So… It’s become very apparent that at higher ranks Pharah is having a rough time. She has so many counters nowadays, and with the previous changes to her kit, it makes her performance subpar.
Pharah has been nerfed repeatedly to deal with the oppressive nature of the Pharah+Mercy combo that is present in lower ranks. The changes that have been made thus far were an OK short-term change but it’s left Pharah in rough shape.
Here’s my suggestion to improve the viability of Pharah and lessen the impact of Pharmercy:
Rework Mercy’s Guardian Angel ability so that you need to touch the ground before being able to reuse it. [VIEW EDIT DOWN BELOW FOR CHANGES]
This will mean Mercy must touch the ground before flying back up to Pharah and should make sustained flight as her to be more difficult.
[AGAIN, I made changes in the EDIT down below, read that for update]
Remove Pharahs ability to hurt herself with rockets.
Why this is even a thing is beyond me, she’s wearing a metal suit for crying out loud. This will serve to make her a more formidable threat at closer ranges.
Increase fire rate and ammo count.
She’s always reloading even though she shoots so slowly. She’s very sluggish. It’s also a good way of improving her DPS without making her Time-To-Kill (TTK) overpowered.
Increase flight speed and fuel.
Without the Pharmercy combo being too OP, she needs to be able to sustain flight for longer again.
I can’t think of anything that needs a change after this, maybe just some fine tuning from there.
I have tried to test this in a custom game with custom settings and, though I wasn’t able to replicate everything, it was a good test and showed me that Pharah can definitely be viable again.
If you guys have any ideas or suggetions please leave them below and I’ll try and test them. Think I’m wrong? Be sure to let me know!
EDIT
I made some suggestions for Mercy’s Guardian angel ability, I’ll quote it below:
Well… Mercy is in a decent place right now and Pharah isn’t (Unless she has a mercy pocketing her). The nerf I propose for Mercy barely affects her as almost every other hero stays on the ground.
As for the buffs I proposed for Pharah. Two are for quality-of-life and the other is a firerate improvement. Not too much I wouldn’t think…
I like to take advantage of any hero that can fly up (Winston, D.Va, Echo, Junkrat, etc…) to get up high and float with Glide until I need to GA to a new target. I can also slingshot from a target above me to get even higher. Super-jump is also an option. Requiring Mercy to touch ground to GA again isn’t as small a change as you say. It also makes her gameplay quite clunky.
As another Mercy player I also like using heroes to super-jump or slingshot but I feel like her flight capabilities without using her ultimate should start and end there.
Slingshotting is a great tool to gain height and I wouldn’t change that myself, but giving her the ability to stay in the air as good as Pharah (If not better because of her glide) just goes to show the state Pharah is in right now.
No!
First of all, Mercy doesn’t need any nerfs. Especially one that makes her bad. Also if she is about to fall of a cliff and she’d need to touch the ground, she’ll die.
Don’t nerf Mercy. Just buff Pharah. Also the Pharmercy is popular regardless of each hero’s state.
I mean you have still have that one one nonreusable ga, so unless you ga off a cliff you should be fine, however the point still stands and the second sentence is completely true.
I mean I also like slingshotting into the air then ga’ing to another target.
First of all, Mercy doesn’t need any nerfs. Especially one that makes her bad. Also if she is about to fall of a cliff and she’d need to touch the ground, she’ll die.
The minor nerf I propose won’t make her bad. Her kit is very good and very easy to play well with.
As for falling off a cliff… Unless she glided off the edge of a map after she GA’d to an airborne character, this shouldn’t be a problem that arises.
Also, if someone does somehow manage to do that, it’s a fitting punishment for not managing your abilities or positioning properly in my opinion.
So if Mercy gets booped out of the bounds she is just dead? Or wants to play safer from snipers and use the GA tech she would have to drop down and get stuck most of the time? That change is just plain stupid overall as it makes her movement worse.
I think this is needed for rocket jumping, the self damage could be lowered from maximum 40 to at least 30 (old was 32, with lower splash damage). Also don’t give her more ammo and fire rate, she already has 1 extra compared to coinflip rat.
Fuel could be increased, but speed is fine otherwise it would be pretty impossible to kill Pharah without hitscan, it’s already pretty hard to kill her with projectiles.
What about 75 shield HP? She would need that as her thicc hitbox is a sponge to poke damage, if she would have shield HP she could regenerate some HP by flying away. Shield HP would do nothing to improve pharmacy, so it’s a win-win
So if Mercy gets booped out of the bounds she is just dead?
No, because she can use GA to fly to someone whos still in the map. I’m not saying get rid of the ability, I’m saying that once it’s been used, she has to touch the ground before being able to use it again.
It means she can still get out of tricky situations, still fly up to heal someone and still save herself but it will mean she can’t stay in the air indefinitely.
The change I proposed only tackles the Pharmercy combo and should not affect her utility or survivability.
Also don’t give her more ammo and fire rate, she already has 1 extra compared to coinflip rat.
I mainly proposed this because she reloads so often and it’s not particularily fast. It’s OK at the moment but the boost to DPS without boosting her TTK would make her a lot more viable.
What about 75 shield HP?
That’s quite an interesting suggestion. The added survivability and lack of reliance on healing could definitely help her as a standalone character, without the Mercy.
The only problem there could be is that if she does have a Pharmercy on top of that, it could allow for a recently killed Mercy to regroup with her without Pharah risking a staggered death. It could make the combo more aggressive.
Even if it were as powerful as people make it out to be, the devs probably want the duo to be strong.
Why is Mercy being hammered for Pharah? If anything this hurts her more with almost every other comp and leaves her basically unaffected with pharmercy.
Pharah’s new playstyle involves less air time, meaning Mercy will be playing an annoying ground jungle, but she’d need to do that against hitscan anyways.
This just makes it far more punishing for Mercy with all comps.
It’s a hard pass for me. If you want to kill Mercy’s air time, at least look at angelic descent.
They could just revert her fuel nerf, then sky pharah will be as reliable as dive pharah.
I’m not sure about any fire speed buffs but an ammo buff sounds lovely.
I don’t think we should try to kill Mercy for Pharah but lower Pharah’s dependence on Mercy.
This can come in many forms, like shield health, some medpack interaction, the downward thrust that made the experimental, and possibly other ideas.
Armor just makes Pharmacy stronger and makes her worst hitscan counter even worse. McCree, Ashe and Widow would be the only reliable heroes to kill Pharah then
The combo is downright oppressive at lower ranks and on console, I’m all for having a combo between the two but to have it THIS powerful is crazy. It does see less action above Diamond but after that the players are significantly above average anyway so they can handle it.
It definitely does hurt the Pharmercy combo because it means Mercy can’t be consistently by Pharahs side, forcing Pharah to actually pick her fights carfully.
Most heroes stay on the ground aside from the occasional movement ability here and there so I fail to see how it’ll hurt other Mercy combos more than Pharmercy.
I’m not saying get rid of the ability and I think it’s actually a necassary ability to have, I’m just saying that it sholdn’t allow her to stay airbound. As for the Angelic descent, she’ll have to hit the ground eventually so I don’t see that ability needs changing.
Reverting the fuel nerf doesn’t adress the Pharmercy issue. As good as that revert is for Pharah, it would make the combo more prevalent.
Yeah the fire speed isn’t necessary tbh, the ammo buff is far more appealing and serves to decrease time reloading.
I agree about the dependance. The only problem I see is that’s it’s very difficult to buff Pharahs independance without nerfing Mercy’s air capabilities a little.
Medpack interactions? What would you propose? Would it fit the Pharahs character and playstyle? Not sure myself, but I’m optimistic.
I did some of the math on how much of an effect it would have. Like against 200 health pharah at max falloff range it takes 10 bodyshots for mccree to kill her. The extra health increases it to 12. A damage boosted ashe would no longer be able to one shot her. Ana would take 4 shots instead of 3 to kill her.
Now when you add in mercy healing it makes more of a difference. Technically mccree can only do 40 bodyshot dps at max range so mercy can already heal through that.
Soldier has longer range than mcree or ashe though so less falloff damage plus he has no spread anymore.
Something like both soldier and baps firing at her with say a discord orb would still burst her down pretty fast.
Yea I still don’t think she’s that great. I play mcree and soldier on console and she’s still pretty easy take out even with a controller. Unless she can get right above you.
How about we stop trying to nerf healers? They already are short staffed along with getting some of the worst nerfs in Overwatch history. They’re also one of the most unforgiving roles and gets blamed for 90% of encounters because DPS/Tanks can’t position themselves correctly and expect them and only them to be healed through a team fight half way across the map behind the enemy team.
Ranting… but healers already have it hard enough. Mercy is fine. Leave healers alone.
The only problem with just changing some of her health to be shields is that mercy, and other healers, can heal shield as if it were regular health. This means it would only serve to make Pharah stronger without addressing the Pharmercy combo.
