The idea of a ‘pocket healer’ is frankly a myth. Its a concept that just doesn’t work anymore. I mean, name one of Support you’d call a ‘Pocket Healer’. There isn’t one. Ana’s CAN pocket, but she doesn’t have to, she’s a main healer, she can heal everyone at the same time AND fight. And Zen? He’s less of a Support and more of a DPS that also heals. The difference is that Discord Orb actually helps focus your entire team on getting a pick, AND he has Defensive Ultimate. Damage Boost boosts 1 person while Discord potentially boosts your entire team, including your own damage.
Mercy IS the only Support who ONLY supports, everyone else gets to DPS at the same time. In order to make up for that tremendous lack of DPS you either have to make up for it with EXCESSIVE amounts of healing like when she used to be able to be run as a Solo Support, which meant you had an extra Tank or DPS to make up for her lack of damage. But since 2-2-2, that’s just not an option now.
Her only offense is Damage Boost, and what sounds better, 30% boost on a single target against the entire enemy team? Or 30% to your entire team against a single target? There’s 2 reasons Zen gets played in OWL and Mercy doesn’t, Discord and Transcendence. Discord and Trans make Damage Boost and Valk look like cheap knockoffs. Sure Mercy has some insane mobility and better healing, but mobility only matters if your character can be effective in the first place.
And that’s not to say that Zen is OP or needs nerfs or anything, but his design is at least functional.
My opinion, Mercy should be more like Tracer, fragile, high mobility, and bursts of impact. Give her a short range burst heal so she can fly around between her teammates tagging them with bursts of heals like spinning plates. The mobility and beam juggling are the most engaging and rewarding parts of her kit, not idling around while you watch your DPS miss all their shots.
Mercy is supposed to be a triage doctor, she flies into dangerous warzones and heals her allies to get them back into the fight. Instead she lofting around in the air on a leash connected to a Pharah or hiding around a corner.
Pocketing needs to not be a thing anymore, and YES I understand the irony with my name. But Pocket heals just don’t work, and yet its somehow the best and only way to really utilize her kit. You’re not balanced to be a main healer like she should be and you can’t rely on a single DPS to carry your entire team. Mercy is a dead character, like Torb, Sym, and Bastion, their initial designs are just outdated and irrelevant.
I agree with the “pocketing needs to not be a thing anymore” sadly it is atm, and OWL is a whole diffrent beast then Ladder, sure Zen is used in OWL, but that’s because the insane amount of teamwork those teams have
atm playing Mercy as a pocket to a Pharah or Dva etc is the only way to play her and this ruins the balancablity of the pocket target heros haha
also, Sym is actually pretty decent, Torb is actually quite strong atm and Bastion is hot garbage unfortunate
Honestly Sym needs to have her teleported changed to be a mid fight ability if they want her to actually be as viable as others but that’s not what this post was about haha
The problem goes beyond just Mercy though. The changes in experimental are a decent step.
Mercy stopped being a main healer thanks to 2-2-2, damage boost change, her own nerf to 50 HP/s and of course healing creep. More specifically, healing consistency creep and also the addition of burst heals.
Every healer but Zen got their consistency buffed. Not so much for Lucio, Moira and Bap, but considerably so for Moira and specially large consistency increase for Ana and Brig.
Lucio had an increase in his aura range, Moira has more duration on her lingering effect as well as more resource regen. Bap has more ammo, more Ult duration and his Regen Burst CD was buffed.
More importantly, Brig consistency was buffed out the wazoo through armor pack changes, shield nerfs, faster flail, inspire duration and cooldown buffs. She went from a burst healer with low availability to one of the most consistent healers in the game.
Ana also got her ammo increased from 8 to 14, shots through full friendlies, nano heals for 250, nano range increase and nade radius increase. And more recently, shield revamps and less DM.
Meanwhile Mercy remained as consistency was she ever was, which means the relative value of her consistency went down, that aspect of always having heals is almost ubiquitous right now, thus the juggler main healer, always there with a helpful beam, just faded away for burst healers that even though can burst and run out, are still consistent enough that they outvalue pure consistency.
Now many of those things aren’t going to change (I certainly don’t want 2-2-2 to change, I don’t care if Mercy goes in the trash can for it), I was hoping experimental was going to nerf Ana’s ammo down to 12 - keeping her HP/s over consecutive shots but increase the time she spends reloading - meaning same burst potential just less prevalent. Mercy on the other hand, could have used a beam that didn’t break through Res, Valk transformation or melee (with 50 HP/s still). A small nerf to Ana’s consistency with a small buff to Mercy’s consistency, in an attempt to make consistency - not raw HP/s - valuable.
Blizz took the more obvious route and just bridged the instant HP/s gap. I guess we will see how it plays out. I’m scared but also excited, hopefully it works. Wish I could scrim Brig/Mercy dive right about now, armor packed damage boosted Winston sounds scary, be like having 2 beams.
I personally still believe that giving Mercy percentual healing according to the max hp of the target would be the best way to balance her.
60hps for 500-600hp targets
55hps for 400-500hp targets
50hps for 200-400hp targets
This would help Mercy massively keeping big tanks like DVa, Rein, Ball and Hog alive, while at the same time not making a pocketed DPS near unkillable.
This change would demotivate a Mercy just to hardpocket 1 DPS, since that would be literally throwing. It would also really help her to gain the mainhealer role again, as she would actually be able to keep the tanks alive. She would feel a lot less pressure to just heal and would be more free to damageboost whoever she thinks needs it. A small flick to damageboost while you heal Hog for example can help him secure a kill, but with 50hps (live), doing that flick usually results in Hog just dying.
This has floated around: How about a decaying beam? Maybe Lets say 70 to 35 HP/s.
Stay on target for 3 seconds? Yo beam sucks now, go find someone else. Sho! Fly away! Don’t even think of coming back before that beam is decayed on another player!
Mercy has seven abilities; Healing, Damage Boost, Basic attack via LMB, Guardian Angel, Passive Regeneration, Revive and her ultimate Valkyrie. Her kit is loaded up as it is, and adding even more to it would break her.
No target healed by Mercy would even remotely killed or have any danger of being killed by her. It seems you really don’t understand basic hit rates, damage and accuracy, otherwise you wouldn’t be making statements as bad as this.
Again, you don’t seem to understand much about Mercy’s abilities or even comprehend that her damage per second (on average) can potentially be higher than Genji’s, Doomfist’s, Lucio’s, and Wrecking Ball’s. Or that Valkyrie provides a tremendous boost in offensive power in addition to healing power to Mercy for 15 seconds.
How much more powerful do you want Valkyrie to be? 500% more powerful healing, free flight, infinite ammo with no reload, and permanent and constant health regeneration. What else would you like?
You don’t have to heal in Valkyrie, Mercy get a significant upgrade in power, offensively too.
Base-level Guardian Angel has a 30 meter range, that’s larger than most capture points for payload maps. Not to mention the physics abuse you can utilize to gain extra distance or air time.
Salvation already exists in this game, Zenyatta has it, it’s called Transcendence.
This is hugely misleading and simply not true.
This is also not true.
That’s how a player wants to play Mercy, that’s on them, not on Mercy. This again, a false statement.
This is hilariously false. No healing performance has changed in years - well before GOATS - Moira’s healing saw a recent reduction and only her healing over time output was increased just before double barrier.
The exception, of course, was increasing the potency of Inspire and re-tooling Repair Packs for Brigitte. This is hardly an increase in consistency.
Decreased from 30 meters to 10 and then later increased to 12/13.
Not duration, healing output.
All fine-tuning just months after he was released.
Repair Packs became a heal over time and heal less now than they did before, but an increase in charges. Barrier was reduced, flail did see a speed increase. Inspire did not see a duration increase, but a healing output increase. Cooldowns were increased on Shield Bash, and Repair Packs.
All of this - save for Nanoboost - happened before GOATS.
There are two healers that have burst healing; Ana, and Baptiste; all other healers focus on heal over time with high end outputs in some cases. Secondly, the last time Supports had increases in output or consistency led to GOATS and Moth Metas, that changed with the introduction of 2/2/2 (and some earlier tweaks and reductions). Only other changes have largely been towards utility (Lucio’s Crossfade Speed seeing some tweaks), everything else has remained largely the same for years on end with much of the focus towards recent healing output reductions due to a healing and mitigation power creep.
Congratulations, most of the HP targets are right at 55 healing per second. Only two heroes have 600 HP, the rest have 400 with an additional 100 armor.
This is and will always be, bad Mercy play.
Not a good one, and would simply create a problem where Mercy would be picked even less because that decayed healing is too unreliable.
Keep in mind that any changes or suggestions need to factor in player behavior and what players tend to do or will do based on the performance of said changes.
A good example is how many low-skilled or low-ranked Genji players love to jump and spam RMB because it’s faster, even though it’ll take longer to kill an enemy than running around with poorly aimed, but stronger LMB shots.
Or how players play Sombra now, counter to what Blizzard originally intended when Sombra was first released.
Or how Mercy players played when Revive was an ultimate.
Most heroes are 200-250 hp. So it would mostly stay like it is on live. It will only help Mercy keeping tanks alive better, which most of us say is her biggest issue.
Just because pocketing 1 DPS is bad play doesn’t mean current Mercys state doesn’t encourage this playstile. It absolutely does. You simply cannot play Mercy as the main healer, so you usually have Ana or Moira in your team. So with the tanks taken care off, what do you think most Mercy players do? They bluebeam the DPS.
Ofcourse it’s bad Mercy play to just bluebeam 1 DPS, but I literally see it every day done in my matches. Most Mercy mains feel like their help is not needed with the tanks. A lot play with DPS friends, so their logic conclusion is to just pocket friendo.
Best current Mercy play is to keep your DPS and mainhealer alive and damageboost as much as possible across your whole team. If you don’t utilize damageboost, you might as well play Moira.
The timing doesn’t matter if they are in the game now. None of the changes are by themselves super important, but when combined, they paint a picture.
And it is absolutely a lie that healing performance didn’t change. There have been dozens and dozens of consistency buffs, would you like me to list them or the patch notes will suffice?
Lie. Ana increased ammo, nano buffs, shots going through allies and nade radius all increase consistency all make Ana’s healing easier to apply.
Brig went on to be one of the most consistent healers in the game thanks to patch 1.31.0.1 and then her rework. Inspire triggers faster, lasts longer, Armor Pack are consistently available.
Moira had buffs to her lingering effect, it lasts longer and her juice regen increased.
Which makes his effect easier to apply.
Wrong.
1.34.0.1
Biotic Grasp
Heal over time duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds.
Cool. Does that somehow make it not relevant?
I am aware of what the changes were, thank you.
Wrong again.
1.31.0.1
Duration increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds.
Not only its duration was increased, the triggering cooldown was decreased.
Wrong. Repair Pack was always 6 seconds CD. That did not change.
Were they somehow removed from the game and thus aren’t relevant anymore? I guess not.
Moira’s Orb is burst healing as well.
Unless you make it valuable, then she be picked just fine.
If they want hard pocket and get less value out of a decaying beam that’s their problem, bad players will be bad.