Mercy was meta for a long time

[Arceus-2238]

Like I said, it’s steadily decreasing. Now, let’s take a look at her winrate. Nvm, I already explained it. She Is Underpowered. If anything, you proved my point. For a hero with a high pickrate that’s steadily decreasing, her winrate should be increasing. That is not the case though.

Also,

I’ve heard people say that Mercy is fine, that Mercy is in a good place, that she’s more balanced than she’s ever been, etc. These claims are 100% false. Mercy’s win rates are below the tier average throughout the SR spectrum. The problem gets progressively worse the higher up you go. Being 3% away from the tier average is incredibly bad, given that the entire spread of win rate averages of commonly played characters is about 6%. Statistically, if you are playing Mercy right now then you are deranking, and if you’re playing her in high ranks then you’re throwing.

Another version of this attempts to shield itself from reality by making the non falsifiable claim that Mercy is fine because she still has mobility, consistency, damage boost, and res. You can tell that a claim about Mercy is on its face wrong if you can make it verbatim regardless of what number her healing is changed to. But even more importantly than that, this kind of theoretical analysis is not very useful. The final arbiter of what is good in Overwatch is what actually happens in the game, and the actual numbers point out clear as day that Mercy is not fine. Just as a reminder - after the Ana nerfs pros thought she would always be fine because she still had anti heals, sleep, and high burst healing.

Mercy will be balanced claims: I’ve heard people say that people are still learning how to play post nerf Mercy, and that the numbers will get better once people figure out what maps/comps she’s good at. From the start, this claim is dubious. Mercy has been around since the game came out and, she’s not hard to figure out. Mercy should be good on maps with lots of verticality, and should be good in mobile comps that can exploit vericality, as well as comps centered on long range damage. I don’t think higher ranks players have any trouble at all figuring this out.

Looking at the data however, this claim doesn’t appear to be true. It’s been a month and the win rates show no indication of an upward trend. Mercy’s pick rates have already plummeted quite severely. People have already heavily restricted the situations they play Mercy in. They just haven’t found success. If this claim were true, you would have expected to see an upward trend when the pick rates decreased, especially in higher ranks where people make better strategic choices. It’s just not there. As a side note: the hero you are thinking of when you make this claim is Zenyatta. His pick rates have gone down, but his win rates have not.

In order to believe this claim, you need to believe an very unlikely constellation of ideas. This claim has grown a beard and needs a shave from Ockham’s razor. Its fig leaf of plausibility is shrinking by the day and it’s becoming indecent.

Balance is meaningless: These are claims of the form - win rates don’t matter/don’t mean much. Bulls have to eat quite a lot of food. They can’t digest it all, and so that food comes to an unpleasant and inevitable conclusion. A similar situation holds here. Win rate is the number one statistic that matters. The only variable that determines whether or not a character is good is whether or not they’re winning games. Pick rate is only secondary evidence towards this.

Now, that isn’t to say that one can just look at win rates in a vacuum. Some thought has to be applied to them. For instance, situations where a character is on both sides have to be taken into account. These situations will always cause a character’s win rates to trend closer to the tier average (For example, when a character is picked on both sides in every game then their win rates are the exact tier average). When a character is below the average win rate (as Mercy is), that means that non mirror matches are actually significantly worse than the win rate indicates.

Just because you have to think about something in order to speak about it in an informed way doesn’t make it meaningless. I suspect that many of you making this claim would not make it about other characters.

Mercy shouldn’t be balanced: These are claims of the form - Mercy is mechanically easier than Ana, so she shouldn’t do as well in higher tiers. Leaving off the fact that non of the other characters are balanced in this way, it’s a non sequitur. Mercy players don’t want to be better than Ana at higher ranks. They want to be viable there. When you are making this claim, you are really thinking about someone else. Moira is better than Ana at lower ranks, and worse than her in higher ranks. She’s viable at every rank. She’s also very easy to play (easier than Mercy in my opinion). Moira is the model Mercy players are looking for.

In any case, these are claims that can’t really addressed by numbers. They can only be addressed by love. If you’re making this silly claim, I love you anyways.

Data and claims aside, I have 3 requests to make:
Pro Mercy crowd: I’ve seen a lot of you retreat to the claim “Mercy is balanced now but boring”. When you do this, the other side just says that fun is subjective and dismisses you. Don’t be so hasty to retreat from reality. Mercy is not balanced. That needs to be fixed.

Anti Mercy crowd: Some of you are making honest well reasoned arguments. You have a natural and worthy position to take here - Blizzard should be cautious with regards to Mercy to prevent her from dominating the support roster. You guys should stick to points like this where you are in the right.

Blizzard: In trying to balance pick rates, you over nerfed Mercy. You know this. My guess is that you knew it all along. You will need to fix it eventually. The healing will need to go back to 60. Start figuring out how to do this without breaking the game. Valkyrie and res are both controversial messes. Do something to them, and make it happen. Also, despite my criticisms I love you guys too.

[OCT-11505]

She is not underpowered. Dont you understand? She is viable. Let mercy be off meta for this season at least.

[Absql-1290]

wElP tImE tO sH*T oN zEnMeTTa

[Arceus-2238]

She quite literally IS underpowered. Stop ignoring the statistics.

[OCT-11505]

Overbuff is still not reliable.

[Arceus-2238]

Lmao, I already covered this. Click on the thread I linked. Here it is:

On Mercy and data

This post was conceived as a companion piece for evaluating my previous post (A month of Mercy nerf in numbers). Other than that, it’s not really going to be about Mercy (though I use her to work out examples). It’s about everyone’s other favorite subject - math. More specifically, I want to address the question: how much trust should we place in Overbuff statistics? I’ve seen a lot of people claim that Overbuff’s numbers are meaningless due to private profiles (or due to the fact that even bef…

Honestly, now you’re just ignoring proof that’s given to you. At this point, you making this thread was really unneccessary if you’re just going to say no to evidence and not provide your own evidence.

[Absql-1290]

She is underpowered. They literally said in the dev comments when they nerfed her she is meant to be able to provided the most raw healing out of all healers. Now it’s hard for Mercy to even be on par in healing with an Ana or Moira, or even Lucio

[ThiccBuddha-1468]

Just wondering, why? Why does it matter that she was meta for a long time? How is that an excuse for poor balance?

[Milo-22120]

Okay. But that isnt an arguement…

“x character was op for a bunch of seasons so now its okay for the x character to be almost no playable”

[OCT-11505]

I understand she is unbalanced. But she is viable

[Celsius-12710]

She’s not underpowered, but she’s is not at all fun to play. Considering fun was the argument that got her reworked in the first place, instead of simply making Rez LOS and replacing invulnerability with damage reduction. No one wants to play a hero that is not fun.

Mercy is balanced.

But she’s so unfun to play.

[OCT-11505]

Im pretty sure mercy is playable

[Xian396-1819]

People have been complaining about how the rework sapped the fun from her kit even when she was meta. Why do people think her op state was some sort of golden era to mercy mains when she wasnt

Mercy players cant get anything. Her viable playstyles rn include pocketing and going battle mercy. Ofc battle mercy is more engaging but people are complaining about that too. They tell mercy players to adjust but get mad at them if they dont adjust the way they want to smh

Ps battle mercy =/= dps or pistol only mercy

[OCT-11505]

But she’s so unfun to play.

Yeah, she is unfun to play, but this other guy doesnt understand the difference between unfun and underpowered

[AYAYA-21237]

trashcan hero with zero utility aside from one which immobilizes her for 1.75 secs

reminder mercy players did not ask for the rework which made her meta.

[Arceus-2238]

She’s not balanced according to statistics.

I understand she is unbalanced. But she is viable

Statisitcslly, if you play her, you are de-ranking and if you play her in high tiers, you’re throwing.
That is not viable.

[Arceus-2238]

She is underpowered and unfun. Lol. You pretending like the evidence doesn’t exist doesn’t make me wrong.

[ThiccBuddha-1468]

And that is certainly fair enough, but not really my question. I was wondering why it matters how long she was meta for? Why is that an excuse against balancing her better?

[Absql-1290]

The only thing Mercy is really good at now is pocketing really. And that leaves the rest of her team with getting minimal healing from Mercy.

Im pretty sure mercy is playable

And I’m pretty sure Ana was playable before the support changes.

[Absql-1290]

Cause she is both. mindblown