Why is Mercy considered 'Low Healing?'

-55 HPS
-constant
-able to switch targets at a moment’s notice
-scarcely an aim requirement
-prioritizes most injured player in LoS
-can heal through barriers
[vs]
-70 HPS
-requires aim
-can’t shoot through other injured team members if you need to prioritize
-can’t shoot through enemy barriers (e.i. Winston/zarya bubble, D.Va Matrix, Rein/Brig shield, etc)
-^ goes for her nano grenade too
-AND you have to reload.

Let’s also mention Mercy has unmatched mobility. Sure Ana can fight, Mercy doesn’t need to, and any health she recovered from her own damage turns into ult charge (I could be wrong).

So why are people like ‘PFFFFF MERCY NO ENUFF HEAL’ when she has every advantage to give a player with good game smarts the healing they need?

Situational. If a junk hits a fat mine in all of your 200 Hp heroes an ana Nade is Way more valuable than a single mercy beam. Anti heal is also Immensely powerful especially with less barriers in ow2 Nano nade is OP as it can disable supports completely ina team fight.

On the other hand Mercy is Good at pocketing have a rein for example rush the team and kill their dps and the team fight is won.
Both have ups and downs, Baptiste, Ana, Moira all have Splash heal that “instantly” heals several players. while Mercy. Zen and Brig have Single focused heals. which are useful for pocketing etc
so if a Team member is Saying “Nott enuf heal” It prob meant That several 200hp Heros were low at the same time Being unfavorable to Mercy or that dude is Dumb

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Well that’s where the 2nd healer comes in. The only other options for that kind of thing is Bap/Moira/Ana (only her nade)/and preferrably Lucio considering he has that same trait of being able to heal through barriers.

Also Ana has such a forgiving aim requirement when scoped in for healing. It’s really not a massive difference, unless the player is beyond bad at the game.

Biggest difference between mercy and Ana at the median skill levels is mercy’s far better mobility allowing her to survive dives that would crush Ana in less organized play.

At higher skill tiers, Ana’s utility is just too damn good to forego, and players have far better unscopes accuracy and ability to hit skill shots with sleep dart … or make plays. Mercy has a lower skill ceiling than Ana. That’s the difference that kicks in as you move up the skill tiers.

Mercy was really strong for a while, but a ton of her strength in those metas was concentrated in her ability to delete picks with resurrects.

A character that can rez a full team or ult and quick rez two players is a must pick de facto. Nothing could compete with that.

A lot of Mercy’s “healing” is not actually in HP restoration. It’s bringing back players from the dead.

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I think the issue here is that you’re comparing two different roles. Ana is a flex support and Mercy a main support. In comps you tend to have a flex support whose value is somewhat strongly tied to healing basically what many people call a “main healer” or in the case of Zen “swap we need more heals”. Main support is much less of a healer and more of a support in that their value mostly comes from damage/speed boost, protection or something similar.

Mercy just isn’t that great of a “healer” because when she heals which mind you is slow healing, she can’t do anything else. Ana has nades and sleep, bap has lamp and his aoe thingy and his gun. Moira is a little weird but you get the picture. All of these heroes have something Mercy doesn’t which is high burst heals or just stacking ways of healing. Basically if you want to heal a lot. You’re better off going someone else. Another problem is that very very often having your beam on your main tank means you’re at a very high risk of dying. This means the heals your main tank can get goes even lower.

If you have 2 of these main healers usually they simply don’t synergize well because they for a big part do the same thing which leads to shared ult charge and similar gaps in kits. This is why in a main/off support combo, Mercy shouldn’t focus on healing and that way try to be a “main healer” since it very often hurts the other support more than it benefits the Mercy.

Mercy does do amazing at 1 thing though that no other support can rival. That is enabling off angles. Through a combination of damage boost and amazing single target sustain with heals and a ress. Her mobility allows her to do this while also having the capability to peel for the other support and dps if that is needed.

Honestly the problem is often people don’t have the game sense to recognise their limits and something like getting a health pack doesn’t cross their mind. I think giving a team a Mercy combined with any other support should be enough heals if they just use natural cover and play heroes that are even a little self sufficient. Again though people won’t realise this and just ask for more heals.

My advise for cases like this though is that if you’re trying to keep someone alive by healing then and they still keep dying, Mercy and whatever probably isn’t enough heals. If not, it’s usually just big positioning mistakes leading to inevitable death which then leads to having to blame something that isn’t them. Often they convince themselves they’d have lived if there was more heals.

3 Likes

The issue is often people aren’t getting heals because mercy is busy hard pocketing tanks, because the other healer often is not a high suatain support. Zen, Lucio, etc. They can output decent healing, but there are no burst heals, so mercy is stuck leeching tanks to keep them up.

This leaves other members on the teams exploitable and its hard to duel opposing dps if, for example, they have a mercy pocketing an ashe with an ana pumping out heals on the tank and your ashe has nothing and the mercy/zen are both working overtime just to keep the tanks alive.

In that situation, an ana or moira can be better to enable your DPS to more aggressively challenge angles and whatnot… But, there is also the mentality that DPS asking a mercy for heals is equivalent to asking for a hard pocket, which triggers a lot of people.

I will often swap before i bother to say anything, but sometimes there is a massive sustain diff that the support needs to address with their hero picks.

This is also an issue with pharmercy. Supports think just picking a hitscan means you should be able to stank there and pump out shots to kill a pharah with impunity. No support required, even though the pharah can spam from fallout distance and doesn’t even need direct hits to pepper you with consistent boosted damage.

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the honest answer is that she doesnt have burst and brig out sustains her. essentially, mercy is best used as a pocket bot because in literally any other playstyle, there are better options. hell, id even argue that outside of phara, discord is better than her damage boost so even the pocket bot argument falls short.

she’s mediocre at best.

mercy cant fight. its not that she doesnt need to, its that she cant.
ana doesnt have to fight, she can play so far back that the enemy would have to waste signifact resources to get to her, but if they do get to her, she can fight. or she can fight from range.
its a horrible comparison and the way you worded it tries to mask what is actually happening.

the healing they need is the healing that keeps them alive in a bad situation. by the logic of your viewpoint, soldier has all the healing a team could need as long as they don’t take damage.

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She’s not low healing. But she lacks any burst healing so will struggle to have much effect if your target is being focused. Would be cool to have an ability where the healing or dmg boost is charged up for a few seconds on a single target. Will never happen though as Blizz hates all mercy players.

She doesn’t have burst or aoe healing. With Ana/Bap you have burst, and with Moira you can throw out an orb and spray a group and healing everyone at once rather than having to beam them one at a time (and Nade/Baps heal boost also works on a group). So yeah… her heals are reliable since they go through barriers, but not great in clutch situations or if you have a lot of people that need heals at once.

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It’s mostly due to aoe heals i think, mercy is a pocket healer while “main” healers can heal multiple people at once. Ana might be single, but offers nade.

Baptise has 50hps (i think)
But can heal multiple people at once and has has his E for more heals.

Main healers are to focus mainly on “heals” (they are supports btw) focus on healing

Off healers give big utility.
Speed boost
Discord
Dmg boost
Rez
Whip shot
Bash

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