"Mercy is fine fun is subjective play someone else"

i kinda feel this is what doom was for too, break up the back line, and let hte team break through, it would explain why his ultimate “can” come back quickly

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The fun argument is whatever.

The fact is that current Mercy’s kit design is awful and was broken for most of its existence. All buffs will do is return her to that state. This has been elaborated on ad naseum.

Re-rework or do nothing.

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I’m not a fan of reworks, because it would only divide the playerbase more.

  • There are players who dislike Mercy 2.0 and want mercy 1.0.
  • There are players who dislike Mercy 2.0 and want Mercy 3.0.
  • There are players who like Mercy 2.0 and don’t want mercy 1.0 or Mercy 3.0.

You can’t satisfy all of them.

This is why balancing based only on feelings is a bad way of balancing and why reworks should be the last step if every other attempt at balancing that hero has failed.

Jeff seems to agree with this statement, I remember in an interview a while back [Post-Torb Rework I think] he talked about how he grew to dislike reworks, and how he felt that reworks sort of “Pushed the reset button on balance”. He said that he thinks reworks should be the very last step, to where the character simply cannot be balanced using raw number changes.

A good example of this proving true would probably be Torbjorn, his turret would either be massively weak or strong no matter how you buff or nerf it, turrets are incredibly hard to balance in FPS games, and buffing Torbjorn’s abilities really wouldn’t help his viability as a hero considering Armor Pack could only do so much before it would be too strong and broken. Torbjorn needed a tune-up to his survivability, and a rework seemed to be the only feasible course of action, as none of his abilities could really provide that well enough for him without causing problems elsewhere.

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I dont understand bringing this up, devs are allways happy with the state of the game and heroes in their game. They were happy with ‘‘Mercys current state’’ how many times only to roll out another nerf 2 weeks later?
They were happy with the current state of supports and are rolling out with another set of nerfs now again.

Thats kind of a technicality in my book. As my personal experience, and watching streamers shows that if you pick Mercy as a main healer, your team will tell you ‘‘we need more healing, swap’’ and if you pick her as an off support your team will tell you ‘‘we need a defensive ult, swap’’. So technically, the majority of players is complaining about either both Mercys ult and healing or one of them, depending on how you look at it. The difference is, they dont really care which supports are played as long as they get what they need, aka enough healing and a defensive counter ult, they dont care about the heroes that provide that, and usually just blame the players.

Thats like saying Reaper is on par with other dps, with a healthy pick rate, but suffers cause he simply isnt meta.

I dont know, for me personally ‘‘shes just not meta’’ falls pretty flat when I see top 500 Mercys swapping to Ana in a dive comp.

And if Im being honest I dont see her being in a better spot after Bap comes out.

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Holy concern trolling. Thing is, the damage is already done and the revert option is off the table.

Which is why i’m saying that pity buffs because you feel bad for Mercy mains is unhealthy for the game’s balance.

So either leave it or address the issue properly and that means another rework.

Funny, i used to say that too.

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I’d argue that it should be primarily stats, supplemented with player feedback, and occasionally considering developer thoughts.

Overwatch has millions of players and millions matches a month. The odds that the developers are seeing something that all the stats and all of the players aren’t isn’t all that great.

You’d want to balance primarily by stats tempered by player feedback to ensure things remain fun.

Developers can have worse issues with favoritism than players ever will. The development team spends somewhere between months and a year making a hero. That can easily lead to an attachment as you’ve put a literal fraction of your life into it. Yeah, you’d have some characters that were just designed to be a cog or that had so many different individual’s changes that it wasn’t personally attached to you but, some would probably be primarily the work of one person at least from a design point of view.

The primary reason for attempting to consider developer’s personal views would be to prevent the product from being too depressing for them and damaging future content.

Here’s what the stats showed about the Mercy rework on a fan site in under a week.

7% more healing than before

Mercy’s rework was on the PTR for weeks. It’s highly likely that unless the stats bugged on the PTR or something unexpected happened the PTR showed relatively similar numbers that were ignored.

Player feedback went in a variety of directions and I’m not going to claim the average person was entirely correct, however, some of us were pretty close to what happened.

Ex:

I don’t think the new Mercy is currently fairly balanced compared to the other healers. While the quality of resurrects is lower with the new Mercy, the quantity is so much higher that in matches of players at my skill level even without an ultimate Mercy is probably the best single target healer.

As she has become more balanced with the weapon changes she’s become less enjoyable to play and she’ll likely continue in that direction when she actually becomes balanced.

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There were 25 heroes in OW at the time of her rework. Completely disregarding ALL of the other reasons she was nerfed, something being unfun for 24 heroes outweighs the minority of 1 hero’s player base finding her “unfun” now. 24:1 wins, and it should.

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I dont know man, sometimes i come back to the forums and all i see are armchair game developers-- some of the ideas here are good but some are SERIOUSLY bad. In those instances i am glad developers disagree with them and appreciate that they’re the ones that have the last word.

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how so? Her playstyle hasn’t changed a bit. Admit - you just want her to be OP mustpick character, like Rein

If that was the only reason, they would had nerfed her into the ground and keep her there just like they have done with the characters the community has decided that are “unfun to play against”

But sadly, they never went into detail about the changes-- however, Jeff Kaplan also specified that the developers didn’t liked the playstyle Mass Resurrection encouraged, so they removed it.

The majority don’t complain because the majority weren’t affected negatively by it. If you figure the player base as a whole - say 10% of people played Mercy. The rest of that whole probably was composed of most of the complainers.
90% > 10%.

And as it stands now, the majority don’t complain because they’re happy they got what they wanted. The complains are from those who main Mercy and hate how her ult went from “really useful / game changing!” to “meh…”

The devs say a lot of things, doesn’t mean they’re in the right.

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No she wasn’t.

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Keep in mind the developers get to actually test their ideas (even when an idea is potentially testable in a custom match it’s hard to wrangle the players and get them to give good feedback), spend significantly larger periods of time working on them, have a significantly wider amount of access to stats, and have feedback from people with similar goals to them that aren’t going to be excessively supportive.

That’s a relatively significant series of advantages that should generally make them superior to individual users.

You also will generally just see the ideas that are what they consider to be their best.

Many of the idea people on forums are relatively prolific with some of the ideas being good and some well not being terrible. Forum users also have a really bad tendency to say x is bad without saying why which limits ones ability to improve.

I love how I provided stats that prove she wasn’t broken and people are still going “admit it you just want her to be op again” yeah D tier is most definitely OP…
Even in the developer update for the rework Jeff stated that " mass resurrection was disheartening to play against having all your hard work undone" it wasn’t broken just deemed “annoying and unfun” by the community

The point I’m trying to make is a character got reworked because she was deemed “unfun to play against” and a large majority of the community that mains her now finds her unfun and the claim now is “fun is subjective”. That’s very hypocritical considering she was reworked because people found her unfun to play against if fun really is subjective she wouldn’t have needed to be reworked in the first place.

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What always amuses me with these types of threads, is that despite the actual hard facts you’ve given in the OP, and how you made excellent points backed by evidence, those who can only accept their own opinion on the topic will still ignore it and continue pushing the #MercyIsFine agenda, regardless of the evidence literally saying otherwise.

At the end of the day, the truth remains.

Unfun to play with = subjective

& also

Unfun to play against = subjective

One can’t push one of these and then conveniently ignore the other. As you’ve said, that is hypocrisy. Both opinions are valid.

Even the devs at this point have realized that Mercy is actually not “fine”, and needs improvements. So I don’t believe it’s a matter of “if” mercy gets changes, but rather, a matter of “when”. And quite honestly, I can’t wait to see what they have in store for her.

But anyway, great post. :blush:


~Sincerely Yours xoxo,
a Lover of True, Fair, and Fun Balance.
xavvypls
:blue_heart:

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And it should be said again that it wasn’t even the only reason she was reworked.

But sure, if we ignore that, 24 heroes fun is still more important than 1 hero’s uncounterable ult. Even if you argue “kill her first,” if you didn’t kill the rest of the team fast enough, she still had time to run back and still press Q to bring most of them back.

24 heroes outweigh 1 hero.

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Mercy has always been fine and still is. The issue with stats, is that a character’s balance in the meta is based on the other heroes. Overwatch season one meta was a 2-2-2 comp that allowed all three roles, Tank, DPS, and Support to be utilized.

The balance changed with the addition of Ana who is better at healing Tanks than DPS, because its easier for her to heal characters with large hit boxes. This created Triple and then Quad Tank comps. Then they added Moira and Brig. After adding those we ended up with Goats which makes all DPS practically unplayable.

The issue is that Ana, Moira, and Brig are better at healing Tanks than they are DPS. Further, they reduced Lucio’s support aura from that of the original, making him better at supporting Tanks because you have to be tightly grouped together to receive his support. Zen’s transcendence is also a get out of jail free card for tightly grouped teams that should get destroyed by damage Ults, as he saves them.

Its not that Mercy is unbalanced or ever was unbalanced. Its that the other supports are increasingly being balanced poorly. Mercy is the only support that’s good at healing DPS, so if you don’t have Mercy you run Goats or a similar comp.

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Mercy’s core abilities are still largely the same functionally as they were pre-rework. “unfun to play” makes no sense to me :woman_shrugging:

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Because she had absolutely no to very little impact on the outcome of team fights, more often than not feeding the enemy more ult charge. So much so she would have never been viable for the pro scene.

also if you already know the answer

why are you making another up?

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