I believe it depends on the team comp and coordination, mostly.
Exactly that. Mercy and Dva have a HUGE female playerbase and they will get picked often no matter what.
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But almost every team comp other than dive requires a main healer.
Mercy now has a niche. She can’t be used in every team comp while being extremely effective. I’m a Mercy main and hate it also, but she shouldn’t have been so useful in every situation to start with, which Mercy 1.0 wasn’t.
It’s actually really dependant what difficulty people play the game at.
It has a pretty big effect on higher ranked games, but very little effect on middle-lower ranked games.
It has been the opposite for me, weirdly enough. But I haven’t played 50HPS in comp yet, so I can’t really have a place to talk.
Well, Ana is higher picked than Mercy now in Diamond/Masters/GM.
As she should be! ![:smiley:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=5" ":smiley:")
Both of you are correct. I’m a Masters player, but I end up playing with GM players pretty frequently since there’s so few at Masters+ that the game has to match them together.
Healing is incredibly important at every rank. However, high-tier players take cleaner engagements instead of drawing out the fight by trickling into skirmishes without the team. That is why Ana has always been more viable in high-tier play even beyond her aiming requirement. Her exact style of healing–high single-target burst–is ideal for saving individual allies who get called out as a focus target in organized play.
By contrast, Mercy’s healing is more widely useful in lower tier play with lots of trickling because it is low and constant. It can still be made to work in high-tier play with the help of shields, though, which is why she has remained relevant for so long before the latest unnecessary nerf. Reinhardt has a higher pick rate than even Mercy does, and his shield affords her the time she needs to get her healing done.
I would argue that Mercy with 60 hp/sec already was a bit of a niche pick among the healers. It just so happens that her niche role is something the other most-picked heroes need to synergize with. With the nerf to 50 hp/sec, Mercy is now bad at her own niche as the game’s only pure healer.
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as opposed to what? the patch of mercy’s rework when she was even more broken? Yeah, I would hope dive got weaker at that point. Was dive in season 6 weaker than dive in season 4 though? Most certainly not. Dive in season 4-5 had lucio and zen as the healers. if the dive failed, that was it. The dive failed, your team died, and you reset because there wasn’t enough healing to go around. This is why triple tank was still ran, why pharmercy was still ran and why widow comps were still ran.
Season 6, Mercy replaced lucio and gave dive the healing it needed to dive, and if the dive doesn’t instantly get a kill it didn’t matter because you had the healing to continue a team fight. Mercy’s rework effectively took away dive’s weakness, and made dive and dive hero’s the only team comp worth playing for 4 more seasons. It took a hero like brigitte to shake things up for good.
I mean, you can throw around the stats all you want. Even in those stats you can clearly see in season 6, lucio falls off and mercy is the go to healer. And then dive hero’s straight on till season 9.
Lucio’s fall had nothing to do with Mercy and everything to do with the fact that his aura radius was nerfed into the ground. Before that change, he was actually able to reach all of the dive heroes with it even when they outran him. Since that change, he has only been viable in deathball comps.
You realize he was still played after his radius nerf, right?
And Bastion is still played sometimes even today. What’s your point?
Season 4 was when lucio took the radius nerf. This was in april 2017. Mercy didn’t get reworked until Septemeber.
Look at Maniclings’s post yourself. Lucio was ran in season 5, not mercy. He did not fall off because of his radius nerf. You have no idea what you’re actually talking about.
No, I do… insults aside, I’m just talking about a different fall than you are and we’ve had a misunderstanding. It’s difficult to keep track of all the conversations that I have been having, so please accept my apologies for the disconnect. You’re talking about only this tiny, impossibly small dataset from T500 players within the span of a few seasons, and I’m talking about the biggest fall in the history of Lucio which is when his rework turned him into an inflexible niche pick instead of an always-good must-pick god of tournament play. We were comparing notes taken from entirely different worlds.
T500 Lucios don’t even play Lucio the same way anyone else does. They spend most of their time hunting for boops and speed boosting the team through clean engagements and little time healing their team, compared to the more conservative way Lucios are forced to play in lower ranks to succeed.
The advent of Mercy replacing Lucio as a component of Dive, however, still came about as a result of Lucio’s decreased aura radius. Because Mercy’s effective healing range is greater than Lucio’s, her flexibility allowed Dive to play as they had before with Lucio’s larger aura. The only reason she didn’t replace Lucio in Dive sooner was because she was too easy to punish. Once she started receiving more buffs to her survivability so she could actually follow the Dive team without dying, the choice between fly-everywhere Mercy and the slightly slower and shorter range but more durable Lucio became an easy choice in Mercy’s favor to support the high-mobility team.
Those T500 statistics don’t tell you what the rest of the team comp usually looked like for those Lucio players. There is no way to look at those numbers and draw any meaningful conclusions to the question of whether or not those Lucios were even playing in a dive comp. You cannot assume that they were supporting other T500 players. It’s wrong to think that the top 6 picks can be used together to make the most meta team roster. Rather, it’s likely that the majority of T500 players’ teams were made up of a mix of GM and/or Masters players depending on the time of day, and these numbers don’t say anything about what those lower ranked teammates were playing.
In that light, I would argue that both you and Maniclings are trying to use data improperly by extrapolating beyond available supporting evidence.
In season 5, Tracer, Genji, Winston, and Zenyatta were the main components of dive.
In season 6, when Mercy was in her most brokenly OP state, the diversity of viable picks in high elo increased. This isn’t to say the game was more balanced in season 6 - what it shows however is the versatility of Mercy and how she is able to support many different compositions.
Dive was independently powerful of both Lucio and Mercy - they were both healers than could survive in it, and keep up with it better than Ana. Both Lucio and Mercy have better synergy with Zenyatta than Ana (and Moira).
The impact of dive decreased while Mercy was strong, and increased as she was nerfed- this shows that Mercy could keep up with dive, but also provided some counter play to it enabling more diverse picks.
Dive existed for so many seasons because Tracer, DVa, and Zenyatta were too strong, perhaps balancing them was delayed by how broken Mercy was, and how long it took them to nerf her- but I still can’t agree that she was a key component to the success of dive or the reason it lasted so long.
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Where’s the insult?
You say Mercy wasn’t what caused lucio to fall off, you try to blame it on his aura’s radius nerf. I give you facts that disprove this, that you can easily look up, specifically dates of patches. Manicling even has stats that back up the facts i presented so you know they are not bias. They’re inarguable… Yet, here you are arguing it and calling it a misunderstanding that you didn’t mean it that way and then proceed to argue it happened that way.
So, I say it again, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I quoted the insult. You said I had no idea what I was talking about. It’s not quite as petty as name-calling, but it’s still an insult.
There it is again. You’re not engaging my argument at all, you’re just dismissing it. What you fail to understand is that numbers are meaningless without context. I can’t argue that the numbers are wrong, but I can most certainly argue about what they mean or how we can logically apply that information to reach conclusions.
There was a misunderstanding because Lucio’s aura radius nerf is not explicitly represented in the data set that you were working with, but that’s not because Lucio’s aura radius nerf was insignificant. Rather, it’s because the data set you chose to work with is too narrow to draw the conclusions that you are trying to make.
uhh… You just casually leave out the other 6th most played hero in season 5 being the second most played support, which is Lucio. I hope you didn’t do this intentionally because that is really petty when were the one who posted the original stats to begin with. Yes dive is operated by Zen’s discord, winstons bubble, and flankers to go in with winston on a discorded target. That is dive in a nutshell. What you’re failing to acknowledge is The second support that was used in dive, and I really hope it’s not to continue arguing.
Season 6, Mercy is broken after rework, Lucio completely falls off, winston is still the most played main tank Zenyatta is the second most played support, and the two main dps are Tracer and Genji. D.va off tank. Dive.
And proving my point overall, those same hero’s continue to be the meta picks for 4 more seasons. Mercy does in fact replace Lucio. Dive then continues for four more seasons.
Look, if you find that an insult I’m sorry, but mayhaps don’t say things that aren’t true if you don’t even know they’re true or not.
This is pretty ironic. just for the record.
You can interrupt the numbers any way you want in order to manipulate them into your own agenda. That’s fine, you do you. But to actually go on and say Lucio was the second most picked support, but he wasn’t more often then not played with the other top picks at the time? like, Why? To be honest, I don’t even find that argument worth engaging on, which is why i ignored it.