Mercy is being ignored?

Arceus-2238 · September 22, 2018, 2:55am

Statistically, she is ridiculously underpowered.

Mercy will be balanced claims: I’ve heard people say that people are still learning how to play post nerf Mercy, and that the numbers will get better once people figure out what maps/comps she’s good at. From the start, this claim is dubious. Mercy has been around since the game came out and, she’s not hard to figure out. Mercy should be good on maps with lots of verticality, and should be good in mobile comps that can exploit vericality, as well as comps centered on long range damage. I don’t think higher ranks players have any trouble at all figuring this out.

Looking at the data however, this claim doesn’t appear to be true. It’s been a month and the win rates show no indication of an upward trend. Mercy’s pick rates have already plummeted quite severely. People have already heavily restricted the situations they play Mercy in. They just haven’t found success. If this claim were true, you would have expected to see an upward trend when the pick rates decreased, especially in higher ranks where people make better strategic choices. It’s just not there. As a side note: the hero you are thinking of when you make this claim is Zenyatta. His pick rates have gone down, but his win rates have not.

In order to believe this claim, you need to believe an very unlikely constellation of ideas. This claim has grown a beard and needs a shave from Ockham’s razor. Its fig leaf of plausibility is shrinking by the day and it’s becoming indecent.

A month of Mercy nerf in numbers

Mercy is balanced claims: I’ve heard people say that Mercy is fine, that Mercy is in a good place, that she’s more balanced than she’s ever been, etc. These claims are 100% false. Mercy’s win rates are below the tier average throughout the SR spectrum. The problem gets progressively worse the higher up you go. Being 3% away from the tier average is incredibly bad, given that the entire spread of win rate averages of commonly played characters is about 6%. Statistically, if you are playing Mercy right now then you are deranking, and if you’re playing her in high ranks then you’re throwing.

Another version of this attempts to shield itself from reality by making the non falsifiable claim that Mercy is fine because she still has mobility, consistency, damage boost, and res. You can tell that a claim about Mercy is on its face wrong if you can make it verbatim regardless of what number her healing is changed to. But even more importantly than that, this kind of theoretical analysis is not very useful. The final arbiter of what is good in Overwatch is what actually happens in the game, and the actual numbers point out clear as day that Mercy is not fine. Just as a reminder - after the Ana nerfs pros thought she would always be fine because she still had anti heals, sleep, and high burst healing.