I’ve had a concept for a ‘Mini-Ult’ for a long time now. I think Resurrect could be Reworked into a Mini-Ult and Damage-Boost should be replaced by an Attack-Speed-Boost instead.
Would be replaced with something even more garbage, than what already exists.
It’s bad enough, that both resurrect and damage boost require your team to be better, than enemy team, to work. You supposed to make your team that way by using your abilities, not expect them to be that way.
3 Likes
Breaks rule n°1 : Mercy is the only non-offensive character in the game, diversity never was and never will be a bad thing. The game wouldn’t be more fun if all DPS were Soldier and all tank Rein, why should all support be forced into a single identity of “damage plus utility” ?
Do you disagree with the rules I set up ? AKJ does, he disagrees with rule n°1 and think Mercy shouldn’t be allowed to be a non-pew pewer in a pew pew game. Which rule do you disagree with ?
Looking at these two options :
- Attack speed boost breaks rule n°3 by making recoil even more random and having very bad interactions with muscle memory on at least two different heroes (McCree and Mei). It also breaks rule n°4 as we’ve all seen how strong attack speed boost can be with ults, we’ll just get “X’s ult is broken by Mercy” comments, every character would need to be balanced around having a permanent +X% speed on it, which is as hard to balance as +X% damage. If anything, it’ll be a big buff to snipers who can’t really use damage boost but would love to get attack speed boost. This would be another balancing issue, and there’s no reason to think it’ll be less of a nightmare then current blue beam is
- Cooldown interaction breaks rule 4. Zarya is balanced around having 7s without bubbles, bringing that down would make her unkillable in low elo. Same argument for Orisa : she’s supposed to have 5.75s of “lack of cooldown”, bringing that down would make her even more unkillable. On the other hand, imagine bringing Ana’s nade downtime to less then 6.5s or any other strong support ability. It would work with the “triage healer” playstyle as you’ll be incentivize to jump to a teammate, wait until they spent their cooldown, then jump to another one, but in practice, it’ll make everybody much, much angrier then blue beam already does.
If we want to come up with ideas, we first need rules to make sure the suggestions don’t go anywhere. I’m tired of copy-pasting the same arguments over and over again.
These rules are what to me blue beam should be. Let’s talk about them : why shouldn’t blue beam be an offensive ability ? Why shouldn’t blue beam be a better option then healbotting ? Why shouldn’t blue beam be a thing teammates desire ? And so on. That’s the point on laying down a foundation for our creativity : let’s make sure we don’t waste time arguing on ideas we all fundamentally think are off-topic and instead spend our brain power on stuff which could actually replace current blue beam.
Once we have a set of rules we can agree on, a box to not just give random ideas we’ll instantly dismiss (such as “giving a 50% damage resistance”, this breaks rule 1, you’ve turned Mercy into a pure healbot with 0 offensive contribution), we can talk.
And to go faster, I’ve taken all the ideas I could think about and checked : “do they fit the ruleset we’ve established ?”. And the answer, indeed, was no. So either you can argue I’m wrong and this idea doesn’t break the rule I think it breaks or argue said rule shouldn’t exist, or if we agree on the rules and the idea that the suggestion breaks the rules then we can’t do anything but agree that the idea is not a good one and move on.
Overheal breaks rule n°1.
“Literally anything” that fits all four rules would be worth talking about, but that’s a bit more general, can you precise please ?
Not being able to shoot nor heal nor get too far from your supported targets are inherent limitations.
Also, if “teammate missing” is not a factor of how good damage boost is, why is “teammate not missing” not an “external factor” ? Damage boost does nothing. Literally, nothing. You don’t do damage, you don’t give health, you do nothing. You have nice light effect that gives away your position and that’s it. Nobody should care about it as it literally does nothing.
If you’re going to argue that blue beam does anything, that means in the equation of “result of blue beam” you take into account the teammate being boosted, and if you do, it’s a variable you can’t just ignore whenever it displeases you. If you think this ability does anything when the variable “teammate” is good then the mathematical undeniable truth is that it’s a bad ability when the variable “teammate” is bad.
This is the first time I’ve seen someone suggest the resource should be damage-based instead of shot or time-based. It’ll be less bad, I still think it’s double-punishment for Mercy (if you choose to boost a bad player, not only are you not doing anything but you loose ressource on top of it) and therefore I’ll disagree with it… but technically it fits my four rules of what blue beam should be, so sure, that’s a good suggestion.
Making a character stronger but less fun is never the correct way to “nerf” a character, no matter how you look at it. We’ll have all preferred to keep our fun stuff while having everything else be nerfed.
Also “I saw one Mercy” is not a strong argument. If you want to argue Mercy is too survivable or too impactful you need data on this.
The issue is that this comes very close to the cooldown reduction idea. We know the devs think there are too many ults in the game right now and current blue beam, by boosting damage, is already reducing ult cooldown in a round about way, so while it could work… I’m afraid of the consequences.
With what ? 4 rules, get thinking please.
4 Likes
Rule 1 sounds absurd - it has to be direct offensive buff, otherwise it’s largely useless. So I am all in for overheal, that is % from existing health, like in TF2.
1 Like
What I meant was : it needs to be an offensive capacity (as in, the Mercy way of doing damage) that doesn’t directly impact the opponents (like shooting does).
Current blue beam does that : it’s an offensive capacity, it increases damage done, but it’s an indirect one, it doesn’t directly debuff opponent like discord nor does it bring their HP down.
Do you think this should go ? Do you think it’s time for Mercy to do damage herself or, on the other hand, embrace the healbot aspect and do away with this idea of indirect damage ?
Though you can argue, that it’s direct defensive buff - overheal doesn’t make you better at killing, just in absorbing shots. Your aim or dealt damage remain exactly same.
I don’t see why. Making your teammates live longer is strategically offensive buff, as it allows them to push further. It allows teammates to be more aggressive, even in the face of burst damage.
As for it being busted or not - would depend from exactly numbers. 30% overheal on 200hp hero is extra 60 hp.
I guess you’re right. I don’t see healbotting as a fun gameplay, I think beam juggling is a much better thing but maybe embracing the butterflying aspect, very strong healing but doing away with damage boost could be fun for us, I don’t know how fun it’ll be for anyone else though. We already see people being angry at tanks that never die, wouldn’t it be even worse if we had a healbot with overheal ?
(just in case : I’ve never played TF2)
In TF2, healbotting and managing overheal is primary gameplay loop of Medic. Your teammates need to be in best shape possible at the moment of engagement, as you can’t really outheal damage(best incombat healing outside of “ult” is 33 hp/s).
Possibly, though overheal is what it takes to make pocketing suboptimal - fully overhealed team is a lot more combat-ready, than 1 overhealed teammate.
1 Like
Plus Medic has Uber Charge, which is probably the most powerful thing in the entire game and it far surpasses anything Mercy can do.
honestly I think dmg boost is very problematic and there’s no reason for it to exist, I guess in the beginning the goal was to have a purely support oriented character, as in, her dmg contribution would come from boosting allies instead of dealing dmg herself but…
over time dmg boost has become very hit or miss, on high rank it’s very valuable and reliable but on low rank dmg boost is very much so useless, you can’t rely on your teammates to hit their shots so if you focus on using dmg beam your value is close to zero
This became even worse when they buffed her gun, there’s no reason to sit there waiting for your hanzo to hit an arrow when you can pull out your gun and zone the enemy into his shots
Dmg boost is oppressive on high rank and useless on low rank, it needs to go, give her the pistol as secondary and make Mercy into the glock character
personally I enjoy her gun play a TON and would love it if it was even more available and people wasn’t expecting you to be pocketing at all times
Which is why I want Mercy to imitate Quick-fix Medic - best version for public games, in my opinion.
Something like this:
- Healing: 30 hps, but increases with each second teammate isn’t taking damage, up to 90 hps after ~5 seconds;
- Overheal: 20% of teammate’s health(needs further tweaking, if necessary), decays in 10 seconds without taking damage;
- Ult: 90 hps beam + immunity to CC effects for 8 seconds, on Mercy and teammate she targets. Doesn’t apply, if Mercy doesn’t have healing target;
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I don’t understand why no one complains about Medic when hes basically the same and its even a meme that hes nothing but a pocket character.
Because you can’t be picky in TF2, there is only 1 support.
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Because he’s the ONLY Pocket Character, plus he has Uber-Charge and Abs.
Mercy is just outshined by literally everyone and Overwatch doesn’t really allow for Pocket Characters, it’s too fast-paced.
Plus Mercy can’t make people Invincible, or give Triple Damage, or make them Super Resistant to everything. She can only Resurrect you if you died and she has to do it so clunkily and put herself at risk just to help you.
1 Like
Well, she used to be able to do it in not clunky manner, but people didn’t like it.
To be fair, if not for mass resurrect Mercy, I wouldn’t be here in the first place. And I still believe, that making resurrect into “healing the dead” kind of ability(use beam on dead teammate, and when you heal them to full, they are back) would be much better version, than “press button and stand almost still for about 2 seconds”.
2 Likes
I don’t agree with this, the whole pacifist thing was erased from her story already, instead they focus on Mercy being troubled by war but ultimately choosing to step up against injustice, she’s not a pacifist
Lore aside, diversity for the sake of it isn’t ideal either, it’s way more important to have heroes give similar but distinct outputs and at the moment, dmg boost isn’t giving the output Mercy deserves, it’s instead holding her and a lot of other heroes back
Mercy doesn’t need to be indirect anymore
Speaking of “nobody finds healbotting fun” - it’s because you often do not see results. You heal someone to full, only for them to fall victim of onehit kill, and all your efforts were wasted.
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I like your idea of “healing the dead” but it would need some tweaks to the actual rez mechanics, like you’d need to stick for more than 3 seconds or something crazy like that
funny thing is that valk would become mass rez again which I’m not very keen on but considering how vulnerable she is now during valk I mean… why not?
Main issue would be staying somewhat near bodies, until you heal them to full. Won’t be much of a problem with squishies, but resurrecting tank in that manner would be tricky.
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the cooldown would also be interesting to set cuz clearly you can’t have her rez every death and since there’s no internal cooldown to it anymore the mechanic would be tied to the target hero but then… you could have 4 timers going at the same time which means that at the beginning of the game you can rez all of your team at once if you needed to…
or…
Rez could be a preemptive mechanic maybe? as in a skill where you apply an infinite buff to an ally that allows you to heal them after dying, then you could apply it to several people if they don’t die in intervals of 30s
and to give mercy a bit of a punch the buff could heal a bit when applied or maybe even dmg boost an ally for X seconds, that way we remove dmg boost being constant