Hey OP, other people have answered your question, but if you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, Developer Update, around the 49 second mark Jeff starts to explain exactly what was wrong with mass rez:
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According to Blizzard:
Some players (a minority) would hide and let their team die, then jump out and rez. The large majority of players did not do this, and it was a pretty ineffective way to play Mercy, and Blizzard could easily have tweaked mass rez to stop this without completely reworking her.
Probably The Actual Reason:
A bunch of DPS whiners didn’t want to adapt to focus Mercy down or bait out her rez before they dumped all their teamwiping ults onto everyone except the one who should have been their first priority, so they complained for a year and a half until Blizzard caved.
Blizzard then gave Mercy another ult that could be countered if you actually tried, but again, nobody wanted to try, so they went back to complaining and Blizzard proceeded to nerf Valkyrie so that now you can totally just ignore her ult with no real consequences.
So: TL:DR; The community didn’t want Mercy to have any significant impact or require any sort of counter-strategy. And whaddya know, now she doesn’t.
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I would’ve rather made ultimates unusable for a few seconds after the mass Rez was done instead of add Valkyrie.
You’re absolutely right, Mercy has no impact now, even though she’s still seeing a very high pickrate across all levels of play and especially in the Overwatch League. Absolutely zero impact.
Please, stop adding fuel to the pointless DPS main vs. Mercy main debacle. It doesn’t add anything to any conversation.
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Hide and seek Mercy’s overall didn’t actually climb and if they did they had horrible game habbits. The good Mercy’s used mass rez as tempo to rez 2-3 people but everyone seems to ignore how they exist.
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While I do think it was dumb that Mercy got reworked, I do agree that Mercy 2.0 and Mercy 2.1 were stupidly OP.
Then again the current Mercy on live has the most underpowered ult Mercy has ever had. Her ult on live is worse than the one in Season 3 where she could be killed while rezing because that hardly affected people using it as a tempo rez.
Her pickrate is currently still good because Mercy’s pickrate has never been bad because of how her competitors have always been worse than her. The only exception was Ana in Season 3 and 4 but Moira didn’t exist back then so Ana+Mercy was still a good duo.
Even if you removed Mercy’s ult from the game she would still have a decent pickrate because GA exists which works extremely well in Dive and works against Dive because she can just fly away.
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Because gameplay. A mercy sitting back, doing nothing just waiting for own team to dies to just pup up and press Q and basically win the game.
There was no balance in that, specially no fun in that.
Seagulls Genji 5 man kill got undone by a Mercy so he complained.
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A few awful Mercy players used the hide and rez strat and DPS mains cried overpowered, so it got removed.
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I don’t call it good but that was the case. A 10 year old boy shouting to mic" DIE DIE TOGETHER, I JUST WAIT HERE HIDING SO I CAN GET POTG" Crap old days.
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People were bad and were unable to comprehend that if they wanted the enemy Mercy to die, they should actually seek her out themselves.
Yeah right. It was low skill/risk - high reward and that’s what got it removed.
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Tell me: If the enemy team has a Mercy, what do you do to deal with her? What heroes do you switch to? What strategies do you adopt to counter the Mercy?
Oh, nothing. You do nothing. At no point do your teammates look at each other and say “oh dang, they’re running Mercy, who knows a counter?” You just play the game exactly same as you normally would, except your team has to do a bit more damage (60dps divided by 6 teammates is 10 extra dps per player) and maybe, if you’re in the mood, shoot the completely stationary target while she’s rezzing. But even most players on the ladder don’t bother shooting rezzing Mercies.
Mercy is played because she has survivability and Ana and Moira do not. That’s literally all. Being alive is her great accomplishment in this game. And a major part of the reason that Mercy is alive so often, unlike Ana, Moira, or Mercy 1.0 is that the enemy team has nothing to fear from her. She’s not worth the effort it takes to focus her down. Which is apparently exactly how this community likes it. The only time people in this game want to think about healers is when their health is low. So Blizzard made Mercy strategically irrelevant.
Her competitors are actually considered more important than her, traditionally. Lucio had a near 100% pickrate for most of Overwatch’s lifespan, and Zenyatta somewhat recently has taken over as the “must-pick” support, due to Discord. And yet even with these two, Mercy still gets picked so much, only rarely traded for Moira or sometimes Ana.
If Mercy genuinely lacked impact to a notable degree, she would not be picked. But lo and behold, there is value in a hero that can self-heal, that can provide consistent and fast healing to any hero, that can leap across the map using her allies, that can bring back teammates right into the fight, that can instantly damage boost teammates to turn critical damage into highly-lethal damage, that can take to the skies with her ultimate and provide wider support while being even harder to kill.
And now, for fun, compare this to the old Mercy. What was her impact? Her healing and damage boost were the same, but she couldn’t bring people back into the fight like she does now. She could only do that with an ultimate. But now that Resurrect is an ability, Mercy gets MORE chances to make that impact.
This “lack of impact” argument does not make any sense and it’s entirely untrue, and it’s even worse when used in defense of old Mercy who had objectively less impact in moment-to-moment gameplay.
So to bring this conversation back to the topic, no, Mercy was not reworked because DPS players are All Bad and they just wanted an easier support to kill, because HAD that been true, then we would see LESS Mercy getting picked, and Mercy would have become a weaker character, but now she’s stronger than ever and without having to rely on a weird ultimate just to have any relevancy.
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Her ult currently has less impact, also rezing 1 person doesn’t have any impact compared to what it used to do and it says something that rezing 1 person is the most impactful thing she can do. Saying she hasn’t changed would be equal to giving Genji Dragonblade for 1 second as an ability and making him deflect for 10 seconds his ult. Yea, you can say he hasn’t changed by the same logic but he’d be complete trash tier.
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The difference is Mercy isn’t trash tier.
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Because her kits still powerful, her ults one of the worst support ults in the game.
(Not counting Moira because her ult charges too fast)
That is how balance works after all. I’d say it’s working as intended.
That’s not how powerful ults are calculated, they’re calculated using charge times to power ratio, hence why Tracer has a bad ult but fast charge times. Zen has the best support kit and the best support ult, high charge times (1500 healing needed but Damage can be included) Moira has a good Kit, bad ult but fast charging. Mercy on the other hand has 1600 healing needed for her ult and it’s the most underwhelming ult for that much charge needed.
If characters were balanced through kit and ult, then Soldier’s ult should be deadeye level bad but instead it’s the 2nd best offensive ult.
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First off I gotta grab this low hanging fruit: Moria doesn’t have survivability? What? She has factually much better survivability than Mercy, that’s for sure, unless Mercy suddenly gained two manual ways to self-heal that can stack on each other, plus a sweet disengage/self-cleanse. Maybe I missed a patch note.
You’re tunnel visioning on the concept of counters in this argument and insisting that the worth of a hero is equal to how necessary it is to switch to a counter. Mercy doesn’t need a counter to be outplayed, that doesn’t make her a worse hero, no less than the fact that Soldier 76 doesn’t really have or need a direct counter, either.
Mercy gets picked because no one else can res and no other support has the consistent healing she does. She doesn’t worry about healing resources at all, she just clicks on someone and immediately pumps 60 HPS into them, and that’s huge. The fact that she has decent survivability and decent mobility are two extra bonuses that solidify her as a balanced hero. If you really think people are picking Mercy just for survivability, you’re… well, wrong. Ignoring the facts that she’s outclassed in survivability by other supports, and also ignoring all the important plays she has clearly visible in the OWL, we would also have to ignore, you know, the Pharmercy strategy? She certainly isn’t picked in Pharmercy JUST because of her survivability there. But I guess we’re able to ignore all of that, too.
If you really think people just aren’t killing Mercy because her enemies think she’s useless, I dunno what else to say other than I HAVE to see what patch of Clownwatch you’re in because that circus sounds hilarious.
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