Because sojourn is a only been a problem with mercy on her making her almost unkillable out side one shots and giving her back her one shot along side mercy mains loosing it over any idea of a nerf personly i think all damage boost have been a bit of a problem for a long time and zen is the worst offender and once sojourns nerfed hard zen will be the next big evil
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But it’s not just DPS players who are frustrated with this. I’m a GM support player, and I’ve never been more frustrated with the game. I don’t want the other supports buffed; they’re well balanced and for the longevity and overall health of the game forcing powercreep is too risky. Kiriko is a smidge too strong, Ana should have the buff they gave her to counter RH reverted, and obviously we’re getting a Brig ultimate rework…but otherwise, the support role feels okay outside of OHK metas. If you nerf tf out of like, several heros here, to give a pass to one support, the powerslide is going to be tremendous. Heavily nerfing, say, Widow (more than she needs, I mean), to compensate not changing Mercy, would make her so amazingly weak to things she does not need to be weak against. And then you are looking at a fork in the road; either those heros need a Mercy pocket even more, thus increasing the games dependency on Mercy to maintain values, or they become so bad that they are never picked, which means Mercy’s viability totally disappears and there is no reason to pick her at all either -which isn’t the goal. The goal is not to make Mercy so trash she should never be picked, even without touching Mercy’s kit at all.
Mercy shouldn’t be a hero that is only viable to pocket heros on the cusp of OP into being too strong and overbearing. She needs more individual agency than that. Look at, say, Kiriko. (Who, again, I’ll cede is a bit too strong atm). She is directly intended to counter Ana’s nade, and she does shut Ana down…but she is wholly viable even if the enemy team isn’t running Ana. Mercy is just a garbage pick if there aren’t solid ranged hitscan heros to play with, but with those heros, she feels too strong a pick. She’s just poorly balanced right now. It’s feast or famine.
I understand and hear a lot about matchmaking issues, and I see that the team is working hard on that situation. I don’t doubt that they exist, but I don’t personally notice them often in my games (or perhaps I don’t pay attention?) beyond sometimes the lowest SR fill hero on my team being, as an example, our tank, and the enemy team being their Mercy main. That is dramatically negatively impacting games, but I don’t want to comment on the rest of the matchmaking issues, because I don’t feel like I’m informed enough about the topic personally to take a stance.
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See, that’s a good point. But notice that people have been getting what they want, and bad things have been happening. I always trot out my usual examples of “they removed a shield tank, and now people are complaining about the direct consequences of those actions”, but can we think about that for a moment?
The players don’t always have good suggestions. Any situation where people get what they ask for, and we all admit that its a bad thing should really be rethought. Now, we’re doing the same things with Mercy and one shots.
Say Mercy’s reworked to be generic and oneshots are nerfed. You know what could happen? Heroes that need to die now, suddenly can’t like say Zenyatta for example.
Zenyatta’s about to ult, and you need to stop him. How do you do that? Well, the best answer is burst damage; you just kill him. We nerf one shots (which would be nerfing burst damage), and now he gets an indirect buff. Do we just nerf him, too?
I don’t know about the first one, but people are 100% advocating for Mercy to get some damage ability. Be it duel wielding her gun and staff, or shooting attack beams out of her staff. Also
But if that happens, we could be right where we started. “Oh now, Mercy’s supporting the OP hero. I guess we should nerf mercy!” and the like are problems that will never go away. I legitimately think the correct response is to straight up ignore Mercy complaints and to nerf Sojourn like we should have weeks ago.
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That’s the thing. Meta doesn’t matter compared to getting the Matchmaker issues solved.
Hero usage variety for maybe 500,000 players is trivial if they are faced with prospect of losing 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 players.
And that’s assuming GM isn’t more like 50,000 players. Where if that’s the case, let’s say they lose 10,000 players. Woop dee doo. That’s barely a rounding error compared to losing Millions.
Like if you’re not a streamer or an influencer? The devs care about maintaining you as a player, just about as much as Gold player.
And those Streamers and Influencers are heavily invested in getting more players, more viewers, and the overall financial success of the franchise. And worst comes to worst, they can be bought off with paid endorsements.
And with horrible Matchmaking, even streaming viewers on Overwatch are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
The idea that meta is more important than getting enough Supports to fix Matchmaking, is “financially naive”.
Yes I’m willing if it’s bad for the game.
I’m not convinced that is bad for the game, and i have legitimate evidence to the contrary. You say “The OP hero is OP when Mercy’s pocketing her!”, and then I respond with “Wait, so Sojourn’s OP anyway?” and you go “Yes.”.
Oh. Okay. Lets just nerf Mercy then since the OP hero is OP anyway.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to tell you that we’ve been getting things that people have been asking for, and its only made the game worse. Do you see that at all?
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the support of supports… both games
The issue with Mercy is mainly a meta synergy thing in high skill brackets. People are playing poke because one-shots are OP and with a boosted Sojourn and Widow you effectively have two hitscan one-shots, and in poke comps rez gets huge value as people play safe at range and around cover. This problem will go away if (or when) the meta changes without any real need to change Mercy. In less pokey comps Lucio and Kiriko will get better value because of speed-boosting rotations, beat, suzu, and kitsune rush, and when people are rotating fast and playing closer rez is extremely easy to deny.
Elsewhere it’s mostly down to a few niche, but still relevant grievances. Like damage boost is strong. Which is fine, but there are situations where it feels really terrible to play into a pocketed DPS such as when dealing with aim botters, smurfs (remember there is literally entire economy built around paid boosting in games like this) and then you have combos like Pharmercy which is heavily abused, and utterly loathed duo that basically makes all non-hitscan DPS unplayable from Bronze to Diamond.
In low skill brackets there is another issue.
Mercy’s movement is so user-friendly now the current situation would be akin to if any random Gold player willing to put in an hour or two in custom games could master Ball and Doomfist’s roll-outs and movement techs. Obviously those characters would get a huge power spike in the metal ranks if this were the case, and so too with Mercy as evasiveness is where most of her value lies. Her double strength self-heal, speed and 3d movements make Mercy almost impossible to kill in ranks where consistent hitscan aim is an issue (like even Top 500 players can struggle to shoot down Mercy) and her value as a pocket healer is likewise very high in games where people don’t reliably hit shots.
Valk can also feel very rough if you don’t have a GM Sojourn who can just delete the Mercy at will as it’s an extremely low-cost ult that can’t really be cancelled or denied economically and it’s impact is grossly underrated. Anti nade their entire team and she’ll just damage boost which is probably what she’ll be wanting to do anyway. Use something like beat or tranc to deny the AOE damage boost push, and you’re trading very unfavourably in terms of ult economy. Even Tactical Visor or High Noon won’t work against a Mercy who has any sense because her beam length is much greater in Valk and she can easily play around cover.
Lastly rez got a speed buff which is not a big deal in higher ranks where it’s still very unreliable, but in metal ranks where people don’t co-ordinate to deny rez and can’t reliably hit shots it’s very easy for Mercy to get loads of them off.
It’s a combination of lots of little things basically. Many of which are very situational or meta-dependant.
The real problem is you can’t talk about it without starting an argument because Mercy players generally won’t admit that Mercy can ever be good or strong. They always deflect and blame the DPS. Now obviously if she really had no impact they wouldn’t be so obsessed with playing her. It’s like the Genji thing. If the hero is a solid A-B tier they will pretend they are F-tier and that you need to be an Overwatch God to get value out of them.
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Some streamer must have complained and now people are seeing the thing that has always been a problem.
…good point. I’ve often said DB limits hero design space as they always need to consider ‘what if this hero gets damage boosted…?’ 
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You are stuck on souj. Some heroes are still stuck being bad because of the potential mercy pocket. Let’s say you nerf souj. What than ? Will she become another hero that needs a mercy pocket to be good enough all the time ? Pharah and echo have been held down for ages because of mercy pocket. Every DPS is now balanced around the “mercy might pocket them” which ain’t exactly right. Also, for souj, the Devs though it would be fine if she couldn’t one shot but they forgot to add in the “mercy pocket” and now we again have the one shot problem. Souj is definitely strong but she wasn’t one shotting on her own after the nerfs.
I guess its about damage boost and breakpoints. Its one of those things that is constantly prompting nerfs for heroes that have burst damage.
Happened with Hanzo, Ashe, now its going to be Sojourn (probably) so yes, it is a problematic mechanic. She is not powerful herself but that mechanic, design wise, will always create issues with breakpoints and oneshots/burst damage.
fast, easy to implement, and stops current/future issues with amp:
Disable amp if the damage of hit is greater than 70 ;|
or disable crit mod stacking with amp mod. (double dipping dmg modifiers)
dev’s should of done this after Ashe (as she highlighted the breakpoint issue)
would also give reasons not to pick a dmg amp support (if ur dps is all dps who cant benefit from it)
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They no longer have the budget to make something unique and detailed all reworks are dependent on them using available assets, if you look at Orissa spear model you can see the budget alloted there.
With Hog out of the picture, people have moved onto the next bandwagon. She was honestly getting hate before he was formerly addressed. It is just now that all the Hog detractors are satiated, the full focus is directed at her.
I dont think thats intuitive at all, basically because you are not rewarding skill and HS, you are just “boosting mediocrity” to not be just “bad”.
The most intuitive (not that is good) way would be switching it for faster attack speed. That is a straight up conversion and doesn’t really break damage points. Maybe 20% instead of 30% and thats it.
Heh, compare the Orisa spear to Kiriko’s Kunai.
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Damage boost on demand. Boosts should be ultimates or on cooldown. I look at TF2 for reference, pretty much all the team-buff damage boosts have a cooldown (Jarate) or have to be worked towards (Buff Banner, Kritzkrieg).
mercy is pretty spicy 
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Because Mercy needs some adjustments, but the UwU Mercy 1-tricks don’t want their precious little hero changed.
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