“Here, let’s take away 20 of your donuts and give you back 4, are you happy now?”
Because that’s exactly what these “buffs” are. We lost way more in this than we could have possibly gained. Please allow me to chop up the “buffs” for what they actually are.
After 14 nerfs we finally got a buff, why aren’t we happy? (Including a “bugfix” to Mercy’s damage beam interacting with ultimates that’s been in the game since release-- so years now. That’s still a nerf, we lost pre-existing functionality and power that was in Mercy’s kit for years that we played with and utilized. That’s a nerf.).
Please let me share my own views on why I’m not happy, and I am quite sure many others share the same feeling.
Buffs? Let’s explain them. (They aren’t really.)
-Valkyrie is now at it’s exact (underwhelming to be super honest) state that it was a month ago. Still healing 60hp/s. Not changing at all other than that.
It’s still the same ultimate that was widely criticized as being an invitation to be high nooned, soldier ulted, hanzo or widowmaker headshot instantly. While being comparably worse to all other healer (and Orisa’s ultimate too) ultimates in game.
-Ultimate charge was decreased by ~20% with Mercy’s healing output being decreased by ~20% with her latest nerf. Her healing is still 50hp/s outside of ultimate. Which means that she still has a net loss of ultimate charge compared to a month ago even with this “buff”.
It sounds nice on paper, but looking at the fact her healing is ~20% less… it’s not good. It really sort of rubs salt in the wound 
As I said in my opening quote: “Here, let’s take away 20 of your donuts and give you back 4, are you happy now?”
The fundamental point of our complaints was missed.
We didn’t want Valkyrie to be buffed. In fact most of the posts including my own posts indicate that we widely acknowledge Valkyrie may have fringe useful cases but for the Lion’s share of cases it’s overall just a worse Orisa ultimate or a worse Moira ultimate as I’ll get into in the next section.
Right now Mercy as a whole statistically is not performing well at all and when compared to other supports she comes up short. What you lose in tiny fractions of VERY DEDICATED healing is made up in leaps and bounds (and way more than that) in every other aspect of core gameplay.
Table:
All percentages is showing HOW MUCH THE HERO TO THE LEFT (row) DOES COMPARED TO MERCY. Areas that the opposing hero does MORE than Mercy will be marked by a (+) and areas the opposing hero does LESS than Mercy will be marked by a (-).
Eg: Moira does 1395% MORE ELIMINATIONS THAN MERCY. (Yes, you read that right! ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY FIVE!)
HERO NAME------ ELIMS ----- OBJECTIVE ELIMS ----- DAMAGE% ----- HEALING%
Moira ---------------(+) 1395%----(+) 1406%---------------(+) 1455%-------(+) 5.5%
Zenyatta -----------(+) 1027%----(+) 871%-----------------(+) 2108%-------(-) 53%
Bridgette^1 -------(+) 1072%----(+) 931%-----------------(+) 1379%-------(-) 45%
Lucio^2 -------------(+) 940%------(+) 949%-----------------(+) 1438%-------(-) 19%
Ana -----------------(+) 717%------(+) 608%-----------------(+) 954%---------(-) 16.5%
^1 [If you look into the Bridgette vs. Mercy analysis below, you actually can see mathematical backing for the concept that Bridgette contributes more to “team sustain” than Mercy through her armor generation and healing.]
^2 [Lucio may offer “only” 19% less healing than Mercy. But this isn’t taking into account his shield barrier in any capacity. I couldn’t find average damage shielded by Lucio so I left this out because I wanted to keep this as mathematically relevant as possible. I’m quite sure it’s non-trivial.]
Note: Table does NOT account for armor, shield, healing increase or other utility
Source:
We’re at the point where we need to really look at one of two paths forward:
1: REWORK
In spite of Mercy having consistently been in F-tier since release up until her rework, I think that there is a good position to look towards REWORKING Mercy from the ground up.
My ideas would be potentially changing her to a more MMORPG styled healer where she would be the absolute apex of all healing and completely dedicated to it. But this thread isn’t here to flesh that idea out.
In fact I already posted the idea here:
Below are my sources for my claims of Mercy being F-tier for nearly every report published since release.
Source 1:
Source 2:
2: REVERT TO MASS REVIVE
I don’t think I need to argue this more than I have already in the past. So I’ll keep the points only:
-Was F-tier with mass revive until Ana was very harshly overnerfed (which the recent buffs have more than helped). Mercy also at the same time got invulnerability during revive.
-Revive required resource management that if used poorly would be devastating, and if used well felt AMAZING. Juggling life and death of your team was a huge risk play and Mercy required high levels of attention, awareness and spatial caution in game.
-The difference between a Mercy main and a non-Mercy main was staggering. A good Mercy main would tempo res 2 people or even 1 and help lead their team to victory. A bad Mercy would clutch onto revive and not use it and as the payload was being pushed continue to “save it for more than just 3” and ultimately not revive or use it in a clunky less effective manner.
This difference was mostly homogenized since the rework. It’s harder to tell a veteran Mercy main from a newer Mercy player than it ever was before imho.
Compared to other ultimates, it’s still not impactful.
→ The damage boost portion is weaker than Orisa’s, and requires Mercy’s full attention to do so. Orisa can apply new shields, take down targets with firing at them and all the rest. She is not tied down to doing just damage boosting (which she does more of, factually).
→ Compared to Moira’s ultimate Mercy’s not only heals less, but Moira’s ultimate lets her pick off enemy targets THROUGH SHIELDS and can add up to an incredible teamfight presence by both healing allies for 140hp/s but also dealing damage to enemies at 70hp/s.
Yes you read that right. Moira’s ultimate heals for 140hp/s. And you expect Mercy mains to be happy with 60hp/s in ultimate only? With NO damage component?
Source: h ttps://overwatch.gamepedia.com/Moira
I’m not happy. Why would I pick Mercy over Moira in this instance at all? This buff is not in any capacity increasing my desire to play Mercy.
→ We won’t even get into the fact that her ultimate has no burst potential unlike (1) Zenyatta, (2) Lucio, (3) Ana. And that compared to (4) Bridgette it’s just flat out weaker.
Adding 10hp/s to an already weak (50hp/s) beam and making it spread out over a few targets IF AND ONLY IF THEY ARE BASICALLY HUGGING EACH OTHER is not impactful.
Her ultimate at best, if we assume the enemy team has NO DPS that can kill her, is a selfish ultimate. That’s what it is at BEST. And with revive on cast time that basically stuns her… she lacks the ability to really keep her team alive compared to the other supports.
Other supports are now better than ever
A lot of the reason a single support is often picked is because the other choices are so unappealing that the thought of picking them instead of an “okay” hero is a bit scary.
Ana isn’t even doing that great and has a list of issues I talked about even now when she IS meta. Ana even isn’t that great.
Source:
But let’s be serious. When Mercy lost her ~20% healing a month ago other supports got VERY SIGNIFICANT buffs.
-Lucio’s range was finally brought up to a good size. His ultimate power also was dramatically raised. These are both on their own VERY huge and exciting! I now play Lucio a lot more because of them.
Previously Lucio went from the go-to AOE healer to a very very short range hug-range healer. Which dramatically hit his power.
-Ana now has 75 damage per shot (5 less than 80 per shot at release. But regardless can still 3 shot 200 HP targets like Pharah.
Ana now has a VERY POTENT burst heal on her ultimate that makes the target go wild. This heal is amazing and I do NOT think this is something I want nerfed.
-Baguette is… well… she is herself. She is the baguette. I don’t need to say that she’s good, we know she’s good. She’s awesome.
-Moira got a slight increase in healing recharge, while I’m not going to say it’s extremely out there. I already feel Moira contributes so much to the team through damage and elims and picking off key targets like Tracers, Genjis, Pharahs, stray damage to finish enemies and massive AOE healing at the same time in parallel with her damage that she isn’t bad imho.
-Zenyatta has always been great and remains great. Less healing outside of his EXTREMELY GREAT ultimate, absolutely, but he’s still an amazing go-to support. Always has been pretty solid.
So putting these together with the Mercy nerfs… The entire support roster is just flat out better than Mercy even was a month ago WITHOUT the nerfs.
So giving us back slightly less ult charge than before and 10 more hp/s on our ultimate that was already bad to begin with? It’s not enough.
Like why would I go Mercy for “aoe heals to protect the team with my ULTIMATE” when Lucio’s ultimate flat out does infinately more and protects the team from huge burst fire?
Like Mercy’s ultimate will not save a single squishy who is being hammered on. At 50hp/s Mercy’s primary heal beam she is DEDICATED TO doesn’t even heal a target enough to survive Winston of all heroes.
Like this ultimate is fundamentally not good compared to the other supports, especially now they are buffed.
In Closing
No these buffs don’t feel good to see. These are taking Mercy in the opposite way that the Mercy community has been begging for.
We need more radical changes. Valkyrie wasn’t good before and it isn’t suddenly good now being reverted to the same hp/s it was a month or so ago.
