My Thoughts on Mercy

Hey all! Long time lurker here – I’m writing this post in an attempt to constructively vent about mercy – I played her a lot pre-rework, but felt she lost her luster ever since. This post might be a bit too late now, but I’d still like to hear people’s thoughts on it.

First, I’d like to outline how I played mercy and my understanding of her before her rework, which I feel is important to understanding my fundamental issues with how and why the dev team reworked her and my proposed fixes for those issues.

I viewed mercy’s rez as a kind of ‘game insurance’ on defense, meaning that it should only be used if you will 100% lose the game otherwise – I did not pre-emptively hide. I would do a careful ‘dance’ by abusing her mobility with guardian angel to heal my team, while being able to quickly back out in the event of a teamwipe. This proved very difficult to do properly, especially when I played in higher mmrs, but well rewarding nonetheless. Moreover, what constituted a good rez on offense was even more difficult to judge because you had to have the decision-making ability to know whether rezzing the one rein that just died or two other teammates will be enough to secure you the objective. It was a playstyle that heavily emphasized map awareness, decision making, and quick reactions, and at no point does it involve preemptively hiding – that puts your team at an innate disadvantage, and works poorly the higher your mmr goes.

Now understanding that, I’d like to highlight the main two criticisms of her pre-rework and break down what issues needed to be fixed:

  1. Mercy’s design actively encouraged players to hide and tell their team to die on the point.

I fundamentally disagree that this playstyle is the most effective way to play her. While playing mercy this way works well enough in the lower elos, the higher up you go, the worse it works, as mentioned previously. So, the issue becomes how to design the ult so the playerbase catches on to this fact – rez needs to be changed to make it hard/impossible to hide.

  1. Mercy’s ult requires too little skill for how huge of an impact it can have.

The skill behind mercy’s ult is largely unknown to most of the playerbase, because after all, she’s only pressing q, right? As I highlighted in earlier about my experience in playing her pre-rework, that is not wholly true – however, that doesn’t change the fact that rez can be very frustrating to see after a quadkill. So, rez also needs to be changed to have more counterplay, akin to how a lucio ult can be interrupted or a zen ult can be pushed away / ana grenaded.

At the end I will highlight my suggestions for a mercy revert based on these two points. Next, though, I want to go over my criticisms of the current iteration of mercy, and why her old version was strictly better in terms of design.

  1. Mercy now has no real playmaking potential – every other healer in the game has playmaking potential in their ultimates. Soundbarrier denies team wipes, Transcendence denies team wipes, Coalescence denies team wipes/wipes the enemy team, Nano boost can wipe the enemy team, and Rally denies team wipes. This could be forgiven, if her ult offered some form of playmaking potential. However, it does not. All it does is make Mercy more frustrating to kill and remove the skill behind her survivability in guardian angel – she doesn’t need to position carefully because she can just fly anywhere she wants to, independent of allies. These issues were not nearly as bad in her pre-rework.

  2. Not to mention that each of the supports in overwatch have impactful abilities in their base kits, that require skill to use effectively. Lucio has his boops, Ana has her grenade and sleep dart, Zenyatta does a lot of damage and has dynamic target switching with his orbs, Moira’s orbs and dash are impactful and dynamic. Mercy, currently, has guardian angel still, which is fun and dynamic, and her rez, which is powerful. However, since it isn’t tied to an ult charge, and only affects one person, it offers almost none of the decision making potential it used to, while remaining a powerful pick denial tool that requires almost no skill to use, either because of the aforementioned issues, or because there is no timing / speedy reaction required to use it. Contrast that with the skill of a good Zarya shield, and it’s obvious that Rez is not well-suited to being a basic ability.

Summary:

Mercy’s old design needed more counterplay, and it needed to actively discourage hiding.

Mercy’s current design removes her playmaking potential and neuters the skill behind rez by moving it from a dynamic ultimate to a basic ability, in addition to making her frustrating to play against in a different way by giving her increased survivability for no comparable skill increase.

My proposed mercy revert/rework would be as follows:

Guardian Angel goes unchanged. It is a core part of her playstyle.

Her e ability is changed to a cleanse, making her current beam target immune to crowd control effects for one second. 20s cooldown. This ability allows her to deny picks and be impactful asides from her ultimate, like every other support in the game.

Her ultimate is now the old Resurrect, but plays out differently. Now, Mercy must press Q twice to rez. The first time ‘primes’ the resurrect, requiring a 5 second win up time before it can be pressed again. The entire time, the enemy team is given vision of mercy, like widow’s infra-sight. After 5 seconds, mercy can now reactivate q to rez for the next 10 seconds. When she reactivates it, she is not invulnerable, and must channel for 1.5 seconds. During this time, she rezzes each teammate who was in her ult range at the time of reactivation, resurrecting them one by one at equal time intervals until the last is up (this will always last 1.5 seconds if there is more than 1 hero in the rez. One hero rezzes requires no channel). If mercy is stunned at any point in time during the channel, rez ends and no one else is resurrected.

The numbers given can (and should) be tweaked, but the general idea here is Mercy is no longer only about her resurrect, and there are many more opportunities for the enemy team to counter resurrect. I would love to hear your opinions, criticisms, thoughts, suggestions, etc, on this, as this is an issue I have been thinking about for quite some time now.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: [Feedback Thread Continued] Mercy Updates - Jan 30, 2018