I’ve been seeing a lot of post about Mercy saying she’s now “unfun”. While i can see why Mercy mains are displeased with the state of the character. It always puzzled me how she is suddenly unfun. First off i want to say the fun is something that’s very subjective, so it’s going to be different for everyone.
But Mercy gameplay wise has never changed that much. She falls into the Healerbot archetype wich we also see in other role based games. So she primarily heals(shocker, i know) And aside from her revive being different, the way you play Mercy is still the same as it’s always been. So i was curious to hear peoples Stance on her suddenly being unfun.
Personally what I find unfun is how her rez and ult currently works.
Rez feels awful to use because of the long cast time and slow reduction. Yes I understand its there for balance sake, doesnt mean its not awful to use. With that, it makes using it quite situational for an E ability. If you use it in pre and post fight, its okay, but mid-fight where it counts the most, its horrible to use. That and it interrupts the flow of her kit since, shes supposed to be zipping around and healing.
Her ult is primarily lackluster and has little to no impact. Previously her rez (1.0) at least had an impact on the game, now its quite lackluster since her healing and damage boosts number is the same and most benefits you get is just the infinite ammo and independant flight and thats about it.Also her chain beams take away her fun factor of juggling around teammates to keep them alive, part of what attracted Mercy’s playstyle to me was to her basic zipping around and juggling to keep everyone alive, her AoE takes away that part of her and does it automatically for her.
Overall, my problem is just her E ability and her ult. At least that my personal opinion on the matter.
Her game play has always been mind numbing boring for anyone who plays a FPS game to shoot/battle other players. You don’t get to choose your fights, where you fight or anything of that nature. You fallow around your team like one is walking a dog on a digital leash. It’s part of the reason her skill set doesn’t transfer over other heroes and why most mercy mains are straight trash on any other hero.
So if one was forced to flex to mercy back in the “must have” days you knew you were gaining next to nothing that would help you get better at the game with the heroes you wanted to play.
So that knock out maybe 2/3 of the player base who can’t stand playing Mercy.
Leaving only those of us who like support play being it’s the whole calm in the eye of the storm vibe. Getting chased, getting away, juggling the team and picking who lives and dies based off your play. Just the weight of all of that is fun, if you like playing support.
Yet you still want that “ME!!” sort of moment.
After all every single other hero in the game gets it. The big ULT play the big panic move that saves blah blah blah.
Mercy has been flat out robbed of that, completely. So now all the really have is walk the team on the leash and respawn to do it again. Great… wow… it’s why you play FPS games right?
that said it’s still not worthy of flooding the front page with whines and acting like she needs to be a must pick again level. As honestly the bulk of the player base don’t want to play Mercy and fear her falling back into a must pick. Walk the line between decent pick and trash but never, ever make her a must pick again.
Personally I dont find her unfun.
I have an account where I exclusively play Mercy, because she is easy to play. Actually, shes so easy to the point I can play a competitive game and just chill out instead of try harding.
People find Mercy un fun because she is made to be very, very easy and when you have a grasp on how to do things, the easy things arent going to be challenging (or fun) anymore.
Mercy’s Utility abilities doesnt work well together, if you damageboost you dont heal, if you res you dont heal or boost or move, if you use your pistol you stop healing, boosting etc…
Back then there only was heal, boost and pistol, they worked because if you wanted to max out your utility you had to boost and heal at the right moment. You can still do it now but with 50Hps you are going to expend more time healing than boosting and the risk of boosting is higher.
I enjoyed playing against pre-rework Mercy because she made me play better and pay attention to the game, but new Mercy just…is there. It feels like her purpose is to make everyone slightly more difficult to kill, but for them to all still die because she can’t heal through damage.
I dunno, as a Hog main I wish they’d just revert her back at this point and stop trying to make Valk work. It isn’t going to.
I make it short.
Her base kit is totally fine (Only the 50 HP/s feel bad but in terms of gameplay/strategy it’s perfect). The healing and Dmg management is far more than just “Healboting” and her movement with GA is as fun and skillful as always.
The things which are unfun is E res (And i specifically mean E res) and Valkyrie in it’s entirety.
Mercy’s gameplay is for the most part based on very fast movement and quick decision making. Back then with Mass Res you were constantly rethinking every situation, all the time, while also managing team healing/dmg. And the mind game which came with Mass Res went even deeper with all the decision making.
That’s not the case with E res and won’t ever be the case with Valkyrie. E res is just so situational that you only need that in mind: Is it save? Res. No? Don’t Res.
There goes already, almost the entirety of strategies, which you always had to rethink, out of the window.
Then is Valkyrie which is virtually just an easy mode for her base kit. It takes away the healing/Dmg management and makes her movement way to easy to use as well as just making everything about her boring.
On top of that comes the very bad Polish and the non existing impact of it.
You are not wrong that her gameplay never really changed. That’s true to her base kit. But everything else is just gone which made her perfect, in terms of gameplay and strategy
-Rez is not earned anymore and makes you feel like it doesn’t matter if you perform well or not.
-Valkyrie is earned but not impactful at all which makes it feel like some ability on a long cooldown.
-Healing feels sluggish and underperforming since it got nerfed.
Overall Mercy who is supposed to be a Main Healer feels like a character that just stalls the death of her allies and unearned rezzes one of them when they finally die.
Same goes for Valkyrie it feels like a spectator cam to look how long your teammates last before they get killed.
The main thing is that Mercy did very few things. You left click, fly to an ally, then left click again, right click when everyone’s topped up, and then the ult was like “THIS is my moment!” and you resurrected everyone, and the fight could go on. You felt pround and impactful.
Now between the healing nerfs and the much higher amount of damage flying around, you never get to right click. You just left click, and left click, and left click… Then your ult! Where… you fly… to keep left clicking… and left click… and left click…
The resurrection pins you in place for, like, 3 seconds, and you feel Widow’s crosshair caressing the back of your head. You can’t do anything about it, but you need to try and bring this one ally back to the fight or your lower healing alone won’t be enough to win the fight with one less DPS.
You don’t feel like you do much, and don’t feel like you have an impact. The resurrection takes so long that’s more an exercise on faith than a fun ability to use, and sometimes you even see people die at your hands while you were healing them because you simply can’t keep up.
And if your team mates die, you can’t neither fly away nor fight back, so you’re just left there to die while you think “Maybe I should have picked Moira…”.
This is what eveyone has said for months now. But all the current compliants about her and the new buffs, are saying that it’s not what they wanted at all.
Things like “we don’t want her more viable we went her more fun”
And then you ask whats not fun about her and eveyone says the ults too bad. It’s really annoying that eveyone keeps changing their minds about what they want.
I think you got that wrong. Mercy is supposed to be The single target main healer, but she can’t even do that properly. You better go with Zen in that case. He can still deal tons of Dmg at the same time, while also having a very good healing Ult. All sups are way better than Mercy, even with the “buff” on the PTR she is still way weaker than any other sup.
She is indeed under powered if it comes to raw healing. And that’s just sad for a hero which should have strong solo target healing.
tbh if she worked like the medic from TF2 while having her flying ability on a longer cool down with the ability to burst heal and have 2 ultimates (QUAD DMG or invulnerability) while being able to slowly juggle the ultimate around while also having ultimate loss mechanics then she would be perfect but sadly you can’t do that because: “IZ OP”, “isn’t this just a copy and paste?” or “but but Hanku-sama, her kit is to be an angel, you can’t retcon this stuff”.
Their Job is to tank the damage and prevent their team of getting hit and they’re good at that.
Mercy was described as the “go-to healer” by the devs themselves yet she can’t even outheal the damage of any Tank in the roster anymore.
Rein and Orisa still have utility after their shield breaks down. What does Mercy have besides her weak healing? A rez which isn’t earned, which makes her a easy target for almost 2 seconds and which therefore prevents you from healing for almost 2 seconds.
Ok, let’s put it like this:
Imagine if the ult was that, for the next 10 seconds, Mercy gets to press Q to heal 25 HP to a far away ally and then it applies a healing over time effect of 40 HP/s for 3 seconds to said ally, and you can repeat that as many times as you can for the duration, with a half a second cooldown between casts, and while you heal your current target with your main, single target beam as usual.
This would be weaker than current Valkyrie and still more fun to use.