Precision burst can adapt much easier since the changes can be noticed between shots and adapted to. Sustain cannot. This literally does the exact opposite of what you want it to.
While I’m at it, if you want to improve sustained damage, a fixed numerical boost, vs a percent, will favor higher fire rates.
Is Sojourn the strongest DPS in High ELO right now? Is that because of her Rail gun?
Hard to tell, I haven’t watched high elo footage in a while, but I strongly suspect that the real cause is that mobility is so heavily favored that having any meaningful burst at that speed instantly catapults her to top tier.
It’s her entire kit on top of having a hitscan (essentially) 1 shot on cooldown that has a hitbox the size of the moon.
She won’t ever be balanced until she either loses the ability to crit with railgun entirely OR the rest of her kit gets gutted. Completely gutted. As in Widow utility levels.
Just remove the railgun crit and be done with it. That protects low ranks since they don’t headshot anyway.
Is it really difficult to tell if the instakill, causes instakills?
I have no problem with instakills as a concept and believe it’s absolutely necessary to provide checks to the ult economy.
I think instakills are second to stuns, in being the least fun thing in the entire game to play against.
And the devs have done almost nothing to compensate for them, after they removed a ton of barriers and an offtank.
This is the best idea I’ve heard in a while, it allows Mercy to keep the functionality of her staff while taking away the damage boost one shot problem at high elo. We also know that increased attack speed isn’t inherently broken in the game because Kiriko’s ult grants this. There may be unforeseen consequences but I think it’s definitely worth a test. Also I wanted to mention that I think you’re a forum hero Greyfalcon. In a sea of negative, thoughtless and pointless posts you can be relied upon to be thoughtful and well reasoned - kudos.
I also believe stuns are necessary and that balance is trash because they were removed, and that no feasible alternative exists as long as the tiny amount of servers means that average ping is somewhat high for an FPS. And having a small amount of servers is necessary to get critical mass for MM, which doesn’t even work that well since all the smart people left.
People can complain all they want about instakills and stuns but it’s really poor matchmaking and fight dynamics that actually cause issues.
Well ultimately, if we’re talking about gamewide systemic issues. In 9 days, matchmaking speed/quality in Comp is going to be abysmal. And the devs are going to be desperate to get more Support players. And Mercy could be a very large source of additional Support players.
And it genuinely doesn’t matter if a handful of DPS heroes out of 18 are temporarily weaker, if they need to do that to fix the above problem. Priorities.
If anything matchmaking is already abysmal. In 9 days it’s going to be a catastrophic crisis.
The game has always been this way, regardless of if they want it to or not. It’s nice to see them finally admitting that.
Adding more stuns in is easily the best way to fix this short term. It forces centralization, which massively benefits supports designed for OW1, i.e. basically all of them.
Yeah the game has long been screwed and has been going 'round the toilet bowl since the OW2 second beta.
I don’t think they are going to add a bunch of stuns, after removing a bunch of stuns.
Also they aren’t going to put a stun on Mercy. And Mercy is one of the most important Supports to make more popular.
That’s also a much more dramatic set of changes than what’s currently being discussed on Mercy’s blue beam. So I dunno what that’s good evidence against this idea.
That is a problem with other hero design, not with blue beam…
That is why ASHE got NERFED back in the day NOT MERCY…
again, it is a problem with Vivian, not Angela…
I mean where have you been for past two months? People cry about Kitsune Rush being crazy busted since day one…
I will enjoy my insta queue as support (-;
But jokes aside. Again, you won’t fix Mercy and make her more appealing to average player in 9 days… People don’t want to play her, because she does not pew pew, but rather is focused on enabling her team. And you won’t change that without either complete rework at this point, which is stupid since she is the ONLY support like that atm and that is a reason Mercy mains play her. Or reverting her into some version of MOTH… But no one wants that…
I would like to agree… But that is where most money is… So…
If they gotta worry about losing 20-50% of their playerbase to bad matchmaking quality/speed.
They are take on a LOT of collateral damage to avoid that problem. Like losing 1-5% of the playerbase would be no big deal.
I think there are probably a lot better ways to make Support more popular than just throwing a bunch of stuns into the game.
This is literally the only way to play her in any elo, you clearly don’t understand the basic fundamentals of her kit lol…
Gotcha, by “this” you mean the mercy boost change. Since the person you were quoting was talking about nerfing sojourn, I thought you were talking about that. My bad.
Just because something is only a problem at high elos doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. In fact, we should care a lot about problems that crop up at high skill levels because in the long term, the average skill of the player base will only go up. We should care about the long-term balance of the game.
There’s a few things to unpack here. You’ve correctly identified the problem with one-shots: they are really unfun to play against when the enemy isn’t at risk while doing it.
This is why the breakpoints are an issue: while Widowmaker and Hanzo have charge time for their one-shots, the Ashe and Sojourn one-shots are instant. No, they do not have a 1 second timeframe, they are instant the moment you tap the button. Sojourn is the worst because she has no mobility decrease while using her railgun whatsoever. Having to charge her railgun off her primary fire first is obviously the only thing keeping her even slightly sane. Ashe is slightly worse because she doesn’t have to charge during scope-in, so her mobility decrease can be very brief. Widowmaker and Hanzo break the balance of the game somewhat by having one-shots at all, but they’re not unfair or unfun. They both have charge time, they both have bad ults and sustain DPS to compensate, Widow has very low mobility and Hanzo isn’t hitscan.
Finally as an aside, your preference for bunker meta and lower TTK is a preference. That is not a hard and fast rule of game design. Dive is pretty widely beloved as a fun and frenetic way to play the game. It’s not uncounterable, it just takes more skill, more game sense, more map awareness, more proactive play. In short, the game is harder but more rewarding.
Regardless of whether it’s frustratingly “subservient” they are synergies 
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. My point about how it would affect balance stands. Beyond that, notice how all your examples besides nanoblade are Mercy pockets. I wouldn’t call nanoblade subservient because oh no, it’s literally one part of Ana’s kit that she reserves for another character. The whole point of the ult is to use it on a single teammate, and now that it doesn’t have a speed boost you usually don’t have to think too hard about who to give it to on your team. As for the Mercy pockets: when I have a Pharah or Soldier on my team I pocket them. That does not mean I ignore the rest of my team. That does not mean I don’t boost other teammates and decide to be other places. That’s what bad Mercy’s do. What makes the breakpoint characters different (at high elos only) is I make them so overpowered there’s no reason to do anything else. Again, the change from not one-shotting to one-shotting is a fundamental shift.
You are really insistent on this premise. I think there’s some truth behind it. There shouldn’t be very many straight-up buffs in the game. Once you have too many of them it’s too much to deal with. Your point about Mercy boost vs Zen discord is sound. Discord orb has gotten plenty of hate since people dislike having to simply run and hide for the counterplay, but it’s less oppressive since it can be dealt with 1v1 and avoided with barriers.
You can’t say that Mercy boost doesn’t have counterplay though. You kill the Mercy or run her off. That’s been the counterplay to Mercy since the beginning of the game. No, you’re probably not going to be able to kill a Mercy and her pocket alone. They’re combining 2 players for one strategy, you will need at least 2 players to focus the Mercy down fast. In a team fight you should have 4 or 5 teammates focusing either the Mercy or her pocket. On a related note Ana’s ult certainly has less counterplay, though CC, hyperfocusing, and running away will all do you good. But we’re talking about an extremely specialized and vulnerable character, the only support to have zero movement abilities. There’s a reason she has some pretty insane utility: the best CC, the best healing, arguably the best ult. You have to play strategically around Ana and not let her do what she wants.
You don’t like damage boost, you don’t like pockets. You don’t seem to like anything that Mercy is fundamentally about. She boosts another player in a significant way, so the enemy team needs to focus her. The rest of her kit is about having the mobility to not easily be focused. That is her core premise: I want to help other players pop off more than I want to get kills, I give the enemy a reason to kill me and then I make it as hard as possible for them. Take away the boost, you take away a core part of the character. Take away big synergies, you take away a core part of playing support.
Should Mercy never have been in the game? Maybe, from a certain perspective. From the same perspective Widow never should have been in the game either. They’re playing a different game entirely than everyone else. The thing is though, they’re fun and they’re cool. They attract certain players who wouldn’t otherwise play OW at all. They’re balanced enough that they’re not unfair, just different. I don’t think games need to be perfectly symmetrical to be fun, in fact I prefer the opposite. The more unique kits and interactions the better.
Adapt, love, have fun.
There are, but most of them require reworking the entire support roster and most of the maps. The devs can’t afford to wait that long.
This is objectively a bad idea.
Random attack speed increases on someone like Soldier who actually has noticeable recoil is going to feel and be awful.
You also have several heroes that do not benefit at all from attack speed like Cass, Hanzo, Widow and Ashe so now Mercy can’t play with them without becoming a literal healbot. And yes while boost isn’t exactly the MOST exciting thing there is it is still a universal enabler. It doesn’t force you to swap if you have one of the above mentioned dps on your team or for them to swap to fit with your Mercy.
Supports need to have/be given tools to affect the enemy team and not JUST to undo what the enemy team does more or to JUST enable your teammate by clicking on them once.
Like seriously what is the most fun part of Anas kit for example? Is it the Nanoboost? Or is it actually her sleep dart or to make the whole enemy teams HP bar purple?
Come on.
They did literally just give doom a stun on a 3 second cd. So I mean they dont have no issues adding CC.