Playing Mercy ruins the Overwatch experience

General Discussion
1

As someone with over 200 hours on Mercy, I both love and hate her and I believe A LOT of Mercy mains on these forums are probably in the same boat as me. This will have some length to it, so the tldr is at the bottom.

I began playing competitive seriously in Season 4. Coming from a healing background in MMOs, I mained support role. I quickly realized 2 things:

  1. Mercy is most viable support.
  2. People play competitive to win.

So, putting 1 and 2 together, I begin playing Mercy in an attempt to win. Zero, absolutely ZERO regard for whether she’s considered “high-skill” and no possible way to foresee the consequences of being a Mercy main.

Let me repeat that: When I began playing Mercy, I had no idea what the outcome would be.

Over the next three seasons I’d climb from high-silver, to mid-diamond, racking up hundreds of hours on her, but simultaneously and unknowingly also condemning myself to the predicament I (and I can only assume a lot of other Mercy mains) now find myself in:

  1. Those who play her are largely disrespected on these forums.
  2. She is VERY necessary to win. (Not required, but very necessary.)
  3. Her kit truly is not transferable thus I cannot perform at my SR with other heroes.
  4. It would take more time than I’m willing to devote to QP to become as impactful with a damage character as I am with Mercy. (I realize this is a decision that falls on me, but I do not enjoy QP and so cannot justify devoting that kind of time to it.)

Until recently, hidden profiles weren’t a thing. If a Mercy main were to even consider playing a different hero in competitive, odds are you’re getting a message or chat either demanding or requesting you to play Mercy.

As a team player who wants to win the competitive game, who am I to say no? I know our best odds at victory lie in me playing Mercy. But as most Mercy mains know, it’s generally a thankless job.

And then a Mercy main visits these forums and the same community that was just demanding you play said hero, criticizes and berates you for it.

I truly believe Blizz needs to rework Mercy (again) to increase the viability of the other supports and make her kit seemingly “higher-skill.”

TL;DR: Mercy is the most demanded yet most hated hero in the game - players demand a Mercy on their team yet they shame that same hero. She has an inherently flawed kit the condemns the user to both “low-skill” flaming as well as no flexibility in hero choice. Blizzard does in-fact need to reevaluate her.

13 Likes
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So what are your thoughts to reverting Mercy to Season 3.

Without the wallhax on Rez, and with the GA bounce.

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As long as we keep the latter, I’m okay. That, to me, is a very important mechanic

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I personally believe as long as resurrect it will almost always be a broken ability.

Removing rez would be the simplest solution. But I also believe it’s what makes Mercy who she is, so Blizz would never remove it. It needs to be reworked to be an ability that is both earned and exciting.

I’m not certain what that looks like, but it’s not what it is now and it’s not mass rez.

4 Likes
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I don’t think the solution to Mercy (or any hero with similar accusations to her) is to make them higher skill. Having accessible heroes in the game are fine.

The problem is when the most accessible heroes in the game have some of the biggest impact. There is no reason why Mercy shouldn’t have some sort of weakness right now. Either reduce her base healing per second because of how simple it is to pull off, or vastly reduce the amount of mobility she has. Either of those will help out Ana, Moira, etc.

The problem is that Mercy has a HUGE player-base as a hero herself, to the point Blizzard even admitted they’re afraid to touch her. The development team is now making balance decisions based off emotion (and to a degree, I sympathize with the team to not want to go through community backlash to changes of her again, but it is still necessary to balance Mercy regardless). The entire situation regarding the hero is screwed up because no one can be an adult about it atm. Hopefully that will change overtime, whether out of extreme necessity (it’s necessary already but not completely 100% game-breaking quite yet) or drawing up courage, but it would be best to be sooner rather than later.

2 Likes
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The rework ruined her.

She needs a revert.

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https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/mercy-s-resurrect-could-ve-been-the-reverse-mccree-deadeye/132348/38

So yeah I’m just going to post this here. Ok bye.

8

This would be worse for the entire game.

Better a lame Mercy than a lame Overwatch.

9

Really? Because a fair amount of people are calling for nerfs to GravDragon because it’s so dominant. You know what could counter it easily before? MultiRez.

Sounds to me like reverting Mercy would solve more problems than it would cause, especially if they added in a LoS requirement for it to limit Hide and Rez.

Not to mention the new hero, Hammond, has an ultimate that would basically be a direct counter to multirez, so…

5 Likes
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Mercy is just a microcosm of Overwatch’s design flaw. Characters that have little in the way of baked in flaws are never going to have to compete with characters who do. I have to justify picking Reaper. I have to justify picking Pharah or Sombra. If my team doesn’t want to work with me I can’t pick Torb or Bastion.

But Mercy? There’s no reason not to pick her except if she’s already been picked. The only way she’s bad is if a player with bad instincts picks her up and then, even with every advantage afforded to her, still gets picked and sniped or if she tunnel visions a single character. Her flaw? Well, you’re beholden to the rest of your team to do well.

Normally the trade off to characters with few flaws is that they tend to be anemic characters. Soldier 76 used to go largely unpicked because he could do a lot of things but he never did them better than anyone else.

1 Like
11

Exacty.
Revert her.

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12

Honestly this wouldn’t be bad, as long as she got an E ability to compensate.

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It still boggles my mind how they managed to make her so boring to play.

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14

LOS check has nothing to do with Hide and Rez.

Hide and Rez involved hiding and telling team to die on point before coming out of hiding to swoop in and get the mass rez.

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Mercy is an even bigger problem AFTER the rework than she ever was before. I can see that there were issues before all that but it was never this bad. She is in a terrible state right now after tons of nerfs and a lot of people still have major problems with her ingame.
I my opinion going back and reworking/tweaking her from there would be a good and viable option. Mass-rez doesnt have to be the same it was and with some attention to it the former issues can be solved.

1 Like
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Sadly very true. Mercy and her players have been scapegoated for a while now.

Bit of a contradiction there. Regardless, this is one of those things that’s more necessary because of the demands of teammates than anything else.

Positioning, awareness, understanding of triage/heal priority as well as understanding breakpoints for hp values (120 anybody?) that make the difference between death in one hit or survival. Most of these are somewhat different, in that you’re not doing literally the same thing, but the concepts are still relevant. Basically, the difference between understanding how to perform a task and the underlying reasons how and why one performs said task.

This is pretty variable depending on your aptitude and prior experience. Do you mind if I ask about the possibility of exploring other healers and/or tanks?

Last season, before private profiles, I literally had a teammate lock my preferred pick (Brigitte) in order to try to “force” me to play Mercy. They only stayed on Brig until the match actually started but I decided to humor them. I wasn’t getting anything done and so ended up switching to Brig.

Basically that switch ended up gaining us more than one full section in PL. Oh, and I ended up being on fire for most of the rest of the match. Nonetheless they tried to blame me for swapping off Mercy when we eventually lost.

So I understand when you say that people demand her, however I would disagree with the idea that she is “required” or “necessary” for the purposes of most people on ladder. fwiw this was a mid-masters level match.

1 Like
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"Hide and rez" VS playing properly

If Mercy is hiding, she is letting her team in a 6v5 situation. A situation you can win without using all of your ults.

Whenever Mercy resurects her team, her allies become very visible and immobile during 2.25s. Most of the time they are either all grouped up in a very small area (after a Zarya ult for example) or they are all spread up. They have bad positioning because you had time to take control of the area.
You have the advantage of being the first to shoot.
While they are invulnerable, you have the time to

  • Setup the best D.Va ult you have ever seen
  • Tell your Reaper to prepare spinning
  • Launch your graviton surge to instantly shut down some (if not all) of them
  • Ask your favorite cowboy to tell them what time it is
  • Use Mei’s Blizzard
  • Prepare to release your EMP
  • Meteor strike them all
  • RIP-Tire in their face
  • Blink blink blink recall, then blink again and finally stick your bomb to someone
  • Start raining the justice from above
  • Prepare to earthshatter them all
  • If you don’t have any of the precedent options available, you can still put their head in the center of your screen, and left click
3 Likes
18

While true, I think I remember a post way back talking about ‘incentivizing’ tempo rezzes. Putting a cast time on the ult that changed in relation to the amount of heroes being rezzed. I think that the fastest rezzes would be 1-3 man rezzes (establishing a base value to cast rez) with it scaling up individually for 4-5 man rezzes. In turn, it could pick up heroes who died during the wind-up as well-- cast time depending on what the death count was @ button press.

While I’m not sure about the second half, I think a cast time could seriously discourage 5 man rezzes with how risky they would be solo. Theoretically.

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Then a short cast time as long as her “Heroes Never Die” voiceline would have solved that.

Paired with the Bunny Hop ability and a mini Valk on E, that’d make her perfect.

1 Like
20

Season 3, as in before she got rez immunity? If so then no, she’d be trash tier with how the game is now. If w/ res immunity then I think that would solve a lot of her current problems but we’d be back to her having the problems that originally got her reworked. And regardless I think Blizzard has made it very clear that the rework isn’t getting reverted.

What I think they need to do is put resurrect on cooldown at the beginning of the round. It’s a small thing and I think it would make Mercy less desirable on certain maps like 2CP defense. If that alone isn’t enough then bump res up to a 40-45s cooldown.