Possible Mercy Buff

General Discussion
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So, people don’t want healing output buffed because “cOnsIsTeNT HeAliNg isN’T suPpoSEd tO Be pOwErfuL” and they don’t want Resurrect buffed because “iT Is UnFUn To pLaY AGaInsT”.

So how about a small buff that doesn’t increase the power of either of these abilities, but slightly reduces the most glaring downside, by allowing Mercy to heal or damage boost while resurrecting? You can still kill her while she’s fixed in place for 1.75 seconds and her healing output is still easily outdamaged, but at least Mercy won’t have to interrupt her subpar healing stream to go for a res that might get her killed anyway.

I don’t think it’s a lot to ask, but I do think it would help immensely in the face of all the damage output that is currently in the game.

Thoughts?

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No… because as I said two years ago and predicted every change they would make… as a Designer and Developer all I can say is that they exhausted all their options, unless they revert… there is nothing else they can do. It’s either overbuff one of her skills or healing… or nerf her more… there is no middle ground.

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I literally just presented a middle ground that wouldn’t result in either of those outcomes.

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Yeah… it’s not a new idea + there was so many back and forth from 2 years ago I can’t be asked to explain why this won’t work from a Design perspective…

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Do you happen to know the title of a thread that contains the reasoning?

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I don’t think she needs a buff, I think she needs her kit reworked a little and to have resurrection removed from the game. It’s pretty unfun to have your pick negated two seconds later. Remove res and give her a different skill like a small AOE skill that has a 2-3 second casting time and only applies to people in the circle in front of her and not herself. This helps with her healing out put and removes an ability that has been an issue for years.

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I believe they could ‘fuse’ both of her beams to make a more agressive ultimate, just a thought…

For me Resurrection is high risk/high reward since you can change the fight with it, it’s in a good state.
A solution for that is to make her burst heal X hps while casting it, otherwise it would look weird lol

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lol that’s not true at all. A revert is the LAST option they should take from a design perspective.

Mercy could be easily made perfect with minor numbers tweaks or even just introducing a new heal boost ability/mechanic on her Reload button. You don’t have to bring back mass rez at all to make her balanced or fun, that just brings back a host of new issues and problems and pisses off many people.

60 HPS and no other changes would make her perfectly balanced, viable, and a great main healer who fits into fast paced and divey comps. Season 9 Mercy was the best state she’s been since launch, and the only difference between then and now was 10 HPS.

Or they can give her a minor heal boost cooldown or mechanic on reload and no other changes and she’d be perfect, as it’d raise her impact and skill ceiling.

Or they can do one of the above options and tweak Valk’s #'s and duration to be more impactful and bursty.

Or they could remove rez entirely and make her entire kit much more engaging and impactful, as it’s an anchor weighing down her balance in both ult and E form.

But at the end of the day, they don’t have to touch Rez at all. Just because you want it back doesn’t mean that’s the only option. That’s called bias. They can easily fix her without even making a single change to it.

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They would never do that because Rez is Mercy. Like Torb is his turret, Genji is his cool Nija style and Symmetras Weapon is Light.

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And make even more skinless, further into spectator mode. Sorry, but that is the wrong direction to go about Mercy.

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I know they won’t but they should. It’s just not a good skill to have on cool down. Even at 30 seconds it’s just a OP ability. Like baptiste’s immortality, that should not be on cool down, basically gives him two ults. I really feel she needs it put back to her ult but only to res a couple of people (one or two), then add an AOE heal to her base kit.

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um…no…first of all 60 hps and shes instantly outhealing all other healers except ana correct? (might be one other)…and 10 hps is not the only difference…a bunch of new heroes, 2 years worth of balance changes to all heroes, and a slew of other metas is why mercy is no longer THE support…

where are the compensatory nerfs btw? shes not just a healer…

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The Point is when the Mercy players here 2 years ago called out how badly the screwed up, Blizzards response to us was that ‘We will never revert or go back on decision made’ then we gave them plenty of ideas that they could has used to implement but they slowly trickle down the changes until 1 year later they did the stuff that they should have done.

But stick true to their words… they will never do a revert so we can kiss 60HPS good by forever, they might do something similar but they won’t make any changes.

The main reason a lot of us fell back on Mercy wasn’t because of Mass res or any changes after that… it was because of the consistent 60HPS heal rate was enough that it pushed Mass Res to being a trump card in which some of us held on to the point where we don’t use… like using it can signal an exchange of ultimates.

Once you masted healing, you can effectively not use res… right now the HPS is so bad… it is hard to keep up with your teams! Especially when none of them improve from their brain dead strategy of charging in point blank and dying!

The sad reality is… for a lot of people who don’t realise this… is that a lot of the ideas were taken, tweaked and incorporated into Moira, Brigite and Baptise… it is to the point where we are joking that Echo will have the left over ideas incorporated into her… like Flight Skill, Damage Dampening, Shield HP Extension or protection against status effects or something like that.

The problem with Valkyrie is that it is bland not to mention YOU CANNOT TWEAK IT! Extending the duration, Lowering duration, tweaking HPS or Damage Boost will make it too powerful.

Valkyrie is too bland of an ultimate but even just increasing the duration or heal rate by just a tiny bit will break the balance for it since she can heal the entire team at once and usually unless it is a focus fire… the HPS of Valyrie can pull a team through a fight.

Also you can’t have a single super beam… not to mention it was one of the first suggestions and that idea went to Moira!

Heal Boost, yep… that was suggested too (looks at Baptise) looks like his shift ability was from that suggestion.

As for Mercy’s skill floor and cieling… there is a Skill Floor and Skill Cieling that a lot of players especially non-support players aren’t aware about. The ability to judge a situation, the ability to assess your team mates and your opponents as well as gaining the ability to shot call, knowing when to dive in or pull out, when to res and who to heal and when to boost and when to shoot.

The Problem with Res and Valkyrie is that Res is more of an ultimate skill because it is her most impactful skill whilst Valkyrie is more of a E ability and grants her the much needed ability to survive a situation when her team mates aren’t around so that she can escape.

You can’t boost Valkyrie without it breaking and you can’t nerf it either because if they buff it they have to nerf it and since they can’t clone ANY of the previous changes… it will just end up as a cheap imitation of an older version of Valkyrie but worse.

At the end of the day, Mercy is toast and most of the Mercy’s are still hating on the Mercy changes. We went through too much … to even care at this point.

2 Likes
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I think they should just swap Resurrect and Valkyrie. Make Resurrect the ultimate again and have it work the same way as it currently does, then make Valkyrie her E ability with a 30 second cooldown, 5 second duration. They could even put it on a long recharge meter if they wanted to get creative.

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you’re two years too late to the party, here is the Megathread, it has 12,200+ comments and your idea is not new… As someone who was dedicated to this and all the other 10 megathreads before it… (we must have like 20,000+ comments on the subject) with multiple iteration of what can be done to Mercy and quite a number of the really good ones being incorporated into Moira, Brigitte and Baptise. Quite frankly… any new ideas will most likely go towards Echo instead.

Two years later and we are still suggesting this idea?

The problem with Valkyrie was that as a E ability, a free flight skill would be too OP and it couldn’t be realistically adjusted since there is a rate of cool down and the duration of skill usage.

So the idea was to make it a single Burst Jump like skill where she would ascend like Pharah and potentially have a minor knock back then using Space Bar you can control Mercy’s flight path and for a few seconds she would have the ability to use Guardian Angel at an increase distance allowing for better chances of escaping and surviving.

Valkyrie as a Skill will allow Mercy to have better survivability because her survival is completely dependant on her team mates position to fly to.

If the cool down is too long the skill is pointless. Res is powerful enough to be a skill but having it as a Cast time will put her back into OG Mercy state and having her non-invulnerable puts her into season 1 and 2 state where she suicide res, which to be fair isn’t a bad idea since most other supports can carry on without her!

But over all… this idea was adjusted and given to Baptise as a Shift ability… his jumping skill is really similar to the jumping skill we talked about prior to his release

Quite honestly… the HPS was the only thing going for her.

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Funny enough this was one of the first ideas we had when they changed Mercy 2 years ago when Res came off as a Ultimate and into a skill… some of us even joked about richochet bullets so Mercy can do more damage.

Then Moira comes out with a Heal Spray, Damage sucking beam (this was suggested to replace Damage Boost), richchet orbs and a ultimate that fuses the beam together!

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How would E Valkyrie be OP? Yes, it would increase her survivability, but that is the point. Her value is consistency, which only matters if she is able to stay alive. Right now, her survivability depends entirely on your teammate’s positioning. If you have good teammates who are in places you can GA to, then you are ok. If you don’t, you are screwed. Maybe GA could be nerfed slightly to compensate for the added mobility of an E Valkyrie?

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How would a buff to her healing be an “overbuff”?

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Because we’ve spent months talking about it, the problem is trying to balance it into a skill. If it a long cool down like 10 or 15 seconds wait and last 5 seconds then it would be pointless you an use it maybe once per engagement, not to mention that DPS tracking tends to be bad as it is, so DPS community will hate us. Not to mention the cool down is too long, Mercy will die before it is ready and Freeflight makes Angelic Descent kind of redundant.

You can’t boost the speed because you end up with the exact problems we had with Mercy Valkyrie 1.0.

If the skill last long and cool down is short, she will be in the air for the entirety of the game which the DPS community will not like and already that is too powerful for a skill.

If Mercy can do a single burst vertical ascent that would be more balance… escpecially if the cool down is reasonable… that way she can use it frequently allowing for quick escapes but without freeflight, she can be exposed to DPS to take her out.

Balance has to be both ways, a lot of us already agreed two years ago that Mobility on Skill Valkyrie will never happen, they had to nerf it as a Ultimate… having it on a skill and having it the way you proposed just makes it into a mini Ult. Valkyrie may suck as a Ultimate skill but the ability to free flight is incredibly powerful.

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Because 60HPS was added in to improve her performance, in most cases a good Mercy can sustain her team without the use of Mass Res and Valkyrie is they are skilled enough to micro manage their team and alternate between targets.

Valkyries ability to allow her to heal all allies at once is what makes it ‘strong’ but at the same time the value is incredibly delicate… tweak the numbers one way or another can make or break Mercy which as proven… is the case with the recent changes. 60HPS is out of the question because Blizzard will not revert. So they can go 70HPS, 55HPS, 75HPS but not 60 otherwise they will be going back on their own words and promise

They might do something to cover it up and discreately add it in… but yeah… either you go for one super beam or you add a Damage reduction buff whilst healing or something but they did pretty much everything under the sun… as I said, the ideas in this thread is not new.