There is some logic there. You don’t want to break the reason people play heroes if you can help it.
However there’s a limit to that.
Also there are times that the reason people play a hero is different from why they’re good. Mercy’s in that boat cause I’m pretty sure very few people play Mercy just for blue beam.
They need to keep the movement change, and do an actual, meaningful change to the rest of her kit. The other part of her balance change from last patch just read as a large buff. Like, it far outweighed the movement nerf.
In no way does Mercy need the movement she had a few weeks ago. If their way of dealing with the immense buff to her movement from when they reworked GA/SJ is to raise the CD…well, fine. Some part of her movement absolutely had to give.
But…why laterally buff the rest of her kit? She was too strong. Hard pocket meta is too strong. Dumbing down her movement to put even more emphasis on hard pocketing ranged hitscans…does nothing for that. Giving her much stronger healing does nothing for that.
Either actually sit down and figure out how to give risk/reward to the rest of her kit and retool damage boost and/or clean up her beam fall-offs, or actually nerf it down.
All the changes to Mercy did was make her less of a strong pick -but still a very strong pick- in lower SR. In higher SR, it read as a huge flat buff…when Mercy was already tremendously strong at higher SR. And, to be perfectly honest, the way Mercy gets optimal value at higher SR is not a complex, difficult way to play a hero. You have Ana out there with this huge skill expression playing in an earthquake, and high SR players playing Mercy sitting back with like one hand on their keyboard.
And I say this as a GM support player who does have to play this stupid, braindead changed Mercy or lose. You are at a significant disadvantage if you don’t have a Mercy on your team, and you do not need to be particularly any good with the hero to get the maximum value on her. That’s ridiculous; there is no skill expression, no agency. It’s just RMB…oh? Took damage? LMB. Oh, team fight? Q and free-fly to a spot no one can target you. How stupid that that is the meta way to play the meta hero in the top 1% of the games.
Revert the changes entirely.
Nerf the max distance of slingshot, cap it at 10-12m.
Put the crouch-superjump interaction on a 3-5 second separate CD to stop perma flight.
Mercy’s healing starts at 65 HPS and decays to 55 HPS over 3 seconds ( 65 → 60 → 55). Stays at 55 HPS on that teammate for 10 seconds before the cycle starts anew. Starts back at 65 HPS on new allies. Promotes teamwide healing.
Make it so damage boost can not boost Sojourn’s railgun.
Nerf Valkyrie duration to 12 seconds, keep the 50% increased healing on crit allies.
Because as a Mercy main, I’m sick of it. It’s a boring suboptimal ability in its current form. You use it around 3 times a game…. WAY less than her ult. I paid attention to my Rez the other day…
All 4 rezs I got in most games were either at the start of a fight, after the fight was won or it got interrupted/canceled. I’d say about 2 ended up being impactful midfight Rez’s and that was strictly due to the enemy teams errors, not due to any skill on my part.
I want a fast paced instacast ability to replace it. During valk it can upgrade to a single use rez, but otherwise, I want it gone. I’m tired of the self stun ability that holds the rest of her kit back.
Besides DOZENS of iconic abilities have been removed for other heroes. Orisas pull, Doomfist oneshot punch, syms shields, tombs armor packs, bastions whole kit, etc
I will not let nostalgia get in the way of Mercy having a better playstyle
I agree
with the first line only
I suspect the same.
What kills me though is that, the Devs made GA + SJ the way it is. They even worked through multiple iterations of it because they were so set on making it more “accessible”. A lot of Mercy players reeeeeally didn’t want it, but they got it anyway. And then, instead of winding back those very same GA + SJ mechanics, they nerf her underlaying GA, which messes up more than just the SJ, because they didn’t want to fix their original mistake.
And now, the new healing changes they put in place…which not a ton of Mercy players were crying for…appear to make Mercy too strong in that area…so they’ll most likely nerf it as well in some fashion.
Not to mention they didn’t touch Damage Boost, nor Rez, the two most complained about things in Mercy’s kit. So they’ll fiddle with those without a doubt at some time too I suspect.
The devs just seem to just keep chasing their collective tails with these Mercy changes. They paint a room a new color, hate that color, but instead of just repainting it, tear down the garage instead and kick the dog out of the house. It’s really odd.
I think you’re missing the key point. The GA nerf pushed Mercy into being even more of what players disliked most about her (pocketbot). Mercy mains will stay and make your life hell while the unskilled pocketbot girlfriends that hitscan like to bring along will stop playing her.
It would be like if Blizz nerfed Hog’s hook even more but gave him a speed boost when he used TaB. He’d be an even better flanker and the skilled true Hog players would be terrorizing teams.
Just revert her status, nothing more, and if you want to nerf his amplified damage a bit, fine, but absolutely nothing more.
Now I see complaints about her healing, when there are other supports that heal much more than her, always complaints.
All of those abilities weren’t iconic at all tho, for example the iconic bastion ability was the turret form, and they still have it. I don’t know, is like removin the dragons of the shimada bros.
I will not let nostalgia over a boring ability get in the way of Mercy having better potential and besides like I said it could still be in her kit, just restricted to her ult
There’s literally zero reason to keep it as a 30s cd ability with the longest cast time in the game with the least amount of uses of any ability OR ULT in the game
This is still an fps not a mmo and yet it behaves like an mmo ability (so many restrictions and slow paced), it literally doesn’t belong in its current form and buffing it is not viable either
Just give us something better
i agree they should not have nerfed her, but they always do. the sympathetic healing was interesting though. not sure about the ga cooldown though, too long.
I love the rez personally. It lets you undo cheap one-shots and it often rewards patience.
It also makes sense with her kit because you can fly over to dead targets. There’s not much point in flying to a corpse if I can’t revive it.
As long as one-shots remain in the game, rez will have a reason to be.
Summary on Mercy’s Changes after Feb 7 - General Discussion - Overwatch Forums (blizzard.com)
Mobility should be restored
Doesnt hold true since Kaplan isnt at the helm anymore and its clear this is a design change philosophy
but also a confliction, of the new philosophy of a hero always having something to do. But in Mercy’s case they gave her less to do and also gave her unavoidable idle downtime.
And then telling the clearly not happy community of this change of a character turned clunky and unfun
“No changes coming”
Cap slingshot distance? Are you insane? You already get air resistance 2 second into a glide
No, I’m not insane. You can literally GA to someone 30m away and turn around and GA almost entirely back to where you started.
Sounds like you just don’t know how to use slingshot correctly and are letting go of space too early.
Not gonna lie, I’d rather have them fly forever left to right than have them outdamage a bastion by holding heal beam on a tank and face tanking.
Whatever the hell they did, burst healing needs to be changed and especially for Mercy. The games are unfun on all 3 roles altogether and I’m almost willing to change my path back to another game at this rate.
Capping it to a hard range is a bad idea.
Also you assume i dont, with not a single clip of game-play to make that call from…But you do you…
Maybe if your ego deflates a abit, your head will be able to fit out of your cheeks making uninformed assumptions like that.
No video, no stats to back that up, just a opinion with not a shred of evidence to back it.
No it’s not LMAO slingshot in OW1 had a cap of like 10-12m and felt amazingly fun and great to use still and much more fair to play against. Stop inventing rules for game balance that hold 0 logical ground lmfao.
Excuse me, can i have your game development credentials then?
Alot of the forums here are mostly useless since most posts are just ego stroking and assumptions about how people play is wrong without even so much seeing a clip of gameplay.
Your assumptions are part of that