Being easy to pick up isn’t the problem, it’s being easy to master and play Mercy at her maximum potential that’s an issue.
Classic Mercy hit that sweet spot of being accessible to beginners, but if you wanted to get her maximum possible value… You’d have to master her first. That was surprisingly harder than many might first assume, seeing as Classic Mercy was a poster child for “easy to play hard to master.” She had a lot of hidden depths.
A really neat part of that was that - due to how the counterplay to Old Rez (when it was Mercy’s ult) worked - Mercy’s skill floor actually moved to match the skill environment she was played in:
In a match full of noobs, a newbie Mercy player could get away with fumbling in the dark and making blind guesses on where and when to use her abilities. Clueless enemies wouldn’t recognize Mercy’s mistakes, let alone punish them.
In a game full of experienced and competent players, Mercy was extremely punishing. Her abilities may be mechanically easy to land, but it was also easy to use them at the wrong time or waste it on the wrong person… Which could easily end with enemies taking advantage of Mercy’s blunder, and confirming a kill on a teammate that a faster-thinking Mercy player might have been able to save. As enemy intelligence rose, so did Mercy’s opportunity costs.
The current Mercy doesn’t have that. She doesn’t have real risk or reward to optimizing the value in her kit, unless you want to call “will I die if I stand still for nearly 2 seconds at this location” a challenging judgement call… Which I certainly don’t.
it’s even worse when you consider the fact that it basically is just a judgement call and that’s it. mercy herself has very little say at all over res.
contrary to many other support abilities too e.g.
for shots/los requiring abilities like sleep dart, anti nade, lamp, discord, etc., the user can use the trajectory to bypass shields that block it or they themselves can reposition around the shield, etc.
for statuses like discord, bap window, anti, etc. the user can actually utilise them themselves to get values whether it’s for picks or for extra healing
or the user of such abilities can make more decisions on how it’s used (e.g. whether to use for burst heal or offensively)
etc. but for res? there’s minimal room for skill expression simply because everyone else’s inputs matter much more in the decision than the mercy player’s own input.
and even worse is, damage boost is also like that, and thus, so will valk by definition.
I just want at the very LEAST for Mercy to be able to juggle beam again, probably wont even get that at this point. Not like the devs care about this game anyway
So now that mercy and zen are practically on the chopping block once again, the mob is crying out for the nerfs of the only truly viable and valuable thing Mercy has left, the one thing thata been relatively unchanged since launch (because its balanced), damage boost.
Will Blizzard finally see its time to redo this failure of a rework? Because not only does she not perform her advertized and ONLY role nearly as good as the other main healers, but now the likelyhood of being a braindead-pocket enabler is possibly coming to a close, and she will probably fall from pickrate grace yet again.
What can she offer to players besides her high survivability if pocketing isnt as viable?
Pocketing is the only valuable thing Mercy has left… the clunky 2018 rework and two straight years of nerfs stripping away all other playstyles made sure of that.
The devs have already stealth nerfed DB several times by making it inconsistent at generating ult charge, and gutting Mercy’s control over what she can boost.
If the devs give in to the whiners and “officially” nerf Mercy’s damage boost, it’ll be officially over for her. Mercy would join Symmetra and Bastion in the “trashed characters that will never see the light of day ever again” bin.
This is still one of my favourite threads of all time and probably the best way to actually make Mercy feel fun to play again all while increasing her skill level without it harming the skill floor so I’m bumping again lol. I’m still really surprised this hasn’t caught the devs attention and honestly am really hoping someone from the dev team reads this thread and we can try something on experimental, I just can’t express how much I love these ideas
that pacify idea is pretty cool and i wager blizzard will use that on some upcoming hero. if they read this they are probably thinking which new hero they could create/design around it. im sure its an ability used in some other shooter hero game? i dont play shooter hero games much only overwatch and i tried paladins for an hour never learned all the abilities of every hero
The mercy zen chopping block definitely has me bitter about the balancing approach. And it’s also very…sad to me that mercy has fallen so far in popularity.
It’s a video game. I really feel like people who genuinely liked mercy have been pushed out. Because none of the posts about her are written with a passion or zest for her.
It feels like the old baptiste threads. There were like 2 of us who liked him and otherwise the only time mentioned was like, qol buffs. If people talk about him, it’s because they want him gutted and no one likes him enough to give input to what is or isn’t a fun thing.
Checked.
