“It’s better than it was!” is not a good reason to stop trying to balance the support roster.
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Nobody is saying they should stop, naturally.
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Well thought out and written post.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Blizzard changed too much at once with the recent support changes. You can’t just change 5 out of 6 heroes at once and expect to know what was needed and what was overkill. And judging by Ana’s currently rising pickrate to a point where it can almost rival that of Mercy’s post-rework, I feel like it’s safe to say something was overkill.
(Of course I’d love to say that the Mercy nerf was overkill and should be the thing that gets reverted, but we’ve seen that argument before, so I’ll spare you the details)
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I haven’t come up with a detailed reply, but this is my take:
- Support meta is kind of diverse now due to the changes from the patch, but has shrinking towards Ana.
- To prevent a foreseeable Ana dominating situation, action should be taken, particularly for the main healer role.
- If nerfing Ana is undesirable, the devs should either rework Mercy to 3.0, buff/skill-buff Moira, or introduce another main/sub-main healer.
In conclusion, balance patch can shake up the meta, but will eventually become stale again due to the small hero pool. Introducing more supports is the long term solution.
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You’re not wrong about the meta often coming down to supports. The bad news there is that we see supports suffering anytime they want to shake up the Meta. Beyblade was huge so Ana got hit with the nerf hammer and lost speed boost on her ult. Triple Tank was huge so Lucio lost his radius. They tend to try to swing the meta by redistributing power and viability in the support role but it’s such a small pool of characters to start with that one always becomes the ‘best’ pick and create a new meta. Ana was queen. Nerfed. New meta. Lucio is best now. Nerfed. Ok now Mercy is rising up the pick rates. Rework and tons of supplemental nerfs because they never looked back at Lucio and Ana until recently.
The changes lately have just been too heavy handed. They should have left Mercy and buffed the others (as should have been done a year ago before the Mercy rework) and let things settle. I feel like we would have seen more diversity vs another meta altering power shift thats inevitably going to lead to them needing to nerf Ana again due to people complaining or to a massively superior pick rate.
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This thread is super well written with numbers to back it up. Well done! This was a good read 
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i don’t think anything could be worse than having zen and mercy literally every game because mercy was so broken
you know that triple tank actually had nothing to do with the change right
do people forget that lucio use to dominate this game and was in every single game because he was absolutely overpowered with insane heals and a ridiculous radius? even when he got reworked he was still insanely strong, only dropping hard once mercy became meta
There’s very little variance when looking at weekly stats at gold (I linked a relevant post in my OP). But, that’s kind of irrelevant here.
Do you really think a reasonable way to align Mercy and Ana is for them to be essentially identical in Gold, and then progress to the point where Ana is a must pick and Mercy is a throw pick in high ranks? No other heroes are balanced like this. Differential balancing like this never worked in Overwatch, and it shouldn’t. Heroes are supposed to be viable in all ranks. There could be some difference between them, but it’s not supposed to be what we’re seeing now.
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It isn’t possible to make all characters viable in all ranks without changing them in a way that gives them similar skill requirements. Easier characters will always be proportionally better at lower levels, and the inverse for harder characters.
The only reason we didn’t see this scaling effect for Mercy this past year is because she was already a general best pick at the top level. There was no way for anything else (especially anything more difficult) to compete for her slot at any level.
This isn’t really how the balance works for other characters. Almost no one has a high rank problem whose magnitude is even similar to Mercy’s, and no one has a similar relation with their direct competitors. Like I wrote in the post, the distance between her win rate and the average win rate in gm is about 4 times the average distance.
This is not a balanced spot. This is not where one should aim for. It’s fine for her to be worse off than Ana in GM, but it’s not fine to be as far off as she is now. It’s a balancing issue that needs to be fixed. There have been numerous points in the game’s life when the high rank balance was a lot more reasonable.
It’s especially egregious when she’s being pushed out of her intended role in high ranks and when her natural player base strongly dislike the situation she’s in (which wasn’t the case with pre rework Mercy).
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The high pick rate of Ana directly reduces the effectiveness of other main healers because they lack utility in comparison to her, while bionade shuts down their primary strengths.
In my opinion, it’s the anti-healing effect that needs toning down. The healing boost on Ana’s ult is a most welcome edition because her regular healing is already too unreliable at most ranks to begin with (hence her low win rate).
The reason for the lack of diversity right after Baguette’s introduction also wasn’t Baguette herself. It was because double snipers was OP and other than Mercy, most other healers work poorly with and/or against such a setup.
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Brigitte affected it indirectly by curtailing the dive dps that would have countered the double snipers.
If you watched any OWL you’d have seen that neither Genji nor Winston really countered Widowmaker with her crazy grapple cooldown at the top levels.
The Mercy healing nerf along with the grapple nerf is what actually allows Winston to beat Widowmaker setups again and Genji benefits greatly from the nano boosts right now.
Tracer was never a counter to snipers to begin with.
Most characters don’t really have “direct competitors,” because they have unique functions/purposes, but many characters are affected by skill variance in much the same way.
Off the top of my head, Torbjorn, Symmetra, and Pharah are all examples of this. Incidentally, all three are being (or already were) reworked to improve their mastery curves so that they can become viable across a wider range.
On the other end of the spectrum, we also have characters like Tracer, Ana, and Widowmaker, who have generally been garbage at the lower levels, due to simpler characters overshadowing them.
Mercy’s not necessarily in the perfect spot balance-wise, but as long as she remains as highly “accessible” as people seem to want her to be, she will never be equally viable at all ranks.
You can’t “balance” Mercy by tweaking a few numbers. She has a few fundamental issues with her kit that need addressing. She cannot regulate her healing output as other healers can, and the acquisition of her res needs to be linked in with a mechanic that uses skill expression rather than a universal cool down. Until real changes are made, she’ll be fundamentally broken.
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Good stuff.
The tanks feel like they’re in the best place of the three classes, and as of now, the supports in the worst. Why? Because there are only six of them, and yet four of them are OP or UP with the unneeded Brig nerfs coming. Only Zen and Lucio feel like they’re in a good place.
I don’t know about tanks feeling in the best place, with both Roadhog and Hammond being throw picks in most cases D.va and Zarya are the only viable off-tank options.
I’d say the DPS category is flourishing compared to past metas.
None of those characters have the same level of problems as Mercy has. Torb, symmetra, and Pharah don’t get picked much in low ranks either, and had similar win rates there. Pharah is currently suffering, but has historically been very good in top tiers.
Ana is about as good in gold as Mercy. Tracer and Widowmaker still get played and still do some work in lower ranks, but I’ll agree that they’re less oppressive.
But no one’s situation mirrors Mercy in how bad she is at high ranks (especially when compared to the size of her role). Like I said, it’s okay to be overshadowed by Ana in gm, but this degree of overshadowing is excessive. Moira is easier than Mercy and has higher win rates in high ranks. So does Brigitte.
The reward you get for high mechanical skill is high variance. The lower mechanical skill characters have higher expected values, but less variance. Right not, Mercy’s expected values just isn’t holding her up.
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Rein’s the second-highest pick in the game in GM, and Zarya, Winston, and D.Va are fine. Orisa’s getting another buff.
Only Hammond and Roadhog are weak.
That’s not too shabby.
Mercy needs a healthy injection of skill expression in the right places. Mercy is unique in that she doesn’t have an aim requirement, which is absolutely fine! It’s great that we have a hero that doesn’t have to aim at all. The absence of something is a good thing in design, but you then have to implement skill expression in other areas.
There are basically three flavours of skill expression in OW:
You’ve got aiming.
You’ve got mobility.
You’ve got decision making, which covers things like using an ability at the right time.
Mercy has no aiming and very little decision making. The aiming part should be preserved because that’s what defines her as a hero. However, doubling down by giving her very little / no decision making elements is just too much. You end up putting all skill expression onto her mobility. She needs more to her kit than this.
So, another problem with her kit is that she can’t regulate her healing output. So, we’ve identified two problems with her that can both be solved with one stone. For example, if you give her some way to empower her healing, well that’s not only allowed her to regulate healing output but it’s also injected more decision making into her kit, which makes the whole process of playing the hero much more fun.
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