For a moment let’s put our strong feelings (both positive and negative) about her to the side and look at the actual numbers.
Mercy’s healing output was reduced from 60hps to 50hps in the most recent patch, a 17% reduction. From Overbuff, here are the healing outputs of every support from this month (since the changes went live yesterday, they represent a very small percentage of the total sample):
Healing per game:
Mercy - 12,091
Moira - 10,569
Ana - 8,418
Lucio - 7,938
Brigitte - 7,167
Zenyatta - 6,999
If you multiply Mercy’s healing output by 0.83 (to account for the 17% nerf), her new healing per game is 10,036. This means that her healing now is essentially equivalent to Moira’s and still significantly higher than Ana’s and that of every off healer. If you wanted to subtract a couple hundred more to account for the fact that her ultimate now charges a bit slower, it wouldn’t change the fundamental fact that Mercy remains in roughly the same ballpark as Moira and significantly better than Ana as a main healer.
Seeing as Mercy still has resurrections and the best mobility and self sustain of any main healer, I fully expect her to remain a strong pick going forward. It’s never fun when your favorite hero is nerfed, but the complaints about her being useless or basically an off healer now are quite clearly going too far.
What’s funny is I see an equal amount of posts saying “This Nerf did nothing to curve Mercy’s dominance” and others saying “Mercy is now a throw character”
Yeah, And now sum up healing done AND damage done by every support. You can add boosted damage to Mercy if you want to, she will still be 5th or 6th place then.
I mean, the nerf is only about numbers. I don’t see how it made her more boring to play, seeing as the play style is exactly the same, the raw numbers are just lower. And as those numbers show, she hasn’t been “gutted”
Yet nobody factors in the fact that Moira and Ana (both main healers) also do damage, which takes time away from healing. Mercy, however, doesn’t do a significant amount of damage and only heals
And neither Ana nor Moira possess the mobility or the self sustain that Mercy does. They also don’t have resurrect, which is one of the most powerful non-ult abilities in the game.
Heroes have different strengths and weaknesses. My post is mainly addressing the fact that people saying “Mercy is no longer a main healer” are not backed up by the actual statistics.
Well, if a Mercy player spends 90% of the time healing and a Moira player spend 60% of the time healing, then the healing output should not be at the same level, then Mercy should heal a significant amount more…
I’m not sure if this is the case, but just looking at healing numbers without taking “% of time in the game spent healing” into account then I don’t think you’ll be able to make a fair comparison or make the case that “the healing nerf doesn’t affect Mercy as much as you think”
Mercy is the most pure support, she SHOULD heal the most as she spends 90% of the time doing that.
The nerf is significant. You notice it while playing. With Moira or Ana, you feel impact while healing, but with Mercy, you hold left click and just see as the HP of the ally still gets lower and lower. So much fun
I wouldn’t agree that healing done vs time spent healing should necessarily be equivalent across heroes. There are certain times when consistent gradual healing is useful and there are other times when burst healing is useful.
well they buffed moria’s default healing energy gain rate so she should be doing a little more than her now, which is great news for moria mains like me i guess…finally we won’t be told to go mercy
It might feel like you’re doing less healing as Mercy than as Ana, but objectively that is not the case. At least not on average, it could be that you’re a very good Ana
