It was Mercy before moth, too. Hide n Rez was a famous meme, but actually doing it threw the match most of the time.
The only time an actual Mercy player “hid” was when they “hid” from enemy ults, aka taking cover like a sane person.
Most of the accusations of Mercy “hiding” came from players who flat-out didn’t notice she was there until she used her ultimate… And then they reasoned that if they didn’t notice her until then, it must have been because she was hiding.
In reality, it was NOT because Mercy was “hiding.” It was because it’s easy for a supposedly ‘harmless healer’ to fade into the background and become psychologically invisible to players who are pre-occupued with dueling enemies and trying not to die.
To be fair on two points:
One, its a bit odd that they made Mercy invulnerable during her ult, with no cast time, so that mass rez could be as safe as it got before the first rework.
Two, and honestly the bigger annoyance, enemy mercy heal beams were never a different color from friendly mercy heal beams. Which makes it a touch more difficult to figure out where she even is in a field of 10-12 players.
The devs originally gave Rez I-frames to address pre-rework Mercy having survivability issues… She didn’t have any advanced movement tech back then (not even her basic slingshot/bunnyhop technique), so Mercy often got stuck at the spot she rezzed without any way to escape.
It was a sledgehammer fix that did as much harm as it did good - They should have just given Mercy her movement tech instead.
As for the beam color issue… I hadn’t considered that before You make a good point.
I played OW since OW1’s closed beta. I play very competitively, as a support in GM. Having said that…‘hide and rez’ was the way to get value on the hero. I am always in disbelief that people try to counter this. The bigger issue at hand is that Mercy’s LOS is so incredabily forgiving (and this persists to this day) that she was still able to provide value to her teamates from hidden positions. Around corners, behind doors, etc. You still see this now. It’s why Mercy has the highest survivability of all the supports, despite her kit not being specifically built for that, like a few other supports (Lucio should have the kit made for this IMO. Kiri and Moira as well. Mercy’s should be average).
But so many parts of Mercy’s kit are busted right now that it’s hard to look at one single part and be scandalized, lol.
But as far as the ‘hide and rez’ being a ‘meme’. It wasn’t. It was the optimal way to provide value on a hero who, at the time of her rework, was not a good hero. Her competitive PR/WR was poor. She was still complained about because she felt cheesy to play against. It wasn’t satisfying. So saying Mercy players were ‘throwing’ for using that isn’t accurate, but also not quite wrong; during a huge portion of her life before her initial rework, picking Mercy in and of itself was considered throwing. And that was still the way to get value out of her. Were there other scenarios? Of course. Different factors? Yep. I wouldn’t say ‘hide and rez’ was the poor players anomaly at all; it was just as common (if not moreso) than say, ‘tempo rezes’. That’s not to say it was better to use; it wasn’t. That’s why her PR/WR was bad. But the gaslighting that Mercy players did not do it as practically a standard practice, and that it was just meme trash players is just untrue, lol.
I’ve also been playing since the game came out, and I know from experience that Mercy throwing fights just to get a big Rez off rarely ever turned out well. It wasn’t that hard to kill an enemy team that isn’t getting any heals, and it was even easier to re-kill them after a mass rez. Dropping an offensive ult on a freshly-rezzed team was like shooting fish in a barrel.
The risk just wasn’t worth it… You were always better off staying with your team and helping them win the teamfight to begin with.
Yup, which makes this dude’s rank claim all the less believable. Mass rezzes (not even hide n Rez, just rezzing 3 or more people) got less viable the higher you climbed, because players knew better than to blow all their ults at once.
It’s always been tempo rezzes that increase in value the higher you climb, because it’s the strongest counterplay against one-shots and staggering strats (for casual readers, that’s when a team deliberately spaces out their kills in order to de-synch the enemy teams’ respawn timers, making it take significantly longer for the enemy to regroup).
I was a GM support player in seasons 4-5. Hide and Rez was not the way to get value on the hero. As Silawatsi has pointed out, and as I have highlighted in the OP, it is a fantastic way to set your team up for failure both before and after the Resurrection.
Mercy being very survivable through mobility has always been one of the core principles of the character. In fact, it’s basically the only core principle that hasn’t changed since launch, other than a forgiving aim requirement. Also, you are mistaken about the effect a tightened LoS requirement for Resurrect would have on Mercy’s survivability. Her survivability would remain the same; Mercy players would just revive fewer people.
Actually, if you were around the forums at the time, she was complained about primarily because she was “overpowered”. Very few people on the forums complained about “Hide and Rez” until just before the rework, after one of Seagull’s streams took off where he complained about it… and it so happens that said game was mainly just Seagull being blind.
Only in GM… and even then, not really. In season 4, basically anything went. It wasn’t until season 5 when Mercy’s viability dropped a bit (due to the Dive meta), and even then, it was still pretty good. 12-14% pickrate overall in competitive play. 16.67% was the highest possible pickrate, for reference. The only rank where her pickrate dropped significantly was GM. There, she was last of the healers, with… 4%. So even in the worst-case, she was still appearing in about 24% of teams (and thus about 42% of games). She wasn’t great, but she was far from a “throw pick”, like she was in season 3 during Triple Tank.
This is incorrect, and it’s trivially easy to show how.
Mercy’s average Resurrections/game in Competitive play pre-rework was about 6. My personal average of 9-ish Resurrections/game put me in the top 5% of Mercy players for that statistic. If Mercy players were hiding for mass-Resurrections as often as they were executing tempo-Resurrections, then the average Mercy player was using Resurrect only twice in a Competitive match.
Having an ult worth farming again would self regulate her entire kit.
‘‘muh damage boost’’ dmg boost gives nearly zero ult charge, having an ult worth farming again will make her heal much more frequently, and damage boost would be greatly punished.
‘‘Her mobility makes her harder to kill!!!’’ healing her team would require moving around constantly, keeping her GA much, much less available for evasion of she wants to have impact.
Of course changing Mercy isnt going to fix the whole deal because 75% of the issue is a bunch of hitscans being overpowered and overtaking the DPS role to the point where not picking Soldier below Masters is throwing.
You make a good point.