as of late what has happened to mercy, showed me that Blizzard doesn’t have rules in place to prevent over nerfing heroes.
after i found out that they nerfed mercy 13 times made me think that this is a mess, it shows that devs don’t know how to deal with balancing and are overthinking it.
constantly changing there thought proses between each nerf while having bad communication with each other and the players.
randomly nerfing/changing heroes without thinking the consequences of what it could imply to the entire game.
i think the devs just need to sit and rethink of what they want to do with the game. and maybe set up some rules that can prevent nerfing a hero 13 times.
I think the devs have a rule for balancing heroes:
The hero’s average viability must be equal of the others.
Mercy was the most viable support hero on average so they nerved her over and over again to get her average viability on the same level as the other supports.
This has been proven by the recent balancing patch because not only Mercy got nerves, the other supports got buffed.
It is important to notice that they are working to make everyone’s average viability equal. Each hero shines on different situations and on others, the said hero might not work at all. What’s important is that overall, counting good-choice and bad-choice situation, each hero is equally viable.
Mercy should have a mechanic that rewards skill expression and allows her to boost her healing output in situations that warrant it. This will address two perceived problems with her design.
Every other healer in the roster (except Zen) can stack abilities when they need to do so, in order to increase their healing output for situations that warrant it.
Lucio can boost his healing song.
Ana can grenade / shoot.
Moira can stack an orb and her LMB.
Brig can swing and use her E.
I don’t see Zens inability to stack healing as a problem, since he’s basically a DPS.
Mercy could have a resource bar which could be used to turn her healing output into overdrive. To increase this resource, she could be required to collect orbs of light which would act very similar to Torbs scrap, these would be dropped from allies as they are healed.
Mercys skill expression comes in the form of using mobility, so this mechanic would reward that side of her play as she has to relocate in order to pick up the orbs. This is similar to how Moira is rewarded for her aim tracking skills when sucking resource from her enemies with her RMB.
they changed mercy to make her more engaging but it also made her the strongest healer in the game,
after that, they started to add nerf after nerf just to pull her back down and after all those nerfs, she still has the same boring playstyle as ever it was.
Blizzard didn’t think through, and it hurt the game.
the problem isn’t nerfs themselves, its that blizzard doesn’t think before acting.
all of this could have been avoided if they thought about it a little and how it would change the entire game itself, instead, they just change a hero and are too late to realize they added a broken element to there game.
in addition, they had to nerf mercy to balance her but after several nerfs it pissed of all the mercy players and divided the community, creating a toxic environment.
in short, all im saying is that Blizzard needs to think before they do any massive changes like this again,
before its too late.
Even if they think hard the results still end up bad. Someone who doesn’t play the game would have told them that Storm Arrow is completely broken but they released it anyway in this state and had to nerf it like what, 3 times so far? I refuse to believe they didn’t know they are making yet another character broken, they did it for their own reasons.
If a character is japanese/weeb must be overtuned at the point comps are build around him.
tracer cannot be nerfed.
Snipers must have more mobility than front line damagers.
if a specific hero/composition is op, we do not nerf them, but we create another braindead character just to counter these specific op heroes ignoring the fact that the new char also counter the heros that are not op
The number of times she needs a change is irrelevant, the overall game play is much better now that it ever was between healers.
Mercys rezz is all you hear people complain about, I get that it’s a strong ability but you have to look at it from a game Devs stand point. They want to have this ability in the game, I don’t think they will remove it as mercy is the perfect person to have such an ability.
Thus they need to change her kit else where and for the most part mercy will remain as one of the better heroes as it’s designed this way.
Easy to play and effective, they have the same ethos with heroes like reinhardt and soilder and Reaper. Simple heroes with strong kits designed for less mechanically skilled players.
there not changes there nerfs, and there is no gameplay for mercy. she became irrelevant because of those nerfs.
its a strong ability because its an ult, making ults into abilities is a bad game design
it made mercy too strong and caused an outcry for nerfs, creating a split in the community,
her rez was designed as an ult now that an ability it has also made it harder to balance her compared to other heroes and now with all the nerf she has lost all staying power.
technically new mercy is harder to play, she is constantly harassed by all dps and she is useless on her own,
with the changes that happened to her only made her worse, her ult now cant out heal a Winston
and if all your teammates die then you’re pretty much useless, her kit is pretty much gone.
she has the lowest win rate of all support character and people now a day don’t pick her in games,
she isn’t played in general new or skilled players.