No, it’s not. I want you to tell me how you’d avoid it with so many heroes with completely different playstyles. Tell me how you can equalize a fight between a Reaper and a Widow or Ashe without a fundamental rework to one of them.
That’s how the game is played. Maybe try Siege if you don’t like that. Poke counters Brawl, Brawl counters Dive, and Dive counters Poke. That’s just how it is.
Such a defeatist mentality…
So again, tell me how you can equalize that matchup without a rework. You don’t like hard counters, right? And it’s really easy, according to you. So DO it. Prove to me that you can remove hard counters without completely reworking every hero and homogenizing the game.
Pharah is fine, a really really cool hero for a shooter, imo. Pharmercy is two players working in tandem – to wit, using teamwork – on complementary heroes and should be countered with teamwork. Failing to do so is to fail a particular set of skill checks and should be awarded with an “L”. Working as intended.
Right, teamwork. Super high skill gameplay there with the Mercy hitting GA on cooldown on an airborne Pharah lobbing those high splash damage grenades.
Name me a tandem duo who needs to put in the same level of “teamwork” to counter Pharmercy as easily. Enlighten my ignorant self!
You’re right OP, but why do you say “balance issue” in the title… Pharmercy is not OP. It’s not even strong. It’s just unfun to play against for many, many people, that is the issue. Not balance, but game/hero design.
With mercy / discord: Widowmaker pointing and clicking at any of the two heroes, Soldier pointing and clicking at Mercy, Ashe pointing and clicking…
even IF you get 3 players to swap (not gonna happen) to full counter you still just get even with her. she doesn’t have to swap. you don’t hard counter her, you are now EVEN.
Not really. Any comp with 3 counters at average skill can put her into a corner indefinitely.
Of course that’s assuming you have the fortune of having 3 people who can play a counter at average skill (which you often do not). But if you do, Pharmercy is worthless. 2 counter mains (hitscan mains, DVa main) are also enough. You won’t completely dominate her entire existence, but it’ll be even or you’ll be at a slight advantage.
Not 3, 2. Also, you DO kinda hard counter her.
I pick Pharah out the sky as Hanzo all the time, if anything it’s a soft counter for projectiles. You gotta learn how their projectiles work.
Have you tried shooting Mercy first?
Burst and sustain will always be imbalanced as they are the opposite of each other.
Hanzo is burst damage, 76 is sustained damage with burst (Helix), then you have pure sustain damage heroes, I would say Moira falls into that category, Torb as well.
It is, and it’s because of Mercy, damage boost needs to be tuned, and healing needs to be less the farther away they are, or the longer she stays connected. Something to make her less pockety and more supporting for the entire team.
Simply put: Damage breakpoints need to be hard and not able to be broken by damage boosts. Mercy and Zen currently make balance a nightmare because you have to adjust around both’s damage boosts.
Plus if they touch Mercy the entire forum loses their minds and acts like Mercy is about to be complete and utter garbage, but when she’s buffed, they’re all happy.
Pharah is quite easy to use, I mainly just have to use my brain when hitscan get involved. Without hitscan you generally can press the W key without much thought at all. With hitscan involved map geometry and hitscan innate weaknesses help you out a ton.
Widow/Ana/Ashe move at reduced movement speed while scoped. The closer you get, the easier it is to hit them compared to regular players. Since they have no mobility they can’t push choke points. Pharah is amazing at stopping progress through choke points. While the hitscan players tend to be at a backplane you can usually abuse anyone else. Predominantly tanks because by slowing them down from getting through choke points you maintain defense easier. If an enemy tank pushes a corner, you concussion blast them to push them further out, push back whoever was trying to go with them, cut off Los to tank healers, and bomb out the choke point preventing people from pushing through it forcing the tank to take a 1v3 or 1v4 without healing. Boom. Hitscan rendered useless, fight won.
Even with those characters there is often enough cover with rooftops or abusing rooftops to close distance to dive bomb them.
The Tracer options is not a full counter. It becomes DPS vs DPS in terms of who can abuse the enemy team better as Tracer and Pharah will rarely be targeting each other. Sorry to say, but Tracer killing an enemy backline is harder than Pharah doing the same. Supports have a hard time killing Pharah before they murder her back.
The only time Pharah gets little to no value is if the entire ENEMY team swaps dive. Against Tracer, Winston, Genji, Mercy, and Kiriko there is like no good target for Pharah to hit. If there is a single enemy ana for me to abuse I can get tremendous value while my team makes easy swaps like brig, moira, etc. to avoid being dove. Support players LOVE to play their pharah weak characters that aren’t evasive. Especially since it drags out hitscan players who again, Ana/Bap have little to no mobility making them easy targets to isolate away from their team with blasts at choke points, crossings, concussion blast, and simply dive bombing them.
This one is simple. If nothing is broken by 30% (nothing is broken by 25%). Mercy si only ever been meta on long range one shots (Ashe/Sojourn) via damage boost. Without it the dmg amp is not enough. By virtue, neither is Discord.
Honestly, Cass/Discord/DmgBst has been 1shot for ages on headshot, but no one plays it. Even 120 bodyshots are 195 dmg, but that’s like never been meta either before. The dmg break point is really easy. Nothing above 75dmg for a headshot kill. No bodyshot above 153dmg. These are really not that hard to avoid at all. Rein has 2HKO on bodyshot, but that’s not being meta.
It’s really not. Go Echo and you can literally 1v2 them. It’s way harder for pharah to hit directs in the air on Echo than it is for Echo to land some stickies + primary and beam her down. And if you have your own Mercy then losing is most definitely a skill issue.
Most people have issue dealing with Pharah strictly because aerial targets are hard to hit. Echo’s sticky and primary fire being projectile and naturally spreading out is why people complain about Pharah/Mercy and not Echo/Mercy. It’s also why you rarely see Echo come out compared to hitscan since hitscan is far easier to land and safer usually.
Mercy forces a certain amount of sustained DPS to kill pharah. Which many players will struggle to land until higher up. Mercy’s easy healing enforces a minimum threshold of sustained fire to pick Pharah off.
In many cases, I see an Echo have to get super close to kill pharah and possibly get the kill, then be so far deep into enemy backline she dies for it and Mercy gets the rez. That’s often how that plays out.
If it does become an echo+mercy vs pharah+mercy the goal becomes ignore echo/mercy and just murder echo/mercy’s team on the ground and when echo/mercy are the only two remaining they can’t contest objective.
The higher up you get the more accurate people become, but that’s why pharah/mercy is a mid-tier problem not a higher tier problem.
Pharmercy is neither cheese nor a balance issue
at all
The problem with Pharmercy is purely a perception issue - peple dont seem to realiz that Pharmercy is one of many forms of 2v1.
In 2v1, the two always has the advantage over the 1, while the rest of the 1’s team gains an 4 to 3 advantage over the two’s team
Further, almost any two other characters can dish out more damage than Pharmercy can
so no, this isnt a real problem, it is a made-up one
Smoked gouda would like 2 have a word with u
I usually try to stay within that ~15m beam range. It’s close enough to hit stickies but not so close that pharah direct hits are more likely. At that range I think it becomes more difficult for pharah to hit me than it is for me to hit her. As far as being in the enemy backline goes? Most times I see pharah trying to play vertical cover which can kinda work for me too. I never really have these cases where I kill one of them and then I’m stuck in the enemy backline. Even if I am I usually have flight again by then and can just fly away.
I find it’s safer for Mercy to be with me as Echo than some hitscan since she’s more likely to get hit by spam. If she’s in the air with me then the same logic applies where direct hits are less likely.
granted this is plat gameplay so idk how my strategy would play out in higher elo.
I feel the same applies to the other team. Sometimes when i see a pharmercy I will go Tracer/Sombra and kill the other lone support. Especially if it’s an Ana then at the very least disrupting the backline puts a lot of strain on their tank.
Then you provide a specific fix to the “problem” that gets rid of the counter approach without removing aspects of the individual heroes, retaining the individual hero’s unique approach to gameplay.
I’m sick of the “counters are bad” argument when nobody has yet to provide any fix that doesn’t outright remove/replace the hero due to inherent design mechanics that cannot be removed /replaced without disrupting what makes these heroes fun to play.
If the solution is to remake the game in your image or cry harder for unrealistic/unspecified change, then as far as anyone is concerned no solution is needed.
Which is why Widow, that plays too far away to contest, is the only hitscan counter.
Echo and Tracer are the primary counters. Tracer forces the Mercy off her while Echo one shots her.
No, it’s really not. As a Tracer main, Pharah can be fun to face because the other Support is the only thing keeping the team up. And if you have enough skill, you can easily kill that Support and FORCE the Mercy to leave the Pharah. Then Pharah is easy to kill and has to play passively.
How about top 500? It’s been proven that Pharmercy is just a better combo than any hitscan players can handle. Most really skilled players don’t gravitate towards a Pharmercy playstyle though because… it’s cheesy. Just like Brigitte didn’t get a huge amount of play when she was OP. It was a good amount but it could’ve been a lot more. Player stubbornness and their perception of how others will view them is a factor.