So was Resurrect at higher ranks. You know Mercy has Rez. You have an ult advantage. Burst down a couple of her team mates and focus her. She’ll have to choose between dying and using Resurrect. If she chooses Resurrect, your ult advantage is now pretty much set in stone. You use one ult, say, DeadEye, and kill an X number of Mercy’s team mates, possibly including Mercy herself. You again have both a numbers and and ult advantage, just like before Mercy popped Rez. Except, they no longer have Rez as a backup.
Not in my experience. Focus fire alone can bring down a successful Rez, just like you can burst through Valkyrie. When Mercy executes a 4 or 5-man Resurrect, your team has 2.75 seconds to set up for free kills. Widow can line up a headshot in a fraction of that time, McCree could have his Flashbang come off cooldown and line up for an FB+FtH combo, and that’s already two picks, right there. You have a numbers advantage, and the enemy team’s scrambling to get the hell out of dodge.
In general, if you had a numbers advantage prior to the Rez, you should be able to win the engagement ‘reset’ on your own, without the use of an ult.
The higher you get on the ladder, the better people get at managing their ult economy. The better you get at ult economy, the easier it is to counter mass rez.
A Mercy tempo rezzing to keep momentum up used to be a green light for the enemy to start whombo comboing. Just like any other ult, rez could be baited.
Many DPS players got enough gamesense to realize that if their own team was doing awesome and the enemy Mercy wasn’t in LoS, a rez was coming. They lined themselves up accordingly and waited to Press Q to Rewipe.
If you had gamesense that was at minimum on par with the red Mercy, Mass Rez didn’t come out of nowhere. You could predict when it was coming, just like how the Mercy using it could predict when it’s needed most.
Considering that people resurrected where they died moments ago, that leaves the potential for so many people to be out of a decent position as well, so unless your team could be quick to coordinate themselves after a mass rez, they just ended up dying again because of poor positioning upon rez. So I am honestly not sure where you are getting instant win with mass rez from. Tempo rez was often much more reliable.
Edit: I realised I should have responded to the other person and not you but I messed up because I wanted to agree with you and add a point but whoops <3
There’s a big difference between getting a monkey to jump the Zen with equal numbers and roughly equal ult economy and getting rez out after getting a few picks with an ult advantage. Like you should win the latter nearly every single time regardless of rez or if there is a Mercy.
You don’t just simply wipe out the enemy team with no scratches, and if you do, mass rez is unlikely to successfully go off anyway. In most cases, when Mercy gets a 4 or 5 man, you likely have 3-4 people left with some degree of damage and a good amount of abilities on cooldown and partially empty mags. Also you won’t have high burst characters every single time; they might be dead or not picked at all, and you’re not going to oneshot a freshly rezzed tank, yet you are probably one hit for them, and often outnumbered.
A pick would be a green light regardless, and dumping unnecessary ults in would be bad economically either way.
Mass rez is easy to predict, but you won’t always have someone with the right ult in the right position and with a reasonable amount of HP when it goes off. Most of the best ults for this charge much more slowly. So in most instances the entire teamfight comes down to predicting which angle the Mercy will come from and hoping you have available ammo/abilities, and hoping enough shots land in a very tiny window. So in most cases, mass rez excessively raises the stakes, yet is rarely successful, and the reward counterintuitively doesn’t scale with risk. With all this on a character that was overall underpowered and you have solid grounds for a rework… just not the one we actually got.
Ah, but in this case whombo comboing before the enemy Mercy rezzed was a big risk. You don’t want to compromise your ult advantage before the enemy does.
If you bait out an enemy tempo rez, you can then safely use more than one ult to finish the fight (normally a setup ult + a DPS ult, like gravdragons), without risking the red Mercy countering it.
I agree with you there.
Mass Rez itself needed to be reworked (I really love the version Titanium provides in the OP) into more of a midfight ult with preemptive counterplay options.
Without a midfight E ability, Mercy 1.0 was exhaustively ult-dependent. It made any nerf suggestions to mass rez a nerf to Mercy’s entire existence/viability, because there it was/is the only unique thing she brings to the table.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the rework suggested in the OP.
IMO you shouldn’t be using more than one ult anyway unless you’re planning to outult all surviving members of the enemy team.
As for the last point, I got clarification earlier in this thread that there’s no slow but I’d still find it to break the flow of the character, much like a lengthy reload.
I don’t get what you mean by “making breakpoints unpredictable”. I’ve never heard of the term breakpoint. Is it another word for chokepoint?
I really really want to emphasise this next part as much as possible without being crude: you can have an ability have a cast time, but no slowdown. E.g. how any character reloads. Most of them can’t shoot or use abilities during the reload animation, but all of them can move normally without any slowdown. When the reload time is reasonable (aka not obnoxiously long), it blends into the gameplay seamlessly.
Both one of the (very) old versions of mass rez and current rez do a what amounts to a cast time+root effect. Titanium’s rework wants the first, but not the second. Mercy would still need to stay alive until the end of the cast, but she would not be slowed down or hindered in any way, maintaining her fluid, mobile playstyle.
Also: the longest reloads in the game are well over 1 second, with Orisa’s at a whopping 2.25 seconds. The cast time for mass rez proposed in the rework would not be set in stone, and could be shortened if it ends up being too long. For example, it could be set to the same as Lucio’s new sound barrier cast time: 0.8 seconds.
Breakpoints are the point at which a threshold is breached. In this context I mean the number of shots needed for a kill; for example a 5 damage increase to McCree or Ana on their primary fire allows them to two tap a full health Tracer, yet 200hp targets would still require the same amount of hits.
With regard to pacify, I went into more detail further up:
I do think there should be something on E that isn’t rez though.
As for cast time, I have an issue with both the delay between pressing Q and the effect going off, and the delay between pressing Q and being able to use abilities again. I don’t see the cast time being short enough to effectively time the burst heal on squishies and avoid the problems with the old cast time for SB while also being long enough to actually contribute to the balance of the ability and not just be an annoyance.
One of the things I found to really add to the fluidity of 1.0 is that even if you were locked in the animation, once you pressed Q and saw that animation you know the effect went off and could shift your attention to other things. But again, this is probably the least of my concerns.
I think that this would be harder to decide on, if it weren’t for Overwatch already setting a precedent for changing breakpoints: Zenyatta’s discord.
We already have an ability that changes the amount of hits required to kill a character, and is the most noticable when used vs a 150hp character.
Mechanically, Pacify would be an inverse discord. It could even provide a soft-counter to discord, and weaken Zenyatta’s death grip when it comes to being picked in high-level play. The vast majority of heroes would need just one or two extra shots in order to kill someone while Pacified.
At low levels, this wouldn’t make much difference… but it would become progressively more valuable the higher up you go on the ladder. This would fit very well with the ideal of Mercy being very forgiving at low levels (with both positioning and decision making, now with mechanical aim thrown in), and getting higher-risk the higher you climb.
Another way Pacify provides counterplay is how it interacts with burst damage heroes. Heroes with slow, powerful attacks would feel the effects of pacify much more keenly than heroes with faster, weaker styles of attacking. It would open up new ways to play the game.
As for the rez: both the burst heal and the rez effect would occur simultaneously, at the end of the cast.
Requiring more hits to kill a character is very different from requiring less hits to kill a character. On the latter you more or less keep shooting as you normally would and get pleasantly surprised when something dies early. Meanwhile on live, even though the damage reduction has always been 50%, it’s extremely hard to tell if you’re capable of killing a nanoed target.
Having something like that apply to the entire enemy team… well I don’t like using unfun as an argument but for many here I’m sure that holding down left click during valk or otherwise, and hoping for the best because you can’t really do anything better is a familiar unpleasant feeling. It would also be like playing Reaper or Hog on any of the recent patches, and never knowing if a clean shot will instakill or do minimal damage, or playing against a team with the pre nerf 150hp rally armor. IMO the game should always feel deliberate and deterministic; to that end I’d honestly prefer disabling primary fire for a few seconds, at least you know what that does every time.
Fun aside, I’d also be concerned about the balance of the ability:
It would make low RoF characters more vulnerable, but otherwise it does the exact opposite. More burst is required to deal enough damage before someone reacts and heals it up. That’s part of why snipers were so valuable when Mercy was freshly reworked and again when Brigitte was introduced. Also, short range and/or low mobility characters are more likely to get hit by it and also more likely to be unable to wait it out in safety. Many of those characters aren’t doing too well already. And in a worst case scenario, with 33% and rounding down, something like biotic rifle would have the TTK increase by 40%, while Widow would just charge up for a little longer on a headshot.
Looking purely at balance, the game might be able to eventually fit such a mechanic which is why I didn’t mention it earlier, but I’m skeptical of it integrating well into the game while not being useless. We already have a similar problem with Sombra’s hack and previously with shield bash, but going back to the previous point, at least these two have known and obvious effects.
Discord but also Zen healing both show just how important those one or two extra shots are. Those extra seconds mean everything, which tbf if the ability is to not be useless, it needs to be that impactful.
It doesn’t actually counter discord all that much; you can pacify one person but discord is much better than damage boost because it applies to an entire team shooting at a single target; proper focus fire isn’t going to be fazed by someone having 66% output.
The current iteration for pacify also has it listed as a hitscan ability; CC is currently balanced by having short range or being exponentially harder to land at long range, and imo it’s better balanced that way.
I don’t want to complain without leaving actual suggestions, but I really don’t think the game needs any more damage mitigation or CC, and would focus on making an E ability where heals/damage boost/pistol gets stronger, or where the value of switching tactically between these tools or between targets increases, possibly by applying a lingering or multiplicative effect or something.
Okay, so I agree with this post entirely. I main mercy, she isn’t fun anymore, and she’s relatively weak when her rez is down. People say her healing is still strong, but as a main myself, the targets she’s healing can easily get shot down, no matter what she does
Omg the pacify ability concept is beautiful. And you just explained all of the conscerns us mercy mains have. Sadly I don’t think they will read this thread because it’s the Overwatch team. They don’t care about the actual people that play mercy but rather the whiney do 3 year olds that have to have everything their way and have to be able to kill everything they can see. That’s just me being a “salty mercy main” though.
Disabling primary fire sounds extremely powerful… but I actually quite like the sound of it. I’m not sure it would actually make it into the game, just because how hard a certain demographic of players would babyrage.
Even the damage debuff ability proposed has made a few people (ahem. people who don’t think Mercy should be able to interfere with their killing spree) foam at the mouth. I assume that if Pacify did disable primary fire, cooldown abilities would still be usable? Man, you have me in Brainstorming Mode now. How about it firing the same as Ana’s sleep dart, and lasting for 2/3 seconds if it hits?
Yes. I originally suggested that the hitbox should be “symmetra orb sized” in the brainstorming phase, but I had assumed that Pacify was going to be a slow moving projectile attack. At this point, I consider the concept of the ability to be what’s important, and everything else is small details up for debate. Debating about the details is fun! But I get sad when people dismiss the concept, because the they disagree with the proposed details.
CC (at least how I understand it) is any effect that controls the movement of the enemy: boops forcibly move them, and stuns forcibly root them. It controls crowds by taking control away from them.
Debuffs are effects that make an enemy vulnerable without taking away the victim’s control of their character. Antiheal reduces the effectiveness of healing, discord debuffs an enemy’s defense, and hack silences abilities… but the victim can still run around and deal damage.