If they added a cast time like the current rez on E the ultimate would’ve been far worse than Valk is.
Maybe not cast time, or maybe quicker than the current rez one. Idk, I think they could’ve tried to tweak mass rez a few times before completely removing it from the game. I wish we could’ve tried a few different concepts.
I think it was a pretty polarizing ability that would be tough to balance which is why they removed it.
However, I get your sentiment – I wish they would’ve tried some more concepts on LFG before enforcing 2-2-2 role queue. Now the upcoming solution is just to have two separate queues which is not the ideal solution to me either.
Totally different topic, but I do feel Blizzard is notorious for reacting slow then making huge changes instead of trying quick and smaller iterations as a general rule of thumb.
Experimental is supposed to be an answer for that, but so far I feel it’s been pretty so-so. I am sure COVID and working constraints might be a part of that. Who knows.
Totally different topic, but I do feel Blizzard is notorious for reacting slow then making huge changes instead of trying quick and smaller iterations as a general rule of thumb.
I actually thought the PTR was for that. Lots of different things and whatnot. But it seems like whatever changes they put on there, they almost all go live. I found that kinda weird.
I do agree that they are pretty slow though. I wish there was more open communication…I’d be ok with slowness if at least they’d update us on Twitter or something on ideas or changes they were thinking of trying out (as “crazy” as they may be).
Nah, the PTR has always been more for catching any outstanding bugs. They’ll once in a while make some number changes there but anything they put on PTR is pretty locked in if it doesn’t break the game.
The only other benefit of Experimental is that PTR was PC exclusive, where as Experimental card lets console players try out stuff too.
Well, maybe if I describe how pinball worked, you would get where I was coming from. It was a HELL of a ride when you got it working.
So, here is what pinballing looked like from her players point of view.
You would need to know, the next 2 healing targets you were after, so there was a massive amount of lookahead required.
You would GA to your target, and slap your beam on them, the moment they came into range, you would then look at your next target, and work out which target was after that, make sure there was an LOS to it from the next target, and as you got to your current target, you would jump to the next one, leaving the connection to your last one, filling them up with the last of the healing, because, unlimited range on the beam post connect.
while you are in flight, make sure there is a jump point out, make sure you can get to who needs healing, make sure the landing after the next jump will be safe, attach as you hit range, GA, make sure you still have two targets ahead, and that you don’t need to change your target stack, and go.
It was a super fast flowing style of play. You had a massive amount of pre planning which you were doing on the fly (kinda literally) but, the lack of stops in the play, let you get into a flow state.
It was VERY much like those crazy shopkeeper games, where it just stacked more and more tasks on you, and you basically just have to read what is needed like 3 steps ahead, and your like juggling priorities, and a changing field you were working in.
But it only works, IF you can get into that state of flow, because you are doing crazy amount of preplan, and focus on your task.
What you CAN’T have is any pauses, or massive mode switches, or your preplan stack just kinda fails, and the whole thing grinds to a halt.
Ok, so what did the rework do? Well, it reduced your healing so you HAD to pause at each step, because you didn’t quite have the output to heal someone at a stop, which kinda ends it right there.
You ALSO ended up with this massive mode switch the moment you valked.
So, pinball mercy was effectively killed, and when the Mercy players were all “this has killed the flow in her kit” that is what they were talking about. That flow playstyle had a bullet put in it.
Pauses added in healing, in using your e, a mode switch in Valk. It just ruined her play style.
And, you can see it in the pre rework pick rates for her, and post rework pick rates for her.
You had times when she was VERY much the weaker support, but, people loved that style so much, she was still heavily picked. post rework when everything settled down her pick rate basically 1/2ed.
And to this day Blizzard STILL doesn’t know why.
They made the perfect flow state hero, and then wrecked her, not by removing her ult, but by putting in the new one.
Mass rez COULD have gone without a problem, putting in single target rez would have easily worked, especially if it was instant, since you could just add it to the mental stack.
The extra power could have speed up her kit, making it work EVEN better, but they went a completely different way, and like that, my favorite hero in the game was gone.
Instant single target rez would have been so VERY much better for her as an ult. It would have enhanced what made her good.
Mercy getting ult and then hiding was really bad design, one they didnt quite foresee when they made the ability. It turned the optimum mercy play into the anti-thesis of what blizzard was trying to do with OW.
Because theres a big difference between “killing multiple enemies” and “reviving multiple team mates”.
For a LOT of reasons.
Its important to keep in mind the sheer number of ways we have in overwatch to contest damage sources.
You can block things with reins shield, orisas shield, winstons shield, sigmas shield, block them with bubbles from zarya, eat them with defense matrix.
Dont have any of those at your disposal?
We have heroes who can blink lunge dash teleport recall through time phase from existence melt into an incorporeal form entomb themselves in immortal ice jet pack jet boost, bounce off mines turn super saiyan become immovable or huff gasoline while taking half damage
We have heroes who can build physical obstructions and block off ults.
Amongst many other ways.
Now flip this back to mercy pressing Q
How many of these options did anything?
Oh no, mercy is about to mass rez!
Ill… Recall? Nope. Wraith form? Nuh uh. I know
Mei, use ice block!
Oh, it still went off.
There are a plethora of ways to deal with damage in this game- On a personal level through mitigation or evasion, as well as on a team based protective level. With really none of these doing anything to block the interaction of a resurrection.
Your options for mas rez were “Kill her before she hits Q”, or- and more realistically-
Staggering and limiting her capacity to resurrect team meats. Killing 1-2 team mates, then hard-focusing mercy- Forcing her to rez 1-2 at the most, and then killing the rest of her team.
We just dont have good ways to interact with an ability like that, in regards to the potential power it can pull out.
Its one thing to secure multiple eliminations in this game due to the context of how it works because of the abilities and interactions at our disposal.
its good to prevent those eliminations.
Its another entirely to undo those eliminations, especially in light of what you need to do to get them / what you can do to prevent them in the first place.
Mass rez, no matter how “balanced” you got it- just wasnt good for the game. Theye tried it in multiple iterations. I personally do not miss it.
You’d be surprised. There were a lot of players who had convinced themselves that hide-and-rez was just this broken overpowered strategy, so they hated it, but they’d also scream at their Mercy if they didn’t hide.
Kind of like how, after the rework, everyone hated the Moth, but would report you for throwing if you didn’t pick her.
Id argue theres a bit of a distinction here.
Players hated that mercy was necessary.
At the same time players are playing to win- So they mate hate that you were at a huge disadvantage without her- But if youre playing to win, youd probably want/need that advantage because you can be sure if you didnt your team mates would be.
I’m saying that’s basically what happened with mass rez.
There were people dumb enough to think that hiding was the strongest way to play Mercy, so, even though they didn’t like the strat, they insisted that you use it.
No but other options did.
Flashbang, Charge, Shatter, Blizzard, Noon, Hack, Emp, Mei wall, Junkrat trap, D’va bomb, Tire, just shooting her (yes, it is hard when she is GAing, which is why it wasn’t great)
Like, it had a fair amount of counters. but they were different counter from other ults.
You couldn’t iceblock it to stop her, sure, but you could wall her out during her GA.
ANY kind of stun just ended her. Any kind of ult which covered the field as people were rezed ended the fight as well, people were able to be hurt BEFORE they could act, so, things like Blizzard / D’va bomb / Shatter just lead to a second team wipe with no defense.
Like, I don’t like Mass rez, (I DO like it more than valk though), but to say it didn’t have actual ability counters is 100% wrong.
Now if only Valkryie was interesting instead of auto mode like trash mobile games.
Before becoming a die-hard Junkrat main, I was a flex player back in 2016-early 2017 and my most played support was Mercy (40 to 50 hours). I entirely stopped playing her after the rework (I was already onetricking Rat at this point and stopped swapping to tanks or healers – besides, after the rework in every single game there was already at least 1 Mercy main on my team).
As much as I think that she was overnerfed too much after the rework – the rework itself was for good. Supports are supposed to prevent their teammates from dying by healing them or using abilities that prevent dying (like immortality field). Not to leave the teamfight, hide and let them all die in order to rez them. It was bad and counter-intuitive for the gameplay.
Though i agree that SOME of her nerfs after the rework were unjustified (particularly the hp/s nerf) because Blizzard balances mostly for OWL (their main source of income for this game) and pros whined that it is healthier for the game to have Ana as the best main healer than Mercy (why not have both? same applied to dps and tanks – every hero should be viable regardless if someone thinks they are “cancerous”).
I swear, the game would have been so much better if they didn’t start with that e-sport thing. Initially it was designed as a casual game, heck, there was even no competitive mode for a first couple weeks after the release (developers only added it because players were almost begging for it).
And now we have to deal with double standards when “high skilled” heroes in all 3 categories are allowed to be overpowered while “low skilled” ones are nerfed to the ground because “muh esports game should be high skill-high reward low skill-low reward”. I have quite high skill: otherwise I wouldn’t be in master (so you don’t say I’m angry and want to only play easy heroes) but I did not initially came for the e-sports – I bought the game because i liked the aesthetic and then got addicted to it.
I’d say less they did and more that they could
Many of these things I’d strongly argue didnt reliably stop or prevent mass rez.
I mean how often did you actually see rein charge a ulting mercy?
Mercy wasn’t sitting there going “I could use rez, but man I think mei has ice wall off cooldown!”
Even at a high and pro level of play-
The response wasn’t typically stopping mass rez from going off.
It was mitigating her capacity to use it on a large number of targets.
Again it’s the reliability of these measures.
You CAN shut down a nano blading genji with a sleep dart
But I don’t think people look at sleep dart as a realistic and reliable counter measure.
Many of them just team wiped a second time, with no counter. They 100% did work.
Of course not, they would go for the rez, and fail.
Oh yeah, I forgot you could use that on her as well 
The issue was the LOS rules on it. If you COULD block it with Barrier then it would have been a very different story.
A slight change, and it stops being cancer. But we got valk instead, which is just horrible.
I’d love to see the statistics on how often a mass rez was team wiped a second time.
Again- did it happen?
Absolutely.
Consistently?
Not really. It was more of a “wow that happened” and not a “better wait because they could just wipe us up again… a second time”
And that honestly falls back onto why I think mass rez was bad.
Having to wipe a team again? Players are understandably not going to enjoy that.
I was a Mei main, Blizzard was not ONLY the perfect response, but it let our team charge their ults off the attempt to rez.
Rez was literally worse than useless if blizzard was on hand, because all it did was charge our ults, like, by a lot.
I saw a LOT of D’va bomb counting going on as well, because, what could they do to stop it?
It wasn’t as if you had a hard time placing it.
What I would have liked to see would have been the stats on hide and rez in the first place, because I don’t think it happened that much itself.
Being wiped in the first place would not have been much fun honestly as well.
Who enjoyed being Nano bladed?
Who enjoyed being Emp / D’va bombed?
Who enjoyed Grav / Dragon?
Ult spam was cheap as hell.
Yeah, seeing your hard work being undone was not a lot of fun, but, Mercy mains got to see people being one shot all the time. Which for her, LITERALLY didn’t have any counter play in her regular kit (still doesn’t!).
Making the argument that it was disheartening isn’t a great argument, because it was the counter to a bunch of stuff which was at least as bad.
Unless you are using “literally” to mean “figuratively”, you may want to read the patch notes.
nope they are using it correctly… as much as you may hate it
Literally (informal) - used for emphasis while not being literally true. (Oxford)
I know I hate it!
Ahh, for when people could care less about words with contrasting meanings retaining those contrasting meanings and thus having reasons to exist.
…By which I of course mean “couldn’t care less.”