Replace DMG Boost

Masaru-21327 · April 25, 2023, 12:00pm

I heard a call. looks to the skies and see the mothlight symbol

It doesn’t. In the entire history of blue beam, the only character to be utterly busted with blue beam were meant to be or just mistakes. Ash was designed as a blue beam buff. Echo was busted with or without it. Sojourn was meant to be busted with blue beam when they nerfed her. Pharah’s dependency is more on healing then blue beam (her rocket / boop combo doesn’t kill without blue beam, but that’s it, it’s much less of a dependency then Sojourn going from 2 to 1 shot).

The problem with this idea is that Mercy would need to essentially make someone immortal for it to be worth it.

Think about it : you’re sacrificing a fifth of your team potential damage output, the payoff needs to be huge. Right now blue beam is, because, while you’re loosing raw stats, you’re winning consistent damage output, that’s worth it. If you make Mercy essentially a heal-bot (or pseudo-heal-bot, damage reduction would work the same way), you need that heal to be stupidly better then every other supports’ for her to be viable.

We all know how bad the game can feel when the opposing team has a DPS popping off and seemingly winning the game on their own, imagine that, but they’re literally immortal, and tell me how that would be a good experience. I don’t think it is.

We spent weeks talking about “how we should change blue beam”. Being autistic and tired of suggestions going in every direction, I tried to come up with rules that we can agree on for a “new blue beam” (once we’ve agreed on rules, we can rule out all the suggestions that don’t fit in them and therefore stop wasting our time debatting stuff that we already know wouldn’t work), so let me share them once again. They might not be the good ones, but they’re ones I think a lot of people can agree on, feel free to tell me where I’m wrong if I am.

MY Take on Mercy and why she's a Stupid Character

A new blue beam would have to follow a few rules :

1) Has to be an indirect offensive buff

She’s a pacifist, the only non-offensively minded character in the game, it’s not something Overwatch can afford to erase. Using her gun or any other directly offensive ability would also go against her identity. We need more diversity, not less. Nobody finds healbotting fun, so we should avoid it as much as possible.

2) Needs to be strong enough to justify not heal-botting no matter what the comp or elo is

It doesn’t mean new blue beam needs to bring the same “value” no matter what, but the lowest possible results still need to be good enough to not justify yellow beaming when everybody’s above 50% HP. This also needs to be true at all elo : healbotting is not okay at bronze level, I don’t see why it would be at GM level, or the other way around.

3) Needs to impact the boosted player positively

This is an extension of rule 2, but I thought it was a big enough extension to make it a rule. We don’t want people to actively flee blue beam, or get angry at Mercy for boosting them : not only it would make this a bad experience, but on top of that it’ll be peer-pressure toward heal-botting. In practice, this means that if new blue beam makes aiming much harder, it’s not a good enough suggestion.

4) Needs to not come with any broken interactions nor be a "single person gets an ult-like ability while we're pocketing them"

If the plan is to solve a potential game-breaking ability, we can’t replace it with another game-breaking ability. The second part is because people already call rez a pseudo-ult, I don’t think giving Mercy a second pseudo-ult would be any good.

I think that, based on these rules, our “new blue beam” :

Cannot be “nothing” (rule 2)

Cannot be a beam version of discord orb, attaching to enemies instead (rule 1, she’s a medic buffing her teammate)

Cannot be using her gun (rule 1)

Cannot be over-health or armor boost or cleanse or “stops from dying” (rule 2 and, for the last one, also rule 4)

Cannot be speed boost (rule 2)

Cannot be a slight aim assist (rule 2, it’ll be next to useless at high elo)

Cannot be a slight wall-hack / “Mercy giving intel to the teammate” (rule 4)

Cannot be projectile speed boost (rule 3 and 4)

Cannot be attack speed boost (rule 3 and 4)

Cannot be a slight ammo boost (rule 4 for technical reasons, some UI would break because of this, also rule 2 as it’ll be pretty much useless on certain comps)

Cannot give infinite ammo (rule 2 or 4, depending on comp)

Cannot interact with cooldowns in any major way (rule 4)

So, outside of keeping blue beam as it is right now… what did I miss ? The only things I can think off are putting blue beam on a resource timer, to make Mercy an anti-Moira (when out of resources, Moira is forced to DPS, Mercy would be forced to healbot), but I’m pretty sure it’ll feel awful to be punished because your opponents are not hitting their shots… but, as so many people want to “delete blue beam”, I’m probably missing obvious options so please, help me find them.