Pharah without a mercy is sub par, with a mercy she is over par.
It’s one of the few heroes that requires a whole team shift and unless you have a hitscan and supporting hitscan that can both aim close to 50% you will lose.
If they have a good pharah mercy, and you don’t have a good hitscan player, you may as well just all leave the game.
I have never felt so bad against a pharah mercy because you know you can’t win the game, it is the bastion pirate ship of OW1. I can’t believe with all the balance patches etc this hasn’t been fixed yet.
Really the only way they can fix Pharah/Mercy is to rework Pharah. Pharah would need to be reworked without perma hover and the devs have said they don’t want to do that because they worry it will ruin her fantasy/identity. The reason perma hover is the big issue is because Pharah doesn’t ever have to come to the ground. This means you need hit scan to counter and needs a Mercy because Mercy is the only support who can reliably heal her outside of Zen (who is okay with Pharah but not optimal). If you make it so Mercy can’t fly with her, Pharah now doesn’t have a reliable support and will be subpar/trash and it just ruins a synergy instead of fixing the core issue. Pharah coming down also makes her a lot easier for other supports to heal her as well. There is a reason why you can see Echo often without a Mercy but not Pharah.
As a Mercy player, I hope they find a way to rework Pharah eventually because honestly I kinda hate having a Pharah on my team. She takes up a lot of resources. I like to be able to take a second to help someone else if I see it but Pharah makes that very difficult. If I leave for half a second sometimes Pharah just insta does and it’s like bro. It’s so frustrating.
I would be 100% up for making Pharah worse with a mercy pocket, but buffing her to make her a more solo hero.
No other DPS needs a mercy to work. It’s not like you can’t play an Ashe or soldier without demanding a mercy, otherwise they aren’t playable.
I originally played Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament when I was younger, and rockets are my thing. But I don’t want to have to play a hero that requires a specific support being played and boosted almost 100% of the time to make work.
Pretty much this and most of Åvacyn’s points. Can’t ‘fix’ one half of the pair without compromising the reason people play that character.
The only way that I could think of to discourage Pharah pocketing would be to make her damage less reliable. Like how Junkrat can do wild damage numbers but most Mercy players will stick to pocketing the other DPS on hitscan since those types of characters are throwing out more consistent damage. Maybe upping Pharah’s direct hit damage but lowering her splash? I think the devs tried that before, tho, and I can’t remember how badly that affected Pharah’s viability.
Ya been like this for years but we would have to completely rework one or the other to fix it sadly.
Genji also has this to a lesser degree with ana. Reaper and hanzo used to but they fixed it for them.
She was actually like this on OW1 launch where she couldn’t stay airborne permanently, but they buffed her jets vertical boost so she could. Probably one of the worst aged long-term decisions.
They could probably rework her so she’s no longer perma airborne but has better movement (Ex. giving her a short distance horizontal air dash like Hanzo or Lifeweaver getting his controls redone soon) but I don’t really have much expectations from the devs.
Well, it’s a double edged sword, this pharmercy combo. I agree that the combo is really strong, esp on certain maps, and that it requires usually more than 1 hitscan to take them down, like Endz said. I even switch to Bap when I see that they don’t come down fast enough (although I wish I had better aim ^^). But :
Like Avacyn said, if you play Mercy, you pretty much have to follow Pharah around constantly. Meanwhile, the rest of your team is on the ground, more subject to flankers or heavy fire.
Honestly, at least in QP, the good Pharahs that actually fly well and aim well are not that common. So even with the boost, a lot of them are not that impactful.
Mercy also has a huge impact on other heroes : Bastion, Torb and Junk for ex. So maybe it’s more the damage boost that could be considered problematic, more than Pharah herself… (I play support 99% of the time, so I’m not advocating for a Mercy nerf, but I understand that this ability can be problematic sometimes).
So I don’t know. After only 115 hours on this game, my experience is that there are plenty of annoying heroes that can wreak havoc, and I’m not sure that, on the whole, Pharmercy is as frequent as others…
while I dont feel either has anything to be “fixed” – given the horrendously bad history of reworks in Overwatch, I would hope no one would advocate for a rework for any character
the character is usually left in a damaged state, far worse off than they were before, and few if any of the changes made are what anyone wanted
I don’t think Pharah needs to be nerfed, just reworked. Give her some fun and fast vertical mobility but make it more bursty and pop a CD. They can do a lot of fun things that if anything, make her better and more versatile. She just needs to be less about hard counters and come down more.
Im talking reliable. It takes a lot more effort on LW to heal Pharah bc you need to be looking up and aware of Pharah more than any other hero. He also has a charge time on his heal. Even if he gets reworked to heal more, just the fact that she is harder to see for a ground support makes her significantly harder to heal.
Yaa this is what I would like to see. I picture more similar to Echo than Hanzo or LW, I think she should still have strong vertical mobility but they can make it less hover and more bursty and dinamic. It would make her more versatile without sacrificing power, lower the need for a Mercy but not ruin the synergy completely, and also lower hard counters for both heroes like Sym and Junk as shell need to come down (she should still be good against them) but less need for hitscans against her (but hitscans should still be good against her).
While I agree there’s some problematic synergies right now (wouldn’t agree with your examples as they are only okay pockets, hitscans, burst, mid to long range, and constant damage). Damage boost’s largest issue stems from her lack of effective play styles. Damage boost itself wouldn’t feel as problematic if it was more spread out for key abilities and rather on a single target all game. I could get into that but it’s a bit off topic unrelated to Pharah as I personally think the constant healing is the strong point in that synergy and damage boost is more of a bonus. Pharah needing to come to the ground would help with that as Mercy wouldn’t need to be as needed for Pharah and if there is a Mercy, she doesn’t have to be stuck on her like you acknowledged
I hate Pharah. Even when all of us switched to Pharmercy counter we still couldn’t get them. Due to her team protecting them and her talking covers.
She is miserable to deal with. Please rework her to be like TF2 soldier. I want to play games just for fun and not to be ruined by crap heroes like her.
No, pharah even without a mercy is OP as hell. Even if she’s got no mercy, you have to pick a hitscan right out of the door just in case they’ve got a pharah. It’s dumb as hell, you shouldn’t lose first point just because you didn’t pick hitscan just in case they get a pharah.
I understand your frustration… It can be a real pain.