Mercy is being ignored?

[GreyFalcon-11737]

Would you rather Mercy be unfun and underpowered for the next year, if it meant they’d get rid of Valkyrie by then?

Or would you prefer a fun version of Mercy in the next 2 months that would include Valkyrie?

[Blake-13490]

She is fine. There are other heroes that need attention.

[Narcodix-1755]

I mean do you Mercy players have a definitive reason that mass rez was healthy for the game? You can imply all you want that oh the DPS players caused mass rez to go because of complaints but from a fundamental standpoint it was broken.

Reason being terrible gameplay pattern. Wasnt very engaging for the Mercy player and wasnt engaging for the enemy team. Yes I understand tempo rez but hide and rez was a strategy as well forcing/allowing your team to die so you can get value is rewarding a mistake essentially.

[BadWidowEU-2419]

Would you rather Mercy be unfun and underpowered for the next year, if it meant they’d get rid of Valkyrie by then

This is assuming that they will take a year to rework her again. That by itself is ridiculous.

Or would you prefer a fun version of Mercy in the next 2 months that would include Valkyrie?

Nope. Scrap Valkyrie. I’ve already said that Valkyrie is not fun. The only way it can be fun is if it is overpowered. This rework proves that much.

[Narcodix-1755]

What I’m saying is that mass rez is not good for the game and reverting it as a bandaid fix isnt the solution regardless of how easy your implying it may be.

Fun is subjective and in a game with a playerbase of 40 million the forum users are the vocal minority. Your never going to satisfy everyone so aiming for the majority isnt a bad idea. If YOU arent having fun then YOU need to make a change. Not blizzard.

[Titanium-1686]

@Narcodix-1755

I mean do you Mercy players have a definitive reason that mass rez was healthy for the game?

Yes. It was a check for ultimate spam. It promoted intelligent use of ultimates rather than holding onto them for a single push and blowing 5 of them at once, which can actually be a viable strategy on assault maps.

@Narcodix-1755

Reason being terrible gameplay pattern. Wasnt very engaging for the Mercy player

I can personally attest to quite the opposite.

@Narcodix-1755

wasnt engaging for the enemy team.

Apparently, fighting an enemy isn’t engaging.

@Narcodix-1755

Yes I understand tempo rez but hide and rez was a strategy as well forcing/allowing your team to die so you can get value is rewarding a mistake essentially.

Hold that thought…

And…

@Titanium-1686

Moving onto “Hide and rez” …

“We think it’s wrong to tell a main-healing character to go off and hide somewhere and stop healing for some period of time.”

But it is fine for a main-damage character to go off and hide somewhere and stop dealing damage for some period of time, like many heroes currently do in preparation for an ultimate?

In actuality, you are right; just not for the reason you think you are. You are correct because hiding was maladaptive for the team’s chance of victory, and therefore was a bad way to play her. Allow me to explain this in an even more elaborate manner than my past few megaposts.

The success of a mass-Resurrection (4+ revived players) depended upon several factors:

• The Mercy’s ability to survive and execute the ability in the first place (the obvious one).
• The number of players alive on each team after the Resurrection.
• The number of available ultimates held by each team after the Resurrection (but primarily the enemy team).
• The shock value of Resurrect against the enemy (by far the most important factor for the post-rez fight).

The last factor is more important than the other two post-rez factors because it determines what other factors need to advantage the Mercy in order to have a good chance at a successful Resurrection. As the enemy team is given time to reorganize and fire their first attacks at the newly Resurrected team, they would already have a positioning advantage and the first shot… that is, if the team was expecting the Resurrection.

If the enemy team is expecting the Resurrection, they will have the post-rez advantages of the first shot and additional positioning time. Of course, this is a very bad situation to be in for the newly revived team, requiring some very strong advantages of their own to compensate and have a chance at winning the fight. In this case, they would need both the numbers advantage and the ultimate ability advantage.

If the enemy team isn’t expecting the Resurrection, then the Mercy could probably get by with either the numbers advantage or the ultimate advantage and still have a chance at winning, as the enemy team might not capitalize on their positioning and first shot opportunities as well as they should due to the shock value of Resurrect.

How does “Hide and rez” fit into all of this, you might ask? Hiding before the fight removes the possibility of having enough of those advantages against the enemy team in the post-rez fight, and therefore any chance of a victorious post-rez fight against any team of similar skill.

Hiding leaves the initial fight to a 5v6, the missing hero on the Mercy’s team being the main healer and primary source of sustain. Obviously, this is a huge advantage for the team of 6 in the first fight, allowing them to steamroll over Mercy’s team with likely zero casualties, and ultimate expenditures used only to counter any of the opposition’s ultimates. On top of this, the team of 6 also now collectively has 2000-3000 more ultimate charge from killing 5 players in addition to any healing dealt over the duration of that fight. Thus, it hands the ultimate ability advantage to the team opposing the Mercy.

The opposing team, assuming they are paying even the slightest attention to what is happening around them, would notice that the enemy is crumbling very easily for a supposed 6v6, raising suspicions as to whether or not the fight really is a 6v6, quickly leading to the realization that the enemy Mercy is missing from the fight. From this, only one conclusion could logically be drawn; she’s waiting to use Resurrect. There goes the ultimate’s shock value.

At this point, even if the team of 6 somehow managed to sustain 2 casualties in the initial fight, it won’t matter. If both teams entered the fight with the same number of ultimates, the team that does not have the hiding Mercy has at least two more ultimates than the other team (2000+ ultimate charge, Mercy’s team used Resurrect). One or two offensive ultimates is the absolute maximum a team needs to wipe a freshly-revived team when they are expecting the Resurrection, resulting in the revived team staring down the barrel of a gun they have no chance of avoiding.

In contrast, a Mercy who stays with her team keeps the fight at a 6v6, granting her team more sustain and forcing the enemy to expend ultimates to overpower them. Once the ultimates started firing, the mercy would distance themselves from the fight, evade, or take cover, laying down pistol fire or amplifying damage rather than attempting to heal those for whom healing would be useless. As a result, the enemy was less likely to realize that Mercy has Resurrect (the enemy was comparatively difficult to kill, removing the prompt to think about why they were crumbling easily in the first place), Mercy’s team was more likely to pick off a few enemies, and Mercy has successfully baited more ultimates from the enemy team. As a result, her team has more advantages and fewer disadvantages in the post-rez fight.

The only cost to staying with the team was an increased chance of being picked off before being able to revive the team, which just follows the same risk choice explained in the Resurrect section; if taking more controllable risks now helps to mitigate the high risk later, then taking those smaller risks now is safer than not in the long run.

Consequently, reviving a team after hiding typically resulted in a second wipe, while staying with the team until it was unsafe to do so was more likely to yield favorable results. That is why it was “wrong to tell a main-healing character to go off and hide somewhere” . It was a bad tactic, as it usually backfired.

Rather than letting the issue resolve itself by fixing the SR exploit that ultimately led to the tactic’s rise in the first place, the developers decided to remove Resurrect as an ultimate entirely. They changed the thing that wasn’t the problem, and ended up pissing off the playerbase.

Sound familiar?

Anyway, I’ve used this example many times before, but removing Resurrect as an ultimate because some players abandoned their team leading to a second wipe is equivalent to removing Rocket Barrage as an ultimate because Pharah players too often blew themselves up with it. There’s no need to intervene; the tactic will die out on its own, so long as the ranking system isn’t feeding it.

Ironically, the rework ended up only replacing one tactic of hiding with another. This time, however, the is no drawback to it, making the tactic beneficial. Valkyrie is best used by pressing Q and then flying the hell away, barely staying within beam range of the team. Doing this minimizes risk, but compromises no rewards. A Mercy playing closer to her team in Valkyrie is not helping her team any more than a Mercy 29 meters from her team, and is only exposing herself to enemy fire. Consequently, staying as far as possible from the fight for Valkyrie’s full duration is the way to go.

Go.

[BadWidowEU-2419]

What I’m saying is that mass rez is not good for the game and reverting it as a bandaid fix isnt the solution regardless of how easy your implying it may be.

You may need to look up the definition of a revert. It definitely isn’t mass Res with tweaks.

Fun is subjective and in a game with a playerbase of 40 million the forum users are the vocal minority. Your never going to satisfy everyone so aiming for the majority isnt a bad idea. If YOU arent having fun then YOU need to make a change. Not blizzard.

The vocal minority online find her unfun to play. Like I said, where do you think they got the opinions of people; saying that she’s disheartening to play against? Obviously the vocal minority online. Or are you going to explain how they found out the majority opinion amongst 40 million players that ultimately lead them to rework Mercy.

If YOU arent having fun then YOU need to make a change. Not blizzard.

Shall we dive into a bit of player perspective philosophy?

Unless the hero is a balance concern, Player 2’s perception of Player 1’s character isn’t relevant. It is given that Player 2’s perception of Player 1’s character is likely negative when playing against Player 1. On the other hand, Player 1’s perception of Player 1’s character is not a given in any videogame. For the videogame to be successful, Player 1’s perception of their own character, or how it feels to play their own character, needs to be positive. If that perception is negative, players will stop playing. As a result, Player 1’s experience with Player 1’s character is infinitely more important than Player 2’s perception of Player 1’s character.

In short, a player needs to feel empowered by their own actions. The player does not need to feel empowered, and in a PvP game, should not and will not feel empowered, by the actions of their opponents.

Player 1’s experience with Player 1’s character was breached and disregarded when Blizzard tried to make Player 2’s perception of Player 1’s hero positive… which they also failed to do. By attempting to change that which neither needed to be changed nor could be changed, the balance team tampered with something that should never be altered.

[Arcalias-2773]

So the existence of a bad strategy performed by people who were basically throwing games (even if it wasn’t their intention) justify a hero’s entire rework ?

Sorry but this doesn’t make sense to me, we might as well rework every hero because a minority of players are exploiting a bad strategy.

[Mroowski-2293]

Mercy is bound for a rework or revert or a combination of the two. Nerfs were nothing but band-aids to make her less OP - not really an attempt to make her playable. She is one of the most popular characters, so there will be a lot new Mercy threads, but looking at how the dev team tackled balance issues so far - it might be awhile before they look at her again. There are a lot of other characters that need to be dealt with, and Mercy is only one of them.

A lot of Mercy players come of as inflammatory and some of them talk from the position of privilege. While I might sympathize with your cause and I agree that Mercy is pretty bad right now… You don’t own the game as a whole, Devs will fix her when they’ll get to it, she is not ignored, I’m sure the dev team right now is leveraging different options internally, so they can’t speak out.

At the same time I see a lot of unjustified hate towards Mercy players for things that were out of their control. Mercy Mains are not responsible for her state, neither current one or the previous OP one. It’s not very smart to be happy about the nerfs, because underwhelming Mercy is just as bad for the game as overpowered.

people, chill

[Narcodix-1755]

It was the counter to all ultimates. Mercys mass rez could counter just about every tank ult or fps ult in the game and the only real counterplay was to kill her. In some cases even if the flankers did track her down and kill her she could walk back from spawn and still get value from reseting the fight. Is that a good gameplay loop?

Point two is subjective. Glad you had fun.

You can have an engaging game with the enemy team. It’s different nuisances that attribute to that versus mass rez which just guaranteed you a fight reset. The gameplay loop was kill Mercy or lose just about every team fight which was very linear. Other healers have things like bionade to counter Zen ult, EMP to counter beat drop or peeling back and letting it run out or trying to burn through it through other means. Mass rez was the counter that had no counter other then stop her from doing it before she did it.

A multitude of other factors can be put in the dps hide debate and almost all DPS ults arent equivalent in terms of value to most tank/support ults. Most can be countered through positioning or basic abilities.

[Mroowski-2293]

Other healers have things like bionade to counter Zen ult, EMP to counter beat drop or peeling back and letting it run out or trying to burn through it through other means. Mass rez was the counter that had no counter other then stop her from doing it before she did it.

I’m assuming that if mass rez would ever make it’s return, it should be countered by both bionade or EMP. I think everybody agrees that old Mass rez was broken - but whats the problem with tweaking it? It was a way better ult than Valk, that is just a slight (well, at her current state) buff to things she already does, with little to no added value.

[BadWidowEU-2419]

He’s going to say it’s unhealthy and say no more, if I were to take a guess.

[Mroowski-2293]

If I were to predict how OW team is going to fix Mercy: I think, the Mass rez will return, but with the introduction of the “down” state of every character, working similarly as it does in other FPS games. Instead of insta-killing, ultimates would put characters into a “down” state, where they would just lay down, not being able to do anything - sorta like being hit by a sleep dart. Then, they could be finished off by the enemy… or rezzed instantly by the Mercy.

Well, that how I would do it, anyway.

[Narcodix-1755]

Explained why already.

[BadWidowEU-2419]

Quote it again please. I must’ve missed it.

[Narcodix-1755]

It’s two or three pist above you. Response to Titanium.

[BadWidowEU-2419]

Reason being terrible gameplay pattern.

What?

Wasnt very engaging for the Mercy player and wasnt engaging for the enemy team.

So having a team fight isn’t engaging?

Yes I understand tempo rez but hide and rez was a strategy as well forcing/allowing your team to die so you can get value is rewarding a mistake essentially.

Hide and Res counters itself, wasn’t encouraged by the ultimate and was only used because of the SR abuse. The SR system is fixed now. That means “Hide n Res” is no longer a problem. Ofc, some people are still going to do it but that doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t encouraged by the ultimate. Otherwise, what’s stopping them from reworking Zen because some players only use Transcendance when the enemy team uses ult comboes.

[Titanium-1686]

It was the counter to all ultimates. Mercys mass rez could counter just about every tank ult or fps ult in the game and the only real counterplay was to kill her.

Or not blowing all of your ultimates at once.
Or staggering enemy deaths.

You know; basic skills that any somewhat-decent Overwatch player should be accustomed to exercising anyway.

• Target prioritization.
• Ultimate management.
• Hostile death staggering.

Point two is subjective. Glad you had fun.

I find it funny that you bring up a subjective argument, and then back off as soon as it’s contradicted and then trying to invalidate said argument with “That’s subjective”.

Did you not think about that before making your argument in the first place?

You can have an engaging game with the enemy team. It’s different nuisances that attribute to that versus mass rez which just guaranteed you a fight reset.

Saying Resurrect guaranteed a fight reset is like saying that Dragonblade guaranteed a teamwipe.

It is a downright lie.

The gameplay loop was kill Mercy or lose just about every team fight which was very linear.

Or… maybe stop blowing 4+ ultimates in a single fight?

Literally countering Mercy’s Q with another Q of yours right afterwards was a free second wipe.

Other healers have things like bionade to counter Zen ult, EMP to counter beat drop or peeling back and letting it run out or trying to burn through it through other means.

Literally everything here works just as well for Resurrect.

A team being revived into a Biotic Grenade has the same effects as a team being Bio-naded during Transcendence. A team being revived into an EMP has the same effect as a team getting EMPed after Sound Barrier. And if you can burn through a mobile team that is comprised of effective tanks after Sound Barrier, then you sure as hell can burn through a team of freshly-revived players when you have the positioning and first-shot advantages.

Mass rez was the counter that had no counter

Except for the blatantly obvious ones that any team of semi-decent players does automatically. There’s a reason mercy had the lowest GM pickrate out of all supports.

Countering Resurrect was easy. The difference between it and other ultimates? I more clearly highlighted the fact that the enemy team was sloppy. Those players, rather than learning from their mistakes, would rather put the blame somewhere else so they don’t have to deal with it. So they did.

They destroyed a hero and caused a year of Mercy meta because of their preference to remove an obstacle over learning how to counter it.

[LCC-11142]

I just think there are to many heroes who are in more dire need than Mercy.
She had the spotlight for the past year.

[Narcodix-1755]

You know what dude. I’m not going to debate with you anymore. If you think mass rezz is balancable good for you, personally I dont.

Agree to disagree because I dont really see this line on conversation going anywhere but into circumstantial evidence. Take it how you want and good luck.