as a person who has defended the ability for resurrect to be balanced into the game. I think blizzard making it what they balance the rest of mercy’s kit around means that it needs to go.
I feel like this is true. In groups that I’ve been during these last few days of season 11 healer comps have been, Mercy/Ana or Mercy/Moira or Moira/Ana which is a good thing. I’ve seen some Lucio and Zen in there but usually its a triple support comp going.
The groups I’ve been in used Mercy as a second/off healer and is usually just there for a rez and damage boost. Yet sometimes, I’ve seen either me as Mercy outheal my Ana, Lucio, And Moira or get out healed by Mercy as Ana, Lucio and Moira.
I also noticed that even with the healing nerf I have been able to outheal my Ana or Moira Most of the time. The times when I haven’t been able to outheal is when I get focused everythime I get back into the fight.
In my experience, the Healing nerf just made it more challenging to heal and more dire to heal your important allies rather than make it impossible to outheal Ana and Moira. Knowing this tho it still isn’t the right nerf especially when everyone is still complaining about res every other post.
Anybody who told you that no other reduction would really affect her was being hyperbolic or obtuse. For instance, if you removed guardian angel, damage boost beam, and healing beam entirely, and left her with only res then no one would ever pick her for any reason.
It’s similar to saying that you bring Lucio for speed boost or Zen for discord, and that when those two are must picks that’s the reason. I think no one doubts that a Lucio with no heals, damage, or boops and with only speed boost would be weak. Or that a Zen with only discord would be bad. But it still doesn’t change the fact that when Lucio or Zen are OP then those are major contributing factors.
The more reasonable version of the argument you’re arguing against is this - Mercy with res on 30 second cooldown is a must pick as long as her healing is good enough to enable her to be a main healer. Res on E isn’t the sole source of her power, but it’s a big contributor. You bring her to have a main healer who can also res.
What we’re seeing now is the effects of having a healer who brings very little damage, struggles at the main healing role, and can also res. That just doesn’t work. If you want to gauge the strength of res you need a version where she’s a main healer who cannot res, and doesn’t bring much damage.
We know an example of a healer who does more healing than Mercy at every rank above gold, brings more damage, and cannot res. That’s Moira. She’s not OP.
In the grand scheme of things, 50 hp/s is not hugely different from 60 hp/s. Most of the time the same people would remain alive and the same people would get killed, just not the edge cases.
Yeah, they were being hyperbolic. But still, even in concept, we’ve demonstrated here that rez isn’t the core base of Mercy’s power. 60 to 50 hp/s isn’t a huge change - we wouldn’t have gotten this kind of massive power swing if Zen’s discord went from 30% to 25% damage boost (a change of equal magnitude). Or if his healing went to 25 hp/s instead of 30.
Mercy’s winrate seems to have been mostly driven by her healing. Rez isn’t an overpowered element of her kit. If there was one, it was her healing, probably all along.
No, because she’s still perfectly usable? ![:joy:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=5" ":joy:")
News flash, your low skill hero isn’t supposed to be top tier.
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They targeted Mercy mains.
Mercy Mains.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Mercy Mains aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a genji-ized head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Mercy Mains are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Are you okay broski.
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Right in the grand scheme of things it shouldn’t make that much of a difference, but it does. Out of 10 matches of Comp as Mercy with Valk, 100% of those matches everytime I use valk my team loses the fight even if the enemy team has just 4 or 5 team members alive. it’s not pretty when you’re getting blamed for not doing enough.
I am fine with this.
I am tired of having skillful kills and ults undone by a keystroke of E.
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Your character’s winrate went down less than five percent in most ranks, and is certainly less than 5% lower than average.
So, basically, you would have probably lost most of those matches away.
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She is not the worst. Maybe the worst main healer, but I highly doubt that Moira is actually better. And those stats mean nothing since private profiles. So there is no conclusion on how she’s doing
Before I give my points, I think I owe you an apology. I’ve been replying to a lot of your posts. I’ve been doing it because, while you and I are on opposite sides of this issue, I think you make good points and are engaging is serious minded debate (which seems rare on either side). I just realized that it might come off as overly aggressive, and I’ll stop if you want me to.
I agree that healing is the major driver of Mercy’s contribution. It’s the core of her character. That’s why a 17% flat nerf to it was such a large issue. But res on 30 second cooldown does takes up a large chunk of her power budget. I think this for two four reasons.
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Mercy’s healing pre rework was 60 hps. Historical stats (Titanium posted some of these a while back) show that her healing average didn’t really change by much past the rework. But she certainly became a must pick after the rework. That’s evidence to me that res on E is a problem.
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Moira’s healing is higher than Mercy’s and is not driving a must pick status. Moira lacks some of Mercy’s consistency, but she more than makes up for it with high burst and aoe healing, and a high healing ult with a low cooldown.
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I wrote a post a while back quantifying each healer’s contribution. For Mercy, that was average healing + average damage done + average damage boosted + average number of resses*average hp of a character. Mercy’s contribution is about 15,100, with about 1803 of that tied in resurrected targets, and about 11,800 tied up in healing. The healing reduction ends up being about 1000, so I’m reading res as contributing more than that.
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Between February and April Mercy (after her previous nerfs) Mercy’s pick rate went down below Moira’s (her win rates didn’t change much though). Then her pick rate slowly went up above Moira’s. During this whole time, her win rate wasn’t higher than Moira’s. In fact, it wasn’t that high at all (which you would expect if she was OP). Her healing wasn’t higher either. The increase was driven by something else that was less quantifiable. To me, this indicates that Overwatch has an addiction to resurrection. The one good thing that comes from the current situation to me is a cure for this.
What I’m taking from all this is that her healing is super important, but the res is also a big part of it.
Back to your point (which I think is very good) - that Mercy’s success is driven by healing which explains the precipitous drop in win rate. Why is the win rate changing so much? Because Overwatch is not driven by continuous variables. It’s driven by discrete and even boolean variables. Kills / kills prevented. Existence of a character competing for the same role that can do the job better / lack of such a character. That’s why burst damage/healing tends to be so much better than sustained damage/healing.
In healing, the only hit points that end up mattering are the ones that prevent deaths. Less healing means more deaths, more deaths means more losses. Mercy has crossed some threshold where she’s not able to hold her own against the other healers in preventing deaths. When she’s above it, res matters a lot - it’s her added value and her burst all wrapped into one. When she’s below it, it doesn’t really matter much.
That’s a frustrating place to be in as a healer - constantly seeing people die because you can’t keep them up. Feeling ineffectual (and it’s not just a feeling - the stats show it). Res doesn’t make up for it, since we don’t really like it. We like the healing. That’s why many of us would be happy to dump the power in res (whether you think it’s a lot or a medium amount) to save the thing that makes the character work.
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Oh come on. To even suggest that Mercy isn’t still the best healer in the game by far is ridiculous.
Do not worry, Mercy will always have Pharah.
Uh, no.
Taking away Mercy’s healing piss-beam would be like taking away Rein’s shield. Resurrect has done practically nothing but hold Mercy back forever. Take it away and Mercy’s power-budget suddenly becomes open to gameplay mechanics that can have a bit more nuance and skill involved.
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She is in no way dead. I am a mercy main and I find her to be still more useful than other supports at times. She is great to play with and against in the sniper meta (res/damage boosting smaller hp heroes). She just isn’t able to work with a lot of tanks atm which is where moira and ana come in which I think is fair because she shouldn’t be the first pick healer into every single type of comp, there should be variety. She is still a very strong pick, and can heal through shields. She is also very good at keeping other supports alive still even with the nerf. Her pick rates are now lower because people will hear the word nerf and scream and run the other direction. Her winrates are lower because people who are average and don’t know how to play Mercy are now suffering more as it is harder to play her.
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I’ve been saying this for ages. Resurrect is currently in the time-based limiting factor the devs want for her. Even with that, though, and even though they had to handicap it with a 1.75s cast time and by far the longest CD in the game, they still have to strip stuff off her main kit so that it doesn’t break the game. Before the latest patch she was the best throughput healer with the best survivability and the only ad-hoc death prevention tool in the game. No wonder she was in every single game. The issue is you can’t nerf rez anymore without making it almost impossible to get off or making it not worth the time (by adding debuffs to rezzed allies).
Resurrect as an ultimate was even more limiting because of the nature of the ability. She had no midfight because “well what if her rez picks up 5 people” is something you have to consider when balancing her, and people were constantly asking for her to get an E ability for something to do when she didn’t have Rez up, which she didn’t get until resurrect was no longer her ultimate. That wasn’t an accident. But people romanticize mass rez with rose-tinted glasses and forget that even then she was a deeply flawed hero that large portions of her player base was not happy with (this isn’t even getting into the whole hide and rez debate). And again, the issue there was Rez.
I do think at a certain point you have to step back, look at the history of Mercy as a hero and ask if Rez is really worth it. Because at this point, I honestly don’t think it is, and I say that as someone who does play Mercy, not someone who never wants to see her again.
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In other words, because they messed up before, that justifies messing up again.
Failed argument.
That’s not a bad analysis. I know the 50 hp/s has seemed to make a big statistical difference.
However, I think there are still some arguments for preserving current Mercy (or possibly one that’s been buffed up a little, like 55 hp/s). Rez is an ability that’s totally distinct from the other healers. It’s the only way to help someone who’s been one-shotted, for instance. Mercy with less healing but rez is more distinct from the other healers, particularly Moira, than a stronger healing Mercy without it. She’s kind of a soft-counter to snipers with it, and they sure need one.
Likewise, I think Valk should not be discarded out of hand. Valk allows the normally reactive and defensive Mercy to do something proactive and initiate a push with her damage amp. Mercy players used to complain a lot about being dependent on their team to push and unable to initiate one themselves, and I think Valkyrie as it is now is good for that. That Mercy players feel unimpactful while using it may be somewhat psychological - it is slower paced and less immediate than mass rez was, but it’s still powerful and effective and the Mercy absolutely deserves some credit if the push is successful, or if it saves the team during a bad teamfight, or it otherwise makes a difference. And it’s not low-skill either, you have to balance healing and damage correctly to get full use out of it, draw fire without getting yourself killed, and a good Valk player will get the occasional kill of opportunity too. It really isn’t a bad ult at all if you don’t already dislike it because it replaced something else you liked.