Mercy's problems aren't balance-related

General Discussion
1

Please stop responding to #ReworkMercy with comments like:

  • “You just want her to be op again”
  • “She’s fine, the meta just doesn’t favor her”
  • “Mercy only needs a small buff, not a rework”

These are off-topic responses.

#ReworkMercy isn’t about viability, meta, or balance. It’s about how the 2.0 rework screwed over Mercy’s skill curve and by extension, how “impactful” and “rewarding” she feels to play.

Mercy 2.0 is busted; in ways that no amount of nerfs or buffs will fix.

The core designs of E rez and Valkyrie are almost completely divorced from any form of skill expression, making Mercy’s skill curve plateau way too early to be satisfying. That’s where the complaints of “Mercy’s not engaging enough, she doesn’t feel like a hero” come from.

Unlike Mercy’s 1.0 form, whose issues were fixable with some simple nerfs/buffs in the right places and the addition of an E ability (since the slot was empty), Mercy’s 2.0 design cannot be improved in any meaningful way without putting her back at “must pick” status.

The process of elimination

Buffing her primary back to 60hps makes Mercy a must pick (again) because of E rez. A reliable main healer with rez on cooldown is too good not to have.

Buffing E rez would also make Mercy a must-pick again, although this time she’d take the off-healer slot. An off-healer with a consistent rez on cooldown is too good not to have.

Buffing damage boost at all would push a lot of heroes into one-shot range. Mercy would become a mandatory accessory for those heroes.

Buffing Valkyrie would just turn it into a duplicate of another hero’s ult no matter how you do it, and still leave Mercy with a sucky base kit.

Mercy 2.0’s design has hit a wall.

Valkyrie can’t stay as her ult (though it could be an E ability if it were reworked) because the concept itself isn’t powerful enough to be one. Rez can’t stay as a cooldown ability because it’s holding the rest of Mercy’s kit hostage just to keep her balanced.

The only reason Mercy and her E rez isn’t a must pick right now is because the nerf to her healing (down to 50hps) has suspended her in limbo between the roles of main and off-healer. She can’t fill either role adequately (at least in comparison to her peers), which means there is no reason to pick Mercy over a different healer.

Whether or not it gets moved back to her ult is up for debate, but resurrect cannot stay on E. It’s taken up so much of Mercy’s power budget that the rest of her kit has been gutted in order to make room.

Mercy is a prime example of how sometimes, the only way to fix a character is to rework them.

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Feelings are not always good for a game.
Especially when half the players feel one way, while the other half feels different.

I haven’t seen anyone wanting her to be op though, i have only seen people suggesting nerfs.

Was*
She is fine currently.

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Feelings are exactly why Mercy was reworked in the first place.

The precedent has already been set.

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Disagree, E rez does require skill considering how many bad mercy I saw that rez in bad position then die turning the game into 4vs6, Valkyrie is just like zen-soldier-Brigitte-ana-ashe-doomfist and MANY other ults that require little skill but the most skill come in positioning and TIMING.

Mercy 1.0 didn’t have ANY mid-battle impact abilty her most impact tied to her ult, mercy 2.0 is more flexible and her E rez has mid battle impact so she don’t have to charge a slow ult to become impactful.

Mercy healing buffed because she lacked of mid battle impact ability so they buffed her healing to compensate, mercy 2.0 has E rez which has impact in mid-battle so they reverted her healing back to 50

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Nope.
She was reworked because there was no counter play to her ult.

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Not to mention, how did mass rez take more skill than valk?

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Mercy has next to no impact, thats her Problem and DMG Boost doesnt save her.
Its realy hard to come up to something like antinade, speedboost or discord orb

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Yeah, no. It doesn’t take a rework to add counterplay to an ult whose last incarnation didn’t have a cast time, went through walls, and made the user invincible after using it.

Adding counterplay to multirez would have been as simple as nerfing it.

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Was already one of the worse ults in the game, and mercy didn’t see much play at higher ranks because of this.
But you want her nerfed?

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Yes.

Though not without compensation. A big part of the reason why multirez wasn’t considered as good was because it was Mercy’s only midfight, her only backup after her base heals got overwhelmed, and it didn’t do anything to help living allies.

The first two issues wold be moot if Mercy got a midfight E ability* to use as a middle ground between “basic beam heals are enough, everyone lives” and “all hell is breaking loose, ults are annihilating us”.

The third issue is solvable by adding some kind of healing effect for living allies in rez’s radius. It could be a burst heal, or a few seconds of health regeneration.

It’s also worth mentioning that Mercy 1.0 wasn’t nearly as hard to pin down without the current bunnyhop or superjump, making her much less effective in ranks where aiming is better and flankers are more skilled. If Mercy gets reworked again, I’d be shocked if bunnyhop/superjump didn’t transfer over.

*

Ana really raised the bar on what it takes to be considered a viable main healer by providing “emergency healing” on E with her nade. Moira welded the bar into place with her healing orb.

Mercy has never had any equivalent, aside from trying to use rez as a makeshift burst heal when 60/50hps isn’t enough to keep a teammate alive. Mercy 1.0’s empty E slot forced her to use her ult in unconventional ways to pick up the slack, but while the devs have clearly stated that they weren’t happy with these unorthodox strategies… they seem to have completely missed why multirez was being used like that.

The irony is intensified by the dev’s saying over and over that they don’t want Mercy to be “too dependent” on rez. It’s like a city planner outlawing the sale of first aid supplies, and then getting annoyed that people are going to the hospital for something as trivial as a scraped knee. Where else are they going to find bandaids?

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Excuse me, but that mid-fight impact… do you mean that she has to be stationary to be easier to kill if he team doesn’t immediatly come and protect her, or that she stops healing for that whole duration of the rez channeltime which often causes more of her teammates to die?

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This. This is what sparks so many witch hunts and gets so many heroes ruined.

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Something being difficult to use doesn’t make it skillful. Is it skillful to stand behind a wall and revive a Widow that got headshot by another Widow? What about the skill required to hide when a Junkrat uses tire and just come out after and do it?

Also is there skill in asking a tank to help you when you revive? Perhaps. But it gets to the point of annoying when you need to plead with your team to allow you to use an ability (something no other character, not even Mercy 1.0 had to do to justify using the ability)

You have 30 meters of leeway. The margin of error is so massive that positioning is nigh irrelevant.

The ultimate lasts 15 seconds, most teamfights last less than fifteen seconds. I mean yeah if you use the ult at spawn and use it to get back to your team I suppose timing would be a relevant point.

Exactly why Mercy players were asking for an ‘E’ in exchange for ult nerfs I suppose?

You have to be pretty silly to think that reviving mid-fight is a reliable tactic with current Mercy.

Stated reason was that she wasn’t healing enough. Why was she nerfed back to 50 HP/s then? By the developers indirect admission, she’s in a state where she no longer heals enough (and we can see this as she’s not picked as a main healer anymore)

E revive isn’t a mid-fight ability, it’s just too strong to justify having that much healing with it.

Hypothetical: Reduce Widowmaker’s damage by 50%, give her an ability that executes someone after 3 seconds of being in your LOS after targeting them and casting the entire time.

Would Widowmaker be balanced overall? Perhaps if the numbers on the ability were tweaked. Would her rifle deal enough damage to be a DPS anymore? Nope. But the ability is just stronger than her base kit that it justifies picking her.

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They did not completely spend the time effort and money just because some people complained on the forums about Mass rez

Stop making that the prime excuse to be whiny yourselves

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They already admitted it was rehashed from beta, they didn’t spend much time or money adding 2 different wing graphics and recording someone scraping a violin for 20 seconds and the air.

The most amount of time and effort they did was adding animations to fix their own mistakes, that being the Revive animation which makes the player look constipated rather than making them feel powerful. The old animation looked really good because it flowed wit her mobility, now it looks like she’s struggling to do something so basic. I have no issue with the cast time but the animation makes me feel so weak. Literally everything Mercy 2.0 launched with bar the wing graphics was already in the game

  • chain beam graphics are damage boost chains from Orisa recoloured, they don’t even look like Mercy’s beam (They literally didn’t even reskin healing chain beam, it’s the damage boost one but yellow)
  • Mercy 2.0 didn’t even launch with sound effects or a voiceline. When you activated Valkyrie she would use voicelines which would play for GA
  • The animation/visual effect that plays when you use Valkyrie is the same as the one for Resurrect, and I doubt having an animation which makes Mercy’s hands disappear for 0.5 seconds broke the small indie company’s budget
  • Nerfs are the most bog standard unintuative and mind numbingly boring I’ve ever seen. No intuition was done to keep the interactivity she launched with, which was better than Mercy 1.0
  • My God on average people were reviving up to 30 people a match do you think anyone actually balance tested that?

They literally didn’t give a **** about Mercy 2.0 except when they realized they were being extremely lazy.

My frustration with Mercy 2.0 comes from the very beginning - from the get go the developers showed they don’t care. If the developers did something you know interesting like graphically reworking her abilities to give the allusion of power I’d be A-Okay with that, but they aren’t because they just don’t care.

I know this is a borderline circle**** of agreement at this point but I cannot find a single person that finds her current kit aesthetically pleasing. This is balance aside; the aesthetics (sound and visuals) suck.

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If there was no counterplay to her old ultimate why wasnt she S-Tier? Oh right! Her old ultimate was countered pretty easily and was rather weak. Stop that lie about mass-rez being OP with no counters.

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I mean a lot of ults have no counter play, you just have to deal with them once they happen or are happening. Not to mention they didn’t even attempt to add counterplay

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The counterplay was pretty much just killing her first. She can only mass rez a bunch of people if she’s the last to die.

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Mercy is fine. She needs no changes.

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Wouldn’t dying first also potentially give her enough time to run back and rez

look I’m sorry you guys only ever liked Mercy for mass rez, but the devs don’t want it back

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