Well I’m glad Lucio is getting playtime (I know I’m playing him more), but I think that was because of his buff instead of her nerf.
Mercy has gotten many nerfs since her rework, and had to get many buffs in her 1.0 state, causing the “Unfun to play against” mentality, giving us the rework that made the situation ultimately (no pun intended) WORSE.
I think the reason people find her “boring” just now is because you can’t just get away with playing mercy.
Her entire character is designed to be the “easy support to learn” (just like Soldier is the typical DPS and reinhardt is THE tank). Her beam is brainless, I’m not saying it’s bad and that people that play her are brainless but her beam is. she’s not mechanically demanding and the main thing that is going to improve with maining mercy is your game sense (which is fine).
Her entire kit is just boring. simple as that. people didn’t think it was boring because how powerful she was. low skill = high reward. So when you’re the ultimate support hero why would you even feel bored! you can carry your team :^D.
Now that she’s in a more balanced spot she finally has some drawback and competition so people see her boring side.
P.S: I play mercy too. she’s in my top 3 most played characters and I still find her fun. I don’t think she’s dead and her pocketing is still extremely powerful. her ultimate is still the most boring thing in the entire game but people that complain “iT cAn’t hEal YoUR teAM” they need to learn to use it like supercharge and not like trans
I personally don’t find her enjoyable due to her lack of Risk/Reward midfight gameplay.
Since Res was one of her only good abilities as an Ultimate, it made the thought process of “Should I use it now, or later at the risk of dying?” gave a sense of urgency to her very simple kit. Now, if someone dies, just walk on up and E mindlessly, because you’ll ave it back in 30 seconds regardless of your performance.
The problem with this theory is that in application Mercy/Moira and Mercy/Ana are quite bad compositions, the reality is people just need to get used to having less healing again and considering how long Zenyata/Lucio was meta I think a lot of people have just been drunk on heals for a year. Moira is still bad outside of a deathball and Ana is easily diveable, it’s just a matter of time till everybody goes back to Mercy and 50hps is the new normal.
At this point, i’d go for a second rework entirely. I mean, symmetra got a second rework and that made her more fun and rewarding to play (she is still super weak, but her current kit can be tweaked).
Reverting to old mercy would just ruin her entirely and make her even more of a liability and even less fun to play / play against.
Her old kit just wasn’t working, while her current one is busted and can’t be balanced outside of nerfing everything to the point she is just a rez bot and nothing else.
Let’s just call it quits and try again. Maybe have the gall to remove rez and give her something else.
Rez is an ability that makes her binary. She’s either the best or the worst. That was the reason of the rework a year ago.
I recommend that you read this post.
It explains how Resurrect is the thing that was making her OP.
I did mention a 3.0 rework in a previous post of mine.
Basically:
-E turns to Purify, taking away any status
-Ult gives a meter where if you heal more, you can Res Tag someone, so when they die, they res at thwir spot of death after 1/2 of the respawn time needed to go back to spawn.
yeah sure, nerf the ultimate ability that’s worse than a basic ability. Lucio’s Amp It Up is better than Valkyrie.
that’s the thing though, rez has been nerfed so hard that it couldn’t possibly be nerfed again without making Mercy F-tier. Right now she’s C-tier, good in low-mid ranks with the right comp and a competent team, bad everywhere else. They could rework Rez so that it functions differently, but a straight nerf would take an already difficult ability and make it impossible to pull off.
I posted a bit above your post about how I think Rez could be reworked so that it’s not OP but not entirely useless. If they nerfed Rez again the cast time would be upped to 3 seconds anyways, so let her heal allied souls for 3 seconds with her normal healing beam and let that be the rez. gives it counterplay while also making it possible for the mercy to survive.
Alternatively, if they want her to be an off healer (which she currently is not, healing numbers are not the only thing that determine whether or not something is an off healer) then her healing needs to become passive (such as by healing the 2-3 allies that are closest to her and within a certain range and LoS) and make her pistol her primary weapon so that she can heal and deal damage at the same time (which is one of the things that makes a hero an off-healer).
I used to think she was an off-healer too because of her low healing numbers and her utility based ultimate until I joined an OW community that explained the difference to me. An Off healer isn’t just a healer with low numbers and offensive capabilities. An off healer has several qualifications:
I see this a lot, but I also see a problem with this. If you’re using it as a damage boost only, Then for 15 seconds you’re denying your team of heals, and they are all dying. But if you switch to heals then they still die, only now it’s slower. this has been my experience anyways.
Congrats to OP: this is a positive and constructive post.
Penguin seal of approval 
Thaaanks Mr. Penguiiiiin~ ![:innocent:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/innocent.png?v=5" ":innocent:")
Healer that does nothing but healing since the beta should be an off-healer, but doesnt have utility to perform off healer plays like lucio/zen, just so ana an moira (who have always been main healers) can have a bit of spotlight? Are people actually saying this should be a thing?
Every type of healing is “brainless” and not mechanically demanding, except Ana’s.
Mercy has always been an extremely popular hero, not just when she was powerful/meta.
Transcendence is actually a great ultimate while Supercharger is crap, so you’re not making Mercy sound any better by describing her ult that way.
And there’s no such thing as a good/competent team in low-mid ranks. You need to rely on yourself more if you’re not in high ranks, so that makes Mercy bad everywhere.
Too bad for console players, who don’t even get an “E” to use. And those of us on the PC who don’t use E anyway.
I really don’t believe Mercy’s an off healer at the moment. And differentiating three different types of Supports is completely over the top for no reason and rather useless. There’s Main healer, and Off Support.
Main Healers: Ana, Moira, Mercy
Off Support: Lucio, Zenyatta, Brigitte
Mercy never lost her Main Healer position. People viewed her healing nerf to 50hps in the completely wrong light. Mercy does not heal 17% less, she heals 17% slower. That’s an important distinction, just as important as the Moira softlock/wide beam myth. Mercy can constantly heal, theoretically to no end, or one could say, to an infinite degree.
Now what is 17% of infinity? Infinity
If you’ve taken at least Algebra I, you’ve heard of a little formula that goes y=mx+b? Apply that formula to Mercy, and you’ll see that all we did was change the m, nothing else.
Now sure, she’s weaker than before, that’s undeniable. But only to a slight curve. She’s still entirely viable as a main healer. She’s not even harder to play, she’s just less easy.
To be clear, if she got a 50% nerf to her heals making it 25, it would just be 50% speed nerf to her heals?
Also,
You think there’s no time limit? You think the speed at which one hero does something isn’t weighed against the speed at which other heroes do their thing? There is no “infinity time” anywhere in this game.
Wow. You are trying way too hard to seem clever.
Funny, people were saying this same exact thing about Ana before the Mercy nerf, when they weren’t calling her trash. Ironically people keep saying that about mercy too, even though she’s still the best pocket healer in the game. Basically the exact niche she had before the rework.
So we’re just going to ignore the fact that blizzard themselves said they wanted Mercy to be the one you go to for Raw Healing? That pretty much means main healer by any definition
So if the OP is right then Blizz really screwed up their own metrics
Nevermind the fact that rez as it is now spits in the face of half of their proposed identity for Mercy and to make room for it they had to nerf the other half.
This makes no sense.
The main use of the off healers is to have an ability that helps the whole team survive a team wipe. Which is why Lucio and Zenyatta are so awesome and why Symmetra 2.0’s teleporter was crucial. Brigitte also did this and still sort of does this with her ultimate.
However, using Mercy as an off healer with Ana or Moira leaves your team completely exposed to the team wipe. Which is why I got to veto this classification of Mercy as an off healer.