Mercy Replays and Thoughts

Competitive Discussion
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This is going to be a self-reflective post where others are encouraged to join in on the discussion about what went well and what went wrong.

Hollywood-Nail-Biter Win: J1M6MA from 12/22/2020

Context: I can recall: Both enemy supports and Arcadial on enemy team were Plat. Noah (DPS) was Silver. I believe the other two were Gold but one more might have been Silver. On my team we were all Gold aside from my other support who was unranked. This was a 2300s or so SR game. BTW gained 28 SR on this win from 2274-2302.

Thoughts:

  • Pretty sure our other support was a Flex DPS fill due to the fact they treated Ana/Baptiste as all DPS. It worked out alright honestly. I don’t remember the exact healing number but I had 35% of the total damage healed this game with 11 offensive assists, twenty something defensive ones, 6 resurrects, and about 1400-1500 damage amped.
  • Skip the first 3 minutes or so. It’s pretty pointless until the Nano-Valk-Blade from us.
  • I feel I used cover well this game hence the six total deaths. I also disengaged from fights well like @ 12:55 and 7:45 but the latter I was far luckier my Ball bailed me out albeit I got to the mega by myself. I’m curious what others think about that.
  • I rarely was with Pharah because they kept dropping me but between Widow, Discord, and Baptiste being in the air felt unsafe unless behind cover.
  • I didn’t use Resurrect enough this game. 6 is a paltry number and I know that.
  • I amped a lot of damage but most of it felt like it went nowhere. I feel 132 (1450 damage amped/11 offensive assists) per kill is a bad ratio. Maybe I’m mistaken there.
  • This game went from feeling like a lost cause to a really close game. I’m not sure what really changed as comms were all but silent with the occasional chirp from me but we coordinated a lot better after the ult blowout.
  • I basically used Valkyrie on cooldown if it looked like an even fight. Is that a good idea? It charges fast and breaks parity but half of them I feel like my team never tried to use them. Is that on me or them? Both? It usually feels weak for defensive maneuvers but it is great at keeping tanks and the like up.
  • My Valkyrie flight is generally poor. I don’t know how to make it better but I often die in it unless behind cover. Do I need to fly more dynamically or something?
  • I super-jumped 0 times. That’s my usual. I know the input but almost never do it outside of practice in spawn.

Havana Felt Like I Carried WIn CDWBZG from 1/9/2021
This was a Gold game where I felt like I backpacked the team. I don’t recall every stat but had 25k healing in the game which was only 33% of the damage taken. This is more of me recalling a game I did really well in and not a ton to grow from but it felt so good so it’s here.
*I stayed alive a ton hence only 6 deaths. Enemy supports accused me of actually smurfing.
*Really great use of cover and movement to live including my disengages.
*I even used my Blaster and had some fun with it getting some sweet kills. We won despite a 30 second 5v6 on defense due to an AFK on our team. We even held the first push back down someone.
*I dodged High Noons like a boss this game too! Those felt so good as usually those equal my Valk ending in tears.
*I easily coulda lived at 8:16 if I abandoned Hog sooner and ran to regroup. Live and learn.
*A lot of this was due to my high awareness this game from constant surveying the field around me a habit I recently made.
*I had a lot of flick Damage Boosts in this match like on Hook targets and dang! are they effective!
*This is what a game looks like when a Support carries it at least imo.

Temple of Anubis -Comeback Win NM2MEC from 1/11/2021
This was a Plat-Gold game with me at like 2450 SR. It truly felt like my Plat or bust game though as it was such a nail biter and I was so close to the threshold; winning this put me close to it.
*This game started with me feeling really like we were a shoe-in to win when we took it with 3:30 time left. Unfortunately that overconfidence turned to demoralization when opponents took it even faster. One of my biggest things here was I asked for the switch to Roadhog and Junkrat that really twisted the game in our favor imo. Our Sig refused to Rein and the other combos weren’t working.
*My Res this game were awful. Super high risk, high reward. Like at 12:46… In could have just walked forward and used the wall I’m standing on at 25 HP as cover. facepalms I really was playing go for broke and while it worked out here, it shouldn’t have and I know that.
*Alternatively the hold at the end felt heavily impacted by me. Junk and I held the right side by ourselves and I boosted him so he had a Riptire in a minute flat. I also was focusing on the other four and told him in voice that I had to go help the team informing him he’d be alone. He came with me and we clinched the fight. Similarly I had some big boosts on the Hooks.
*My DPS/Tanks definitely carried me in the first half considering they won a point with me in spawn. That felt good but hurt at the same time.
*18:17 I could have just went in the room to the left and been in cover too. Man, these Res hurt to watch back. What was I even thinking? I normally use cover and peek them and so on.

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Once you stop climbing in ranked and instead start to float at a stagnant rank watching your own gameplay is indeed very important to improve but going so deep into the statistics really doesn’t help much. No need to keep track of what ranks the people in the game are after the game has already ended, just focus on your gameplay.
With mercy, it’s all about staying alive, her beam was decent range, use it. There’s rarely ever a scenario in which being right next to your frontline is a good idea, usually only increasing the chances of you taking unneccessary poke or even dying early.
Mercy’s beams also have a lingering effect where they still attach to someone for a short period of time even after they’re broken line of sight from you or have gone out of its max range, use it. You can heal people behind cover by peeking out ever so slightly every once in a while then ducking back, this is very important when fighting sniper characters like widow or ashe and poke characters like sigma.
Another very important thing to remember is that even though mercy is supposed to be the kind and caring character, the best way to play her effieciently is ironically as selfishly as possible. If there’s ever a scenario in which you feel like you can save a teammate from death whether it’s through a rez or just healing them, but your own life will be at severe risk because of it, it’s ususally better to just let them die and save yourself. That might sound counterintuitive but think of it this way, a dead mercy=no more heals for the team, it’s much better to survive and keep the steady stream of healing to your team going than to risk a team fight loss by dying. Obviously there are many exceptions to this rule and better mercy players are going to know when it’s best to play passively and when to go for the aggresive rez but that’s something that really comes with more practice and can’t be taught easily unless u specifically hire like a mercy coach or sth. Just remember that your life is always above everyone else’s, if you’re dead, they’re probably dying too.
Also I’m sorry to say this but in the small amount I watched, your movement was triggering me to no end lol. This applies to literally every character in the game but when in the line of sight of an enemy, never stand still or move in a straight line in one direction, always be on the move. Spamming your a and d directional keys erratically makes it much harder for enemies to hit you, trust me this stays true no matter what rank you’re at, whether it’s gm or gold, make sure that you don’t just alternate a and d, press them rapidly at random, ur movement should be aaadadddaddadddaddd and not adadadadadadadad, that’ll just make u stay in the same spot for the most part and not do much. I also saw that you kept walking towards the enemy for no reason, it’s hard to describe the ideal distance you should be at from the enemy as being too far away makes it hard to gather info and support your team properly but I can definitely say that getting close enough that the opposing rein can swing at you is a big no no.
When damage boosting, don’t worry about the stats, just damage boost when no one else on the team requires healing or an important resource has been used like flashing dmg boost onto a roadhog after he hooks somebody just so that his follow up has increased dmg or dmg boosting dragonblade. It is not your job to ensure that your damage boost gets max value. It doesn’t matter if your dmg boost did not result in a kill, it gives your pocket more ult charge, it gives u ult charge and it puts more pressure on the enemy team allowing them less time to peak and poke.
As a mercy you should always try to pocket your pharah, damage boosted rockets op and without ur healing pharah insta dies after poking her head out for any longer than 3 seconds against people that know what their doing, like you said it isn’t safe to fly in the sky all the time, so you should do ur best to use aerial cover. Hollywood’s a pretty bad example since it’s a garbage pharah map past first point but on maps like King’s Row for example you can use the multiple tall buildings or even sth like the mondatta statue as cover to allow yourself to still pocket the pharah while staying out of los of the enemy hitscan attempting to shoot you down.
I thought ur valkyrie usage was pretty alright, it’s best to use right as a team fight is about to begin to give ur team that extra sustain and damage to push. It is not a defensive ultimate so using it try to heal through a grav or sth is a horrible idea that will never work out unless the enemy team is completely unable to follow up on the grav(in that case everyone is probably still surviving regardless of valk lol). It’s ok if ur team doesn’t make full use of your ult duration, not really ur fault and using it to save teammates from dying is not too bad of a usage since it allows everybody to regroup and take the next teamfight 6v6. Same as ana using nano boost on a mercy stuck with a pulse or sth just to save them from dying even though she’s obviously in no position to get kills with it. And just because you can fly high in the sky doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea to do so, it allows things like mccree’s high noon and soldier’s ult to kill you before you can escape to cover. When it’s best to fly higher and when it’s best to stay closer to your team is something you’ll learn with enough practice. Also use ur GA in valk more. It’s actually stupid and allows u to move at mach 4. Also the movement thing also applies here except now you can make yourself even harder to hit by flying up and down and using GA here and there.
Finally u should really get into the habit of doing the egirl jump more, a lot of the time your teammates in solo queue cannot be relied on to peel for you properly, and the egirl jump is the best way to help yourself escape the genji that will come for you relentlessly. If you’re uncomfortable with the inputs you can always do something like bind ur crouch or GA to a secondary key to help with egirl jumps specifically.
Anyway your gameplay wasn’t too bad, I felt your general awareness of your team was pretty good, make sure to keep track of stuff like your genji that’s about to blade so that you can pocket him. There’s also pressing tab all the time to take note of your team’s ult charge and the enemy team’s team comp, seeing if they make any switches. There’s also tracking the enemy team’s ults that is quite important that comes with more practice. Anyway you’ll get better with enough practice, and that’s the most important thing. Just play more ranked games while keeping these things in mind and you’ll eventually climb.

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Cant watch it now, but my suggestion for climbed ng with mercy is to find decent dos player and duo. Unless you want to do it solo :slight_smile: which is honestly pain full as you could see in my topic about mercy.

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The meme is that all you have to do to play Mercy is hold mouse 1, but more accurately it would be hold mouse 2. In the replay way too much time is spent healing, when the majority of your time should be blue beaming the damages. This changes with an off healer, but still. Damage amplified per kill doesn’t matter at all, I didn’t even know it was a stat. I think a good average damage amplified per 10 minutes is 1.7k-2.2k.

Must commit to Pharah much more.

Can never die to predictable spam like Junkrat’s at the beginning.

Must play behind cover more, out in the open or in the middle or too close to people too much. A 2300 Hanzo player can’t punish this, a 3300 or 4100 Hanzo can and will.

Must respect Amplification Matrix, and never use Resurrection when an enemy can shoot you through it.

Only use Valkyrie when your team will actually be able to capitalize off it, except when you need to use it to keep people alive.

Nanoblade is itself often fight winning. Definitely don’t Valkyrie for it, damage boosting it doesn’t add much value normally, and can easily get you killed.

Look around more, need to be more aware of other support, and poor Pharah chasing you for healing.

Let the main healer heal meaningless damage on tanks while you damage boost damages.

Great to post a replay rather than complaining about your teammates with your own interpretation of events.

Killing Junkrat during Riptire in Valkyrie is high value, and you can often do it very safely. You could do this on Point A over the roof.

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First off thanks to all of you for your time and insights.

The parts above this I knew and feel I largely followed. This part struck home though. So I’m still moving too predictably even when ASDFing. Noted.

Is this true? I feel like if it’s not getting kills, it’s doing very little. I got the ratio that game by dividing the total damage (it was between 1400-5000 so I estimated 1450) divided by the 11 offensive assists I got. That seems rather typical for me with over 100 amped to get a kill which seems bad and why mine are so low.

My rebuttal to this is they had 3 counters (Widow, Zen, Baptiste) focusing her and she didn’t use cover at all. I figured them dying would be better especially since they were not at all mindful of me in the game. Was that incorrect? I didn’t wanna get Widow tapped in the air.

I have a bad habit of over-holding ults because mainly when I ult, it seems everyone ults then we have none (like the wasted Mines and Blizzard on point 1 attack when we took the point) so I hold mine. I was treating it as a CD this game. I feel they generally were unused by my team to initiate despite my efforts at that.

It’s not. Like I said above I divided the total damage by the number of assists it resulted in to get a ratio. My average amped is like… 500-1500 a game if I had to guess. I feel at my rank it’s poorly utilized at best by my teammates unless a good Ashe.

Also said above with the three counters while I felt unsafe going with her.

I was trying to use it more aggressively because I tend to hold it for ages. My team also really needed coaxing to push that game it felt.

My Ana was kinda “out” of it imo. I figured since he ulted and Ana paused that we could do Valk-Blade (a decent combination) and save Nano for Rein. Then they Nanoed late so I was kinda left with no other options to get use out of it so I went with it.

I thought I did this decently tbh that game. Pharah was kinda abandoned but they were kinda playing their own game it felt.

I was the main healer. My Ana/Baptiste was a third DPS that game. I watched it back from their side for the grins and giggles. They 100% were a DPS flexing or playing them like DPS. They only healed beyond the Regeneration Burst if someone was super low and in front of them. I healed 36% of the damage taken that game and our Ana/Bap I’d estimate was… under half that. I definitely do default to heal botting though because often no one else does otherwise.

This honestly never even crossed my mind but I get about 1 blaster kill a game. 3 is a high game for me and 0 is very much a norm. Should that be higher? I always feel like going blaster unless alone tilts the team and pocketing anyone else has a better chance of winning that matchup.

I did this one out of order because I don’t understand. I barely died in this entire game (6 total) and 2 of those were suiciding on point to stall. Did I really seem out in the open? I felt I used cover exceedingly well this game which is a huge part of why I picked it.

This was dumb on my part. We just had the 3K Riptire and I figured it’d be safe. I coulda asked for Bubble (Zarya had it) or waited like 2 seconds more for it to go down. I thought they were mostly dead so I was safe but their Silver McCree double tapped me through it. I’m still (bleep)ed at myself for that death. It was a terrible assessment on my end.

I don’t wanna be carried. My winrate on her is 57% atm as is. It doesn’t have to be all solo for me but I don’t wanna Mercy-Pharah/Ashe my way up; I want to earn it.

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I said find decent DPS player, not a smurf :slight_smile: I did same in my climbed at the start, and I had few occasions where I grouped up with players who were in their normal ranks on main account as I dont like to be carried too.

Good luck in climbing, I am interested how many games it will take for you vs how many games I had to play to make it to plat.

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Yeah I forgot to mention this. In valk, if your team is already fully topped up but not in too much need of the damage boost you can pull out the blaster and go chase down like a widow with it, not only will you be contesting her, not allowing her to have a free sightline of your team but it could and should result in a kill if no one else is there to peel for her. That’s very high value, this can apply to basically any sniper and as mentioned junkrat using tire or finishing off a low hp rein that’s trying to back out with his shield by flying above and behind him to hit and pistol him down.

Spam those keys randomly and I mean spam. You can randomly tap crouch here and there as well to make yourself even more unpredictable but don’t hold it.

What makes damage boost so strong is as mentioned the increased ult charge that your pocket gains, genji for example builds blade so quickly just by spamming shurikens into a choke with damage boost and and also the change in the kill ranges, for example ashe being able to one shot-headshot 200 hp targets with a damage boost as opposed to without. A very underrated damage boost target in the lower ranks is Winston, obviously don’t follow him around all the time like you would a pharah or an ashe but when he jumps in for a dive damage boosting him allows him to deal very high burst to whomever he lands on and the extra cleave damage gets him to finish off targets and build primal much more effieciently. Also you can still damage boost a genji using blade without using valk, just follow him with GA, any form of dmg amplification on blade is really op and it’s what makes it one of the best ults in the game. With any form of damage boost genji can one-tap 200 hp targets with the slash-dash combo and with 2 of them he can one-shot 200 hp targets with just a slash.

You can always use cover yourself, like I said ur beam has range, especially on a map like hollywood where the skybox is really low, you could pocket her from behind cover relatively easily. Also when flying the target of all hitscans is always the pharah as it’s almost impossible to kill a good mercy player from range since they will always duck behind cover and heal back up using the passive. Also, without shooting at the pharah and pressuring her, the pharah will be much more free in the skies to rain down rockets on them and their team. Exception to this rule is ashe and widow. Most likely dude only picked or stayed on pharah because he saw you were on mercy. Picking pharah without a mercy is a very big soft throw.

That’s just ranked in a nutshell lol. But anyway the heal priority for mercy if you already have a main healer generally goes pocket>other support>other dps>tanks. There are many exceptions of course, such as in the current meta, the support line is usually zen with a brig bap or mercy and in that case you wanna prioritise tanks more as ur zen outputs very low healing. If ur other support is really dpsing or wtv then it’s probably best to focus more on tanks or to swap to another healer such as moira.

Also after watching a bit more of ur footage u seem to really tunnel-vision sometimes like on ur 3rd point attack where you ended up running into the opposing rein. Look around more and pay extra attention. Mercy is a very non-mechanically intensive hero, so she should be the one in charge of looking out for her teammates and calling out key things such as what ults they used in the last fight.

Lastly a thing I don’t think you realise or use too much is that you can rez around corners. Rez only checks for los when you activate the ability, the rest of the time you can be anywhere within the range of rez so if a teammate dies around a corner u can peek out slightly click ur rez then immediately back out which will allow u to get the rez off much more safely.

You can use it to save yourself in a pinch as well, so as long the team fight has not been decided yet, like using it to escape a blade for example. When a genji pulls out the blade use it and fly high up in the air so that he can’t kill you with it unless he’s a god and waste his dash or be forced to find another target. Without dash genji will find it very difficult to close the gap with his targets, getting minimal to negative value. You can still dodge blades by using GA on a far away teammate or by egirl jumping as the genji dashes to u to close the gap but it’s much less consistent. Just rmb to use valk pre-emptively and not when he’s already slashing at u or in general when you’re already quite low on hp, that could cause you to die in valk before u have the time to fly away or regen hp which for obvious reasons would be really bad.

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I agree with this but I kinda fell out of talking much in comms due to focusing on my game itself and the general bit of folks not listening often even when I did.

I know this works and love like ledge Resurrections (when they die on high ground and you float down below the high ground to Res em) but in general I don’t Res enough. My average is 6 a game which this one was spot on for. I feel I’m usually left with Res targets that are suicide to try or right in front of spawn so what’s the point? This game definitely was a lacking use of the ability which I agree with.

I love doing this. It screws Winston over too.

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One thing i would like to mention is that I dont heal my team mates in wall if we are already winning the fight and if there is no risk that they die at being critical close to death. Mostly because healing in valk is not charging your next ult. Its better to wait for end of valk and then heal to charge next valk.

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Usually not worth the risk for like 15% ult charge. It’s better to just guarantee you win the fight. Ranked is weird, sometimes your team bots out and loses the 2v5 somehow. Trust me when I say that this can happen at all ranks, including GM.

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How? I only get around 500…

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Battle Mercying is rare and opportunistic for me. It isn’t necessary at any elo, and it’s often throwing if you’re not smurfing, but it can be useful. Widowmaker is the ideal target, but only if you can go from an off angle.

You have to pocket Pharah even if they have counters, it’s almost a hard rule unless you’re trying to tilt them into swapping.

5:32 you are begging to be focused. Ana luckily doesn’t have sleep here. 6:24 their Reinhardt can just shatter you and you die. 7:18 you’re walking into spam. 7:26 you’re asking for Zarya to grav you because you went in front of the Mei. 8:23 you die to Pulse Bomb because you’re repositioning right into your team when you could bunnyhop somewhere safer. 8:45 you are on point for no reason, your tanks are touching. 11:11 you aren’t cancelling your Guardian Angel to play cover, you’re giving Widowmaker a free shot. 11:31 playing too far away from the wall. 11:41 sitting behind unsafe cover in front of a window.

These are just examples. It’s about the general idea of playing cover tightly. You’re right, it won’t get punished in 2300. You’re definitely not worse than other 2300 players, but presumably you’d like to climb.

Bonus tip, you walk forwards slightly faster than backwards, and Mercy can heal without looking, so in a lost fight you want to escape from it’s useful to just turn and run.

You’re free to ignore my advice, but anyone else will tell you what I did about damage boosting. Maybe a 4500 Mercy will argue min-maxing by pistol shieldbreaking instead of blue beaming in nuanced situations, but generally I’m right. I know what Gold games are like, but it’s still valuable there.

Good luck on your climb!

Know what heroes are the best to damage boost and at what ranges. Keep loose track of important cooldowns to boost like Dynamite. More important than a number is getting people to their ultimates.

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Will keep that in mind, right now i only blue beam my team mates when no one is at risk to get killed!

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So I added more replays if any are curious albeit one is ego-stroking but with my current 61% win rate on her, I’m not sure how much review I need to do currently.