The Mercy Rework - Part 1: An Introduction

Depends upon what other changes she received between then and now. If she received no changes (save for the global ultimate charge nerfs that all heroes received), then I’m quite certain she would be in the same boat as Moira right now: Well-designed (and likely able to fulfill her role as a main healer, although that’s hard to tell for certain given the healing and damage creep between then and now), but badly in need of buffs. If, however, the Mercy rework never happened, and Mercy was buffed to keep up with the damage/healing creep (which I will note is not preferable to undoing that damage and healing creep), I think she would be in a very good spot right now. Not to mention her popularity would be even higher, as indicated by the Quickplay pickrates I mentioned in the video.

It is worth noting that the Mercy rework is a large part of what contributed to healing creep. Moth Mercy became the benchmark for a while, and a lot of other healers were buffed in an attempt to close the gap. So while Mercy 1.x would probably be garbage in Overwatch today, things would probably be very different in a timeline where Moth meta never happened.

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LOL WAT

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By this logic, since Widowmaker has a scoped accuracy of 47% on Overbuff compared to Soldier’s 36%, it must be much easier to hit shots on Widow than it is with Soldier, right?

Oh no, wait. It’s because Widow takes much less shots than Soldier does, and saves her shots for when there’s a good chance to get a kill. So evne if Soldier’s shots are “easier”, taking more of them means that each one is more likely to miss, as opposed to a good Widow, who will take far fewer shots but hit more of them by comparison.

LIkewise, Ana’s sleep dart is easier to use than Mercy’s Rez, but it’s also more versatile and more likely to miss. Ana not only uses her Sleep Dart to sleep a Rein standing 2 feet away, but she ALSO uses it to try to save herself from a Tracer/Doom/Genji/etc.

The fact that the ability is easier and more versatile use leads to it being used in more situations where it’s more likely to fail. By comparison, Mercy has to be a lot more careful about when she uses her Rez.

The problem is you aren’t providing “context”. You’re providing straw scenarios which may or may not happen, but are the specific ones that make the two abilities look “similar”.

What does this have to do with the fact that the four things I mentioned MUST be true for this “value” to even exist?

Movement is movement. It is inherent value. It doesn’t matter if it actually results in their teammate doing anything else with it. The movement itself is the value.

If Lucio speed boosts Zarya over the top of the Hollywood buildings so that she can flank the enemy and Grav them, it doesn’t matter if they get read and the enemy D.Va/Sigma eats the grav. The movement was the value. On the other hand, if Mercy damage boosts a Pharah rocket and then that rocket gets eaten, then the damage boost literally did NOTHING. Pharah would have taken the shot whether or not Mercy was there. Mercy’s sole purpose was negated.

No. Again, what you’re doing is not context – it’s pointing SPECIFIC similarities between two things while ignoring the real context that makes those things more different than they are similar.

That is the Loki’s Wager fallacy.

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And yet dart lands as much as rez.

I’m providing context of all supports require a team.

Nice point about Lucio speeding someone and depending on them to get value from speed. That so different from boosting a dps and depending on them to get value.

The musts. Many thing must happen for a Lucio to get value. Affect and value are different thing btw.

And yet, by this logic, Widow lands more shots than Soldier. Therefore, it must be easier.

No, you are IGNORING context to try to push an incorrect “all supports” narrative.

Yes. It is literally night and day different.

Just going to repeat myself here to once again show why you’re wrong.

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That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. Sure sleep dart and every ability and gun in the game are more powerful when used in concert with your team. However if your opponents give you an opportunity to use sleep dart (which doesn’t take much of one) you don’t need your team to be competent to hit an enemy with it.

Who even cares about comp deathmatch? Of course DPS units are better at murder than Support ones. That doesn’t erase the fact that Baptiste and Zenyatta can in fact get kills.

Sure Moira falls off at high ranks, but to be honest that has more to do with Ana than her. However the fact that she can undo a successful Reinhardt charge on her tank in about 2 seconds is much more raw output than Mercy can manage most of the time.

You missed the point. Obviously the supports should support their team. However if their teammates decide to not work with them, their value does not abruptly drop to near zero like Mercy’s does.

She can pocket them, but that assumes they have the awareness to peel for her in return.

Sure, but unless Mercy has managed to get their attention somehow, they won’t waste their time going after her.

And? You aren’t going to win a game with Mercy’s regen.

Here’s the deal. Each Support can potentially deal with different brands of stupid. Zen can deal with bad DPS by picking up their slack. Baptiste can help deal with bad teammates who can’t handle team wipe ults. Ana is great for dealing with teammates who are bad at not getting shot. Moira is pretty good for dealing with it when your team won’t help you deal with flankers. Mercy on the other hand, cannot deal with incompetent allies at all. She simply does not have the raw output to make up for a teammate not pulling their weight.

This is just flat out wrong. Moira, Ana, and Baptiste all can beat that with their primary healing. With their abilities or ultimates, most can eclipse that. Heck, even Brigitte can beat that by stacking Inspire and Repair Pack. Seriously, there’s nothing special about Mercy’s heal beam outside of its reliability.

Why would I compare Baptiste’s DPS to any of the DPS heroes? Obviously they will usually do it better than him with the possible exception of the utility DPS like Mei and Sombra. The entire argument is that Mercy has significantly less agency than most of her fellow supports.

Nice straw man.

None of this is based off me watching a smurf. This is based off of me attempting to get value out of Mercy 2.X. It simply doesn’t work very well. You have to engage in some really weird game play to get value out of her considering she’s supposed to be a main healer. Also… I have in fact posted Mercy reworks. This one is probably my personal most refined one.
Low impact Mercy Rework - General Discussion - Overwatch Forums (blizzard.com)

Here’s the thing. Way too often Mercy Rework posts just get a ton of people trying to claim Mercy’s fine when she’s not. So… now we’re starting from the beginning. Break this false assumption that Mercy is fine first… then we can discuss how exactly to fix her.

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And those things depend upon your teammates carrying their weight in the first place.

Getting value out of Damage Boost depends upon your teammate(s) dealing a respectable amount of damage. If they’re not doing that, the value of Damage Boost is entirely null.

Getting value out of Resurrect depends upon whether or not your dead teammate’s positioning was good in the first place… and… well… The reason bad positioning is considered “bad” and good positioning is considered “good” is that that the former is more likely to end up in your death than the latter. So if someone on your team dies, there’s a good chance their positioning isn’t suitable for Resurrect. In such case, the value of Resurrect is entirely null.

The one grey area here is “saving a teammate”, but in such case, the other main healers (and even the off-healers in some cases) still hold a strong advantage in player agency there. 55 HPS can only hold up against so much. Meanwhile, every other main healer has at the very least the option to “go nuclear” on keeping a teammate alive, at least for the moment. Baptiste has Immortality Field and/or his Amplification Matrix to dish out 156 healing/second (not including Regenerative Burst) or to swiftly kill the enemies attacking the ally he’s trying to save. Ana can deal over 200 healing in under a second with just her Biotic Grenade and a single shot from her rifle (not to mention followup shots dealing more than 100 healing each), and she can potentially Sleep one of the enemies closing in on the ally she’s trying to save. After all of that, she still has Nano-Boost. Moira can temporarily ramp her healing output up to 135 HPS using her Biotic Orb and primary fire, or up to 205 HPS when combining her Biotic Orb with her ultimate.

Off-Supports, on the other hand, often have other ways to save teammates that don’t depend upon raw sustain. Brigitte can directly engage the enemy, which increases the sustain of her ally, sure, but more importantly, it prevents the enemy from finishing the kill. Zenyatta can slap an Orb of Harmony on the ally, but that’s not where his main clutch-save capacity comes from. He can dink the enemy a few times and they’re no longer a threat.

With other supports, you have ways to increase your saving capacity through your own direct actions. You have “nuclear” sustain options that you can use as main healers, and you have alternative methods to protect your teammate as off-supports. Landing a well-timed Biotic Grenade as Ana to save a teammate? That’s player agency. Your own actions led to you having that ability ready right then, you got the projectile arc right, and you timed the grenade right so that it wouldn’t be blocked by the enemy. You’re rewarded with a teammate that is not dead. Mercy, on the other hand… You get 55 HPS. That’s it. No ways to increase their chances of survival through skill expression. Just 55 HPS. Good luck.

Of course those things can happen without me. Put another support in my position and you could get much different results. The results there would actually vary within a given hero based upon the player’s skill, because those supports actually have agency in that regard.

Put a Platinum Mercy in my position, and you have the same saving potential. I’m not exaggerating.

Every support has unique abilities. That’s not relevant. What’s relevant is how much the value of those abilities depend upon the player’s own decisions and skills.

That’s like saying “If you don’t like the policies present in the United States, move to a different country.” I’m not fond of other countries. I prefer where I am now. That doesn’t stop me from learning from the good aspects of those countries and seeking to apply them to the place I actually care about. That’s not entitlement; that’s common sense.

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I feel like I need to jump in because it seems like you’re not comparing the right things together. Agency wise you should look into Ana’s ult and Mercy’s ult they have about as much agency as one another because they function very similarly.

Ana’s ult heals whoever it’s put on, gives them damage boost and gives them damage reduction. With this ult you need a teammate. This teammate to fully use your ult needs to then deal damage. This means that if you ult a rein and he decides to hold his shield your ult was useless (maybe apart from the 250 healing).

Similarly Mercy’s ult gives you team heals and damage although not at the same. You could say that in this context mercy has more agency since she can chose to heal or damage boost compared to Ana who just gives a boost to 1 teammate. But Ana can still use her basic kit while her ult is out. Meanwhile, Mercy’s ult is her kit but boosted.

This is where the problem lies, Mercy’s kit is basically Ana’s ult. All of her abilities (except her blaster) are all attached to her team. Meanwhile Ana’s sleep doesn’t require a teammate to get value out of (a slept enemy can’t do anything). Ana’s anti healing doesn’t require a teammate to get value out of (an enemy that can’t be healed can’t be healed). On the other side Mercy needs a teammate near to use her GA. Mercy needs a teammate near to use her heals (Ana has a MUCH longer range on her heals) Mercy’s Damage boost requires your teammate to do something (but we already talked about this). Mercy’s rez is the only thing where there’s instant value. Even then there’s so much conditions over this that it’s hard to pull off or to know if the value will be there. If the teammate died in their team or in a team fight it would be likely that the rez wouldn’t be used and if it used who knows if there would be value for your team or if the teammate would just give the other team ult charge. Then there’s the whole if your teammate has ult or if your teammate is good deal, but I’ll skip this and assume the matchmaker gives people fair games.

I’m not saying she needs Mass Rez back but I feel like she needs something in her kit that doesn’t require her to have someone near. I think using that blind that we saw in a cutscene (I can’t remember which cutscene but I think it was in the Storm Rising event) could help her since said blind (even if it was tied to when she presses Q) would be instant value and wouldn’t require a teammate.

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not at all

You should know better dude, no convincing this one, they completely will stand adamant on valk no matter what. Remember the 55hps fiasco? Yeaaaaah…

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That’s interesting, I don’t really think her role in the game would have changed at all over time if there hadn’t been a rework and no additional abilities given to her. Eventually she would still have become the “pocket” support. I don’t even see what kind of ability on cooldown would be able to break her out of that role.

It doesn’t seem like there has been any intention to increase her healing to be on par with or better than the likes of Moira, Ana or Bap

It’s possible. Personally I believe, that healing creep was result of resurrects being reduced - suddenly damage turned out too high and other supports had to be improved.

Before rework, pocketing was suboptimal - you wanted to maximise your heals(and possibly boost) to get your ult ASAP. After rework, getting your ult is no longer as important, as it used to be, maximising heals also isn’t valuable anymore, so you end up maximising damage boost, which means pocketing best player.

Keep up the good work my man. Good to see that there are still people out there who refuse to accept this abomination of a rework. I dont even know what kind of rework you are proposing, but i know you for long enough to know, that you are passionate about Mercy being Mercy again and that is enough for me.

Lets hope we can somehow pass this video series to the people in power. With AndyB lurking around, it may actually happen.

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Do it however you want. The point is if you a damage boost someone you increase the chances you’re gonna win the fight coming up this is value simple as. Saying it has no value when it could miss is akin to saying a d6 doesn’t roll high because it could roll a 1.

Except she does. You have a bad dps and good dps you can pocket the good dps. You can choose where to put the support and in any balanced game, you can get value.

Look, in the cases, mercy can’t get any value because you have 4-5 bad teammates you know what zen could do in that situation. Get gold elims and dmg sure… but still lose because no support can correct a bad team but all supports can help the stronger parts of your team.

Yep, 100% a strawman hence why I made it so obvious but I’m using it to illustrate how to argument sounds to me by taking things like zen’s dps, sleep dart or nad and taking them out of context.

As for the rest. Yes, you don’t like how mercy is. These are your expectation of the hero, I can’t argue them but you are saying you want mercy changed because you got youe expectations wrong.

As for “main heal” people use that word to mean different things but if it’s down the amount of healing, mercy is 2nd highest healing, if it’s the competitive definition she is the main heal but also Lucio is.

In balance terms, she is fine, you can play her at all levels of the game. She could use tweaks to make her less dependent on meta but that is an issue for most supports and it could be by intention.

In gameplay terms, you could be right she maybe too boring and not engaging enough. The thing with this, it’s subjective and I personally think her gameplay is fine so do many others. To consider the counterpoint is a false assumption here is trying to argue that someone doesn’t have an opinion. The thing is they do.

It was a reply about context to someone saying sleep dart was easier to land and use than rez. Not about the agency.

Hate to say it but asking for something someone else has without suggesting a fair way to do it is entitlement… My point is in balance terms mercy is fine. As a one-trick experience, it could suck but this isn’t a Mercy v Zen issue cause it’s not a balance thing. It’s a Mercy 3.0 v 2.0 as you have to rework in a balanced way that is more engaging than current mercy without ruining the hero. I do think that is possible but going on and taking stuff out of context ain’t gonna get you anywhere.

That’s not fixing the stupid, that’s ignoring it and hoping it doesn’t sink the team.

You’re assuming that there’s not also 4-5 bad people on the other team as well. Zenyatta can 100% lay the smack down on bad opponents on his own with just using his team as a distraction. If he does it well enough… that may just save the game. Mercy on the other hand, will get pretty much all of the value she brings to the table wasted by her bad teammates, but she’s largely incapable of taking advantage of bad enemies.

I didn’t get my expectations wrong. Mercy used to fulfill my expectations just fine. Then Blizzard botched her rework and she’s been terrible ever since.

Oh you mean total healing given out throughout the entire game. Yeah… that statistic is completely and totally worthless.

It doesn’t matter if you can eventually spit out the most healing. To have impact, healing needs to be able to save teammates from their mistakes.
Low output but reliable healing isn’t gonna cut it. Your tank who just got pinned needs WAY MORE than 55 HP right now. Mercy can’t do that. Ana can do that. Baptiste can do that. Moira can do that. Even Brigitte can do that. Mercy though… nah.

Yes, this is subjective. So?

Every single piece of entertainment created on this planet is created with the sole purpose of satisfying people’s nebulous and subjective need for fun. That includes Overwatch. If a piece of entertainment fails to be fun… it has failed at its one and only purpose for existing. For that reason our subjective complaints are still 100% valid. Because Overwatch has literally no other reason to exist.

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In that case, the teams are even and mercy can have the same impact as much as zen can.

Saying someone saying mercy is fine is a false assumption when it’s subjective is illogical. That’s the point.

No she cannot because she’s bad at having direct impact that isn’t filtered through her team’s skill.

THAT’S HER PROBLEM. She sucks at making a difference on her own. Way too much of what she does is dependent on her team.

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Yep, and without your team Zens dmg and elim potential is useless too.

That said if you have 2 bad teams fighting each other or 2 teams of equal skill and you think she can’t help with healing and dmg boost. I’d just say like before your wrong.

Here’s the thing… I’m not.

If you damage boost somebody who misses every shot they take… congrats, you wasted your time. If you discord somebody and your team misses every shot on them, as long as you manage to hit your shots on them, discord wasn’t wasted. That’s the difference.

Mercy’s value drops to near zero on a bad team. Almost no other support’s does.

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Yea that’s an event being measured after an event vs one that isn’t again. (if zen misses or you get headshot it’s wasted)

If you boost a target, even if bad you’ll increase the chance of winning.

Like with Zen if you discord and shoot a target you’ll increase a chance of winning.

If you have a team so bad you can’t have an impact. No support and fix this and you’re over exaggerating the impact of other supports.