad, too.

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The 50 HPS? Like from Pre-September 2017? when she died on Mass Res and healed 50HPS, No Ana because she didn’t exist and Lucio was a viable main healer and speed boost was useless?

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Yeah, that was awful.

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Hi guys. I’m a Mercy that uses my gun at any time other than during Valk in order to mop up an already won fight.

:clown_face:

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Sure you can have 60hp but she cant self heal 100% anymore

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This is more or less Moira’s niche. Mercy trades raw heals for additional mobility and utility, sorta like Sombra in comparison to Tracer.

I’m not particularly happy with this, especially with Moira’s lack of utility, but that is definitely her niche atm and not Mercy’s.

FWIW I don’t object to 60hps, but I didn’t object to Moira’s 80hp/s either.

1 Like
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This is what I was expecting to see after I made my first post in this thread. Better late than never!

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Moira is best in a group. All of her heals are AoE. But the reason she sees play and Moira doesn’t (besides being aoe) is that her heals are good enough because they’re balanced out by a resource meter. Same with Ana having to reload.

Mercys heals are infinite and consistent, but that means they’re doomed to either being consistently too good or consistently not good enough. Mercy’s consistent healing is outdated because the game isn’t consistent. Sure Mercy seems fine in a neutral fight but as soon as abilities and Ultimates start coming out, Mercy has none of her own to contest with.

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This was true of launch Moira, who required actual skill for resource management, but right now it’s really not hard to match Mercy levels of availability, and with the heal nerf, old Mercy levels of output too.

Mercy post rework has always been about winning neutral fights with valk and using damage boost and rez to circumvent her low heals. That does actually need to work again, but putting Mercy back in her old niche requires moving two characters out of their current niches and the devs are deathly allergic to that, even when they shouldn’t be.

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Sure mercy was a main healer earlier because of more healing but also as you say because it was lower health targets with fx 3 dps. if mercy is solo healing she is however not using her damage boost at all. mercy being played as a pocket who can help her main healer when needed is a way more unique place for mercy to be.

flat out more healing though is gonna make it easier for her to keep up tanks which is not what mercy should be doing imo.

I do agree with the juggling part I would have made the buff 55 or even 60 but only for the first 1 or 2 seconds shes on a new target which would promote beam flicking instead of hard lock on.

another thing is her valkyrie. atm she uses valkyrie either to hard engage with mass damage boost or when several targets needs sustain and her other healer aren’t available. the second one is often a problem because the beam breaks when activating valkyrie which is awful when keeping critical targets up and might make the mercy player hesitate to commit. so making the beam not break when activating valk would be the biggest thing for her right now.