Edit: Hey. Check the date before you necro threads that have been dead for over a year. Thanks.
If you’ve been on the forums for five minutes over the past twenty-three hours, you know exactly what I’m about to talk about.
For those of you who are on the forums just long enough to open and read this post, I’ll reiterate the situation for you.
First, this happened:
And then… well, just read the comments in that same thread. A LOT of Mercy players, including myself, are thoroughly dissatisfied and outright angry with this change. Why?
I see a lot of hypotheses on the topic…
“Mercy mains are ungrateful.”
“Mercy mains are entitled.”
“Mercy mains just want attention.”
“Mercy mains just want Mercy to be overpowered.”
“Mercy mains will never be happy.”
All of these are built upon a position of ignorance.
I know that a lot of those cases stem from willful ignorance, but I’m making this post to inform the readers nonetheless, in hopes that maybe some people will have a better understanding of the situation.
So why are we upset?
That’s a simple question with a long answer. Buckle up.
To understand the problem, we need to identify what the change is; it’s a flat buff to Valkyrie that effectively reverts the ability back to its state prior to the healing nerf several months ago.
“That’s just a buff,” You might say. “It only serves to bring her back into viability. How can you be unhappy with that?”
The problem is that it misses our primary concerns entirely. The “It only serves to bring her back into viability” is exactly the problem here; if we only cared about Mercy being viable, we would not have been expressing discontent during the 10 months in which Mercy was within must-pick status. We would not have been playing Mercy during Season 3, when she was an outright troll-pick, if we only cared about viability.
Our concerns are based around something detached from balance; Mercy isn’t fun to play in her current state. She hasn’t been fun to play for a very long time, and this includes the period during which she had a healing rate of 60 health/second in Valkyrie.
A buff isn’t what we wanted. A buff only wastes time and delays the process of producing remotely desirable results. Again, the overpowered versions of Mercy 2.x were unsatisfactory to us; what makes you think that a balanced version of 2.x will be any better? It’s simply impractical to attempt to balance the current build of Mercy when you’re going to need to apply drastic changes to Mercy later anyway due to missing the problem entirely… and this problem has been going on for far too long to be justified with “damage control” or “band-aid fixes”. We need an overhaul.
It’s not a step in the right direction. It’s just… a step. There is no direction to it.
The anger goes deeper than that, however. I don’t think it would be far-fetched to say that no other ability within a character is hated more by that character’s respective playerbase than Valkyrie is by Mercy players. The most popular thread of all time on the Overwatch Forums at the very least calls for Valkyrie to be taken off the ultimate slot, and at the most, calls for Valkyrie to be removed from the game entirely. I’m not alone when I say that I outright despise this sad excuse of an “ultimate”.
And… after the developers pulled power out of Mercy’s base healing to make room for a certain ability with a 30 second cooldown, they then turned around to revert that change for Valkyrie; the ability that would satisfy us more by not existing than by existing. This patch is less of an attempt to solve Mercy’s problems, and more of a middle finger to those of us who have been advocating for another Mercy rework for over a year now.
It shows that once again, despite over a year of voicing our concerns, 12 megathreads, countless decentralized threads and posts, and thousands of complaints from Youtubers and Streamers, that the developers are utterly oblivious to the primary concerns driving this discontent in the first place. If not that, then it shows how crippled they are by sunk cost fallacy.
If you want to fix a problem, you need to first understand what it is. The developers haven’t demonstrated the ability to even go that far, and we are over a year into this mistake of a rework. Despite being told repeatedly how our feedback is so important to the developers…
We have seen nothing but apathy and disregard from those very developers.
That is why we are upset.