Damage creep never happened.
No it was not. Healing creep was a thing and Mercy had long since seen a reduction in healing output from 50 to 60 to 50 during the early days of Overwatch. The chief complaint was that Mercy wasn’t healing as well as Brigitte other top end healers because they had creeped over her. Particularly Brigitte with her armor.
Wherein everyone else saw healing reductions, Mercy saw no changes after the initial increase to 55. Even Blizzard was reluctant to boost this for a long time.
And then you add the average Transcendence healing numbers of 2.1k and… hey, Zenyatta is doing close to the same healing numbers of every other Support!
There’s a reason why Zenyatta is considered too strong right now.
This is a very false statement.
Every single Support has both a single-target heal and an area effect heal and has them them since day one. In fact, most Supports have area effect healing instead of single-target healing.
Mercy’s Revive was an area effect heal. Mercy’s Valkyrie is an area effect heal. Mercy’s raw healing exceeds Baptiste’s raw healing and competes very closely with Moira’s.
This is false. Every Support has to make choices between more offense or more healing.
Nope, this is wrong.
Metagaming is largely defined by the playerbase and perception of what is the most accessible way to win in a competitive environment. It has little to do with perceived power on individual heroes and more to do with what works best. In the case of Overwatch, certain compositions tend to work better than others in combination which tend to outvalue individual hero capability until the need is called for or discovered.
The GOATS meta, for example, largely perceived Orisa to a less valuable pick compared to D.va, Winston, Zarya and Reinhardt. This is despite the fact that, at the time, Orisa had 100% up time on her barrier. It was until Sigma and the forced 2/2/2 composition that forced the playerbase to perceive Orisa as a valuable alternative. After it was initially tweaked, many meta compositions moved over to Mei/Reinhardt compositions; despite the fact that Sigma even back then was considered very strong (and even now, prior to the barrier deployment tweaks, still is).
That’s specious reasoning and not how it would work.
If Mercy, as a support, were getting similar number of offensive assists as other supports were providing, and still remain competitive in the healing front; it would not necessarily be a problem, but it may require some looking into.
This is false. No new damage-role hero has ever exceeded the top-end damage per second of the current roster, and no new damage-role hero has ever exceeded the damage per-shot of Hanzo, Widowmaker or even Genji. And no new damage-role hero has exceeded the ability damage of any existing hero.
This is not the case when it comes to Tank-role heroes and Support-role heroes - who, in the given roles, have crept up in terms of mitigation, speed, and healing output.
This is false.
Reducing falloff damage to as low as 33% of output doesn’t seem like it would happen again after the prior normalization.
Probably will have to happen again, and Zenyatta’s orb damage would see a minor uptick in return.
Wait for OW2 and see what they do. If it’s like WoW’s attempt at diminishing returns, it’ll probably be awful.
Echo is not a flying tank shredder. Echo has difficult dealing with Tanks.
This would probaly require a greater number of barriers and increases in barrier health.
This is wrong.
Easy math:
Soldier (19 damage x 1.3)x9 = 222
Hanzo (125 damage x 1.3) = 162.5
Time is still an important factor. And if you want to add accuracy in the mix, it gets a little more complex. Then add in critical hits, critical hit rates, armor, fortify, etc.
In 1 second, she heals a single non-tank target for 28% of their health, in 2 seconds, 55%.
At any given time someone is being fired at, and Mercy is healing them, Mercy is mitigating 55 damage every second.
Unlike other “bulk healers”, there’s no travel time associated with Mercy’s healing. There’s zero-cost and no ammo. No need to reload, and healing can remain on, forever and ever.
Specious. While healing someone another teammate could die as well.
Ashe’s damage did not improve. They only adjusted her gunplay as a QOL measure and increased the ammo capacity; a change that has since been reverted. Ashe has seen decreasing damage since, both ability-wise (dynamite) and basic fire output (twice).
This is false. Any Support and Any Tank added to a team is immediate benefit regardless of their outputs when compared to others. If GOATS did not prove this; GOATS would not have happened and would not have existed. We wouldn’t have 2/2/2 forced compositions. And so on and so forth.
The biggest issue with Mercy is that her healing is largely free of cost, requires minimal skill and with the boat load of passives on Mercy, tends to be fairly low-risk overall.
The fact that her healing is free isn’t that big of an issue. Lucio is in a similar position.
The fact that her healing doesn’t require much mechanical skill isn’t an issue, either. All Supports have fairly minimal mechanical skills to perform their main job.
The fact it doesn’t require much risk isn’t that big of an issue, either. Brigitte, Ana, and even Baptiste have massive range on their healing, even if two them are subject to misses and the third is limited by cooldowns.
It’s the combination of all those factors that gives Mercy a unique edge. SHe’s not much different from other Supports when it comes to making choices (damage boost or healing, biotic orbs, crossfade, etc.), but she’s able to do it so well without much risk or cost that can be a problem. Many Supports (excluding Lucio, Zenyatta and her) had their healing numbers tweaked downward. Mercy’s healing was tweaked upward, even when she didn’t really need it. Supplying additional damage output has been Mercy’s thing since day-one and it hasn’t really been too problematic - more to the point that it was other sources of damage being the bigger culprit. Her damage boost comes freely, and limited to one target, much like Zenyatta (though, more offensively). She’s an enabler, just like other Supports, and just like other Supports tends to be built out more strongly than the typical damage role with a lot more perks included in their kits.
She probably is healing too much - especially since every other Support’s healing went down while hers went up. Damage boost is a thing, but I don’t really see too much problem with it other than it being extremely flexible compared to other damage-boosting abilities - particularly ultimates.
Most players seem to complain about Mercy boosting, but not Orisa-boosting (which is also stronger than Mercy’s) or Baptiste’s (even higher). So, reasonably, that seems to suggest that Mercy is just that much more flexible than the other damage-boosting ultimates and/or abilities in the game. Does that flexibility that Mercy has warrant her being the second-best Support healer in terms of raw output? Virtually cost-free healing? And an incredibly powerful ultimate?
I don’t know. Seems like Mercy just gets a lot perks with relatively little cost or skill associated with it. Kinda the same issue that Tanks have.
