Mercy is a Juggler, not a Pocket Healer

[Sly-13591]

@KazTehOne-1516

??? Are we just conveniently ignoring nade used to amp healing by 100% instead of 50? where Ana was pulling 16k on average by herself?

She was still capable of solo healing after that nerf, which is why I ignored it.

My point was that you seem to be implying that it was her healing nerf that took her out of the meta, when she was still meta after the fact, and remained meta until her damage got nerfed and Winston got buffed. Again, her healing getting nerfed was not what took her down.

@KazTehOne-1516

Season 4, and the healing buff to Nano was like 2 years apart, you realize that, right?

Yes, and that’s the point.
Ana was capable of solo healing before, and she has technically gotten stronger since.

@KazTehOne-1516

And still, It took mercy getting her 16k on average healing nerfed out of her before we saw Ana come back at all.

It’s interesting that you claim that. Do you have any source to back it up? Or am I just supposed to take your word as hard objective fact?

Because Mercy was not hitting 16k anywhere at the time of the nerf.
She was averaging around 13k, which is actually what Moira averages today.
GreyFalcon put together a few graphs at the time to showcase this, and this was months before the nerf went through.

[Album] Every support's average healing & damage per game for each rank

Point is you seem to think Mercy was stronger than she actually was, and you chalk it up to her healing numbers, which are being matched by a support many claim to be balanced presently.

@KazTehOne-1516

Healing is so sub optimal in Overwatch these days that even Zen’s ult is being burst through.

And has Zen’s ult been nerfed?
I don’t believe so.

As I said in that post in what was literally the next few lines.

@Sly-13591

If there is a difference in capabilities between then and now, then it’s due to an increase in damage creep, resulting in what once took 1 healer now taking 2 to keep pace. You can’t blame the one factor that’s been consistent for years, however.

Convenient you ignored that part.

It also plays into the idea that while Mercy was able to solo heal with 60 HPS two years ago, there is absolutely no guarantee that she’d be able to do so today.

@KazTehOne-1516

Ok first, we didn’t have competitive either, yet the game was designed for 6 stacks before they even considered solo queue to be a thing. To nobodies surprise, the game wasn’t fully complete when released and many features, balance changes, maps and heroes were to be added that could change the entire game around.

Overwatch officially released at the end of May 2016.
Competitive was released at the end of June 2016.
Role queue was revealed mid July of 2018.

You’re comparing a difference of 1 month with a difference of over 2 years and saying “oh, they’re practically the same, the devs planned for it all along”.

You’re also completely ignoring how things such as Deathmatch or a Switch version of Overwatch were straight up initially said “that’s not possible” or “that’s not a good idea”. Times change, and the devs adapt to the times. You’re acting as if they had the past 4 years completely planned out to the T, and that the development over the past couple years hasn’t been, well, developing.

@KazTehOne-1516

When there’s literally an entire developer update that explains in great detail why they chose to add it now and the way they chose to add it by their own standards regardless of what players or community “spent years demanding”

When asked “Were you guys expecting 2/2/2 to be the standard go to comp when the game launched?” this was Jeff’s response, describing how they did not originally expect 2/2/2 to be so dominant, but rather had to adapt to how the playerbase decided to play:

@JeffreyKaplan

Well, just speaking for myself here, but I expected 1 to 2 tanks and 1 to 2 supports with more variance. I also expected more hero switching. Naively, I didn’t expect “maining” and “one-tricking” to be so dominant.

We imagined a world where players would be ok with Torbjorn on defense but not playing him on attack. The maining/one-trick mindset led to us having to rework those characters to fit with how the game eventually evolved to be played. I guess what I am saying is we hoped to be able to create more highly situational characters with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable.

We like the direction things evolved and in hindsight, it seems obvious that they would evolve that way. It’s not that one direction is good or bad… they’re just different directions and we adapted to what the playerbase was doing, rather than fighting against their instincts.

@KazTehOne-1516

And now that we’ve moved the goalposts this far.

It was not my intention to move goal posts when bringing up 2/2/2. I simply saw you claim something else wrong in a different comment, and just added that in to the end of my reply that was already addressed to you.

Though it does bring up a good point. The game was originally balanced with the expectation that you would sometimes run 1 support. As in solo healing needed to be a viable option at the time, hence solo healers were not “overtuned” when they were capable of doing so. And as I said before, even if they were overtuned then, there is no indication that they’d be overtuned now as the amount of damage that’s needed to be healed has gone up.