I was a mercy main during the mass rez days and also a mercy main in these… rough times. I have to clarify it because I will always get a message saying “well I didn’t do this” or “I had a friend who didn’t do this”. I am not saying that everything in this thread happened 100% of the time, but it sure was more than 50-60%. With that little intro, let’s begin.
Mass rez was a powerful ult, as what support ults should be. And the reason people complained about mass rez was that a low skill hero had the most powerful support ult in the game. Because of that, players started to complain saying she has a too powerful ult for her kit. But the hate for her ult began to fume even more when pro players would just complain every, single, time, mercy poped a 4-5 man rez. Mass rez could’ve been altered, changed, tweaked, but to completely remove it from the game because it was too powerful? Look at heros like Ash, she literally spawns a new entity in the game that counts as a player and has an aimbot, and can easily farm her ult with dynamite. But I don’t hear people calling for blizzard to remove her ult. Another reason why mass rez got removed because it created a habit for mercy players to just hide and when all their teammates died, they would rez them. This was the case because the DPS players would tell mercy, “go hide go hide”. And then those same players would complain that mercy does this. They weren’t aware that she could use her ult as a tempo rez as most pro mercy players would do. So to sum up what I said, people made mercy use a strat on her ult that they would complain of at the same time when she could use a good viable and successful strat as well that didn’t require hiding.
Mass Rez wasn’t too powerful, and in the modern game would still be fine. There are so many ways to prevent it or counter it that it’s not like it would be every game, every team fight, Mercy miraculously resurrects an entire team.
A lot of DPS and tank ults pretty much instantly wipe out a team, but one ult does the opposite and people lose their minds.
No the simple story with Mercy is her rivalry for main support with Ana. Flashback to 2016, both Ana and Mercy got buffs throughout the year since launch Ana was trash and so was Mercy. End of 2016, triple tank Ana was the meta and they needed to change it so they nerfed Ana at the same time they gave Mercy a buff no one asked for and no one wanted. She gain invulnerability when she used her ult.
Before that change it was fine her ult was easily counterable but after that simple change she became meta and the same nerfs Ana got ruined that hero. Since there were only 2 main healers and Ana was a dumpster fire Mercy became the only viable main healer for an entire year which is why they decided to rework her instead of buffing Ana (which they didn’t do until half-way through the endless Mercy nerf patch notes).
They messed up so bad with Mercy I will always have hate for the dev team for their incompetence with her.
If that were the case, blizzard could’ve easily reverted the buff. But because people were saying mass rez was powerful and not the invulnerability part, it resulted in a time where when you pick mercy, you have to have a main healer with you
I think the devs thought it was boring and saw an opportunity to make it more interesting.
Valkyrie: In Norse mythology, a valkyrie is one of a host of female figures who choose those who may diein battle and those who may live. -Wikipedia
Interesting right? A gradian angel who flies up watching over the battle and choose who to rez and who to leave to die. But sadly it worked too well that it turned into a mess.
I am not saying they would get mad at her for hiding in the game. But mad at the fact that mercy players had to create the habit of hiding to pop off mass rez
Until recently Blizz never reverted anything though literally not a single thing even if they knew it was a bad change they just changed something else to even it out. Before the invulnerability change no one complained about Mercy. They buffed a balanced hero to outperform an over-nerfed one. Ana was so bad all of 2017 she was never played and that entire year dive was basically the only thing played. Ana is straight out weak against dive and Mercy is strong with it. Since Ana saw no play time and Mercy was the only main healer being played (there were only 4 supports at the time) they reworked Mercy. People complained about her ONLY BECAUSE Ana was SO over-nerfed and so bad and you saw a Mercy literally every match.
Everytime I see a thread about it my emotions go all wonky I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. Not because I care about the ult just for what they did to the hero I devoted so much time into.
Mass redirection encouraged mercy to hide and disengage from the team fight (despite being a primary healer) all so she could swoop in and get a 5 man resurrection. This disengaging play style was something the devs wanted to stray away from with mercy
mass resurrection felt bad to play against. All skilful gameplay / ult strategies were all erased and the skilful gameplay in that moment meant nothing because mercy could just undo that hard work. It felt demoralising to play against
Thats the thing, blizzard shape shifted mercy in every way possible that resulted in her being a soon to be 2017 Ana (even with the 55hps buff). I am so sure that if they just removed the invulnerability aspect of it, or hell, add a cast time to it, mass rez would be viable today. But the point of my post was, people just complained about something that made blizzard think, hey its rework time
because its an FPS game at the end of the day, the object of the game is to kill things, and the goal of support is to enable your team to kill them first, not prevent it from happening / undoing it
Mass Rez was removed because it promoted the counter intuitive play style for a healer to hide and let their team die to ultimates only to fly in and rez them after, making all those ultimates wasted.
It was counter intuitive for a healer and not good design overall.
There are literally abilities that just shutdown ults. Genji can simply deflect zarya’s grav with a push of a buttom, or on the ultimate scale, the enemy team could have invested both grave and genji played and zenny boy would pop with and save his entire team with trans
And with this, tempo rez was the way to go, holding onto the ult until I had a 4-5 man rez wasn’t worth it when I could rez 2 now and by the time I would have used my ult to rez those 4-5 people, I would have rezzed two other players.
MR was broken with line of sight and instant gratification. Not to mention the invulnerability while rezzing later added.
I agree MR should have stayed as Mercy’s ult with tweaks to its functionality, Blizzard just hates anything that may oppose their precious OWL and reworked Mercy to be balanced, albeit way less fun than before.
bUt nO OnE aCuTTually hIdE aNd rEzzED. Funny how the devs the people who observe the game say that many players who hiding and rezing as I saw many times in high master/low gm games. Mercy’s would play differently and wouldn’t play with their team in order to make sure they got a rez. This just wasnt a good thing for the game but people say otherwise on this forum. This forum is very biased though.