This “huge” amount of data you’re referring to isn’t huge at all. The only real data you can get from playing the game is your own data. Aka, your personal experience.
Why do you think we mostly use Overbuff to gauge how balanced the game is? Because the sample size is big enough for us to generalise to the entire Overwatch playerbase. Meanwhile, you can’t do that with just your personal experience.
Ok, I’ll admit I forgot that I made those two off hand comments. Most of what I’ve said in this thread has nothing to do with balance. That is in fact an accurate statement.
Wasn’t the point of this argument because of forum users that say “But what’s your rank” or "In (insert rank here) people don’t know how to play the game) or “But the game is balanced around the “5%””.
Their point was probably to say look I know how to play the game and the hero I’m in this high rank. If they didn’t include that in their video they’d get asked for their rank in the replies regardless or get ranked shamed if the person wants to assume they’re “hardstuck”.
See (not to be that person because I personally can’t care less about ranks) but when people make arguments like this one they usually get bombarded with “but what rank are you, I bet you’re in gold” and then they proceed to explain how they play the game at their elo.
I’m not saying everyone should just throw their ranks in when they talk balance, but I’m saying that’s why I mainly stay out of the balance discussions most of the time (because it becomes a measuring contest really fast).
Basically this argument is flawed out of the forums context but when you put it in context you can clearly understand why said argument is made.
I’m not saying over buff vs my personal data. I’m saying using both is better than using one. The reason you can’t use over buff to judge the balance of the game is solely because you can’t capture the context in averages.
A basic example is how winrate can get inflated by niche heroes because people switch off or on these heroes when they good/bad.
Another thing is the context of player synergy for example bap Lucio winrate may increase as rein is buffed it doesn’t mean bap is OP.
You really need player experience for this or at least watch a lot of overwatch.
Sorry to burst your bubble Titanium, but I think Mercy is fine at the moment and I think most people would agree with me on that.
If that’s what you’re saying, then this makes no sense:
In your first sentence, you essentially say that both can exist on their own and be valuable (which I pretty much disagree with when it comes to personal experience but whatever) but then you say Overbuff stats need personal experience to be useful.
You can 100% gauge how balanced the game is by looking at Overbuff alone. Especially if you’ve played Overwatch before. It would be a different story if the person in question never played the game whatsoever but they clearly did play it enough to comment on the balance. At that point, who cares if they didn’t play for 2 years?
They still have stats to go by, don’t they?
Well I agree with this but not for the reason you think.
Winrate is an incredibly poor metric to determine balance. As Titanium explains well:
This however does not make Overbuff suddenly useless if you don’t play the game regularly. For instance, when Mercy’s rework was launched you defo didn’t need to play the game to see how OP Mercy was.
You could’ve either just took a glance at her new kit in the patchnotes or you would’ve just went to Overbuff and saw her pickrate skyrocket and stay close to 100% for months.
Yep, I totally don’t care about winrate. If their pickrates were high enough to say they were in META though, I’d argue that either they’re slightly overpowered or other heroes are too underpowered.
To determine the above all I’d do is look at the patch notes.
You don’t need any personal experience to watch gameplay now do you?
I stand by both statements.
“The reason you can’t use over buff to judge the balance of the game is sole that you can’t capture the context in averages.”
and
“I’m not saying over buff vs my personal data. I’m saying using both is better than using one.”
And I’d disagree with…
You can 100% gauge how balanced the game is by looking at Overbuff alone. (I’ll ignore the 100% cause no person can gauge the balance of the game 100%. The proof is how OWL teams have changed metas without patches which could have never been predicted)
As an idea on the whole potentially but as soon as you get to hero balance without understanding the context you can’t tell if a hero is powerful or not (unless they’re broken ofc).
For example, yes a maxed-out pick rate can show a hero is meta but does not show how overpowered/balanced they are because of hero synergy.
The problem here is that you’re assuming that the only way to get the “context” is to play the game and obtain some personal experience to comment on balance. I’m saying you don’t need to do that.
All you do is look at the other heroes with high pickrates and start comparing their kits with one another. Again, this is something you can do without putting hours into the game. Gamesense is one of those few skills that can be improved upon without necessarily playing the game.
To a degree, yes, and that’s part of the damage/healing creep that needs to be toned down if we want to see true diversity in support roles.
Which is a symptom of damage creep. Adjusting heroes to suit the new levels of damage/healing only furthers the damage/healing creep, and should be avoided.
No, we see one consistent healer paired with one inconsistent healer because there are only two supports that have inconsistent healing (Ana and Baptiste), and they fill the same role.
Yes and no. AoE healing works really well for certain compositions (such as brawl), but not nearly as well for others (such as Dive). If Mercy’s single-target healing output was brought closer to the single-target healing outputs of the existing main-healers, she would function as a main healer herself. The spread-out compositions she would fit best in would strongly encourage her to be rapidly switching targets… and if she is supposed to be functioning as a main-healer, failure to do so would be handicapping her team.
It being a necessary component is exactly what would make it better. As a main-healer, it’s her job to keep the entire team alive. She can’t do that if she’s pocketing someone. As an off-healer, it is not her job to keep the entire team alive; it is the other healer’s job. Changing the role she can fulfill changes her optimal application (main-healer vs off-healer in this case), and changing her optimal application changes what the best way to play her is.
That’s not what I said, though, is it?
The former being “Mercy is problematic”.
The contradictions within her kit and her inability to fulfill her intended role are indeed problematic.
I’d hate to rain on your parade but uh…
If it were a competitive game, the game wouldn’t have been changed because of a few people complaining about their PotG Q-press getting denied when someone else pressed Q.
Balance is not the end-all-be-all of whether a character is fine. If it were, then Mercy 1.x would still exist.
I wouldn’t say assuming more I have the opinion. I could see how someone could potentially get an understanding by over buff and watching lots of overwatch gameplay but I still feel even then you lose the context of how difficult things are is to execute and the mental focus needed at the moment. Like for example, on paper bap can weave healing and DPS at the same time but in practise it’s humanly impossible to do that all the time but you could see someone spamming it down a corridor and thinks it’s true.
So I’d still hold the opinion that someone that plays the game will know the issues with the game more than someone that doesn’t. I probably won’t use it as a main counter point and keep in context but if someone brings up experience as part of the context. I will argue that point.
I’m 100% ok if you disagree with that you do not really make any statements of falsehood or extreme one-sided statements. I’d just say fair enough and move on.
With that said if someone wants to call someone’s opinion flawed purely because their experience is on console while they don’t play the game. That is what I’d called a terribly flawed opinion.
And a symptom of sustain creep and damage mitigation creep, which started first when Monke got the bubble buff that resulted in the S4 meta turning into the S5 meta. We both know how good the S4 meta was.
I said value, not heals. This applies to the other roles too, but in the context of supports it means Zen is inconsistent.
Nearly all compositions benefit from double AoE or one AoE and one supp that can reach those that break off from the team. The latter has usually been single target ranged, be it Ana or Zen, and occasionally Brig. Mercy works best when the team is so spread out that there isn’t much of a safe spot, i.e. very hard dive, for which there is no need to have the same throughput that would be needed to sustain a less minmaxed comp.
Overwatch supports have never fit nicely into main/off heal categories other than for the sake of convenience on ladder where it’s useful to guesstimate the amount of heals required. Back when my IRL stack still played in S3-10ish we played double main heals often and cycled the main heal role depending on which supp was needed for non healing purposes. For Mercy, this was pocketing. Closer present day, this has become quite optimal and occasionally mandatory depending on the whims of the meta and the status of Zen. Mercy hasn’t changed much in the regard that what she provides is boost, boost pocketing, pocketing, and E rez but that’s temporally a small part of the match.
Even if she was capable of main heals, this setup would mean that she would differentiate herself from other main heals by being good at pocketing, and doing it reasonably often, unless there are characters like Zen that can’t main heal.
Additionally given the practical constraints of having a short range high mobility single target healer with consistent output, there simply aren’t many comps that would change the fact that mercy is getting picked specifically to pocket (or personal preference but that shouldn’t be a massive factor in balance). So either Mercy needs mechanics that discourage pocketing, or dive and Zen need to be really meta.
With 29 damage for genji very recently. It was a good idea and they acted on a good suggestion we made. A mercy rework that she not only doesn’t need but is a rework, something they said they wouldn’t do until overwatch 2 is not “ignoring the community” its an unnecessary addition that appeals to a group of players that don’t know what’s best for the game
That seems reasonable.
That is what the Mercy players are saying though, how much value they get from their abilities is a lot more out of their hands.
Boost heavily relies on the person you are boosting. You will never do a lot of damage with it, it is there to lower TTK, and just win that tiny window when burst wrecks the enemy.
Their healing is also very much dependent on the person they are healing, and to a VERY large degree on their position, and the enemies position. Your positioning is far less of a thing. A widow shoots your healing target in the head, and it doesn’t matter if you were in the combat or not really. Rez is literally the only answer you have, and people hate it.
Mercy is a “slightly tilt the battlefield” hero, but, like it is a very gentle tilt over a long time (like, many many many games long time) - and I can see how people can say from a balance point of view that is ok, but it really sucks from a player point of view.
Your SR just drifts around with a slight push towards where it should be. The biggest thing you can do as a Mercy player is play conservatively, where you don’t do anything particularly well, but you don’t do, anything horribly, and team up with people who have a much higher SR than you do.
And abuse the fact you have so little direct influence on the game, that acting as a way for them to play against lower ranked players is the biggest influence you are going to have. I’ve done this as a test, and got WAY out of where I should be rank wise doing that.
That the most influence you are likely to have is punking the matchmaker because you have so little impact, is a truely sorry state for a hero.
Like there shouldn’t be a climbing strategy for a hero involving “have no impact one way or the other on the games you play”
It simply doesn’t work in fast-paced game like Overwatch, where all your accumulated “tilts” can be reset just by one misused ult.
This game is ruled by bursts, and Mercy doesn’t have burst even in her ult…
At least it’s working strategy.
Mercy doesn’t need a rework. She needs buffs. If she is focused by even 1 player she gets taken down very fast. All she has to defend herself is to hope someone is close enough to fly to yet far enough away to escape the danger.
She doesn’t even need to get focused in order to win game, that’s how much impact she has.