Oh. I didn’t expect that anwser, That’s actually understandable 
alright thanks for the reply. Continue on with your day.
A “bug fix” that makes a character worse is a nerf. There is no other way to look at it without coming across as extremely biased and/or unintelligent.
4 Likes
I feel like it’s better to say that the content of the iteration matters more than the number.
If Mercy having instant Res was OP, then it doesn’t really matter if it was 1 iteration ago or 4.
Similar goes with the nerfs in general. Just because she was changed 5 times before doesn’t change the fact that she needs to be changed now. Only difference is what we know to avoid on the next go-around.
3 Likes
I see your point. I still think that the number matters however, for sake of context.
Downplaying the amount of work going into changing a hero shouldn’t be understated, especially since for us a look into the exact points where something didn’t work would allow more data to compare to to make changes.
This goes with knowing what to avoid as well, you simply have more information to confirm your decision. I see no point in excluding information on how much effort was put into a hero for things such as “the numbers are too big” or it “makes them look bad” for example. For me, the more data we can get about a problem, the better.
~Sincerely Yours xoxo,
a Lover of True, Fair, and Fun Balance.
xavvypls 
It is 15 nerfs, first because there are “follow ups” to nerfs. (like the recent one. Valk charges slower and healing in valk is lower). PTR nerfs DO COUNT and very specific bug fixes (like not being able to dmg boost some abilities) , as every change that tones down a hero is a nerf, no matter how you look at it. If you count the follow ups they are 15. If you don’t they are 13.
If you ignore the PTR nerfs then they could’ve just put all the nerfs, altogether, on the PTR before the release of the rework then we could just say she recieved no nerfs whatsoever. Because they were in the PTR before the rework came live. See how your logic goes?
5 Likes
There should be a limit for several reasons. The biggest is that it’s bad design and bad testing.
You can’t say you have a finished E-sports ready product when your design keeps having apparent monthly flaws.
You get it right the first time and listen to feedback you can avoid ridiculous 6 month overtuned hero.
Constant nerf correction shows a sign they don’t know what they want to do and makes the game feel like it is in beta.
It would be one thing if Mercy was an isolated incident. But we’ve had megathreads for Dva, Ana, Bastion and so on.
Once it twice is a fluke, three is a trend, and 4 or more flaws-nerfs-reworks-overtune-underpowered whatever you want to call it that’s the identity and expectation especially for heroes coming off the ptr is they will be a hot mess.
And if you still think constant nerfs on a hero doesn’t matter look at the state of 2018 Overwatch vs 2017 Overwatch before Mercy had an ult changed to an ability.
Overcorrecting and constant fixing is bad design in gaming as well as anything you do in life
1 Like
You forget though that the entire point of the rework was to balance Mercy because Mass Rez was supposedly overpowered. Then they created a new kit that was even worse and went through multiple iterations to try and balance which is still unbalanced.
All they’ve done now is cripple every part of her kit except resurrection which is what made her such a heavy presence in the game. The decreased HPS is very noticeable and her ultimate is useless during a teamfight because now it can’t even outheal tickle damage from Winston.
2 Likes
One change? How exactly can movement speed reduction and “can now be interrupted when Mercy is knocked back, stunned, or hacked” be counted as part of the change in casting time? Blizzard could have changed just the casting time without the other two nerfs, hence we have three nerfs here, not one. You are being just as disingenuous as the posters who try to inflate the number of Mercy nerfs.
3 Likes
You’re talking about bad reworks, which is something completely different from the assertion that there should be a hard cap to how many nerfs a hero should get. As if a hero is still breaking the game after 20 nerfs they shouldn’t get any more because it’s unfair. They’re pixels. They literally do not have the capacity to care about the balance changes they get.
Overwatch will also never be in a state of balance where Blizzard can stand back and say “ok the game is perfect now” and have a majority of people agree. There will always be heroes that are stronger than others, strategies that are stronger than others, and there will always be people that want the weak or OP heroes changed. And thus the drive to tweak the balance of the game will continue until nobody is there to care about it. That’s not a fault of the devs, that’s literally how game development is expected to be in this day and age - constant iterative change to meet the flaws of the game state at the time.
Let n = any arbitrarily large number. Yeah, having a character get nerfed n times sucks. But nerf n only happened because after n-1 nerfs the character was still too powerful. That is quite literally all that matters.
Dragon was only a problem because of dmg boost making it do more dmg than zens trans. I cant believe people are against this change. It got rid of a team wipe that most people seemed to hate, without nerfing dragon when it didnt need one outside of that interaction. That change was great.
I am not necessarily against it. I feel as though more people should have ran Ana to counter it, or just attempt to stifle the Hanzo or Mercy before the combo as it had counter-play, but I am not entirely against getting rid of it. It was the reasoning that irked me. If they just said, “we are changing this” rather than lying about it, I would have felt much better.
People did try Ana after her ammo buff. It largely didn’t work, because Ana didn’t heal nearly as much as 60HP/s Mercy, in order to do the same thing as damage boost Dragons offensively you need to commit a third ult to the combo, and she can’t Rez.
Her winrate was garbage until the dragons change happened, where she actually became worthwhile to play over Mercy if you were an Ana specialist.
People bring this up to criticize the devs “personally”, not to offer feedback on Mercy’s current state. It’s not a nice or constructive thing to do, but legitimate.
Either way I really enjoyed OP blowing these guys out of the water a bit.
My question is: when did they change damage-boost to not affect certain ults? And why not just buff transcendence a bit instead of adding inconsistencies to existing mechanics? Oh well.
You be correct if Mercy had three or four but currently she’s around ten, that number shows me that Blizz doesn’t know how to fix their own hero. I don’t know about you but my patience has ran dry months ago, Mercy getting nerfed is like the norm now.
1 Like
Oh I realize that. It’s purely venting rhetoric, but the amount of nerfs, as well as what qualifies as a nerf, changes quite literally every day. It was 10, then 11, then 12, then 14, now 15?
Trance is already absurdly powerful and didn’t need to make Lucio’s ult even more useless by comparison.
I don’t like the precedent that change set though. Soon no ults at all will be able to be stat comboed if this is followed to its logical conclusion.
Because Mercy being too strong is even more so.
Except in the most recent example, I know what OP is talking about when they say “15 nerfs”. I was in that thread. Even titanium thinks there was between 12 and 15 (not sure on the exact number though). When, in fact, there was only 8 actual nerfs.
It’s hard to have a discussion when you think it’s been 15 nerfs.
Me and the party in question have already started our discussion, quite easily in fact, and I have never made any claim where I’ve said “I think it’s been 15 nerfs.” So apologies, your statement is objectively false.
~Sincerely Yours xoxo,
a Lover of True, Fair, and Fun Balance.
xavvypls
1 Like
My mistake. It was someone else in your thread.
Nerfing a hero 15 times in a row ((don’t come at me with “quantity < quality” since all of the nerfs were huge) means there was something wrong in the design and something needs to be changes.
is what they said.
Winter Wonderland 2018 event confirmed.
Kind of easy to be too strong when Blizzard gave Mercy a rework that made rez on cooldown instead of a ult and ignore it after months of backlash. The Moira ‘bug fix’ and Ana nerfs help too.