Why Mercy mains are disapointed by the recent buffs

Hello everybody ! :wave:

As we finally got something new about Mercy, I wanted to take a step back, try to sum up the Mercy rework and express all the problems I have with the current Mercy.


Why did Mercy got reworked ?

This, to me, is the most important part.
Why did the developers decided to change Mercy in the first place ?



0:41 “Why are we changing Mercy in the first place ?”

1:33 “We think it’s wrong to tell a main healing character to go off an hide somewhere”

2:02 “It’s pretty disheartening to have Mercy just erase that moment with a full team rez”

So according to Jeff, there were two reasons for this rework.


Hide n rez

This one is the most commun misconception about Mercy’s old ultimate.

While hide and rez did exist, the problem is that it is often communicated or remembered as something that happened every game, and every fight which is blatlantly not true. It is most of the time implied that this strategy was impossible to deal with, and that it would instantly grant the Mercy player the win.

The strategy consisted of …do I really need to explain ?

It was just Mercy waiting for her team to lose the fight and die only to resurrect as many people as possible. The goal was never to win the fight, and it was extremely unlikely to win any fight.

It was a very predictable strategy as you knew the enemy would be doing it the moment you realised you were fighting only 5 people because Mercy was missing. And this is where most people would make a mistake.

As Mercy is hiding, she isn’t healing her team which means her team is fighting without her main healer. Without her 60hps. In this scenario you shouldn’t need any ultimates to win the fight. If you’ve played any ranked match where one player quits (which I don’t wish to happen to you) you should probably know how easy it is to take a point against a team that has a constant one man disadvantage. No ult is needed unless to counter the opposition’s ults.

Then Mercy flies in and does her big Resurrect, and you now have 2.25s to prepare to unleash the ults you kept (and charged by killing 5 people) and setup an instant teamwipe.

Hide n rez did exist, however all it took to counter it was some game awareness.

Let’s also remember that people who were using and abusing this strategy were doing so for one single reason. SR. They were selfish enough to willingly let their team lose every fight, and therefore every game in order to maximise their sr gains. These players had about 30% winrate but would still climb because of how sr was distributed.

As the strategy would most of the time result in a loss for the Mercy pulling it, it was strongly discouraged by the game, just like waiting in the spawn room the entire game would be likely to result in a loss, and discourage you to do so the next game.

If there wasn’t any reward for the player to play this way, hide n rez would have simply died. But there was. Unfortunately.

People were gaining so much sr with it that it was worth abusing it to climb the ladder.

And what did Blizzard do to fix this ?

They reworked Mercy.


Disheartening to play against

So apparently the ability was considered “disheartening to play against”.
That’s a laughably terrible reason to rework a hero.

Mass Rez is often seen as “unfun to face” or even “unhealthy” because it was able to counter ultimates. Which is literally the point of a support ultimate: limiting the value of the enemy’s resources therefore forcing them to spend more.

The actual reason behind this belief is a psychologic bias that everyone should be aware of known as loss aversion.
If I give someone $1 000 only to take it back later, chances are this person is going to be upset or at least confused.
But that’s not a reason to get rid of the ability. Others support ults could do exactly the same as Mass Rez (or even better). The only difference being that I never give you the $1 000, while the result remains unchanged.

Of course the enemy team being resurrected can be disheartening because that means they can get value from it, but it is just as disheartening as having the enemy team buffed with insane healing or shields. Not to mention they can still fight when healed/shielded while they are immobile and unable to act when resurrected.

If you don’t want to face a support’s ultimate, just make sure to kill him before he can use it. If not, then be prepared to have to spend more resources to outdamage said ultimate.

It is not fair to claim Mass Rez to be “disheartening” while not even blinking an eye to the literal aimbots and wallhacks that the game have.

Mass Rez could have been tweaked. Removing the ability isn’t fixing any problem. That’s called giving up.


What are the issues about current Mercy ?

This has already been covered countless times.
If you haven’t yet, I would suggest you to take a look at Titanium’s post, it’s really worth reading.

Overall, Mercy has become the most disheartening character to play as, with and against. Securing an important pick only to have it resurrected is not fun, and neither is having to activate your statue mode to correct an ally’s mistake.

Resurrect

The new core concept of Resurrect being single target encourages a very counterintuitive playstyle. Having to wait 1.75s to use a hero’s signature ability is not fun, goes against the concept of a mobile, dynamic support, and prevents Mercy from doing her job as a healer.
Resurrect went from a powerful, iconic ultimate to a bland, unfun self punishing ability. It’s no longer an impressive play that requires a good amount of game awareness and thought process to pull of, it’s a death wish.

Valkyrie

It was supposed to incentivise a more engaged gameplay, yet it does the opposite. I learnt how to juggle beams and prioritise my targets, so why does it grant me chained beams ? I learnt how to use GA to avoid dangers and survive during a fight, but why bother when I can just press space bar and fly away ? I learnt how to play Mercy, so why does my character turn into a spectator camera ? I was promised an impactful and engaging ultimate. Valkyrie is none of that.


Why is this buff actually not a buff ?

While this buff is technically a buff, it is in fact a partial revert to a previous state. A previous state where we were already unhappy with.

We didn’t like the reworked Mercy with 60hps. There’s no way we will like Mercy with 50hps except during Valk.

We don’t care about Mercy’s viability. All we’re asking for is a fun Mercy.
This has been said countless times in the megathreads since the begining of the rework. How is it possible to never acknowledge this despite “reading the forums daily” ?



For those of you who are still reading, get ready for some memes… in a video ! Hope you’ll enjoy it !


Note: this video is not meant to be inflamatory. It is nothing more than a parody that is, by essence, supposed to be humorous. It is by no way a rant or a form of communication of any feedback, criticism or thoughts related to Overwatch. I guess I shouldn’t have to explain this but I wanted to be clear about it.

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I’m happy that Mercy got a couple buffs instead of being ignored like other heroes looks at Bastion for a couple years.

I understand your frustration, but things could be a lot worse, imo.

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Nice detailed thread you made here Arcalias. Good job! :smiley:

Edit:

Just leaving this here.

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Very well written post, and that video is 10/10. xD

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This is my main issue.

If the whole point of picking Mercy is to be a mobile healer, why is the only reason that we really pick her slowing her down and making it awful to play as her? I think the team are still in denial about where Mercy’s true power is if they think Rez in its current state is somehow “perfectly balanced”

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Do we need a 746th post about it today?

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Do we need 746th complaint about that kind of post today ?

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Wow, it’s almost like people complain about the forums being flooded by the exact same post over and over and over, but worded slightly differently. Especially when it could all go into Titanium’s or Aria’s thread.

They literally might as well make Mercy her own forum section. The rest of us are really over hearing the exact same thing, and we’d like to see more topics than 80% Mercy on the General Discussion.

Like, we get it, Mercy mains aren’t happy with the changes. But we got it the first time. And the second. And the third… it just gets old seeing the same post reworded and then remaining at the top of the page next to another reworded post. And then the entire front page is “Mercy.”

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Aren’t you also part of the “problem” though? By complaining, you’re bumping these threads and making more people see them - these people could comment and like and a bump train then follows.

For example, I would not have made it back to this thread if you had not complained.

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We also understand your frustration with seeing these similar posts over and over again, don’t you think we get fed up making them over and over again? While the vast majority of the forum users may understand that we aren’t happy these changes, the dev team obviously does not so we have to keep making these, we have to let our voice be heard and not be forgotten about. You’ll stop seeing Mercy posts all over the forums as soon as we stop having this major issue with her or until we are completely silenced, which I hope it doesn’t come to.

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Well, Mercy needed changes after this 60hps version because she was OP.
Instead of pitching design ideas devs wouldn’t outright reject, we just got spammed with multi-rez ideas.

Mercy needed changes after this 50hps version because she was UP.
Instead of pitching design ideas devs wouldn’t outright reject, we just got spammed with multi-rez ideas.

Has it ever occurred to you guys to accept the design approach the developers are going for, and suggest something within the limitations they are using? Make the best of it.

Roadhog, for instance, the developers really didn’t want to increase his shotgun damage. However this current patch has a series of simple adjustments to the current design that has pleased almost every hog player you can find.

Feels like you guys are missing out on some big opportunities to make Mercy Fun/Worthwhile, by limiting yourselves only thinking about big rez abilities.

Y’all have really made a full-time job out of these shenanigans…

If they didn’t notice, they would not have buffed her. I feel like that is a blind statement-

Just because it isn’t what you wants to see, doesn’t mean it isn’t a buff. A buff to Valkyrie, something you were all complaining about, were you not?

We weren’t asking for buffs to Valkyrie, we were asking for Valkyrie to be changed fundamentally. They just saw A LOT of Mercy complaints and thought “Oh well, I guess we should buff her.” I seriously don’t believe they actually looked at what we were saying. And I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of debating this “buff” because that’s all the forum has been for the past couple days so you should know where the Mercy community stands on it.

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I’d argue you’d have a lot more success suggesting tweaks that don’t fundamentally change the characters design, but instead fine tune what’s missing in the gameplay.

Being focused on high level results, and keeping your mind open to a large variety of ways to get there.

By changing it fundamentally I mean things like, removing chain beams in favour of one strong single target beam or tying Resurrect to Valkyrie in some way, I’m not trying to advocate for Ult Rez’s return right now (although I wouldn’t mind it.)

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I have personally tried to adapt to the new Mercy when she came out.
She was op, so she got nerfed, which was perfectly fine.

But she was still op, so she got other nerfs, which was still fine.

Then she was still op, so she got other nerfs, which was fine.

Then she was still op, so the devs stopped caring and started hard nerfing her by changing her abilities so much that they are now against her fundamental design. And this is when it was no longer fine.

In my opinion, this rework will not ever work unless destroying Mercy’s core concept as a pure, mobile main healer, which has already started.

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Gotcha, I’ve suggested a couple of these similar ideas.

-Rez on Q during Valk
-Rez on E as a seperate secondary ultimate

As for chain beams, you could just make that be a toggle feature, so that devs don’t have to remove it. I.e. Q or F to toggle between.

Sorry gray but the issue petaining to fun that people have can’t be achieved as long as REz is on E, why. Because the slow down that exists right now on Rez is inherintly an unfun to use mechanci and we know it has tobe there for balance reasons.

And Valkyrie at best needs to have it’s power shifted drastically if it’s going to be fun

So yeah there are no solutions we can think of to this problem as 2.0 is just that bad. There is no salvaging it because fun and balance are mutually exclusive with this build

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Personally, I just really hate chain beams altogether so I wouldn’t be sad to see it go, I just feel like it removes all the decision making that was ever at all present in Mercy’s base kit.

I think my favourite idea I’ve seen so far for tying Rez to Valkyrie is that Mercy has to “heal” the life orbs of fallen allies in order to Rez them, obviously not at the same rate as a normal heal. This is an instance where I’d be okay with Mercy having some AOE healing i.e. while she is healing a fallen ally, a small healing aura emanates from the ally’s corpse at something like 30-40hp/s just so that she is not totally taken out of the fight while rezzing someone but still has to co-ordiante well with her team if they wish to receive healing.

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