I actually can’t take this seriously, but for the sake of the thread, I’ll try.
Pre-Valkyrie Mercy was beyond busted. Being able to make an amazing play only to be met with the disappointment of hearing “heroes never die!” was never fun and was basically saying: “just kidding, we’re all alive; try again.” The issue was so bad that it’d be rare to not see at least one Mercy per game at most any level. And while I do agree that support ultimates require a fine level of positioning, being able to become invincible and bring back your entire team seemed like a bit much.
And before like many others, you dare argue that no one called the ultimate overpowered until post-Valkyrie, that’s only because people had become so oblivious to identifying broken mechanics in a young game. At least, this is the best conclusion I can draw. If something is defined as normal for an extended period of time, people adapt to and live around said something, like a pet Zebra you’ve had for years. To you, it’s your Zebra, to others: IT’S A WILD ANIMAL WTF?
Actually pickrates prove otherwise. Mercy was considered a troll pick. Her pickrate only started to increase after they gave invulnerability to her ult. Actually an handfull of people prefer mass rez woth some restriction (i would suggest only rezzing up to 3 people and needing los check and a small cast time) than valk mercy. For me having one hell of a powerfull ult as rezz on a cooldown is busted.
Rezz as an ult fuctions exactly the oposite way of grav or death blossom or even blade. Instead of team wiping it undos it. Old mercy punished bad ult management something that these days is an issue even at high tiers like high master and gm.
But hey each one has their opinions, no rights or wrongs
Like you just said, it undos those other plays of ultimates that require more than good positioning and a functioning Q button (mass rez).
Hypothetical situation: let’s say that I catch the entire enemy team-except for their Mercy-in a Death Blossom. How is it fair for me-the Reaper-to have my efforts completely undone despite the fact that the enemy should have been keeping better tabs on my position? With no compensation for the used ultimate by the way.
EDIT: If pickrates were low before the invulnerability buff, what difference does it make? The cast times never changed and the hero received a questionable buff that further dug mass rex’s grave.
Lucio - faster cast time on his ult. decrease the amount of charge on his ult slightly. Either extend his Aura another 5 meters or so permanently or do a slightly larger increase ( 7 - 10 meters) when he amps it up. I like the aura size coincides with amp it up idea personally. its thematic and gives the Lucio player some additional power in the middle of a fight.
Brig - I think she is actually pretty balanced atm. I know she gets a lot of hate but she isn’t that hard to play around.
Ana - I’m honestly not sure. I don;t thing bio grenade going through shields is a good idea. that would be really powerful. I would up her damage/healing back up though and reduce the cooldown on her sleep dart a tad.
Moira - I haven’t played a lot of Moira. but i agree she is a bit too niche. I honestly don’t think her being able to heal through shields was a problem. Other than that i don’t really know what you would do for her. Nothing wrong with being a niche pick but when your options are so few i would prefer those to come much later.
Mercy - she is a bit over tuned for sure. I don’t play much mercy so i won’t comment but I have seen some decent ideas in this thread.
Zen - pretty well balanced. If i had to pick something i would probably nerf discord orb a bit. Discord is a pretty powerful ability and along with his ult makes him just about as much of a must pick as mercy. Then again en is also enabled by mercy quite a bit so i probably wouldn’t touch Zen until Mercy was brought back in line.
Nothing in her base kit needs nerfing. Mercy had DMB reduced from 50% to 30% for a reason. Her heals were increased due to the amount of damage in the game that she couldn’t keep up with.
The main issue is Valkyrie giving her chain healing/Damage Boost to allies which covers the weakness she originally had and that was to be a single target healer.
What needs to be done is move Valkyrie into her E ability with a stronger single target beam to keep up with the immensely powerful antinade. Moving Resurrect back into her ultimate slot where it shouldn’t have been moved in the first place.
I think Brig’s biggest issue isn’t really with her kit necessarily, but more with how armor works in general. I think armor is a bit too strong. I think her shield bash could use an extra second or two added to the cooldown though to force more measured and intellegent management.
Be that what it will, I choose to withhold all further comments on the topic of mass rez despite my desire to continue this conversation. Hinted kernels of aggression upon this sensitive topic may lead to more than what I expected of this thread.
Unfortunately Mercy always has been and always will be a touchy subject. It’s why I’ve tried to avoid putting out any absurd ideas for it and just talking about minor tweaks to her kit rather than reversing the rework and whatnot.
All of the supports can be viable! Lets keep it all friendly!
And I cant take this seriously. Mercy had issues like the broken SR gain and the invulnerability buff to mass-rez but she was never that good. In higher ranks people wanted Ana, Zen and Lucio and not Mercy. She was considered underpowered and her ult got several buffs because of that.
The rework truly made her broken and formed an entire meta with her. Blizzard was in desperate need of nerfing her again and again. They could have done a much better job by toning down mass-rez with line of sight and what not. Plus giving her an active e-ability she can use during the fight for compensation. Yet they went with a terrible rework tons of people hate and even after all the nerfs to it she still remains a problem.
They reworked her because the general way to play Mercy became…
1 - stay at the back healing/d-boosting your team
2 - build ult
3 - hide
4 - wait for team to die
5 - fly to corpse
6 - Resurrect team
7 - repeat steps 1-6
Step 3 was the big reason Blizzard didn’t like Mercy. While playing a game, the most important part to “not throwing” with Mercy back then was basically to stop playing the game. They wanted Mercy to feel more active as a hero, and in reworking her they did exactly that, plus they gave her more meaningful choice. The playstyle went against how the game should be played and how she was intended to be used.
It’s not a horrible rework, but I know a lot of people liked her previous iteration.
You never had to hide if you did that was your decision. With current rez you need to hide with old mass-rez you could pull of tempo rez in the heat of the moment.
By letting her spectate with her ult? After all the nerfs thats pretty much all you do with it. Of course you could go battle Mercy but that is not the sense of it neither are you getting the most value out of it that way.
Look, I never wanted this to become yet another “revert Mercy” thread, nor did I want it to be exclusively about Mercy either. While your opinions are fine and fair, that’s not what this thread was all about. You’ve made your points but I’d ask that you stop there because you really don’t seem all too happy about anyone else’s input.
This is a support class discussion thread, and I’d like it to stay that way.
How do you feel about the other supports, think they’re balanced?
Zen and Moira are alright but I dont know why they “nerfed” Moira with that bugfix.
Brigitte could need powershifting from her tankier side more to healer.
Sorry if I were rude at any point but that damn rework is literally the only reason I started posting on this forum. I know Mercy had issues before the rework as well and I dont want a straight up revert back to the old version. I just get tired of people going for her after so long despite her base kit was fine for over a year already even before the rework and all.
In my opinion Blizzard did a poor job trying to balance her with valk and they could have done much better. Thats it sorry if I broke your discussion in between.
Ana needs help. We ALL know this after she got hit with the nerf hammer into another dimension.
Lucio - needs help in the ultimate department. He either needs to have a decrease in ultimate charge or a boost in it’s overall power. Also think AMP should increase his Aura range for the duration.
Zenyatta - Even though personally I think he is quite strong he is semi-balanced in a sense that he just needs more competition from Lucio.
Moira - The nerf to her healing puff cloud I don’t know if it was REALLY needed but I guess it was a bug that needed fixing. I do however think she should get a boost to her healing output from her ultimate to double her healing power to 160 since her healing cloud is 80HP/s from 140 where it currently is sitting.
Brigitte - I think she is much more balanced. Of course she’s annoying to play against but for the most part she has counters and the armor is less oppressive to deal with also less shield bashes. Plus she is also really fun to play so… yeah.
And finally…
Mercy - My BIGGEST issue with her. Is her ultimate and her ability.
Here is why.
Valkyrie is an ultimate which enhances Mercy’s abilities all across the board (except Resurrect). The issue with this comes from the AOE it’s providing to allies around the main beam target and also the survivability it gives Mercy.
Resurrect is an ability that is VERY punishing to use and is the ONLY ability that does so. ALSO being the only ability that DOESN’T give ult charge (Besides movement abilities). To top THAT off it’s also on THE longest CD in Overwatch.
So here is my problem. Mercy currently outclasses every support because she has one of THE strongest utility abilities in the game. She has THE best surivivability of the support category. She also has one of if not THE best AOE healing from Valkyrie.
What Mercy needs is to have a weakness. Which Mercy 1.0 had, and that was being a SINGLE TARGET HEALER.
What I propose is switching some things around in her kit. Valkyrie needs to become a strong single target beam on a CD as an E ability for Mercy.
Resurrect needs to come back as an ultimate but WAY more counterable and easier to deal with.
This is my idea regarding the idea around Resurrect and how it should be implemented into the game.
It’s fine to have an opinion and be passionate about something, it’s just there’s a lot of Mercy specific threads where that sort of thing would be better suited. This is just to discuss the state of support characters as a whole and it’s been filling with a lot of good and useful feedback I think!
It seems there is a general consensus that the weak ones are Ana and Lucio so a little love from Blizzard to them could help with the state of things an awful lot. Thanks for the feedback and for contributing my friend!
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@Macster
Nice to see such a detailed response, thanks for the input! Also I didn’t want to highlight the whole message, so I just picked a good part.
We seem to agree on most things but split a bit regarding Mercy. For sure your points are all valid and make sense, however it’s very unlikely Blizzard are going to revert the rework. I figure it just makes more sense to discuss methods of balancing her in her current state, as they are much more likely to be listened to and considered, y’know?
That being said, I like your idea for if they were to revert the rework.
EDIT: Also just on a technicality, barrier/shield abilities also don’t provide ult charge!
I really think Damage blocked should be added towards ultimate charge. But yes I forgot about that as well.
It’s unlikely but it is possible. They said they have no plans to revert Mercy but they never said they didn’t have plans for another “rework” this time implementing some new mechanics. Easy to counter visuals/voicelines. Plus a new mechanic that offers something new to the table something Resurrect never had. Also giving us the ability to fly more frequently in Valkyrie because I really do enjoy that.
Let her swap weapons to a medkit that she can use to self-heal in a fashion similar to Bastion. (I think forcing her to swap weapons and stand still to self-heal will be more balanced than passive health regen.)
Brigitte
Reduce Inspire radius to 10m. Maybe decrease Repair Pack cooldown to compensate.
I think the others are fine. I can see a case for making rez Mercy’s ult and giving her the ability to fly as a basic ability, but I don’t know that that’s needed. I suspect she’ll feel fine with some balancing of the other healers. She’ll still be the best at healing, but that’s the whole point of the character.
I feel like one particularly could be a bit broken, healing through walls and whatnot. The others though make complete sense.
I actually agree, I completely forgot she didn’t have a secondary weapon so it’d be a good use of the empty space in her kit.
Yeah being double the size of Lucio’s aura is a bit cheesy considering it heals essentially the same amount. If RP’s cooldown were lowered though, it could only be by a second. It’s a very strong ability.
Removing the LoS restriction from Lucio’s auras would certainly be a huge buff. It might be warranted though. It requires some coordination from your teammates to make optimal use of his healing and the LoS restriction makes that more complicated than I think is necessary. Allies shouldn’t have to be aware of your LoS to get healed, especially considered you’ll tend to be in the backline outside the field of view. They should just know that “if I stand inside the orange circle then I’ll get healed”.
(Brig’s a bit different because she’s more frontline and doesn’t have the aura indicator.)
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")