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.
Mercy is great and I will always play her.
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I wouldn’t. Disjointed hitboxes makes the game feel cheap. Just ask paladins.
If her mobility is REALLY an issue, revert some of the buffs that let you shift momentum extremely easily.
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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.
Popular streamer got back on his hobby horse on social media and all his groupies followed.
6 Likes
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!”.
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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.
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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.
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I understand what you are saying, but that is just putting a stopper in the problem. I don’t doubt that ranged snipers need tweaking in general (again, particularly Soj), but unless they overnerf them, Mercy is just going to feel even more valuable as she exists. I can’t stress enough that I say this as a support player; the dev team can’t tip-toe around changing supports like this. In this instance, Mercy is a huge contributing factor as to why the support role feels bad to begin with.
So you have, for example, Pharah…who feels okay without a pocket. She’s counterable. But with a pocket, the complaint is she is overbearing and that she is hard to counter. But if you’re doing everything you can to avoid changing Mercy and how pocketing works and you just nerf Pharah down some more, she’s unplayable without a pocket. And you’d have to adjust so many heros in consideration of this, all to avoid changing one hero, when you’re just prolonging the inevitable; eventually something in her kit has to give.
So like I said, it’s a really hard problem they’ve got themselves, and I agree with where you are coming from in that adjusting supports during a time when support play feels rough and is at a low is rough…but I think the alternative is rougher.
Reworks are slow (both on their end to figure out, balance, program and implement, and on the playerbase to learn well enough to make the hero feel impactful again), but we’re seeing with Roadhog what probably has to happen; you nerf the hero until the rework can be done.
This is very reminiscent of what is happening in League of Legends right now. Obviously they’re very different games…and Riot is a lot faster and tougher on balance changes (of course, their team is massive), but the champ Yuumi has been very domineering for a very long time now. She’s a support champ who is generally viewed as non-mechanically challenging, who has a huge and loyal fanbase of ‘one tricks’, and who has a very high PR and ban-rate (as bans in League are a thing). Despite that, Yuumi’s WR is pretty low, particularly in lower SRs -despite Yuumi requiring less mechanical skill than even Mercy does. But she is a ‘pocket-hero’, so she has proven to be an either must-pick or must-ban in high ELO and professional play. It’s been a thorn in the side of a ton of LoL players for years; the same sort of anti-Mercy stuff you see here is anti-Yuumi stuff in the League world…and finally, after years, Riot called it quits and is reworking her to make her more counterable and focusable, and rely less on pocketing but still not be mechanically demanding to ‘preserve the fantasy of playing the hero’. But, since that takes time to do, they’ve very intentionally (and they said as much themselves) nerfed the crap out of her while they wait for the rework to go through, to alleviate some of the pressure of the playerbase until then. This is precisely what we are seeing them do to Roadhog right now, and it’s what I would wish they would do to Mercy…or, if not that, at least admit they realize that there is a problem here that does not just lie in the heros Mercy pockets. We’ve seen time and time again the hero Mercy pockets to make overbearing get nerfed, and she moves on to the next, and so on and so on. I don’t know how many times Mercy can eke by without getting looked at by the dev team critically when she is clearly the common denominator with the problem over and over.
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They absolutely can, and if anything they should be doing everything they can to make the Support role more desirable right now.
Even if that means half the GM DPS players quit.
I cannot stress how important it is to fix Matchmaking, when we’re talking the potential of them losing MILLIONS of current & potential players.
3 Likes
But you’re not considering that what people want -and I am not a designer here, I couldn’t give you solid ideas of what this is, is to replace damage boost with something else, that does not as negatively impact the rest of the game. I don’t think many people are suggesting just removing DB and upping her healing. I also don’t see people saying replace DB with a damaging ability on Mercy’s own. Mercy’s ‘fantasy’ is not built on that. But there has to be an ability that Mercy can be given in lieu of the damage boost she has right now that keeps her fantasy alive, is still helpful for her team, while not being pretty unhealthy for the game as a whole.
Again, I don’t know what it is exactly. It could be reworking how DB is applied even, it could be an entirely new ability. But there has to be another option here.
Also here’s a continue on that train of thought I had.
This, was the reason for the past 3 years that the devs were so focused on catering the OWL and GM players.
YouTube reportedly paid $160m for Activision Blizzard esports exclusivity | GamesIndustry.biz
That doesn’t exist anymore, and will probably never exist ever again.
That pile of money is gone forever.
And pretty much all the rest of their money is coming in the form of
- Cash shop sales to Ladder players
- Battle Pass sales to Ladder players
- PVE sales to Ladder players
While high ELO and the Pro scene is important in a “Marketing” sense.
If they gotta make a choice between “Sales” or “Marketing”. Any sane business would go with “Sales”.