When Blizzard did the mercy rework they said if it does not work out then we will revert her. Well, it been a year and I think (among many others) that mercy is still not balanced. Mercy has been ‘fixed’ many times and for a while, she has still been overpowerd however recently blizzard has nerfed mercy to make her more balanced. This, unfortunately, did not work and now mercy is one of the worst supports to pick at the moment.
Mercys recent changes have made her unplayable as she is a bad choice over ana or moria. It’s time to go back to old mercy. Most people believe her mass rez was overpowered but it was not it was very easy to avoid. Rez was most effective when a team used many ultimates to mass kill the team and mercy was still alive to use her rez. The key here is “still alive” rez is very counterable however most teams do not focus her when they ult leading to her massive rez. Yes, I understand mercy will most likely hide when she has rez but that is common knowledge and if you know the enemy mercy is hiding then all you have to do is not use your ultimates. The fight should be very winnable because their mercy is hiding. Then if she decides to rez you have your ultimates. Mercys new ultimate is very ineffective it no longer enhances rez, she does not do that much healing, and she is very easy to kill. Old mercy had more values to her when you got a massive rez it was fun and exciting now mercy is boring and she is basically a heal bot. Blizzard did not even fix mercys hiding problem, With mercys new rez you almost always need to hide to get it off because she is so vulnerable. Mercy as of right now heals like a secondary support but with no helpful ultimate. Also having rez as an ability will never work as it is too strong on a 30-second cooldown and will save most fights.
Blizzards statement to the rework was “a massive rez was dishearting” well lets take a look at some other prime examples doomfist one tapping you, getting storm arrowed, getting comboed my brig, getting slept by ana, getting your ult transed, getting booped off the map, getting pined, getting graved, or maybe watching peoples favourite hero get gutted.
Currently, mercy has the lowest pick rate of any support and in higher ranks, mercy is a thrown pick. It has been a year of constant mercy rework and to be honest things have gotten worse. If blizzard wants to save this hero they need to bring back old mercy with very slight changes to her. This hero is dying because of blizzard stubbornness to “make it work” instead of just admitting things didn’t work out and revert mercy any future buffs and nerfs will only make things worse. If we keep going with these mercy “fixes” mercy will die as a hero. Please do no trash talking the comments or this post will be locked and forgotten. How we fell lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele33mxd6rk im adding this many days later because some people have decided to flag this post as spam please do not do this if you disagree then leave this post alone.
I hope this thread attracts positivity instead of negative comments! Lets try and keep it friendly people.
Very good post, point out a lot things I believe as well. I hope Blizzard reads this. We need old mercy back. This is not what we wanted.
While I generally agree with your statements, Mercy does not have the lowest pickrate. She does have the lowest winrate however.
A lot of mercy players get shut down for toxicity i just want this post to make an impact
Mercy is in a balanced state currently and the statistics back that up. While she’s no longer the supreme support, she’s still a very good hero when on the right comps, especially ones that benefit from pocketing. Resurrect is always going to have power, as an easy-access hero Mercy will still have tons of power in the lower half of the bracket, she’s overall in a fine place compared to the other supports. Saying she’s the “worst” when all six support heroes are doing fairly evenly is unfair.’
Hide-and-res specifically was one of the biggest reasons mass res was removed. Resurrect as an ultimate encouraged Mercy to drop out from the game and stay out of fights, putting far too much value on her life that it was never worth playing the game conventionally as Mercy when your ultimate was ready. This wasn’t healthy for her, her team, or the enemy team. The mere existence of this one ultimate being ready would forcefully change the entire flow of the game, stalling everyone out until Mercy could be found and picked off in a way that felt clumsy and punishing for both teams.
Yes, people could focus Mercy first, but doing so always required at least one person from the enemy team to do the hunting. This wasn’t fun to search every relevant nook and cranny in pursuit of a hero that you had to kill first in order for the team fight to commence. No one liked waiting for this, no one on Mercy’s team enjoyed fighting a pointless fight while anxiously hoping Mercy doesn’t die first, no one enjoyed this experience, and this is what the ultimate encouraged to happen by its mechanics.
That’s the point that it no longer enhances res, because tying Resurrect to an ultimate, in any sense, is always going to make the resurrection aspect the most important part. It took Blizzard months to realize that Resurrect couldn’t be made better by an ultimate without it still being far too oppressive of an ability.
She was literally ONLY a healbot in her initial design, with her only place to have any significant impact being in her ultimate. She had no other mid-game abiltiy besides healing and damage boosting, she never did anything else because her kit consisted of just those two things plus her mobility. Compare that to now, where Mercy is exactly the same except that she now has more potential to have big mid-game moments with Resurrect as an ability, plus her mobility has been made better, plus she has an ultimate that provides her independence to do more on her own.
There is a HUGE difference between “Mercy hides several corners down away from the battlefield, and after an entire team fight is complete, she swoops in and revives everyone to make that whole initial team fight just a huge drain on enemy resources and a waste of time for everyone” and “Mercy needs her team to cover her while she enters a vulnerable state, which is the trade off for being able to bring back someone from the dead in the middle of the game every 30 seconds.”
One of these encourages Mercy to completely disengage from the game and only be useful if her team either commits to dying on purpose, or really screws up. The other encourages team play, uses a res mechanic that has counterplay, and is a smaller but more frequent moment to give Mercy more impact besides these post-fight mass resses.
Mass Resurrect was disheartening because all Mercy had to do was press Q to completely reverse the deaths of her teammates. This one action allowed Mercy to undo precise headshots, multi-ability combos, set ups, and/or entire ultimates. It didn’t feel good to do all the work to confirm your kills, only for a Mercy to breeze in and completely undo that work in an instant.
Here’s my usual metaphor to help you understand: When you kill an opponent, you’re basically cashing a check. The enemy is trying to make that paycheck more costly to cash, which in turn decreases your profit. Most abilities in the game only prevent or delay the paycheck from being cashed, but Resurrect – reviving players in general – is the only mechanic that uncashes a cashed paycheck. Even though that McCree used both of his abilities, scored some amazing headshot kills, and then burned his ultimate to finish off the rest, Mercy could just… press Q, and all that value is reversed.
No other ability works like this so it’s unfair to compare them. Things like one-shot kills and combos requires precision, set ups, and the cost of resources. Mass Resurrect simply required Mercy to obtain her ult (very easily done), and then wait for the enemy to be good at the video game.
She isn’t dying, if that pick rate is considered “dying” then Bastion and Symmetra have been laying off the side of the creek getting poked by children for months now.
Mass Resurrect was removed from a number of reasons, it’s more complex than Blizzard thinking “this is a mean ultimate, it’s too strong.” It encouraged unhealthy playstyles, it was an ability that compressed far too much of Mercy’s power, and it couldn’t be easily tweaked or adjusted for the future of Overwatch when it would inevitably need to. It was a bad design made for an older version of Overwatch, Blizzard doesn’t want the game to ever be about reversing team fights on this magnitude, it isn’t making a comeback. All of Mercy’s biggest problems were solved by the rework and she’s finally now in a place where other supports can contest with her – her being OP for so long does not mean the rework was a failure, it just meant that she was made OP in the process and now, yeah, they’ve worked her down to something manageable.
What we didn’t know is that the rework would come with a new definition of success.
You bring up very good points and I agree with some of them but the mercy we have now will most likely never be picked over a ana or a moria as she cants keep up with their healing anymore. And I do understand that a massive rez was disheartening but I brought up counter methods to this you are correct about the first one people don’t like hunting for mercy but you could also not use ultimates first fight. When you talked about the ultimate you only brought up the part about rez and I said more about it. There are other dishearting things in the game as I have said I agree some are not as bad but they are still annoying. I am not saying bring back mercy exactly how she should be I agree she needs some changes but this new me is not fun. You bring up many good points and i am not saying these things to start an argument i just want to see mercy in a healthy state
“Not a mercy main btw”
“2 posts”
entirely new account out of the blue posting extremely pro-Mercy agitprop, topic is then immediately flooded with Mercy Mains, as if on queue
i was a console player lv 600 i believe. just started pc so i have game Knowledge if you do not believe in the existence of this account look up PiloxKing xbox. I use to fill A LOT as mercy but i dont call myself a mercy main cause i dont enjoy her
as syme main, mercy is not “dead” and ik what im talking about, problem with mercy is, she heals… oksih now and has… ZERO defenses and can heal OR deal dmg, the ultimate is fancy, but not that useful, just to survive maybe… and mercy should have better healing than the rest of the supports for obious reasons, has 0 cc 0 defensives 0 self heal in combat and a deficient gun for 1v1, so she has to heal way more, the explanation for removing the old ult as, “discouraging and annoying”… IF we removed all the annoying things at the game we will start overwatch and we wont find the play button at all… select a heroe woops no heroes avaliable, the ult was powerfull it was able to cancel multi ult combos… then kill mercy with ur dear genji and gg, or dont multi combo, just push 6v5, zarya ult+hanzo=team kill, heroes never die… yea… hold on, lucio ult? zeny ult?
Please dont come in into this and try trash talking mercy mains
How is she unplayable? She is still in a good spot, the only difference is that she isn’t completely overpowered anymore and doesn’t outshine every other support character.
What is the old mercy? What is mass rez? It’s been so long v.v
she didnt outshined em, she outHEALED them, why, mercy is a FULL healer, no range no nothing but, heal sustained
so, yea nerf mercy heal fine, give her a shield and 100 armor and a stun, too
I agree mercy need to do more heals that is the only thing she can do so she needs to do it well
She got the best mobility abilities of any hero in the game, consistent heals through barriers, resurect, damage boost and an ultimate that makes her not almost invincible. Add ontop of that the fact that she is the easiest character in the game that doesn’t need any aim besides using the pistol. Very simple, she was too strong and got nerfed, what’s so hard to understand?
All other healers can do something WHILE healing, dealing damage(Zen, Lucio, Brig, Moira…), offering utility(Zen, Lucio,Ana, Brig ) or BOTH. Most of them them also have burst healing(Healing Orb, Nade, Amp it Up…).
Mercy:
- Either Heals or DMG Boosts. Always one of the other.
- No burst healing.
- Her utility is Res which, unlike the others, can’t be used every time its needed(because in most situations you die)
- Her ult does not give her invulnerability, she is as killable as Phara, which is very easy with the right heroes.
- Valk is terribly unimpactful. Its a bad version of Transce OR Supercharger. Its weak and boring.
Now after all these nerfs Mercy heals less than Lucio and on the same state she was pre-rework(crappy), but now she’s even worse to play because everything you do is mediocre.
Yes, she was OP, we said it was OP since PTR, but the devs didn’t listen, and she went from fun and balanced(pre-rework) to fun and umbalanced, then to unfun and unbalanced. You might think gutting a character until it doesn’t do anything and is a bore to play as is a good way to solve the problem, good for you, but we know this is bad for the game, not just for our favorite here.
This was the same for old Mercy. Why are you trying to make an argument about this.