Why Mercy was considered the only anti-fun Hero?

All heroes have tons of frustrating ults to play against but still Rez, the only ability that used to let you set up for kill isn’t? It could be improved? Of course! There are many great suggestion on the Mega thread that show how balance and fun for the Mercy and enemy can coexist. Here is a video that shows just that:

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Whenever people bring up this “double standard” with mercy, they ignore the context.

In terms of junk hiding for his ult, it’s because he literally loses control of his character, to drive a riptire. He’s immobile and an easy target.

In terms of “5/6 kills in 1 ult” Mercy’s rez was an outlier. Zen and Lúcio need to ult in that moment to protect their team. Mercy just needed to undo it, which this is what caused “hide and go rez”. That whole strat was caused by rez invuln, because it made Mercy’s ult uncounterable.

If you ult in the middle of the enemy in hopes of getting a 6k, then you should be punished for poor ulting.

The same went for mercy. Rez your team in front of the enemy team? You deserve to be punished.

The only double standard is ignoring the punishment of one hero to skew the bias.

My credentials: Mercy is my 4th most played hero, as I racked up 30+ hours on her both before and after rez invuln.

I’ve narrowed it down to Rez invuln being the problem, and have yet to be disproven. As a mercy player in Diamond, she did not need invuln. Mercy’s just needed to learn to not ult in front of the enemy, and to temporez 2/3 teammates.

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You are forgetting that when your team is wiped and you can Rez, YOUR TEAM IS WIPED. That means there’s 6 people on the other team who could deal with you before you Rez. Yes there could be more counterplay, but its 6 people with stuns, damage and more ults to kill a single target. Even the Invul happened after you Rezzed.

And you are ignoring the people who leave the fight to ult like Solder, Reaper and Mccree. Setting up your ult has always been a part of the game.

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I made a thread about this, too.

I really do think they don’t even care anymore and they just left a 5yo in charge of the developing.

Edit: omG sEnPai nOtICED me

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That and no line of sight check. She could be under last point gibraltor and res her entire team above her. It was pretty broken. It worked for two points on nepal too.

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All of which weren’t instant. Mercy always had a window to press Q, since the MILLISECOND she pressed Q you couldn’t damage nor stun her.

So that’s a pretty moot excuse.

Combine the ‘hide and rez’ where the Mercy could fly in anywhere, and you have even less time to react and counter/kill her.

The only instant denial was EMP, but you would need both a Sombra, and her to have ult.

But bypassing a punishment for a horrible ult hasn’t. Soldier isn’t invuln while he ults. Reaper only get healed if he does damage. Then McCree lights up like a firework without invuln.

Stop with the excuses.

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They changed that on the last month of rez as an Ult

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And HCL.

LoS was a problem, but it’s not what sparked the ‘hide and rez’ craze.

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Boy with Brig, Hammond, Junk buffs, Hitscans buffs among other things Mercy Rez would have tons of counter play now, but again blizzard don’t see it.

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They limited the range of it i thought, not a line of sight check. Which stopped some spots but not others.

Oh no, certainly not. That was both due to the broken personal performance system at the time and the invulnerability.

Invuln would still need to go though.

Don’t forget literally every 2CP map, where the spawn was three feet from the point.

Can’t stop a rez if the Mercy is literally intangible as she casts it.

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I can tell that everyone of us Mercy mains who want her res on the q do not want a “revert”, we want a Mercy 3.0, there are 45243413 ideas on how to balance the res as an ultimate.

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Anyway, the premise of the OP is wrong, since Roadhog got gutted - actually gutted, not “oh no I’m maybe not the best hero in the game anymore” - because of his ‘unfun’ one shot.

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yes invurnerability

At MOST it should have been damage reduction , like roadhog during selfheal

Disabling heroes like Mei/Sombra are way more “anti-fun”. Mercy is kinda boring if anything.

The invulnerability removed a lot of counterplay from Mercy’s ult. But regardless, I’ve always found “unfun to play against” as a crappy excuse for reworking her. No ult is fun when it’s used against you. That, and they could have easily dealt with her issues without changing her kit completely.

The funny thing is, people loved Mercy rezzing when she was on their team - even with her invulnerability. It was only when the enemy Mercy was better that people found it unfun. There’s even a parody video about it on Youtube comparing “your Mercy vs enemy Mercy” or whatever. Can’t remember the exact name though.

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The thing about the old res was too is that,
Lets say youre playing anubis first point, they wipe your team except for you, youre on the highground behind the point on the big healthpack and their team is just waiting on the point to cap it and you jump in and rez before they can react within the first millisecond, and you get your team back fully

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Unfun is laughable cuz u know what i find unfun? Aimbot/ press ___ to win ultimates and fat men with garbage guns doing more damage and having more armor health than a militarized meka but that’s none of my business right bliz?

Anyways the best idea i heard for stopping the hide and rez play was making it more like sombra’s ult to where it couldn’t go past walls and had a very small radius and line of sight. That would have stopped team rez’s almost entirely and would have kept it to a max of 3-4 ppl being rez’d rather than all 6 coming back in an instant. Even with the invulnerability she still would have to come out of hiding to get that rez off. Also, in higher ranks they always made sure that they had ults to fight against mercy rez, its the lower ranks (where she was being played more at the time) that was having a hard time fighting against it because they don’t know ult conservation and stuff like that.

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There is no “anti-fun” double standard, and I think using the word “fun” in this context is out of place. Specifically, what most people mean by “not fun” is “not engaging.” Thus, a better phrasing of this argument is that, “Mercy 1.0 did not encourage an engaging experience.”

People counter this “anti-fun” argument with other ultimates; generally the idea being that if other ultimates are allowed to kill tons of people in a short amount of time, why can’t there be an ultimate that revives tons of people in a short amount of time? The basis for this stance is that revivals are just opposite kills, and thus when Mercy gets a five-man res after hiding, it’s no different than if McCree jumped out from hiding and uses High Noon to get a team wipe – which is technically better.

But the fallacy is that a revival doesn’t have the same value as a kill, and that Resurrect as an ultimate encouraged a behavior out of all players to be less engaged with the way the game is intended to play.

When a player is revived, what is happening? I’ll use my go-to comparison: Imagine if every kill you got was a work check being cashed and deposited, and thus every kill was earning you some amount of profit. To cash that check, though, you need to work. You need to expend time, resources, and position to secure any given elimination, and in most circumstances, the only thing the enemy can do is make that check harder to cash; healing up damage, blocking damage, getting your own picks, etc. And normally, when a check gets cashed, there’s no question about it. You got your money, you can spend it.

But Resurrect is the only ability that undoes that check. Resurrect takes all the work done to secure that kill and reverses it. It’s the only mechanic that takes a cashed check and voids it. So that doesn’t feel very good, especially if the work put into that kill – or five kills – was particularly expensive. This is a game where you have to kill the enemy, and the game is designed so that victories are largely dependent on killing the enemy. It doesn’t feel good here to put in all the work and genuinely cash in a BIG check, only for one character to swoop in and completely undo it, all with the press of one button. No mechanic, again, is at all like this. It never feels good to get a team wipe, successful in playing the game as intended, just to have to do it all over again, but this time without the resources you spent to secure that team wipe.

The other thing to note here is that other abilities in the game have inherent engagement that makes them fun to play around. Take Reinhardt’s charge for example. It’s an ability where a tank can rush across the stage, stun someone, carry them away, and then deal 300 damage on impact. That doesn’t sound fun on paper, but when you actually engage with Reinhardt, it’s a fun ability to have opposing you. There’s a thrill in seeing Reinhardt and figuring out when he’s going to charge and how you’ll respond to it. What do you do if he charges at you? Do you dodge or do you try to kill him? Can a teammate stop him and save you? What if you get knocked away? Can you punish Rein in this situation? Where is Rein going to be after the charge? What is Rein’s team doing after this charge?

Even though this ability attached to a 500 health hero can kill most people instantly, there’s inherent fun to be had with playing around it. All the players are engaged with this situation. But what about Mercy Resurrect? The problem here is that post-team wipe resses have tons of value, and it’s naturally safer to wait for your entire team to die and bring them back to full health, rather than keeping Mercy involved in a battle where she might die, or the wrong people die, or the team gets split up, or people die even after the tempo res goes off, etc.

Hide-and-res is an extremely secure strategy, and it required Mercy to disengage blatantly from the game. She had to stop playing Overwatch while her team died intentionally in one big pile of bodies – you can imagine how fun that has to be, purposefully losing a team fight so that the enemy is forced to waste resources that they won’t get back in time for the second fight. Which leads into how engaged the enemy is, which isn’t very engaging at all. The solution to hide-and-res had only one solution; find Mercy first, and then kill her shortly before you kill everyone else, with very little room for error. This either required entering a fight 5v5 as one flanker goes out to play Mercy’s game, or having the entire team scout out for Mercy’s location, which was very often behind enemy lines where a whole team was just not going to have access too, much less when Mercy can rotate her hiding spot and still rely on allies to protect her.

This isn’t an engaging situation, and yet Mercy forces it on the enemy if her and her team decide this is what they want to do. And of course they’d decide to do it, especially in pick-up games. What better strategy is going to work with a bunch of random mid-rank players than having them just die all at once? It’s reliable, it’s safe, it forces the enemy into a puzzle that isn’t easy to solve, and it wasn’t fun for any party.

I hope this explanation can help us change our view of this whole “anti-fun” argument and perceive it as an issue of engagement. Yes, it isn’t technically “fun” to die to any ultimate, or to have any ultimate be an obstacle for your team, but those ultimates (and other abilities) are all designed to be engaging for not only the player using them, but both their team AND their enemy. Mercy 1.0 was not engaging, it actually did the opposite, and that’s why it had to be removed in the rework. No one wants to put effort into multiple eliminations just to have them undone in one swoop, and no one (well, except some Mercy players I guess) wanted to play into this very cheesy strategy that changed the entire flow of the game, all because one ultimate was present and ready to be activated.

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