Well lemme tell you that Brig’s ult gets overwhelmed in much the same way if used poorly
Then let me tell you that Brigitte has much more control over how easily it gets overwhelmed.
- She can pop it before a teamfight, building up armor on her team before the fight actually begins.
- The combined armor from Rally + the healing output from Inspire are able to match Valkyrie’s effective sustain increase before we even consider the increased armor stacked on before the fight. Each instance of damage on each target affected by Rally is subject to the armor damage reduction.
- Brigitte still has Repair Packs she can surgically apply to teammates who need it, thus increasing her team’s durability even further if used well.
- Brigitte is active in the fight herself and can play aggressively without compromising the supportive benefits of her ultimate.
So while Rally is easy to overwhelm when used poorly, Valkyrie is just plain easy to overwhelm.
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So here’s where the difference comes in
Mercy has damage boost
Mercy’s ultimate isn’t supposed to make your team unkillable, it’s supposed to increase survivability and damage output. It’s not a defensive ultimate, you use it to push the enemy team back rather than withstand their assault.
This intended use is much the same as Brig’s, but obviously Brig’s brings more survivability with less offensive pressure.
Which is flatly outclassed by SuperCharger and Amplification Matrix and almost matched by Discord Orb.
Neither is Brigitte’s ultimate.
I never said it was.
In case you need a refresher on what we were arguing about, you said that Valkyrie shouldn’t be used in situations where it is likely to be overwhelmed. You used this as a defense to justify Valkyrie being an ultimate, implying that Valkyrie is only weak when used poorly. The problem is that there is no situation where Valkyrie is useful but also unlikely to get burned through or flatly outclassed as if it’s not even there. Any situation where Valkyrie is certain to be uncontested is also a situation where Valkyrie simply isn’t necessary. It would be superfluous.
…Which means that the logical conclusion to your defense is that Valkyrie should not be used when it is useful, thus rendering it even less worthy of ultimate status than even the opposing argument suggests.
The issue isn’t that it doesn’t work as a defensive ultimate. The issue is that it’s not worthy of ultimate status.
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After trying out the latest EXP changes, I find EXP Mercy to be a lot more fun than she is on live.
The numerical buffs they gave her were too conservative in my opinion, but even those teensy tweaks have made a noticable difference.
Valkyrie feels extremely natural as a cooldown ability, like this was what it was always meant to be. Rez is finally usable for tempo rezzes, and it’s even saved one of my matches when my team got caught off guard by a YOLO dvabomb.
I’m going to be so sad when the ExP goes down…
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It’s outclassed by Supercharger? You understand little about versatility it seems and only look at the raw numbers
I’m just having a hard time understanding why you find so much difficulty in using Mercy’s ult. It’s very much worthy of ultimate status because of much value it provides from versatility. Mercy can be anywhere she needs in a flash, can help multiple people at a time compared to normally only being able to help one at a time, and she does it at 100% capacity losing nothing and not needing to commit to anything.
Like, Zen’s ult provides way more healing. However, he can’t help his team beyond that and also can’t always even make it to then with the ult to begin with.
Bapatiste’s ult provides the same benefits as Mercy’s ult in terms of healing and damage, but he has to hard commit to a spot. If the enemy pushes past Bap’s ult, then it’s not gonna be that useful. Furthermore, if you’re using it for the damage, it’s not gonna be in a good spot for healing. If you use it for healing, it’s not gonna be in a good spot for damage. It’s only versatile in function, not so much in action.
You see low raw number and assume the worst, but forget that Supercharger is immobile with 200 health
Bro it’s Mercy’s regular beams but AoE instead of single target. And flight that she can already mimic with GA and movement tech.
It has the same maximum value as Mercy’s base kit, just without the skillgates (e.g. beam juggling, target priority, situational awareness) that a Mercy player normally needs to pass in order to reach that value.
Valkyrie (flight) is great fit for Mercy’s ability 2, just… Not her ultimate.
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how orisa can still shield, shoot, halt and fortify during supercharger giving much more flexibility compared to mercy having to only choose 1 of diluted moira orb, diluted supercharger, res, or pistol but often has to default to healing most of the time because dead teammates means the rest of the options are less viable.
ok, how often do you need to heal with moira? because that’s pretty much how often mercy has to give up higher value use cases to heal.
now how often does moira’s healing gets burst through (when not combining heal orbs with her primary)?
because that’s how often mercy’s healing can’t do crap about teammates dying not only preventing mercy from doing the other higher values use cases but also rendering the other use cases less viable and valuable (can’t boost if no-one to boost and no point in resing if most of your team is dead and the enemy team doesn’t have as many people dead).
i.e. valk is simply not resilient against counter pushes at all. it doesn’t even take even ults to successfully counter push because basically all you need to do is just force mercy to heal and she loses a lot of valk value (whereby most of the valk value is in boost).
“versatility” as you so desperately cling to means nothing if every option is so diluted and that it doesn’t swing the fight much. esp in the case for valk whereby she’s locked out of everything else whilst doing 1 of them.
e.g. which gift card is better?
- $1000 gift card at grocery stores; or
- $1000 gift card whereby you can use a multiple kinds stores (like grocery, hardware, office supplies, etc.) with a limit of max redeemable amount is $1 per store
obvs the former.
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It has the same maximum value on one person, except Mercy is even more mobile, has even more range, and can effect more than one person
Mercy becomes very difficult to suppress while using her ultimate and has a much, much wider area of influence
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Since they can make at least some minor adjustments to cards and do, I’d like to see them try more interesting tweaks. Current Mercy just feels worse in experimental.
I would try making ult res single target only, but instant cast. The counter to it is that you can predict that she may try it and move into a vulnerable location to cast it, making her an easy target even if it’s instant and she gets it off before quickly dying herself. If you’re going to leave a cast time on it, significantly increase the range instead. It seems odd that they specifically made changes to make it harder to counter Cowboy/Soldier ults, but now Mercy has an easily countered ult.
For valk, I’d reduce the cooldown to at least 12 seconds. If they removed the other aspects and only made it a healing burst buff, I’d reduce it WAY down to like 6 seconds. Comparing it to Amp it Up since that’s also a 3 second buff (12s cd), the healing potential of Amp blows experimental valk away with its multi-target potential.
If they leave valk as a longer cooldown, they should return to beam chaining to it at the very least. The chain targets could get a lower value heal.
I’m arguing that it has the same maximum value, period.
Everything you can accomplish with Valkyrie can be accomplished with Mercy’s base form.
Good beam juggling skills make AoE beams redundant. Free flight won’t open any new possibilities for someone who already has good positioning skills and mastery over Guardian Angel.
They both do the same thing in the end.
It’s just that one of them takes a lot of practice to master and punishes mistakes harder the higher you climb, and the other is Valkyrie.
Valkyrie on Exp is how it should have been from the beginning.
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Juggling is literally less than aoe for the same value
And free-flight offers more than normal guardian angel because you can reach places not even GA can get you to and then you also have GA on top of that
Then there’s the significant range increase on the beams, allowing Mercy to support people without putting herself in danger
Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not useful
We’re going in circles at this point.
I think that Valkyrie automates Mercy’s base kit for players who haven’t mastered it yet, you say that that Valkyrie opens up new possibilities that her base kit doesn’t offer.
Then we both disagree and reply by doubling down on our position, repeat repeat repeat.
Is there any middle ground we can agree on?
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That Mercy’s ultimate isn’t the most engaging comparatively to other ultimates. We can agree on that.
It does make Mercy strictly easier, but easier is strictly better if the numbers are the same or higher. You may not like it, but it is still good.
Versatility is only relevant if the many things it can do are sufficient.
I don’t. That’s the issue. Valkyrie is laughably easy to use well. The problem is that when I use it well there’s a good chance it doesn’t make a difference anyway.
Versatility means it provides many different kinds of value. Versatility is not value.
Soldier:76 is versatile. However, he is not good because he is versatile. He is good because he can dish out a lot of damage at medium-long range, and that’s an important role on a team. If his damage was nerfed to 10/shot, it wouldn’t matter if they doubled his sprint speed and tripled his Biotic Field healing rate. He would still be garbage.
The only place she needs to be in Valkyrie is behind a wall in the skybox 30 meters from the fight.
All of which makes for a very boring and simultaneously underwhelming ultimate. Oh boy, I can stick my healing beam on 5 people at the same time. Unfortunately, only one or two people actually need it, so it doesn’t really matter.
If the player is at 100% capacity while borderline AFK, there’s a very serious problem with the skill curve and the rewards.
He doesn’t need to. Making his team practically immortal is good enough.
Except more than 3X as powerful.
Good. That makes it more engaging than just “Oh, its the beginning of a fight. I guess I’ll press Q and go AFK.”
I see low raw numbers and conclude that the ability is not worthy of ultimate status. Ultimates are supposed to be high-risk and high-reward, not zero risk low reward. That’s what makes them engaging and fun to use.
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Agreed. That’s exactly why I never used it as an argument, but as a way for Mercy players to finally realize that, after so many years of Mass Rez being rightfully gone from the game and no apparent indication of it returning, they shouldn’t keep their hopes u and just move on already.
Do try to prove these claims.
As I already explained, there is no “circular logic” in play whatsoever.
However, it’s true I didn’t provide any arguments that support my stance. That’s because us two have already extensively discussed this subject already. We were in complete disagreement and the discussion was dropped at some point, so honestly, unless something has changed in your stance, there’s no reason to repeat that same discussion, which depends so much on our subjective opinions and nothing more.
This is just semantics. I’m talking about the Ultimate currently on the EXP, which has the ability to Rez up to 5 people at once and is therefore a nerfed version of the original Mass Rez.
Actually, it shows exactly the opposite.
I read all of what you said and unfortunately it falls in the same trap as almost all counter arguments to my stance. How you die/fail to do something in a PvP game matters when it comes to the frustration that streams from it.
It is simply false to confuse the inherent frustration of failure in PvP games with abilities that are miserable to play against by - design. Feeling like you weren’t actually outplayed and that the enemy just used a low skill - high reward mechanic (like Mass Rez), is a major reason for this, but not the only one.
I don’t have any stats to prove this, but if we ask the entire player base what abilities they consider as the most frustrating to play against, we’re gonna see some clear trends forming. If you want to ignore that, it’s fine. Personally though, I can’t, because said clear trends exist, which in turn point out to specific mechanics as being problematic.
Nope. I believe there’s a major difference between the two and you’re free to disagree, as I already stated above. No need to have such bad faith, which can be easily deflected by me towards your stance as well.
Oh I’m not talking about the Mercy subreddit. Nor these Forums, whose majority of users is comprised of Support mains and where each hero - related thread naturally attracts the mains of said hero more, who are actually interested in them.
I’m talking about the general player base, not these echo - chambers. Think back on what the most - played role is in general and what the majority of the player base thought about Mass Rez before it was rightfully removed will become more than apparent.
What you’re talking about here is wayyy out of Mass Rez’s “jurisdiction”. And since we’re specifically talking about Mass Rez here, its value is nothing more than how many heroes are brought back to life, not whether the fight will eventually be won, ofc.
I disagree completely. For how much this is worth discussing in the first place, who told you Revives don’t with fights? Those players had to die in the first place, which means loss of Ultimates, cool downs that haven’t yet recharged and, most importantly, a potential numerical advantage after said players have been revived.
I am talking in an entirely literal sense.
What wins fights is wiping the enemy team, which allows you to capture the objective uncontested (or prevent the objective from being captured).
Revives can enable/lead to this, but they do not actually do this.
The enemy potentially having lost resources does not actually do this. It’s an advantage, not yet a win.
It’s the same way that, in this very literal sense, Transcendence and Sound Barrier do not win fights. They enable fights to be won by ensuring that they last longer and preventing them from ending too early.
So what you’re saying is that you didn’t even provide evidence to back up your argument in the first place.
Got it.
Can’t anymore because the old Overwatch Forums no longer exist. I suppose you’ll have to take my word for it. That said, I can also tell you that two of my forum posts at the time defending the existing state of Mercy even after the complaints about it had become more common netted 250+ likes, and this was when dislikes were a thing. Considering that the forums will naturally be biased against the position of “x is fine” (most people won’t use a forum unless they have something to complain about), that seems pretty indicative to me that the overall community’s opinion on the matter was that Resurrect was fine. Not to mention that I never saw a post voicing the opposite opinion gain anywhere near as much popularity as those two on the old forums.
If we look to shortly after the rework, the sentiments that Mercy was fine seem to be amplified even further. On the old forums, I had a post with 450+ net likes telling the developers to revert Mercy. On the new forums, I have the most popular forum post of all time with over 2000 likes. For reference, the second most popular forum post is a meme post with about 1300 likes.
Someone also conducted a forum survey in October of 2018 (more than a year after the rework went live) that revealed that the overall opinion of the forums was that a Mercy rework or revert was vastly more popular than leaving Mercy as she was, and this wasn’t because all of the respondents were disgruntled Mercy mains. Mercy mains were separated from support mains who didn’t play Mercy, and the results were still 11% of support players were fine with how she was, 32% wanted a rework, and 39% wanted a revert. Tank and DPS players were also stratified, and they were even more in favor of a revert with tanks being 10%, 28%, 41% and DPS being 12%, 28%, 44% respectively for those three options. The missing percentages were asking for flat buffs/nerfs.
While all of these evidences reflect upon a sample of a sample of the broader community (surveys/posts from the Overwatch Forums), it can be expected that the sentiments expressed here will at least loosely describe the sentiments of that broader community. After all, this is the “Official” location to submit feedback and discuss the game.
The topics of statements such as “Mercy’s kit has some serious design and engagement issues” are not subjective. The statement is an opinion, sure, but the nature of the topic is objective. There is a factual truth to it. That’s why I provide evidence when discussing these topics.
Likewise, statements such as “Mass-Resurrect was unhealthy” are opinions, but the question “Was mass-Resurrect unhealthy?” has an objectively correct answer. That answer can be identified through the evidence.
If you do not want provide evidence for your claims, then the correct way to approach would be “I personally disliked mass-Resurrect.”
The fact that a topic is disputed does not mean it is subjective.
It’s not. If something isn’t viable in an application, it cannot be relevantly characterized by that application. Rally is not a defensive ultimate. It shares aspects in common with existing defensive ultimates, sure, but if you tried to use it like a defensive ultimate you would almost certainly be wasting it.
Resurrect used as a mass-Resurrect is a defensive ultimate. What’s on the Experimental Card right not is not viable as a defensive ultimate/mass-Resurrect.
How so?
See, this is what I’m getting at. If you’re going to argue something that has an objective truth, you need to provide evidence in support of why what you are saying is true.
Why?
Explain to me how the way you die matters if the end result is exactly the same.
However, that is not based upon what is and isn’t fair. It is based upon a feeling of what is and isn’t fair. Unless there is actual cause to say that the ability is unfair (which we would call overpowered; objective fairness in game design is known as balance), then there is no reason to take that sentiment seriously. There is no logical distinction between it and that same position applied to any other ability in the game. If we accept this approach, we immediately reach a point where literally everything goes… away. Because it feels unfair to someone when they die/lose to it.
Sure. But when you remove the most inconvenient thing, the next most inconvenient thing takes its place.
And then, as I mentioned before, we run into the issue of “Is your convenience more important than my fun?” Answering “yes” to that question is how you kill off a large portion of your playerbase, as Mercy’s rework did to hers.
But once again looking at the trends you mentioned, I’m sure one of them would be crowd control. People don’t like crowd control, even when it’s objectively balanced. However, those opinions can be boiled down to a legitimate, reasonable, and objective foundation that actually makes a lot of sense. If you’re alive, you should be able to play the game. You should have control over your own character. Nobody else should be able to prevent you from playing the game. This is at the very core of what makes a game a game; interactivity. If the player is spending too much time unable to interact with the game when they expect to be interacting with the game, there is something wrong. This is something that must be considered.
However, that’s not to say that we should remove crowd control entirely, as that would then quickly raise another one of those trends you mentioned. People will start complaining about mobility. This trend, just like the last one, is not unfounded. There is an objective reason in support of these feelings. In fact, in this case, there’s two. Crowd Control is one of the main mechanics keeping mobility in check. Without it, mobility would become much stronger. This would cause a balance issue. Mobile heroes would skyrocket in pickrates and dominate the meta. This is objectively unfair. Not only that, but it also violates another aspect of interactivity, particularly the principle that you should not be powerless against your enemies. If your enemy can do something that can harm you, you should be able to do something to answer it. This is awfully close to balance, as it is another type of fairness, but it is separate; you can have balance or imbalance without interactivity.
Right. That’s key here.
You believe.
Saying “I believe x” is not the same as saying “X.” The former cannot be debated. It might not have legs to stand on, and it doesn’t need them. But it’s also happens to be useless, because for every person who says “I believe x” there can also be someone who says “I believe !x”. The latter, on the other hand, is actually useful because then you are speaking of substantive things that are actually true or false.
Unless you can describe why there’s a major difference, that difference is simply that you dislike it.
I’d be interested in seeing your evidence for that.
I did. It just so happened that said role’s opinions weren’t any different that what I had assessed the overall playerbase’s to be.
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But,
Does any of this really make a differance?
There was a fairly decent sized, positive in nature, thread about how people who play Mercy water her to be changed in December of 2016.
We were all throwing around ideas in regard to Kaplan saying that Mass Resurrect was too punishing when used without living team members. This was before the idiot mistake of making Mercy invulnerable during the cast.
Mercy on experimental now was the exact same thing pretty much everyone thought was the best direction… In December… Of 2016. We shouldn’t have had to wait until 2022 for Blizzard to let “personality players” decide to take an old idea and make it fresh.
Then, at the end of the day, it’s all for nothing if Blizzard doesn’t keep the change and let the rightful ultimate take its place in the game again. Who cares if we can play real Mercy for 3 weeks and then go back to the Valkyrie imposter for the rest of time.
My opinion, too little, too late.
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As I already said, the Forums don’t constitute a valid source of evidence in the slightest. This is just another reason why:
Moth Mercy seems to have created a bigger outcry amongst the community for reasons entirely unrelated to the new design itself, because of its ludicrous numerical balance. It continued to exist well, well into 2018, and left a major scar either way, rendering the stats you’re providing as even more invalid than before.
The only thing that’s objective when it comes to this subject is its very subjectivity. Tons of arguments have been brought up both backing up the existence of Mercy’s design problems and denying it, ac well las counter arguments to both said stances.
No one has the right to elevate his subjective view as the objective truth, because anyone can debate against your arguments as well.
If what you provided is supposedly “the evidence” of this, then you’ll have to find new stats to hold on, I’m afraid. You certainly have arguments though, even if I managed to debate against all of them in one of your YT videos regarding Mercy (The Mercy Rework - Part 3: The Numerical Absurdity of "Hide and Rez" - YouTube)
I don’t have much to add when it comes to this subject.
I disagree. Like, even if we ignore the actual community, even the devs themselves (who are supposedly experts in their fields) have clearly changed their minds on Mercy 1.0 and you can be sure it wasn’t a universal agreement between them.
It’s still called Mass Ressurect though and can output the exact same value and type of value as Mass Rez. Sure, its underpowered state does heavily decrease the chance of outputting said value (and rightfully so), but that doesn’t prohibit it from existing. You don’t stop referring to Widowmaker headshots as one - shots because they are very hard to land.
That’s the thing, I don’t have to debate against invalid evidence.
Because context matters. People will always hate it when they die in a PvP game, but they will detest it when the situation that led to their death involved little to no way for them to defend themselves and/or the enemy killed them with little effort from their part, etc.
You have to look no further than IRL life as well. People hate it when someone does better, or even as well as them by using shortcuts and/or not putting the same effort as they did into something, at least according to them.
Please equate the two in your mind for the sake of the conversation, because, as I said, you don’t have the right to elevate your own view as the objective truth.
In this environment, both our stances are what we “believe” to be fair.
Not exclusively so at all. The overall statistical performance of heroes we to which we have access doesn’t reflect the balance sate of each of their individual abilities, nor anything else related to the situational value of each hero (which in a game like Overwatch is absolutely crucial).
Even if you disagree with the logical distinction I brought up, which is your right, well at this point is where the opinions of the majority of the player base (not the Forum player base) and/or dev team come into pace.
Okay, but one has to decide. Will you “kill” the fun of a major portion of Mercy mains, or of the general player base that doesn’t main Mercy.
It is a tough choice, but it must be ultimately made up to an extent and personally, I consider anything other than leaning towards what the majority of the player base wants as completely unreasonable.
According to who, exactly?
This is all very fair. Even though it’s a different thing to compare the damage that no CC will cause to the entire game to what no Mass Rez has caused to the Mercy player base, your argument about middle grounds still stands.
And I do agree that middle grounds are always the best. Hence why I haven’t expressed completely negative feelings against Mass Rez even once after the EXP’s implementation.
My stance is this: Mass Rez can exist in this game, only if it’s kept in - check numerically. Meaning, it must have a noticeable cast time, a reasonable range and LOS check.
You can make it charge faster, but that’s about it. Any other buffs and we run into the risk of Mass Rez rearing its ugly head balance - wise and it becoming the low skill - high reward mess that got it removed in the first place.
And you believe the opposite. Like, I don’t get what’s the problem here, unless you’re engaging in the delusional, arrogant mistake of considering only your opinions as subjective facts.
Needless to say they aren’t. My stance backed up by my argumentation has the exact same weight as yours.
Here you go:
From the same time period as the second poll you provided. Reportedly, over 60% of participants are Support mains.
I really doubt that.
It is a fight - winning advantage. Sure, in a literal sense, they’re not the same thing, but that isn’t gonna yield anything more than a slight loosening of the conditions I previously set up for such Ultimates.