Mercy is in a bad position, and here's why! #ReworkMercy #MercyIsWeakestHealer

[Pacifist-21712]

• “Mercy is in a bad spot”

ok

• “Mercy’s healing is weak and her previous raw healing was meant to make up for her lack of offensive capabilities.”

Mercy’s HPS is just enough for players to realize that the healing isn’t the only part of her kit. It takes a little slower for some, as we can see, but that’s the case.

Mercy now has offensive capabilities, Valkyrie and a much heavier use of damage boost

Why Valkyrie?
To pick off poorly positioned / low hp / weak agaist Mercy targets with your pistol.

Why damage boost?
Do you remember a single Mercy player who would frequently utilize damage boost during Mercy 1.0 days? You might, but I sure don’t. It wasn’t as useful as the healing. Now that healing with Mercy mostly results in feeding when in tough situations, damage boost is a much better option. You won’t feed the enemies more ultcharge and your targeted ally will gain more ult charge for hitting their last shots or possibly do enough damage to survive. 50 HP/s isn’t going to save them.

• “Her kit is very team reliant, hence why resurrect as an ultimate worked.”

Doesn’t old resurrect like, require a dead teammate to work? How is that not team reliant, again?

And do we really have to go through the reasons why Mercy got a new ultimate? And no, it isn’t your casual fEeLiNgS .

• “Not only did it change the game, but it tipped the scales back in her favor if she was able to position herself properly and keep her teammates alive through poke damage and team fights, aka playing well.”

Are you insisting that hiding was the correct and intended way to play Mercy? A healer, who has the highest survivability in the game which allows her to soloheal, is supposed to hide ?

• “Resurrect as an ultimate also countered ult stacking and opponents that focused on kills rather than the objective. My proposal is to bring back resurrect as an ultimate that is not only effective for the Mercy player but can also be countered by the enemy team.”

Resurrect also as an ultimate didn’t work in higher ranks because of this exact reason: ult stacking . When exactly does this happen on higher levels of play? (excluding nano + X combos) That’s right. Almost never . Unless you played against uncoordinated teams, you never experienced this.

If the enemies don’t waste ultimates, then there’s no reason for you to use Resurrect when the whole team is dead, as they’re just going to wipe your team again with remaining ultimates. This is where the common strat “ tempo rez ” comes in place.
(Nanoboost has kind of taken tempo rez’s spot since rez has been replaced with valk)

• “Mercy is a single target healer, which is why Valkyrie doesn’t make sense as her ultimate.”

She’s mainly a pocket healer, so it kind of does make sense for her to function the same during her ultimate as she does outside of it, because pocketing is all she has to do.

• “Despite being a staunch advocate for peace, she receives unlimited ammo which contradicts her character design.”

Despite Mercy never actually resurrecting anyone in the lore, she still has it in the game. (Also there was a quote from someone at Blizzard that killing off a hero in the lore wouldn’t make them unplayable in the game, kinda related so I thought I’d mention it.)
Don’t compare the lore to the actual game.

Whatever you say, sweetie.

and it’s spelled prerogative. ^^

[Sym-11267]

I like playing Mercy but she heals so damn slowly compared to the other healers.

[Serendipity-11213]

At this moment, I just wish her healing or damage boost could lock onto things like opponents sym turrets and kill them, without having to swap to pistol. By the time you swap, you’re already dead. And it’s just yet another way Mercy is completely dependent upon her team.

[Dva-21640]

if you want an analysis

Mercy’s HPS is just enough for players to realize that the healing isn’t the only part of her kit. I

This is nigh completely false, verifiable by statistics actually.

When Mercy was nerfed from 60 HP/s > 50 HP/s, her healing numbers were nearly unchanged. What changed however, was her damage boosted numbers were lowered. The nerf makes it so you have to focus on healing more than damage boosting.

To pick off poorly positioned / low hp / weak agaist Mercy targets with your pistol.

Numerically, why would I want to? My team will deal more damage than me, and my healing is more valuable than a possible kill.

Do you remember a single Mercy player who would frequently utilize damage boost during Mercy 1.0 days?

Yeah actually, me! Your insinuation that all Mercy players were “dumb” before the rework is a bit rude.

Doesn’t old resurrect like, require a dead teammate to work? How is that not team reliant, again?

Well, you never required your entire team to support you to use revive. Current Mercy still does.

Are you insisting that hiding was the correct and intended way to play Mercy?

No, hiding was not a viable strategy. Mercys were in high ranks because of an SR exploit, not because people were dumb enough to keep falling for it.

Resurrect also as an ultimate didn’t work in higher ranks because of this exact reason

Well that’s also untrue I suppose.

• The default for high rank Mercys was to tempo revive.
• Mercy not being viable in high ranks is fine, but she needs a place in lower ones and at the very least in ranks where players are less good at aiming. Ana outpicks Mercy (and Moira) at Gold and above. That doesn’t make much sense.

She’s mainly a pocket healer, so it kind of does make sense for her to function the same during her ultimate as she does outside of it, because pocketing is all she has to do.

Valkyrie doesn’t make sense as an ultimate (in my view) because I can consistently not touch my keyboard or mouse and get the same value as if I was. I don’t agree with whatever you just quoted.

For all intents and purposes, as someone who does not remember using the hiding and reviving ‘tactic’, I feel like I can do something quite similar and essentially get a pass because people parrot that it’s high skill.

and it’s spelled prerogative. ^^

Thank you, autocorrect.

[faust-12793]

Mercy is NOT weak and is more skillful than Lucio, Moira, and Brig. She’s also the best Winston dive healer.

[FFirebrandd-1844]

You sure you want to go down this route? Cause oh boy can I go down this route.

@FFirebrandd-1844

Hello everyone. I thought I would share with you all the reasons why I think Mercy needs another rework. I’ve broken this down into what’s wrong with each part of her kit. You’ll notice her blaster and GA aren’t on here. They’re fine. They need zero changes.

Her healing.

The problem with this is threefold.

Firstly, like all main healers Mercy cannot use both her primary healing and primary damage at the same time. However, both other main healers have short cast time, decent duration CD abilities that allow them to kind of do more than one thing at a time. Mercy doesn’t. If she’s healing, she’s only healing and nothing else.

Secondly, Mercy is the only healer in the entire game who does not have a consistent way to either significantly increase her healing output or provide a teammate with a burst of sustain. Moira has her Orb and Ult. Ana has her bio nade and ult. Zen has his ult. Brigitte has armor pack and rally. Lucio has amp and ult. Mercy has to rely on Resurrect or face tanking damage so regen starts but neither of those methods are consistent in the slightest.

Thirdly, despite the previous two points, Mercy’s base healing per second is ridiculously low. Like seriously… It’s only 20 higher than Zen’s, Lucio can hit E to (nearly) match it, Moira can kick out triple Mercy’s healing in an AoE, Ana can nearly put out twice as much and has 2 burst heals as well. It’s… bad. It’s real bad.

Her damage boost.

It has the same problem as her healing’s first problem. If she’s boosting, she’s not doing anything else. Beyond that… 30% damage boost is trash and has been pretty much forever. Almost no heroes can hit the DPS needed for it to just be more raw damage than her blaster. There are very few guns in the game where 30% more damage actually lets them hit important breakpoints. Why? Because most damage values where 30% more would help against a 200 hp target can one shot with a headshot or two shot body shot Tracer. The devs don’t want to invalidate her… so damage boost is stuck being terrible on most of the cast. It is useful on some burst damage abilities and is somewhat useful for helping a teammate get their ult faster… but… it’s still not useful enough. Side note, I realize that Ashe is coming out and damage boost is great with just about everything she does. It being good with one or two heroes doesn’t make it a good ability.

Resurrect.

This is her most powerful ability. It’s on E. She’s the only hero in the game where her most powerful ability is not on Q, which is the designated Ultimate Spot. That’s a problem.

The other problem is the cast time and slow. In case you couldn’t tell… Mercy is supposed to be very mobile and very consistent all the time. That’s why she has GA. That’s why she doesn’t need to aim her healing. Using Resurrect brings the rest of her kit, the rest of what she’s supposed to be good at to a screeching halt. That’s a problem.

Valkyrie.

Mercy’s kit is not very mechanically challenging. For some reason they decided that they needed to take Mercy’s easy kit and give her an ultimate that makes it even easier. What? Now that makes a certain amount of sense on a DPS. Soldier’s ult makes it easier to use his kit. Difference here is that even good Soldiers get on average 50% of what they could out of his kit… so tac visor represents a 2x power increase. Not so for Valkyrie.

Valkyrie gives AoE healing. There’s a problem with this too. AoE damage works because oh hey, you get 3 targets in the AoE? Congrats, you got 3x the damage. Even if you get all 5 teammates in Valkyrie’s chain healing… how much are you actually healing? You can’t heal uninjured targets. If only one guy is taking damage, Valkyrie isn’t helping.

Valkyrie is a wild departure from old Mercy’s play style. When Mercy is in Valkyrie mode, one of the most impactful things that I’ve found to use in for is… kinda pretend that she’s a tank. Hang out in enemies’ sight lines, get them to waste their time, bullets, and sometimes ults trying to shoot you down and use Valkyrie’s mobility and regen to not die. That’s… weird to say the least. Most healers want as little enemy attention as possible. That went double for old Mercy. New Mercy though? Not so much.

Lastly… it is a game designer’s job to make the most fun way to play the game also the most effective way to play the game. Valkyrie is an absolute failure in this regard. The most fun way to use Valkyrie is definitely to pull your blaster and throw hot plasma at fool’s heads. However… the most effective way to use Valkyrie is probably either chain heals or chain boost and hold space so you are much less likely to get your “ultimate” interrupted… but that’s boring. Seriously… that’s boring, but arguably the most effective way to use Valkyrie. That’s a problem.

Conclusion:

Honestly Mercy’s first rework has turned into an absolute mess. No amount of numbers changes is going to fix this. The problems are way to widespread and deeply rooted into Mercy’s current kit to just be ironed out. She needs another rework.

@FFirebrandd-1844

There’s a whole lot of things going on with Valkyrie that make it bad and uninteresting to use. Let’s go through them shall we?

1. Valkyrie is 15 seconds long.

That makes it tied for longest ultimate in the game. An ultimate that is that long cannot be particularly strong, otherwise it would be ridiculously overpowered. Picture a 15s long Tac Visor or a 15s Dragonblade, yeah that’d be broken.

So if a long ultimate cannot rely on its raw power to be interesting or fun… what can it do? Well it has to rely on what’s known as a “Difference of Kind”. The best example of this I can give is Nidalee’s ultimate from League of Legends. Her ult actually has infinite duration. How is it balanced and interesting? It literally swaps out her entire kit. In human form she is a Poke based Mage and in cougar form she is a melee range assasin; her ult allows her to swap between the two… nearly at will. Which form is better? Well… that depends on the situation, raw power wise, in theory they’re balanced. Yeah… Mercy’s ult doesn’t do that. At all. You’re still doing the exact same thing you were doing before.

2. Valkyrie “enhances” Mercy’s current kit.

Now, you can make an ultimate that is an empowered version of your normal kit. Problem is you are hamstringing yourself as far as making it interesting through providing a different experience for your players. You can include some difference in kind as part of the enhancement but it is potentially still a problem.

So… how do you make an “enhance” ultimate fun to use? Short answer, make it short and punchy. There’s actually another example of this to be found in League of Legends. The champion Karma has an enhance ultimate that works. How does it work? You activate your ultimate and then your next spell cast and ONLY your next spell cast is empowered. All of the empowered spells have significant improvements to the abilities primary use (usually over double the power) PLUS they add an extra thing that isn’t in the base ability. In short, Karma’s ult provides a short punch of extreme power with a bit of extra spice thrown in. Again… this isn’t what Valkyrie does in the slightest. Valkyrie pretty much provides zero spike of impact because it just applies her normal heal and boost to everyone.

3. Valkyrie’s primary draw is supposed to be the chain beams which are basically an aura.

This is a problem for 2 reasons. Firstly, auras barely feel better to use than that same ability as a single target ability. Why? Because you rarely can see ALL the effects your aura is having. If you’re lucky you can see… maybe 2 of your targets. Also the AoE nature of it makes how useful it is incredibly variable. “How many people are in range?” “How many of those people actually need this effect right now?”. However… AoE does without a doubt make the thing stronger… so it couldn’t possibly actually have the raw power of the single target version. Add that up and you’ve got Auras generally feeling worse than their single target versions even though they are close to the same strength.

The second problem is that… Mercy’s Auras are healing and damage boost. Trans and Supercharger exist… so that limits how powerful Mercy’s aura’s can be because hers are more flexible… and if the more flexible ult is close enough in power to the non flexible ult… why would you ever use the inflexible ult? You wouldn’t. So Valk’s auras have to be kept weak to not overshadow Trans and Supercharger.

4. Flight and Beam buffs.

So Valkyrie gives both Flight and a range and AoE buffs to Mercy’s beams. This is a problem. Flight is great… it gives Mercy the ability to get wherever she needs to go much quicker than she can in normal form. Range and AoE buffs to Mercy’s beams make it so she doesn’t need to move as much. With a 30 meter range… how likely is it that there’s actually someone out of range? How likely is it that that other guy who needs healing you aren’t currently healing isn’t within your 10m chain range?

Do you see the problem here? Oh hey here’s a cool new mechanic that lets you get wherever you need to go. Oh and also some buffs that make it so you… don’t actually need to go anywhere at all. Yay? Did anyone think this through?

So yeah, those are my reasons for thinking that Valkyrie cannot be made into a fun and impactful ult without rework levels of changes.

tl,dr:
Valkyrie is a long, kit empowering ult which cuts it off from being able to be interesting either via impact spike or feeling different to use.
Valkyrie’s “primary use” is an aura… auras are nearly impossible to make feel impactful.
Valkyrie giving Mercy unrivaled mobility and removing any reason to use it is just mean.

@FFirebrandd-1844

Valkyrie has a different fatal flaw. It’s flaw stems from language.

Language is incredibly important. Like… ridiculously so. I seem to recall an instance where Blizzard implemented an exp penalty for being logged on too long and players complained. They renamed it to bonus rest exp and… everyone liked it. Same mechanic, framed differently, completely different response.

Valkyrie is Mercy’s ultimate. What does the word ultimate mean? Well if we pop over to www.merriam-webster.com, definition 1-c seems to be the most applicable to our situation. It reads “the best or most extreme of its kind”. Does that description fit? Well let’s look at the things it does to try to answer that.

Valkyrie does AoE heals. Is it the best at that? Trying to claim that Valkyrie is better at AoE healing than Transcendence is a very very hard sell.
How about Team Damage boost? Orisa’s super charger does 20% more.
Flight? It is debatable whether Valkyrie’s flight and Pharah’s flight is better.
Diving people? Dragon blade and Pulse bomb are better at that. Even DVa flying in with all guns blazing is probably better.
Getting back to point to contest? The entirety of Hammond’s base kit works way better for that.

Valkyrie is not “the best or most extreme of its kind”. It just isn’t. Players expect it to be though… because the game is calling it an ultimate. It also cannot be buffed to be ultimate in one of its current use cases because that would invalidate a different ultimate in the game.

[Hauven-2768]

Pick rate != Like rate

There can be a number of reasons why players choose to play a hero, beyond whether they actually like the hero or not.

[Lias-11313]

Pick rate != Like rate

There can be a number of reasons why players choose to play a hero, beyond whether they actually like the hero or not.

Yeah of course

But since you guys constantly point how weak useless and outclassed Mercy is and how Ana and Moira are flat out superior in every way I assume those people who play a healer for X reason, but don’t like Mercy would play one of those heroes

[Sadiztix-1996]

Mercy is fine and viable. Just because she isn’t meta due to Goats, doesn’t mean she is in a bad spot.

it’s funny how much players get mad when there “hero main” isn’t meta

[Vael-11156]

I personally think Mercy 1 trick / mains were designed for quick play but thats just my thinking. I am sure someone good could play her in comp if they have good aim let along heal but the mercy’s i run up against are QP warriors like myself , and when they ult they go after the unstoppable widow on the enemy team lol!!! sometimes they get lucky but all kidding aside, I actually feel bad when I kill the enemy mercy.

[Hauven-2768]

Understandable, but we can’t be certain of that assumption .

[Potatogirl-11213]

I’ve been able to play on PC as well. Ana is meta on xbox, ana is meta on pc. Mercy is viable on xbox. Mercy is viable on pc.

[FFirebrandd-1844]

Never said Mercy wasn’t viable. I said Mercy wasn’t fine. There’s a rather big difference.

[Devil-26652]

Why does some players have the urge to put hashtags in their titles?
Do they want to start a movement or something like that?
It just looks silly to me. Like they confused this forum for Twitter.

With that being said, Mercy doesn’t need an unnecessary rework.

She’s pretty balanced.
Thinking otherwise and asking for an unnecessary rework is just being ignorant or being selfish imo.

You can be dissatisfied with current Mercy, you can hate current Mercy, you may think the current Mercy is unfun, but you can’t call the current Mercy unbalanced, because she isn’t. At best does she only need numeric changes.

[Echo11-21439]

I wish Mercy could Resurrect herself with Valkyrie.

[Razu-21778]

Girl you can’t spill the tea on forums.They’r too scared for the true story!

[Agnostika-1802]

This feels like getting carried away to me. I think there’s a good case to be made that that some numerical adjustments to Mercy would be good for the hero and good for the game. We’ve even had some indication that Blizzard was putting some thought in this direction. This makes sense, since they’re trying to change up the meta to be more dps oriented, and Mercy is one of the lynchpins of any such approach.

If you’re hoping for some numerical tweaks, then there’s a decent chance of that hope coming true at some point. However, I seriously doubt that there will be a major Mercy rework coming any time in the foreseeable future. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The last rework caused way too much trouble and Blizzard is hesitant to go through it again.
2. She doesn’t really need a major rework. She has a coherent kit, a coherent play style, and a coherent niche. While I don’t think she’s 100% where she should be yet, she’s also not terribly far from it either. My guess is that there are a couple of simple tweaks that would satisfy many Mercy players and change the game balance for the better.

One thing that does make sense to me is to list the problems Mercy fans have with Mercy’s current play style so that Blizzard can try to take them into account when designing new healers. I feel like they went a bit in that direction when designing Baptiste.

[Coolbreeze-11835]

Healing reverted to 60 hps

Lemme stop you right there.

[GrilledCheez-11520]

all of these sound like absolute garbanzo beans. But it’s the norm considering that this is a revert mercy post. OMEGALUL.

[Miscanadian-1419]

Giving her 25 damage x 5 bullets per second (125-250) has higher dps than zen’ primary (115-230)

Mercy’s mass Rez invul started this whole mess. It won’t fix anything just make people angry again. I liked mass Rez but invul was absolutely broken.

Her cleanse on a lock on beam would be extremely unfair. It lasts for 6s, cannot miss, cannot be prevented, and can be attatched to each team member in its duration. That’s more than a hard counter to long cd: it completely negates it. Anti heal? Doesn’t last for more than a second. Someone was hacked and that person wasn’t Mercy? Not hacked. Sombra just ulted but missed mercy? No one is hacked anymore. If that cc didn’t land on mercy, it doesn’t do anything of value. Sombra’s hack can be canceled. Sombra’s ult can be avoided. Ana’s sleep dart can miss. Ana’s grenade can miss and get used on herself so she can’t anti every 10s. The cleanse cannot be cancelled. Prevention is: kill mercy.