Mercy is a Juggler, not a Pocket Healer

General Discussion
83

So… Overwatch is designed around teamwork.

However… all of its incentives that exist… HEAVILY encourage players to specialize in 1 hero and play them exclusively. Here’s a list:

Time Efficiency: There’s what… 30ish heroes in the game. Most people aren’t going to have time to sink even 50 hours into each hero to master them. They just simply aren’t. However… sinking 200-300 hours into 1 hero to become absolutely insanely good on them is… still a lot, but it is doable. Also that guy who sunk 200-300 hours into one hero will probably get to a higher rank than the guy who played ~10 hours on literally every hero in the game.

Cosmetics: You get bling, you wanna show off your bling. Unless you are luck incarnate or play a ton, you probably only have really cool bling for a few heroes. So… you kinda sorta only want to play on those heroes and not that one who you only have a few of the recolors on.

Performance Based SR gains: Ohhhh once the cat was out of the bag on this one, teamwork and swapping went out the window. Again, this heavily encouraged staying on your hero no matter what because it was more reliable for gaining SR. Swapping to a hero mid match for a chance to turn a game around simply wasn’t worth it because if it worked… well… you wouldn’t have gotten the stats needed to get decent gains and if it didn’t work you wouldn’t have the stats needed to not lose a ton of SR. If your goal was SR gains, swapping in a rank where Performance Based SR gains was a thing just simply made no sense.

Ultimates: When you swap, you lose all your ult charge. You lose all your progress towards your shot at that big moment that might be awesome and might turn the game around. Also referring back to the above, using your Ult represents your chance to get a whole lot of stats in a short amount of time to bouy your SR gains regardless of how your match is going. And you’re asking players to throw all that away? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. They aren’t going to do that under most circumstances. This got even worse when they did the 2 global ult charge nerfs because Ultimates became even more precious.

Overwatch may have been team based, but its incentives sure aren’t… and that’s what players listen to.

They didn’t even do what would have been the intelligent thing to do and tap into the one well known aspect of the human psych that can override selfishness… that being herd mentality and tribalism. We still don’t have guilds/clans/whatever you want to call them, and that would have done the trick. People are much more likely to work together in a team and sacrifice for the group if they know and trust the other members of the group. Doubly so if the pride of the group is on the line and their in a clan war or whatever. Instead all we have are randomly thrown together teams that will dissolve and you’ll never see any of them again unless you either put a TON of work into your friends list or use external programs.

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84

Too bad that thing never worked on me. In fact, I exploited it for my gains with old rez. Since teammates will run ahead anyway - horde mentality works wonders. My goal is to make sure, that this disorganized horde still succeeds. Usually by overwhelming opposition with numbers.

Funny thing is that I first experienced it in school, when wanted to celebrate my birthday with classmates and brought in candy. Zombie apocalypse with zombies, that want candy, began shortly after.

What you describe works on normal people, but unsure, if you can make it work on people with sociopathy or psychopathy.

85

Except, you know. That one trick genji that’s getting hard countered by a winston and refuses to switch. Because counter’s are incredibly prevalent and have only become more so throughout the years. Even Tracer got hers with the introduction of Brig.

This is really a moot point. Cosmetics have absolutely no bearing on game play. Especially golden weapons.

You know this stopped being a factor diamond+ right? Specifically after it was abused.

I actually agree with you here, and so has many of the best players the game has known. Take seagull for instance, in his the state of overwatch video talking about the value of ultimate’s and how their counter productive to the games design. Even backing up the point with the koth stats proving the snowball effect is unbalanced. Where the team who wins the first team fight wins something like 64% of the time. Of course, the counter argument to this has been made where sometimes switching to a hard counter is better than building your ult, which is in fact a reality to the game. It’s about deciding which is more important, saving your ult for the combo win condition or switching to hinder the enemy from reaching there’s. Ultimately it’s a double edge sword either way.

And the stat thing, still irrelevant, 'cause again, diamond+ does not recognize personal performance.

86

Oh, they do. Golden weapons are considered sign of dedication to specific hero, as well as sign of prestige.

It’s not robots, that play this game. It’s humans, and humans are known for their affinity to shiny things. Especially if they get to show it off to everyone.

Just like TF2 players were actively hunting for shiny australium guns with kill counters, despite those being just your standard guns in every other aspect.

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87

That’s definitely how you should play mercy it’s fun effective and rewarding. Her Ressurect should have always stayed an ultimate your way of combining it sounds balanced. I can even see two rezzes being balanced as long as it’s tied to her valk. Her E can either be some form of anti heal or healing burst.

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88

They really are not, I promise.

89

So Mercy is the exact opposite of Zen?

(upvotes to whoever gets the reference)

90

Not true. Up until somewhat recently, most counters were soft at the most (outside of Pharah). Which meant that… if you were a good enough Genji and the Winston wasn’t doing a good job of keeping an eye on you, you could still get past him, do your job, and murder the supports.

Alternatively… I distinctly remember a game I had a long time ago where 4/6 of the enemy team was Winston bait… except their Reaper. Problem is their Reaper kept going off on solo flanking adventures so I rolled them over and over and over again as Winston despite them having a counter. They had a Zarya, but I always engaged before she got her energy stacked, and without high energy she couldn’t burn me down before I shocked her team into oblivion.

Now if we want to go back far enough where No Limits was the only game mode, then you’d have a point because if the whole team is Winston… yeah you’re going to have to get off Genji because everyone is a soft counter to you. You have no targets.

I will absolutely give you that Brigitte is a hard counter to a lot of stuff, but that’s just shifted pick rates to DPS heroes who still don’t really have one.

For me it is absolutely a moot point. For other people… no not so much. There are people who absolutely care a ton about the aesthetics of their character. I’m not one of them and I’m guessing you aren’t either… but to try to deny it isn’t a factor is denying the entire reason why F2P games that only sell cosmetics actually function.

Some people just really want their avatars to look good.

If it is still relevant for over half the playerbase and was relevant for literally everyone at some point (seriously, no one places into diamond their first time), then I’d say it is still relevant.

But… but… lets flip it around. Are there any game mechanics that heavily incentivize working together as a team in a clear way? I’d argue that there most certainly isn’t. Yeah teamwork will probably give you a somewhat higher win rate, but it sure isn’t obvious. Especially when MM seems to have a tendency to overreact to sudden win streaks by trying to bury your face back in the mud by throwing higher ranked people at you.

Oh actually that’s another incentive to not use teamwork. Getting Teamwork out of random teams is really difficult, but if you go into Matchmaking grouped up… well… matchmaking takes that into account and throws harder opponents at you. Which actively punishes you for daring to play this team based game as a team.

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91

I don’t like it but I think it fits perfectly with her concept design.

92

Medal system incentivizes to backstab your own team to get ahead.

Teamwork naturally happens, if there is defense position too tough to crack as any single hero, but since you usually just need to pick one hero to get through anyway, it rarely matters.

And, of course, yes, matchmaking with it’s “game should be a challenge” sometimes becoming “game should be unbeatable” and turning formerly smooth progression into attempt to beat Dark Souls. So any actual strength should be kept hidden from matchmaking, or retribution won’t wait long.

There are reasons to avoid going higher in ranks: even more following meta, even less fun and (for DPS) longer queue. Questionable rewards for, basically, ego boost.

93

Entirely true, actually.

Winston To Ana.
Winston to Genji
Zarya to D.va
Mei to D.va
Widow to Phara
McCree to Phara
Phara to junkrat
Phara to Rein
Sombra to Zen
Ana to Zen

Literally the entire reason you can switch heroes mid match in the first place is to counter your enemy. The game has always been designed with counter picking in mind. Many of which are either synergised with to counter act that counter, or are completely crippled once that counter is in play and better off switching.

This literally means nothing. It’s anecdote. The enemy had a counter, but a bad player wasn’t playing their role properly, so the whole team suffered. If anything this only reinforced just how important team work actually is to the core of overwatch’s gameplay.

I suppose that’s a fair point. That still doesn’t affect the games design though. Like, a player who’s going to grind for a golden weapon in comp is going to play comp, for the most part, as best they can until they can gain that cosmetic. If they refuse to play optimally with the games core design in mind, it’ll take them all the longer and their elo will reflect it.

But this is the point I raised earlier. The average player isn’t playing the game the way it was intended to be played in the first place, which is why the average player is in gold. Meanwhile diamond+, the top 15% of the player base now are more inclined to play past that level of one tricking a single hero because they’ve built the game knowledge at this point to know a single hero isn’t viable 100% of the time. With very few exceptions to that rule.

Overwatch at it’s top level is played without personal which will only take you so far, and then it evolves into how the game was intended to be played… for the most part anyway. There are still people who game the system and blizzard has implemented counter measures for it more times than not.

Every win condition combo in the game incentivizes team work to some extent or another. Bar a few heroes who can team wipe with their primary. And even then in higher elo’s these types of hero’s depend on their team to create space for them to get those openings to achieve that solo character win condition in the first place.

94

The thing that got nerfed was her damage, from 80 down to 60 (which has also since been buffed up to 70). Her healing wasn’t “nerfed to the ground” and in fact Ana still has the exact same numbers as she did before she fell out of the meta. Unless of course you count the additional healing on Nano, in which case she has even more healing than before.

Every healer is still capable of doing it. Again, Ana still has her numbers from Season 4, and Bap and Moira can easily match that.

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.

Objectively false.

Blizzard is making a game that the community wants to play. Literally the whole reason we have 2/2/2 isn’t because Blizzard deemed it “correct” but rather the community did, and spent years demanding such a feature. Remember, we didn’t even have hero limits in the beginning because Blizzard’s vision of “the correct way to play” was to just do whatever the hell you want with whatever combination you wanted. It was the community that pushed for more and more limits on how things could be done. Blizzard just gave the community what we told them we’d enjoy, they didn’t prioritize their own vision over anything.

Gotta admit, it’s weird seeing people demand something for such a long time, then once it’s here they say it was Blizzard’s idea all along.

95

Because a) only part of community actually demanded it, and b) reality was different from expectations.

In “it was Blizzard’s idea” is only 50% of truth: yes, developers did think of it before, but rejected idea. It was implemented in very lucky moment, when DPS weren’t part of meta at all, to fix that problem once and for all.

Both because other attempts to fix problem failed, and because of community demands.

96

buffing her makes her pocket more broken, she shouldn’t be getting buffed. There’s going to be alot more boosted mercy mains playing with smurfs

97

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

Season 4, and the healing buff to Nano was like 2 years apart, you realize that, right? Which was what, like season 12? And still, It took mercy getting her 16k on average healing nerfed out of her before we saw Ana come back at all. Because a hero that’s capable of solo healing, who ever it is, is broken.

That’s not even half true. Healing is so sub optimal in Overwatch these days that even Zen’s ult is being burst through.

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. And it happened, many times.

Second:

I’m not sure you can say objectively false, and then follow it up with an explanation that is in itself objectively false with blizzard more often than not choosing some of the most controversial changes to implement in their game. For example:

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”

Another great example is hero bans. Everyone wanted hero bans from day one. Yet blizzard did their own thing, their own way, regardless of the community, instead opting to do hero pools.

edit:
And now that we’ve moved the goalposts this far. The fact remains. Any hero thats been able to solo heal has been nerfed to the ground. First it was Ana. Then it was Mercy. Most recently it was Bap. Solo healing was only a viable strat when a hero was overtuned. To claim that’s their sole intention:

is absurd seeing as every one of them have been nerfed so it isn’t possible anymore.

98

how about res pulse bomb (but still single target) as ult instead and make valk some e ability with utility and no free flight :heart_eyes:

99

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

100

??? in what universe.

Feb 2018

Oh right, that month when people stopped using Mercy and tried to run Moira in high elo.

https://www.omnicmeta.com/blog/overwatch_hero_meta_report_pc_feb_8_2018.html
Very indicative of mercy’s optimal healing, as people aren’t playing her. Not cherry picked at all.

What even was your point here? That still doesn’t indicate that healing hasn’t been reduced across the board. These aren’t mutually exclusive things here. Healing can be nerfed while damage was increased.

Cool strawman, but no. I was providing evidence to the contrary of your false hood:

By showing things that blizzard has done counter productive to what the community did or did not want.

And here, in the same paragraph of yours where you tried to compare 2/2/2 to one hero limit, I explained very clearly the game has gone through many shifts regardless of community opinion.

You couldn’t project harder if you were literally a projector.

I’m done with this conversation, you’re just becoming fallacious at this point.

101

Mercy’s healing numbers didn’t change from February to August because she hadn’t been touched at the time. A change in pickrate doesn’t change how effective a hero is when they are picked. This is why the graphs I shared were useful for the next few months, because there was nothing to change them and make the data out dated.

If you can actually find a source backing up your claim of 16k, then go ahead and actually share it. Otherwise it’s just your word against my evidence.

Sorta sums up this whole conversation, really. I can bring up all the developer statements and statistical evidence I want, but your argument still just amounts to “no, just trust what I’m saying.”

Have a nice day my dude.

102

Except a change in pickrate indicates a change of meta, which indicates a playstyle change that can very well shift the core gameplay from sustained damage and healing through most of it too burst damage which can’t be healed through by a sustained healer at all thus decreasing the average healing that hero would accomplish. To put it simply, Mercy will heal a lot more when Zen is getting zapped by a Winston than if Mccree two taps that Zen.

Your evidence is anything but. Those stats were literally drawn from an infavorable meta where mercy’s pickrate had plummeted. For a month.

Feb 2018. We left moth for a short period.
https://i.redd.it/ln0mmvzbolh31.png
https://www.esportstales.com/overwatch/most-played-heroes-by-competitive-tier-season-9
https://www.omnicmeta.com/blog/overwatch_hero_meta_report_pc_feb_8_2018.html

Moira was the dominant pick that month. The meta had shifted to quad tank vs the first iteration of bunker with jakerat and widow. Mercy damage boosted rat and couldn’t heal through Rein and hog speed boosting into her teams face. It was barley a month later we went straight back to dive. You could very well give me stats from season 3 and they would be just as relevant as those were to Peak Moth.

And One last thing, for curiosities sake. How do you read:

and somehow come to the conclusion that forcing players into a 2/2/2 wasn’t done because people were playing multiple dps and highly situational hero’s in comps that didn’t synergies with one another. “maining and one tricking” being “so dominant” that Blizzard had to step in and force players to have some form of structure while they were perfectly content to throw games playing 1/4/1’s

That’s just baffling.