In all honesty I still enjoy her, that isn’t going to change. Mercy is a fun character to play zipping around team mates, super jumping and getting that perfect damage increase on a hanzo arrow headshot makes even yourself feel good (even though you don’t aim the actual arrow…). However the recent nerf to her and buffs to the others have left mercy in the dust, and don’t get me wrong being able to now play Ana and not be moaned at for not playing Mercy which is fun but i feel with the other support buffs that her nerf wasn’t completely necessary, while also on this topic I feel mercy should be reverted in some way, maybe to having a cast time ultimate that slows her but she gets immunity while its going off, or maybe instead of immunity a damage reduction so its harder to get off but it isn’t as difficult to get off mid fight.
To me right now this is how mercy feels in a bullet point format
Highly Mobile
Mediocre Healing
Rez is sorta unpowered and difficult to use correctly
Too much time is spent healing that you cant really damage boost or rez anymore
To clarify on my last point, typically mercy mains get told she is easy to play because you can just left click or old RT/R2 however that wasn’t the case as we had the time to damage boost, swap to the pistol, rez, fly and glide now however this has gone down to actually only holding left click/R2/RT because of how long it takes to heal a tank now.
These are just some thoughts I have, mercy is a fun character and I love her, but recently Ana as a support is much more enticing rather than playing the both and also tanks such as Orisa seem exciting to play simply for the reason the nerf made mercy an unfun character to play…literally only holding left click/RT/R2 (and yes i know this isn’t always the case but it seems much more prominent).
The main problem is res.
You can not remove res, it defines her and makes Mercy the “guardian angel”.
The thing is if you buff it, the it will be op. Shorter cast time? Can make a huge, huge difference. No cast time? That’s ridiculous.
Two res? Also too strong.
The thing is, what do you want to buff.
Maybe the healing to 55 per second but 60 made her still an OP pick. Right now she may not be Number one but you can still play her in comp.
Mercy got “boring”.
But maybe she got boring because we all played her too much, you know? A game/hero/band whatever can not always be fun/amazing/your favourite.
Maybe it is time to kind of move on…
I know better than to argue against someones opinions of what is “fun”, because that’s about as subjective a term as possible. There is no way I can possibly debunk an opinion like that, but maybe I can explain why she is objectively unfun?
I mean, what is fun? Well, fun is causality, right? Fun is about making the correct choice rather than the incorrect choice. The choice that results in victory rather than defeat. I did (or didn’t) do this, so it resulted in this occurring.
So, what choice is there when you’re healing an ally with Mercy but that ally dies because your healing output wasn’t enough? What could you have done differently? You kept yourself alive and you kept your healing beam on your ally. You did everything right. Your ally still died.
Mercy cannot regulate healing output whereas every other healer except for Zen can.
So, that’s the real flaw with Mercy that this most recent nerf has made drastically more apparent.
Where is the causality? There’s obviously causality involved in her mobility, as you’ve got to keep yourself alive, but mobility is only a tool to keep you yourself alive so that you can keep your healing beam on your allies for longer. What happens when you’re staying alive, keeping your beam on your ally and yet he/she still dies because your output wasn’t enough? What happens when you’re the last girl standing?
You’re great at surviving, you’re great at prioritising your healing targets and yet all your allies are all dead…? What went wrong? Your healing output just wasn’t enough.
The solution? A way to regulate healing output so that you can respond to these situations. Every other healer has this. Mercy doesn’t. This is the real issue.
You balance res by balancing and linking the ACQUISITION of res to a form of skill expression. See, you’re only looking at trying to balance the casting of the skill itself, but with a resource or a charge system the challenge of the ability comes in acquiring it in the first place. That’s how you fix res, not by trying to implement janky mechanics like a cast time into a fast paced FPS.
I think a big problem for Mercy being fun, is that her ability slots are pretty much tied up, and said abilities aren’t ‘fun’, but are core to her kit.
You have GA, a great movement ability as long as you aren’t alone, but sticking to the team like glue isn’t exactly ‘fun’. She has damage boost which is rarely ever used because of her mediocre if consistent heal she always has to use now, then there’s rez, which IS powerful, but not very I guess, interactive. One button and timer=done.
The only real way to remedy this, is to make her damage boost part of her heal, freeing a slot, and maybe make GA a double tap A ability, like lunge or double jump, freeing another slot. Now you have 2 abilities you can add, and make Mercy heal better by having an extra benefit on top of it.
Also, her ult is just straight up bad, especially with the reduced healing. Either buff it, move it to an ability slot (and of course change it to fit), or just remove it. Anything Blizzard, it’s just not good enough right now.
Deal with these issues, and maybe, just maybe, Mercy can be as fun and engaging, as any other healer.
I like your perspective on this, while I don’t agree with double tap A for GA the heal and damage is a good idea if the damage boost amount was reduced by maybe half? And yeah her ult isn’t fun or really practical, people just use her pistol with it really. One common ability a lot of mercy mains want is a damage reduction that lasts like 8 seconds maybe on a 15 second cooldown? I think that seems reasonable especially instead of rez on a cooldown, make rez an ultimate like I suggested maybe with this as an E and change the healing beam to a heal and damage boost and you have not only another rework but one that might work well however the double beam would need to be tested a lot for balancing.
I know they won’t and it saddens me lol, there are a lot of people who would happily have it back with changes but we know they won’t despite stating they listen to what we want and do it to make heroes fun. It is definitely unfortunate but it’s something we’ll have to live with I guess.
Mercy was considered OP because of invulnerability, before invulnerability her ult was a high-risk, high-reward ult and no one really complained because most of the time Mercy would die and they would lose again because they didn’t have a healer.
After they added invulnerability it all went down hill. It went to a low-risk, high-reward kind of ult. It was very OP to say the least. They could have just fixed her old ult by removing invulnerability, longer charge rate,…
Mercy has only one problem and that is she doesnt contribute anything else to the fight except healing and has no battle changer mechanic. Because of that she plays very boring and unrewarding at times.
If you look on here current stats and the stats before the 10hp/s nerf. She had a healing as good as Moira and ~3k more than Ana or Lucio.
The later seems alot but you have to take into account that Ana also deals in average 4k damage and has 2 battle chanig mechanics with boost and Dart. The former can stop an ultimate completly or hinder it. The later also can change the battle in your favour and works actually pretty simliar to rez.
The point with Ana is that you have a higher skill floor which you can actually bee the pickrates and success in the higher parts like diamond, Master, GM.
Currently ana is starting with her damage/utility on the level as mercy and as the player get better improves even further, what you cant do with mercy.
Moira on the othersite has also a very high skillfloor which can also be seen in the statistic. She has exceptional good aoe heals and a good aoe burst heal, while also having one of the best escape abilities(you can even jump out of zaryas ulti).
My point is. Mercy simply has nothing to offer except the said consistent healing but the falls appart because the other healer do nearly the same healing and contribute other good things to the team.
Moira has a high healing value on a cooldown and resource value meaning missuse means she’s useless with healing, Ana may be more beneficial in a teamfight however if you can’t aim well then you won’t get anything done for healing. What made mercy ‘mercy’ was the high consistant healing. And before the rework she provided a lot more to a team fight than just healing because you were actually able to switch to damage increase to boost an ally or safely rez cause your team would be healed quick enough to do so. And invulnerablility whilst strong was not a reason for her being ‘op’ as she could be killed flying in, hiding, after the rez or even charging it. If you team couldn’t find mercy before killing 5 team members then that mercy deserves a rez because your teams map awareness wasn’t good enough to stop it. The invulnerablility made it so it was a team reset on the spot, that was it, she wasn’t immune before or after the finished rez and all you needed was coordination with your team. If you were a team on the wrong end of a mercy ult because you used 6 ults in one fight on 5 people then that’s your fault. The way to counter old mercy was 2 things. Map awareness and communication that’s all you needed.
Moira is neither hard to play nor is her resource managment hard to learn. She literly was nearly on par with Mercy before 10/hps nerf and has currently more healing then mercy on average.
Yes ana is not easy to play but that the fun with her, that you can actually improve with her alot and contribute more and more to the game.
I dont know what can be done to the current mercy but she is simply has nothing special and is more and more outshined by the other supports the higher you rise on the ladder.
PS: An idear would be to bring back itensify and rez as an ulti. The later should have a HP pool of 1000hp. So if you reviev a group than only 1000hp would be destributed on all revived or something in that direction.
Honestly it seems like you ignored the main thread and comments just to post this, moira is a lot harder to play than most think and her resource management while not hard to learn is a huge thing in her kit, if you spend so much time trying to heal and forget it in the heat of the moment, goodbye team, Ana yes is meant to learnt and mastered but get your typically 2 flankers or snipers on her and what’s she got? Heck a good Winston who knows his core mechanics counters her more than he counters mercy. Mercy was literally said by Jeff to be a fun and impactful healer for new players and yet now she’s none of that please actually read the main and post and other comments before saying she’s completely useless now because that’s pretty much been discussed thoroughly, it’s not a give other supports the spotlight thread but one about people’s thoughts on mercy and how she’s come to be and their opinion on it
How do you feel about giving Torbs scrap mechanic to Mercy? This resource could be used to power both her res and healing output. That way she would be rewarded even more for her mobility. The mechanic has already been programmed because they’ve just taken it off of Torb.
What about instead on scrap it’s called something different (obviously) but it’s gained by healing. Say 1 scrap every… 50 or 100hp restored and this can be used on a new ability if they implemented it? I can’t say what the ability would be but it would reward her more in a game and bring back some enjoyment people had when playing?
Certainly. Could be “orbs of light” or whatever. Could appear after you’ve healed a certain amount. I’ve got a lot more to say about this idea but I wanted to keep it short and sweet and see if any light bulbs turned on.
Sounds good actually aha, let’s say we stick with your idea of increasing her healing the more she heals but make it so rez goes off of this resource bar. Say once she’s healed X amount of health and the bar is full she can rez, emptying the bar and reverting her healing to normal at the cost of no cooldown on rez but like mentioned, a resource
Well, one of my favourite aspects of the resource system is that the same resource can be used for two different things which introduces a lot of decision making. Do I want to play it safe and use the healing boost a lot, and thus not allow my allies to die. Or, do I save the resource up and then use it to cast the res?
Same goes with picking the “scraps” or “orbs” up to begin with. Do I risk my life by trying to collect as many orbs as possible or do I play it safe and risk not having enough healing output or res available for when I need it.
Just introduces a world of decisions to be made by the Mercy player which sounds like a lot of fun to me.
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