I mean, I can only assume they said that in the context of, “We’re not going to change her mechanics, we’re not giving her new abilities, we’re not reworking her”
They have never promised/said they weren’t going to adjust any hero.
What he did say was “We don’t have any plans to change her”, I personally see a numbers tweak to still count as a change. That’s just how I feel
But it did change her playstyle. Suddenly mass res wasnt suicide, leading to the rise in popularity of hide and res
Eh. Interpretations are like that, I suppose. Neither of us are invalid because we interpreted a vague statement differently lol.
No, no, no and no. You either get used to it, play other characters or just don’t play the game if you’re not enjoying her current state.
In other competitive games, heroes get BANNED in the draft phase. OW doesn’t have that, but gives you the luxury of changing heroes on the fly to give you an opportunity to make the most efficient pick. Don’t blame the situation when your current favourite hero is in a bad spot (she’s not!), deal and cope with it if you really think you’re a good player.
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Things change. IIRC when he said they have no plans to change her it was during season 9 where Moira was all over the ladder. That clearly changed.
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Then get rid of the thing that caused the problem - invulnerability. Why go through the trouble of reworking her entire kit just because one buff caused an issue? If you punch a hole in the wall, would you patch the hole or take the whole wall down and replace it?
Due to the difference between a 1 button press = 1 rez and 1 button press = 1-5 people being rezzed. The 1-5 paradigm opened up too many problems and was rightfully imo, moved away from.
And yet somehow, 1-5 people being rezzed was never a problem before the invulnerability was added. If it was fundamentally broken from the start, then why wasn’t Mercy 1.0 OP and a must-pick the entire time rather than only after they overtuned her with 1.5?
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Because its success rate was dependent on many various factors. The coordination of the team it was going against, the tier it took place in, etc, etc. Prior to invulnerable it was known as suicide and rez. After invuln it was hide and rez.
The fundamental problem with the concept lies in the fact that the mechanic was based off how many of your team mates have died within a certain time frame, within a certain area. Therefore, the return on your button press, or how effective your ultimate was in regards to its charge time etc, was directly related to how many of your team mates had died.
This element of having team mates die potentially reward you was being exploited and was contradictory to the entire concept of a healer. Being able to heal is to prevent death, not desire it.
The success rate of such hide and rez tactics are irrelevant. Adding any number of restrictions or conditions of such a mechanic does nothing to address the fundamental design flaw. It simply discourages it.
Name me another PVP based game that has a 1 button press = 1-5 people coming back from the dead mechanic.
I’m not denying that. But it didn’t change it enough to regard her so different to give her a whole new X.0.
In comparison, they completely reworked Symmetra recently and she went from 2.0 to 3.0. You can’t seriously think Mercy’s Invuln buff was equally as significant as Symmetra’s rework.
This will be my last reply to you. It’s clear that you have your mind set on this and I can’t change it, therefore I see no point in going any further.
Have a nice day/night.
Well thats what id suggest too tbh
And how is the success rate of an ultimate indicative to whether or not it’s broken? In higher tiers, Junkrat’s tire is killed more often than it actually hits. Pharah is killed in ult so much more often than she lands it, it’s practically a meme on its own. Tac Visor can just as easily be blocked by shields as it can result in a 4-6kill.
Does that mean these ults are all fundamentally broken because they’re also not consistent, or are they all often only successful due to multiple factors such as the player’s individual skill, their teammates, and the coordination of the enemy team? Inconsistency in an ultimate or even just a particular tactic’s success does not prove anything beyond the fact that it’s just inconsistent. Doesn’t mean it’s overpowered, doesn’t mean it’s underpowered, doesn’t mean it’s broken - just inconsistent. There are too many variables acting upon it to draw any concrete conclusions from it.
Except the point of her rez was not to let the team die solely for the purpose of using it. If a Mercy did not heal, she did not have her ultimate ready. The purpose behind the resurrection mechanic was a “second chance” ability that allowed a team to have a second wind after what could have been certain defeat. Aside from the hide & rez issue, Mercy’s were not forced to only let their teammates die in order to provide value. It was just as common for Mercy’s to not even need rez at all if they were healing well enough - Mercy’s resurrection was used not because she was encouraged to stop healing, but because even her healing output at 60hps could not withstand focus fire or ult-combos.
Yes, Mercy’s ultimate did provide more instant value depending on how many players had died within a certain time frame, within a certain radius - but that didn’t mean that her ultimate was always a be all-end all thing, nor was even a 5-man rez a guaranteed win.
As an opposite example, look at Grav Dragon. You have an ultimate combo that can wipe the entire enemy team with two Q presses that takes advantage of the enemy’s team’s bad positioning, and outside of the enemy team having Zen, that entire team is dead and cannot do anything to change it. That team throwing the Grav Dragon could have been performing terribly and just gotten lucky against a team that was objectively better than them aside from one positioning mistake - and that one Grav Dragon would end it all. Mercy’s resurrect ultimate gave the team a second chance to reverse the tides when the enemy team ult-combo’d them.
Is it fair and balanced now that a team fight is boiled down to who can throw the most ultimates at once? Or was it better when players had to consider the fact that using four offensive ultimates to take a single point may not have been the greatest idea, if they didn’t also happen to catch Mercy in it?
I am not denying that resurrect, in its most basic concept, did reward the death of teammates. But I am also not going to ignore the contextual applications of resurrect in which it was designed to punish bad ult economy on the enemy team, and reward good positioning and game sense on the part of the Mercy.
You could certainly look at resurrect and say: This does nothing but reward not healing your teammates. There is nothing about resurrect beyond the rewarding of bad healing.
You could also look at resurrect and how it was actually used beyond the SR exploit BS, and come to a completely different conclusion: Resurrect was next to useless against coordinated teams, and even the hide & rez strategy was only effective if the enemy team did not practice good ult economy to counter it. If you threw your ults in brainlessly against a team with a Mercy rather than trying to bait out her rez, and still somehow managed to miss her in every single one of them - you were playing poorly. Period. Even with invulnerability you could bait out a Mercy’s rez by trying to kill her early in the team fight so that she would solo rez to protect herself. Even Mercy 1.5 wasn’t impossible to counter.
Irrelevant, Overwatch is not a carbon copy of every other PVP game on the market, and so doesn’t boast the same mechanics. Name me another PVP game where one hero has the ability to speed boost and heal all his allies in a 12 meter radius and can wall ride. We could literally do the same for just about every hero in the game with the exception of possibly Soldier 76 if we ignore his Tac Visor.
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I said what I did in a way to basically dismiss the arguments regarding how successful hide and rez was as a tactic etc. In pro play, mass rez was just used to rez Pharah. Meanwhile, in Bronze - Plat and arguably even much higher, it was winning games. We have no way of objectively knowing what it TRULY was, all we have is experiences and anecdotes and so on and so forth. I also don’t really see it’s success rate as necessary for further understanding how Mass Rez interacted with the game.
Stuff like this is what I wish to avoid.
This is 110% completely true, thus why I try to avoid all the variables, and instead break it down on just how the mechanic interacts with the game.
1 button press = 1-5 rezzed. Regardless of the conditions (team fight, ult economy, if the team actively played around your rez and died in coordination, etc, etc) or if it was the most optimal strategy (pro play pharah pocket says no), the very fact the mechanic operates on a 1 button press, at a singular time, can result in anything from 1-5 people coming up, means that the more people on your team dead the better it is if it all plays out successfully and in a beneficial way.
Man that was a nonsensical run on sentence. The point is, when all circumstance is removed, the ideal return on a Q press would be 5. And ideally the situation in which where you’d get 5 people back for it, would be when it is most conducive and beneficial given all those circumstances listed above. How likely that perfect alignment of circumstance doesn’t really matter, it’s just that the way the mechanic operates means that that alignment means you indeed benefit incredibly from the fact you allowed your team mates to die while you yourself remained safe.
There is no situation outside of mass rez in this game that is similar to that. There is nothing in this game that has the potential to actively benefit you by having team mates die outside of mass rez. That’s it. That’s what I’m pointing at. That’s why mass rez, regardless of the circumstance, situations, restrictions, LOS checks, etc, etc, simply just does not fit in this game IMHO. Hell tbh, I can’t think of anything like that in any game. That’s why I brought up the name me another game thing. As almost all examples of rez that I know of in multiplayer games has been a 1:1 mechanic. Not a 1:1-infinite.
Please. Give me a reason to believe it does considering that.
This is not going to end the controversy.
It will add fuel to the fire.
But - and I do understand the point you’re trying to make here in that we can’t measure Mass Rez’s strength objectively - this also directly contradicts the statement you made earlier about Ressurect’s value being determined by the amount of players resurrected. First, you stated that Mass Rez wasn’t good for the game because it rewarded Mercy for having more teammates die, which goes against her role as a healer. Then, you bring up the fact that it was only used in Pro play to rez one person, and so there’s no way of knowing its objective value as it varied depending on what tier it was used and the situation it was used in.
I’m a bit confused here:
Are you trying to argue that Mass Rez’s strength could not be objectively measured? (Agree.)
Or, were you trying to argue that Mass Rez’s strength was determined solely by how many players it could bring back at once? (Disagree.)
I’m going to bring in a concept my clinical instructor used to use. “Narnia”. While I was in clinicals, “Narnia” was shorthand for the magical world in which every factor in a situation plays out exactly to the book and allows for a perfect, successful, and beneficial outcome. This world does not actually exist - there are always too many variables to account for in practice for what you learn on paper or in textbooks to ever apply 100% of the time, in every situation or circumstance. In theory, yes - everything you say is true - in Narnia, that magical world where there are no extenuating circumstances or situational factors to consider that would change the outcome. But in practice, hardly any of it actually applies to the “real world”, or in this case, Overwatch. The “book” or theory is used as a guide, not a bible, because it can’t possibly account for absolutely every situation that could ever happen in reality.
And while I understand that your argument relies on removing the ability from its context, my problem with that argument is that removing the context from a situation can make just about anything seem broken, over/under powered, or unbalanced. When you don’t consider the variables or factors acting upon something, you’re ignoring how it interacts with the actual game - which is where that context actually matters. The only time in the game where the context and/or situational factors have no effect on the strength or weakness of an ability is in the training room. You cannot, in good conscience, argue from a “Narnia” standpoint on something that does not function in Narnia. It doesn’t work that way.
Say you have a drug. That drug, in labs, has been proven to kill cancer cells. Congratulations! You just found the cure for cancer!
Except for one problem: It also kills healthy cells. Do you just use the drug anyways, because in theory it kills cancer cells, and therefore is a cure? Or do you consider the context in that it also attacks healthy cells, and therefore could not be used in practice - the real world - as it could be used in the laboratory - or “Narnia”?
The point I have been making this whole time isn’t that I disagree, entirely, with the point you are making. When you remove Resurrect from its situational factors, from its context, from how it interacts with the game in practice - of course it does sound broken, unfair, and unbalanced. The point I have been arguing however, is that nothing in the game ever functions in a vacuum, and that includes Resurrect. Therefore you cannot remove it from its context to prove your argument. Your “control” argument as it is does not prove a theory as correct, it merely proves that the concept you’re arguing functions a certain way under ideal circumstances which would not typically exist in practice.
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I don’t see any contradiction here. In a pro type environment, the likelihood of you having multiple players down at once without snowball losing the fight regardless of you rezzing up is so minimized it becomes irrelevant. That doesn’t stay true for the ladder where coordination is at a huge premium because so few use voice chat to talk about anything related to the game typically in solo Q outside of Masters+.
5 people being rezzed is objectively better than 1. That is more return, hit point pool immediate heal, conservation of ult, etc, etc wise, than just 1 person being brought up. But, at the highest levels of play, being able to bring up more than 1 was so rare that it wasn’t even worth remotely entertaining. You just bring up Pharah.
I’m arguing the way mass rez interacted with the game, in a fundamental way, was flawed and needed to be moved away from.
We can go into context. We can do that. Imho, it will be a lot of talking about stuff that simply doesn’t matter in regards to the topic. What is true for pro play won’t be true for ladder or true for Gold or true for etc etc. We descend into a cascade of relativity.
Now, due to that fundamental issue I have with mass rez and how it interacts with the game, what it (circumstantially) encourages, I see no reason why we should entertain that when a 1:1 button press:rez paradigm seems so much simpler and healthier. The only reason is that people who use it like it like that. That doesn’t trump the enjoyment of everyone else, so because some people enjoy mass rez, and some don’t, I just cancel that out. Because some people play in a tier where hide and rez isn’t successful, doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the feelings of people that play in a tier where hide and rez was successful. That cancels out as well.
Therefore, I’m left with trying to ask myself why, given all these considerations, would I argue for mass rez being implemented in this game? I just wouldn’t. I see no reason why it needs to be a part of OW.
That’s not objectively true, and depends on context. THAT is why you can’t look at it in a vaccuum.
The inverse is also true. Just because low-skill players struggle against something does not mean it’s problematic.
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I meant in a very basic math sort of way. Just assessing how the mechanic operates, not how it operates within or interacts with the system.
I’m not dismissing one group of people in favor of the other, I’m saying I have to remain mindful of all groups.
But you can’t JUST look at the “very basic math sort of way”. That’s not what determines it’s value. Your entire argument depends on rez existing in a vaccuum with no context, but that’s not how it exists. The context has a much bigger impact on its value than the amount of people rezed. You simply cannot ignore that.
Something shouldn’t be banned from existing simply because some players aren’t good enough at the game to play against it. Pharah isn’t problematic just because some players can’t hit shots on her. Mass rez isn’t problematic just because some players stack all their ults without considering the possibility of Mercy surviving and ulting.
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