If an ability needs a 30 second cooldown… it probably shouldn’t exist. That and the fact you can rez without a worry with LoS which leads to rezzes that are quite literally unstoppable. And now you just have to deal with the fact that a kill got erased and there was nothing you could physically do about it.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Preferred by mercy players yes, because it requires no actual effort and breaks damage points and forces the game to be balanced around the fact that at any moment with any form of damage numbers, a damage boost can come in and completely change it and make it overbearingly strong.
She’s the only hero in the game with the literal DESIGN for pocketing.
As a widow main - Mercy helps me piss people off even more. I can 1 tap basically without having to charge AND I’m almost impossible to dive unless at least 2 people come at me because of pocket heals.
<3 Mercy (unless you’re on the enemy team - then you’re my first target priority)
I don’t think as a whole Mercy needs a nerf. I think damage boost absolutely needs to be reworked. I would adjust her hitbox while she is using her GA so it’s a little bigger as well, but as a whole, not a big nerf for the hero.
Her kit is just not super healthy for the game anymore. It wasn’t great towards the end of OW1, but now in OW2, with one less tank to put pressure on Mercy, and Mercy pocket heros, it’s actually a pretty hard issue to deal with, even in GM. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, Mercy got 5 more bullets, imba’, so much as, ‘Oh, the direction the game has taken balance wise -most especially 5v5- render’s Mercy’s kit a bit out of touch for the game now’.
Two heros can have an issue at once. Kiriko is not in a great spot either…I play support in GM and Kiriko and Mercy are sort of holding the rest of the support cast hostage at this point, at least in high SR.
I think some part of her mobility does need slight tweaking…but I’ve seen a lot of people complain that if the CD is raised, or if the speed or direction of the GJ/SJ changes, they think Mercy would be unplayable. I feel like the hitbox is actually the tidiest solution to the issue.
I don’t play much paladins, so I can’t speak to that…but I wouldn’t imagine it would be terrible. Lucio and Genji, for example, have disjointed hitboxes during their movement and it’s been that way since the game came out. I don’t think people even really notice it most of the time, so I can’t imagine that if Mercy had it also it would feel that terrible for the Mercy player, while being much less oppressively for the people playing into her.
People hate souj, especially when she slides in their face and one shots them. Under normal circumstances people can kill/punish her when she does that but the mercy pockets enables her even more which frustrates people. Her hitbox is already very slim and wonky so she is harder to kill on her own, add in a mercy and she will hard pocket souj and Rez her off cool down and of course killing the mercy herself is easier said then done.
I’m just going to come out and say it: this is what the Overwatch community deserves after getting barriers and tanks nerfed for so long. Don’t like the characters and things made to prevent that damage? Well, now you gotta take that damage.
Solution: Nerf Sojourn’s mobility, damage, and disable crits on her rail gun. No Mercy nerfs required.
Problem is the consistency with the pocket. If their was a window of opportunity to stop that consistency, people wouldn’t complain. For example, you engage a bap in the backline, he starts dueling you and his team is not getting supported. Add in the fact that he can miss his healing nades and it feels like you can interrupt him. You can’t do that with mercy untill and unless you literally kill her.
Mercy will latch onto the next popular dps and we will be having this argument all over again. Right now it’s DB souj, next people will complain about DB+next popular DPS. The ability to hard pocket a DPS is an issue because it allows them to play alot more aggressively and you literally have to kill mercy to stop that pocket.
I mean…it’s a hot take to say ‘the heros I liked got nerfed, so you all deserve the game to feel like trash!’. And the game felt terrible when there were a ton of barriers also, because it was still ranged pocket heros, but the games were just slower because there were also barriers.
There are a lot of things to counter ranged OHK heros. Barriers were bad for the game in the capacity that they existed in OW1. And tanks in OW2 are, for the most part, great! (except Rein…). The issue is that they simply can not deal with a pocketed sniper anymore; it’s not their job to do that most of the time. It’s better to let tanks exist on the level they’re at, and nerf ranged pocket heros.
I really think that says more about the overvaluing of damage, and releasing characters that are clearly juiced for no reason. Plus, wasn’t Mercy pretty low on the pickrate before Sojourn dropped (or something like that)?
Regardless, what happens when we nerf Mercy? We’ll continue to be steamrolled by Sojourn and other damage heroes. If we nerf Mercy and Sojourn, well I believe we’ll have nerfed Mercy for literally no reason.
At some point, I really think Blizzard needs to tell everyone to calm down.
But I didn’t say that. Me liking the tanks has nothing to do with the fact that people have successfully gotten defenses nerfed, and are now going “What!?! Why am I taking so much damage!?! Why can’t we prevent Oneshots and burst damage!?”.
So the solution is to gut and devalue essential counters to things? That doesn’t seem smart. I think a better solution would be to tweak them so they can still serve as counters. But nah, lets delete a whole tank and then legitimately act surprised when damage gets a giant indirect buff.
Its just like me saying the brakes in my car sucks, so I took them out. Then when I’m driving I say “Huh?! I can’t stop my car!? Why!? What a horribly made car!”.
Well that’s certainly true, and that’s why people are taking arms with Mercy’s survivability as well. Besides the fact that she is harder to kill after her GA/SJ update, Mercy is able to move much faster and in more directions with her new mobility…but her beam falloff remains the same (both in distance and in time)…so it just feels impossible to punish her. I know the popular answer is ‘skill issue’ and ‘get good’, but I am a GM support player…even in GM, it is a tremendous struggle. A hero can’t be that hard to kill and consistently offer such a huge impact for her team, but Mercy does. She’s low-risk and high-reward, as she currently exists. Damage boost can’t be healthy in general (even damage thresholds aside), because in order to make the boost feel counterable and reasonable (as in, keep damage boost precisely as it is), Mercy would have to have a lot of her survivability nerfed, and she would just feel horrible to play as.
I think the easiest solution here is just to tweak ranged OHK heros and damage boost. Soj clearly is too strong and just needs a nerf. But I think certainly Widow (and possibly Hanzo) need looking at also. But I don’t think many people are really calling for genuine Mercy nerfs. I think her survivability needs a slight tone down, but the problem is the concept of Mercy’s damage boost -how she pockets- as a whole. It’s not about nerfing Mercy, it’s about reworking her to push her away from the pocket playstyle. A similar thing happened to Lucio in about 2017.
We can have a game where there aren’t a huge amount of barriers and ranged heros don’t feel absolutely terrible to fight against, but the answer really is looking at ranged hitscans and pocketing playstyles. The tanks -outside of that-, actually feel pretty good (again, barring Rein who feels bad, and RH who is getting reworked to better suit a 5v5 environment). The answer all along really was the dev team anticipating the power of snipers going into 5v5, and they clearly didn’t.
The problem with reworks is that they are slow, and can often backfire.
And they kinda need every Support player they can get their hands on right now to deal with Matchmaking.
So the much “Safer” solution is just to nerf OHK characters, and any other DPS or Tank character that ends up being a problem when comboed with a Support.
It’s not exactly a nerf we are asking for but a change in playstyle where she is more of a support rather than a pocket bot. People don’t hate mercy herself but the pocket playstyle. And you know yourself it’s not that hard to be a pocket bot. With less tanks the pocketing playstyle gets amplified which will be transferred over to the next hero that mercy pockets.
This is my personal opinion but imho Rez is the main problem. Killing a pocketed person is already hard enough and when you finally do it, she rezzes them back essentially resetting the fight. It wouldn’t have been much of an issue if it was just the pocket, an extra life is what makes is worse.
But should this be something that happens? Everyone should have a unique way to support, but you guys seem to be willing to destroy that on every level. I mean, look at your choices.
You can choose from:
Zenyatta: The hero who’s expected to damage and heal.
Baptiste: The hero who’s expected to damage and heal.
Brig: The hero who’s expected to damage and heal.
Ooh! Or your could try
Moira: The hero who’s expected to damage and heal (and people get upset about this for some reason.)
Kiriko: The hero who’s expected to damage and heal.
By now, you probably get my point. Mercy’s unique in that she’s made to heal and not be yet another gun hero, and I think this should be celebrated. Think of all the potential support concepts you guys are turning your backs on because you think supports that prioritize healing are a bad thing.
You could have a builder support who can set up healing drones, but as a downside is a poor fighter. Or perhaps a support that heals and damages very poorly, but can apply buffs to allies and debuffs to the enemies. You guys misidentify Mercy’s uniqueness as “the pocket playstyle”, and I think that’s a critical mistake.