What about Mercy?

[Agnostika-1802]

All right, here is a statement of several incontrovertible facts about Overbuff data for the previous month.

Mercy is dead last in GM in win rates. She’s far below the average win rate (nearly 4 times the distance of the average character). Her pick rate there hovers under 2%. No other support is even close. The nearest, Moira, is almost 2.5% (or 2 average distances) above her. In Masters, she’s also dead last among all characters, and is about 3 average distances from the tier average. No other support comes close. Her pick rate there is currently around 2.8%. No other support comes close. In diamond, dead last again among all characters. Well below the average win rate, no other support, etc. etc. etc.

Even in the platinum data she’s a bad pick (second words character). In gold she’s bad as well, edging out only Ana (who needs aim to function) and then only by a bit. She’s merely underwhelming and mediocre in silver and bronze.

Now, you can do a few things with this data. The first is, you can doubt the accuracy of Overbuff statistics. You would be wrong to do this though.

On Mercy and data

This post was conceived as a companion piece for evaluating my previous post (A month of Mercy nerf in numbers). Other than that, it’s not really going to be about Mercy (though I use her to work out examples). It’s about everyone’s other favorite subject - math. More specifically, I want to address the question: how much trust should we place in Overbuff statistics? I’ve seen a lot of people claim that Overbuff’s numbers are meaningless due to private profiles (or due to the fact that even bef…

The second thing you can do, is you can imagine that this is all some sort of coincidence. That the steeply dropping pick rates, and the singularly bad win rates are not really indicative of any issue with the character’s viability. You can claim that whether or not people pick a hero, or whether or not people win with a hero are not good ways of telling whether or not a hero is viable. In this case, I’d be interested in hearing what is a good way of telling.

The third thing you can do is that you can claim that Mercy players are bad and should be dropping ranks. This can be shown to be false. For instance in February Mercy players largely switched to Moira (you can see it from the pick rates), and then switched back March-April. Throughout that time, Mercy and Moira’s win rates were about equal. These players that were supposedly being carried by Mercy were finding the same success with Moira. You can’t claim that one is OP without claiming that the other was.