Having a hero who’s place in the meta is contingent on whether or not they can make another hero OP is poor game design.
Whether you think she is too strong, average, or weak, the truth is that Mercy is very difficult to balance and makes the game difficult to balance.
Want to buff her? Oh no, she breaks some unforseen damage threshhold or makes her pocketing playstyle too unenjoyable to play against (or play as).
Add a new hero? Oh no, Mercy breaks a damage threshhold and now they can one-shot people cough Ashe cough Soujourn.
Want a hero that is underperforming in most areas to get buffed? Oh wait, buffing them would make a pocketed version of them too oppressive.
While I agree that current Mercy could definitely need touch ups, the question is what and how?
Currently, Mercy sacrifices her damage in exchange for boosting an ally’s. For all intents and purposes, she is the classic healer archetype: focusing more on raising up a single individual at the expense of themselves.
Personally, I think her problem stems from two things: Resurrect as an ability; and how Caduceus Staff works.
Frankly, I would propose moving Resurrect back into an ultimate (like Sage from Valorant), and have both fires of Caduceus Staff be resource based (individual gauges).
Of course, this is only direct changes; this game really suffers from unaddressed indirect changes.
Honestly, I think her damage boost is her biggest issue, that and Rez. Yes, she gives up her damage to boost someone else’s, but as we’ve seen time and time again, it has a tendency to make heroes OP.
Those heroes always get nerfed, but she never does and it just keeps happening like clockwork.
And since she is prone to damage boosting heroes that side in the backlines of their team, Rez just ends up adding insult to injury.
Having a hero be at the root of several issues and never get any significant changes and just cause more and more problems to arise is usually seen as unfun.
Possibly? But then we run into the issue of Mercy potentially losing the biggest reason to play her.
Thus bringing us to the other issue of it being difficult to nerf her. It’s very easy for the pocket playstyle to just not be worth it and that is the biggest reason she is played since other supports are better at the rest.
And yeah, Rez is such a situational ability as it is that it’s best that they move it to either her ult in someway or change how it works.
Yeah Mercy is bad design and I was also curious why they designed such characters, and now I know the reason : They thought this game to be a MMO PvE and PvP could be a small part of it like the arena PvP in WoW.(Unlike in PvP, Mercy design is completely sane in PvE.) But then a big part of PvE is gone.
In a lot of ways I feel that damage boost and discord orb are keeping dps power creep in check. We don’t need more damage on individual characters and Mercy and Zen tend to show off when a character is doing too much. That’s usually when these characters get nerfed. Even if you nerfed damage boost and discord orb, over time you’d likely just see the base dps number go up until these abilities would tip the scale again.
Also bear in mind that a ton of people play this game for the unique hero designs Mercy included. We can’t really afford to ostracize categories of players with the game crashing…
They feed off each other, although if I’m not mistaken, it started with healing creep when Ana was released back in 2016. Ana was introduced into the game doing 75 HP healed with each shot, and for reference, she does the same now but now there is more damage in the game and she is still considered to be able to heal a lot, even too much by some people’s standards.
And it’s also not very good to judge if someone’s damage is too much based on how much damage they do boosted…
This is true, but causing multiple issues that make the game unenjoyable and gatekeeping multiple heroes and other supports at times from being changed for the better should also be taken into consideration.
What I said above ^
Although I’m not so sure about easier. Maybe in the short term, but in the long run so many changes have already happened in part because of her.
And not to mention it should be tanks that we want to pay attention to if we want to talk about stuff like queue times, and I’d guess most tanks don’t like having a damage boosted Soldier shooting at them from a point they can’t reach.
I imagine that there are more players of these heroes than there are of Mercy ones that like to pocket.
That last part is important because there are mercy players that dislike her pocket playstyle.
