mentioning the ashe thing, where "mashe" was completely busted until they nerfed ashe's damage, was something i completely forgot about but really convinced me that it was never a mercy problem, just a "brand new dps hero being busted" problem. now, ashe isnt a garbage pick, mercy + ashe is still really good, ashe without a mercy is still really good, all to just drive the point home that they should really consider doing the same with sojourn instead of changing an ability that's been the same for all of overwatch history and wasnt a problem until a new dps character made it a problem again.
Yeah, this has happened on several occasions where the dev team just release busted characters or busted reworks. Ashe, Sojourn, and briefly Hanzo after his rework, were all incredibly strong characters on release. Even if dmg boost didn't exist, and these characters were never nerfed, people would still be complaining about their insane damage output. Mercy simply magnified the underlying issue that was already present to begin with.
I feel like, players don't like supports to be impactful, they like their healbots, but they don't want them to do anything outside of that, because it's frustrating. If they remove Mercy's damage boost what is stoping them from taking Lucio's speed boost or Ana's nade. Their job is to be there and to help the team run over the other, it includes healing or any other thing they can do. I'm just a bit mad that it is always DPS players complaining when they are the problem 99% of times. Brigg wasn't as bad as people say she was and still she got nerf to the ground, and now she's underwhelming. But we supports still try and we will still be trying even if we are the punching bag of the rest of the community.
Exactly! They want supports to be healbots that are easy for them to kill! If a support can do anyhting else than heal then they will instantly say that "its a dps with healing abilities", or that its "too strong" and should be removed from the game
I was with you until you said Brigg wasn't that bad, Brigg literally made goats, the thing that killed the first game, and then devolved into double shield. Brigg was a troubled character from the start, I do agree they nerfed her into the ground, but for now I'll say that was a necessary evil. Right now thanks to recent buffs, she's kind of pretty nice. Don't worry supports, you'll get your time to shine after this hog rework and sojourn nerf, the dev teams been talking about wanting to bolster the supports up.
@@ChaosBros goats wasn't just Brigg, it was a team effort Rein, Zarya and Lucio are all equal ti blame. Double shield is 100% tanks fault. And I feel like dos players hate goats so much because they feel useless, sadly that's how supports feel for lots of comps. And goats didn't kill ow1 nothing killed ow1 and the pro scene was doomed from the start so that's that too. Anyways i see your points and I understand but like i said in a bit mad supports keep getting the short end of the stick and now that we have "something" things we already had but now we are noticing in 5v5, now we are the issue.
@Another Loser that's the thing, it was Briggs fault, she was the enabler that started it, whether or not it was her fault alone, it is undeniable that she was definitely what needed to be added for the game to break. And you can't say it didn't kill the game be real, no one was having fun during the seasons where goats was meta. I understand what you mean about support players getting the short end of the stick, I love playing support and tank, and supports just been lagging behind the other roles, it's currently the most strained role right now because of hog and sojourn All I'm saying is just hold out because the big support changes are coming as the balance devs have talked about wanting to fix it for a while, especially now since they have the hot fix system working, and they'll be off break now.
So I play support, love support; but I don't want to agree with saying Ana nade and Lucio speed aren't problematic to a degree. Ana's nade is big boom or bust. You either get a huge anti, which either may or may not be cleansed or followed up on, or you wiff it, or ana relies on the lackluster support passive, or your other support for healing. Or If you also use it to heal yourself or your allies, you're missing out on that big boom scenario. I'd still love for her to have two grenades but have only reduced healing instead. That way, it'd be in line with the healing increase, and maybe if she used both on the enemy, then it'd be zero healing flat. Of course maybe decreased damage perhaps to compensate, im unsure. Or scrap that whole zero healing, maybe it just stacks the healing reduction from 50%-75%, or 50%-60%. And lucio speed i'm really unsure of, he has always been good because of speed, and no one else has something like it. He has been fuel for a lot of metals and regardless, I still think he's aggravating for one reason or the other (His fire rate and boop) But i know it'd probably hurt Lucio players to be rid of that entirely. I wish they'd at least get rid of one bullet he fires or at least get rid of the fire once, use boop combo 😭😭😭
There's a quote from Neil Gaiman I'm fond of: "when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Clearly, there is an issue right now, but hearing everyone blaming the support, AGAIN, is tiresome, especially after she's been fine for so long but now she has synergy with a character who's been problematic from the start.
The comment about Mercy pocketing making the duel a 2v1 i think is spot on. Not a whole lot of folks complaining if you get sniped by Ana AND Ashe because they both can team up and shoot long range shots, right? I mean, that's what they do. What if the Winston and Genji dive together? We nerf Genji's ammo again?
People are so weird about duels in this game. Like, it's a team game, if I see you trying to 1v1 my other player, I'm going to help them?? So that they and we win?? I never understood why that bothered people lmao.
I think because it's easier to mentally visualize that you're getting attacked by two people, rather than double attacked by one. But also, when you're getting 2v1 by someone with a support is tough because you just have to kill the support, because the other player will just get healed...but most supports are either slippery or have odd hitboxes. So...idk, it feels different.
It's because many of the players bitching the loudest, don't want a team game. They want this to be another generic shooter game like Call of Duty, or Battlefield, where they can play at being the hero and carry the whole match on their back. All the buffs and debuffs in this game, make it more of a challenge to do that. And they hate team play. It's why Blizzard should just prioritize listening to people that actually love the universe, the unique identity of each character and class role, because they'd have reasonable feedback.
It's unfair how they want her to be useless because "she doesn't take skill" meanwhile she needs some insane macro and decision making in the higher ranks without a get out of jail free card unlike Kiriko
@@endless_del girl, i dont even play this game anymore, but people have Always said that about winston to the point at which "no brain, no aim, must be a Winston main" was something that people spammed at Monke players when they decided they had a problem with them
What about the long term? They are going to add more heroes that will be able to exploit damage boost and as current characters are buffed they will still need to account for damage boost
I LOVED the hidden Mercy tip at 2:48, where you switched to healing bean and flew in front of the Soldier so he wouldn't die to the Mei, since your Ana was on the other side of the cart and wouldn't be able to save him. That's a Top Tier Mercy Player right there!
Love how you are always the most reasonable, fair person when having discussions about OW. Would love if your input was taken more seriously by the Devs. You’d also make an amazing CM or member of the OW team honestly with how much you love and understand the game.
no one complains about the utility of any other support, with the exception of kiriko and tiktok dps moiras. mercy's utility is the least fun to play against and the easiest to reach damn near 100% of the hero's potential with.
@@buttermilkjesus8880 reaching 100% of mercy potential is not guaranteed every match, her entire kit forces you to use the map more then any other healer in the game, no other character besides maybe phara requires you to learn the map as much, not to mention the awareness you need to have to properly fly from target to target. Getting max potential o it if here requires just as much skill as any other hero in the game
@@buttermilkjesus8880 this just isn't true. prior to the release of ow2, immortality field was the thing everyone bitched about constantly, to the point where people were convinced it was going to be removed or reworked for ow2. Since clearly that hasn't happened, Mercy is the new utility to bitch about. And people still bitch about discord orb.
@@idcblue1527 you clearly didn't read what i said. very few players can get 100% out of a hero. it takes proportionately way less time invested and game knowledge to get 95% out of mercy than it does to get 95% out of any other hero.
@@destroying4ngel yeah because baptiste is less oppressive. if immortality field was as broken as you suggest surely he'd have a higher pick rate. the fact is - mercy's utility is the worst to play against and the blue beam is the easiest utility to get immense value out of.
This. The TTK has been out of control since double shields. Most of the DPS heroes need to be pulled back, damage wise. Overwatch has always had high TTK but when I quit in September 2022, like half the DPS roster could nearly instantly kill you. You can’t make one mistake, even a small one, without instantly dying at that point. I peaked a game from GM and comp wasn’t even fun at that level because of that.
I was watching that SVB podcast the other day and that part you mentioned took me by complete surprise, coupled with seeing all the Twitter discourse over the last few days. I love playing Mercy and even though I'm an OW2 newbie, I felt like I was starting to get much better (I have about 8x the playtime on her compared to ANY other hero in my career). I still really don't understand why all of this was directed onto Mercy, right when she had seemingly found a niche in the meta and I didn't feel like I was being shamed for picking her... We supports need all the help we can get, not nerfs or total reworks. If the enemy team refuses to go hitscan or does so and STILL can't get the Mercy, that's on them, not Mercy as a character - sincerely, a 24-year-old Male who mains Mercy
that svb podcast had me writing a whole dissertation lol but i calmed down and just appreciated how well svb reigned it in. the conversation about damage boost outside of ultimates is actually a good and fair one to have, but a lot of people bringing it up don't even consider that mercy brings almost none of her own damage to the table, and instead transfer it into her teammates. baptiste, ana, kiriko, etc. all have incredibly high damage output potential and on paper they all outclass mercy in terms of healing/damage potential, AND utility. the fact of the matter is that no other support can compete with one who can make sojourn broken, and quite frankly that is not mercy's problem.
Exactly why Mercy should keep damage boost. Because every other support outputs damage (and are expected to contribute) except for mercy. Her damage boosted should really just be counted as her damage on the leaderboard.
@@bigfudge2031 that's my opinion on the matter as well. i'm open to changes though, i just don't see how any would be possible without having her be doing nothing for a significant portion of the match, unless they changed her entire playstyle and focused less on her staff and more on something else in her kit (like whatever they would replace blue beam with or the pistol). i actually think mercy is perfectly balanced as she is right now and doesn't need any changes. i even still think rez is fine in 5v5-- more impactful but harder to pull off is more than a fair trade off. though rez in particular i wouldn't mind seeing scrapped for something else as long as the new thing is at least just as good
@@endless_del I don't like rez either, I would like something more engaging. But if rez is removed then 1 shots become even more oppressive without a rez to undo them.
Losing a tank is what made damage boost feel so much more threatening I feel. I do hate the pocket playstyle because it's not ever fun to go against or play with. But yeah removing damage boost would make more problems the same with discord on zen which is always a problem and a huge 1 with tank players. Supports are in a weird place rn
I feel like this goes all the way back to the og Pharah nerfs. Kinda hard to balance a hero when you have to consider how they interact with every other DPS.
That's personally why I want damage boost to get reworked. It's dumb how characters like Pharah unable to get buffs because the duo becomes too strong.
Sojourn could still basically delete you without a pocket because all it takes is a love tap. What happened with Ashe was good so Sojourn and other future heroes should follow this logic so that the same issues don't happen because balancing really is slow since right now, people are still waiting on those announced Hog changes. I don't main Mercy myself but some suggestions could make for a nice idea like a resource bar or maybe she can press a button to have a different beam effect.
I wish she could receive some changes that would discourage pocketing a single character and instead be more of a utility to the entire team. I think half of the fun of mercy's kit is how quickly she can fly back and forth between teammates yet the current mets encourages you to just sit behind cover holding your damage beam on a sojourn.
I believe the best nerf for sojourn would be to remove the headshot multiplier, which to me would make the railgun more of a finish a player off tool instead of it being a one tap
Thank You for creating this video and its well balanced discussion on Mercy! Mercy got no balance changes recently, but a lot of people suddenly seem to be mad about her damage buff? Isn‘t that strange? Find the mistake ;-)
It's because the game went free to play. Newbs are bitching about the healer roles. I've been seeing a pattern of matches with teams that regardless of role, want to solo tank all damage, whilst doing dps, ignoring that there are even roles in the first place. I kinda miss the old days where players that bought the game, bought into it for its identity, so they knew what their role responsibilities were. There were complaints even then, but at least the stupid complaints were almost always a vocal minority.
i think a small change that would also benefit mercy more than 5 extra bullets, would be to buff the things shes already good at/help her survive. id love to see them add more range to guardian angel target. I always feel like i have to tell my team to just slow down for a second so they can taxi me so to speak. or even make it so she can crouch during rez (im pretty sure she can, at least it feels like she cant lol). but seriously, id love for them to just increase her GA target range just a good bit more. espessialy since we have one less person to GA to.
Non mercy main seriously need to keep their mouth shut and play mercy for a while to experience what are we facing in comp. Most of the people lowkey tell you choose mercy just for the dmg boost, if they nerfed dmg boost she is completely useless. Im a GM mercy main on KR server for serveral years now and I can definitely say that dmg boost is powerful but also not, it really depends on your team comp and is your dps hitting sth, you basically praying for a good dps to dmg boost every game if not you really lose all your value. And about rez, it is literally the easiest ability to get punish and counter, it left you and your whole team vulnerble when you try to pull off a rez. I believe that pistol uptime are way more than you try to rez. So in this case, why they saying mercy is too powerful all so sudden when everyone call her bad or a niche pick back in season 1.
i think you have done an amazing job, you are a big help to the mercy community and even the overwatch community as a hole. you help starter mercys get better and even older ones. after quite a bit of the changes to mercy i have stopped playing her as often as i used too. because i feel like she is not a useful as she was before. but watching your videos and listening def helps me when how to use her properly and how damage boost is very imporant. i missed playing her so i have been playing her again and started to have more fun because of her moments still getting use to overwatch 2 of course. thank you for making these videos!
Ive been a mercy main since I started playing ow. I honestly love the suggestion of a drop off in dmg boost if you just pocket one target. Ive always hated hard pocketing just the one player. Her playstyle becomes so much more diverse, when you have to consider positioning - given the fact that you are gonna have to fly and help and boost all players. It adds another layer to mercy that I myself love. I dont think I would love the idea of a charge bar such as DM but I do think a similar thing related to a specific target would be a fantastic idea. This would also force a comp to play a little bit more diverse, and for the players themselves to also learn to get more value on their own - without the constant mercy pocket. All in all I think that would be experienced as the mercy player as if you have more all around impact, and would make the game more diverse. I really hope blizzard can take an approach like this if they were to rework her.
I feel like damage boost definitely needs some kind of change. You said we'll continue to have this conversation in the future when more Soj/Ashe cases appear and I agree. I also just don't think damage boost is actually that good unless you're buffing an ult or changing a breakpoint. Giving a dps 30% more damage is often not more overall dps compared to if Mercy was hitting pistol shots. This is important if you're trying to break a shield or kill a tank. Something like Discord orb is also much more effective when trying to dps a tank down. Given that other supports can swap between damage and healing, or use their util on the fly, I think Mercy probably needs a change that allows her to have a combined beam or to use damage boost and healing at the same time. Of course there'd have to be compensation nerfs elsewhere.
i think people forget that a lot of abilities reflect the characters lore like moira does carry a rocket launcher in game cause that shit makes no sense she uses her biotic grasp to harm the enemy. mercy does not like to hurt others and tried to file a law suit on overwatch for using her technology to hurt people without her permission and this is reflected in how her kit works. she doesnt use her pistol often and shes more oriented in supporting and enabling the teamrather than doing the damage herself its the team doing the damage
I absolutely think the current problem is mainly sojourn. That said I do think that time has shown that mercy's movement changes were absolutely a buff to the character, raising both her skill floor and skill ceiling. It is thus going to make other things seem more OP. The idea of a mercy standing around a corner out of sight and damage boosting isn't new, but what she can do when you try to dive her or when you get an off angle on her is.
Rez replacement idea: A time-limited-harmony-orb-like buff that auto-rezes an affected ally once if they were to die within the duration of the buff, and increases that ally's healing recieved when alive. Basically preventing a death rather than undoing it, but, an affected hero would still be "reset", aka ults would end, nano removed, and so on, as doing it in a way where the buff just makes your hp jump to full or even half instead of 0 would make some combos too unstopable. Numbers are up to debate
I've myself suggested and thought of this, figure it would work well and if it had a fast animation and equivalent cooldown, can serve the same benefit as Resurrect while being better for Mercy players and opponents alike.
I fell like the reason why sojourn is such a problem is because she has no downsides to being able to one shot. Take example widomaker, she has to charge her one shot, stand practically very still since her movement is reduced, has reduced FOV, and then has to build up the charge again b/c she hit a body shot or in general missed. Now take in account Hanson, another one shot potential character. He has a little bit better movement after charging his one shot, but still not great. Then his shot is not hit scan but a projectile and it has ab arc too. Now Sojourn on the other hand has a potential one shot, with FULL movement capabilities that outclass soldier by miles and with some techs even widow, can hold onto the one shot with said full movement capabilities, and even has a small amount of poke damage. The difference between the other two characters (Widow and Hanzo) is that Sojurn has full movement, better poke damage, and has better movement abilities along with the fact that she’s able to just one shot with a mercy pocket (and even then just shoot them one or twice and then fire the secondary fire and their dead :/ ) Overall I think it’s because of the very little downsides she has that make her better than the other snipers Yes you can make an argument that she has a much slower one shot build up, which makes sense, if it weren’t for the fact that the people can try and play behind cover against the snipers where as sojurn can move from position to position every 7 seconds, unlike widows 14 sec cooldown, and Hanzo’ okayish dash away. But hey this is just what I think and should be taken with a grain of salt, I’m not the best in the world (diamond support and tank anyway), so it’s most likely that there is some game knowledge I’m missing about why sojurn isn’t as broken as a one shot character as I’m making it seem
Good video, I agree with your sentiment and the arguments you make. I think Mercy mains like the amazing movement abilities as most of our kit. And the damage boost isn't the problem, it's a 2 person investment as you mentioned. I also think rez isn't a problem as long as there are oneshots, but people really underestimate how hard it is to get good rezzes off in any decent match
Leave Mercy alone, or I’m dropping OW2 altogether. I don’t care about whiny DPS, get better at aim and there will be no problem. Support is the least picked role, so maybe stop making this class so miserable to play. You want “fair fights”? Frick off to CoD, BF or Fortnite and leave OW what it always has been, a character based game with unique abilities.
the only thing i really want to come out of this debacle is for mercy’s movement to still be as fun as it is now. i love how it works and the tricks you can do with it. i can settle with reworks with her blue beam and res
She feels really hard to hit sometimes (might be a skill issue tbh, heard the same complaint a lot tho) but even that could be fixed without changing the movement. A large part of mercys wings don't have a hitbox in guardian angel and valkyrie, by just adjusting those they could make her slightly easier to hit while keeping the insane movement
The problem is with Mercys Dmg boost: If your DPS doesnt know what to do and hit shit, then there is a full ability on Mercys kit thats rather somehow useless. I know in the higher ranks it may not be such a problem... But to me the bad matchmaking keeps putting me into hopeless matches in the gold ranks where u almost always have Bronze players in it... and so sometimes it would be a better idea to deal dmg myself than to dmg boost...
i main mercy and i definitely agree, sometimes i'll favor damage boost over healing by 70/30 and get less damage amplified than on a game where it's a 50/50 split... the value of mercy's damage boost relies on how much damage your team is actually doing. if we're being spawn camped and no one on our team has done over a thousand damage two minutes into the game then blue beam feels useless and i switch :/
Mercy becomes much better in higher ranks because the dps players in those ranks can aim much better. You should probably be yellow beaming a bit more and damage boosting dps when they’re ulting or something, to a point where you get out of metal ranks I guess. Sometimes just having heal beam on a dps is enough of a confidence boost for them too
@@rhett3185 Believe me, if youre stuck in gold you are stuck in gold. Faught my way up from bronze (why it put me there is a big question to me, since i used to be in at least plat/dia range in all time in OW1) and hit best gold 3. from there on the game fully turned on me and gave me 12(!) unwinable games in a row. with dps after almost the full match of around 10 minutes with about 1k to 2k dmg... iam now at the point to learn bap like a mofo just to have a character that can at least try to compensate this for a bit.
I really like your idea about a “decaying” damage boost. For context, I’m a console Diamond tank player who used to play mostly flex supports when I played the role. The problem I think with Mercy is the ability to get value based off of somebody else’s skill. Aka the pocket mercy style you mentioned where they afk with damage boost on a dps. It could show up as a meter when you are boosting that specific target. My favorite part of mercy’s kit as I have transitioned into a main support player on the role, is her movement.
I like the concept but having to keep track of how much you're getting boosted by as dps sounds super annoying and inconsistent. It's already kind of hard to keep track of getting damage boosted or healed (or mercy doing something else), having to remember roughly how long they've been on damage boost sounds overwhelming and unintuitive
I don't like the meter idea. I'd prefer it to be like a Symm style charge where you land damage to charge the boost. That way it's easier to keep track of as the boosted character.
I think Mercy does need changes. She is only viable because certain dps are viable, and that's an issue. Unlike other supports, how good she is heavily relies on her team.
Brig and Lucio are kind of like that too tho. They both require comps to work. Brig needs brawl or the enemy to play dive so you can play bodyguard brig. Lucio needs brawl or dive but not aerial dive so much. Mercy is just a bit more apparent with this due to her pocket nature. Like Lucio with rein, zar or ram is dope, but Winton and dva just kind of go off and do their own thing. You could dive with them but it's much less impact than a full speed team behind a shield running at you. Not saying your wrong or dumb or anything btw, no hate! just throwing my thoughts out to start good discussion
@@sthepcorms6747 he doesn't pair well with mercy, zen or brig for supports. Hog and dva and ball don't really get benefit from him and every long range DPS or flyer doesn't pair well. You can play him, you just aren't supporting your team. Say you have DVA, mercy, pharah, echo, imo Lucio would basically be a throw pick. Double sniper with hog, same thing
I recently had a Hanzo complain that I wasn't resing enough. I was resing, but it was other teammates or my res was blocked/cancelled do to dangerous positioning. So many people don't understand that just becue you *can* res doesn't mean you *should*, a lot of times I would have died before I got the res or the other healer was dead, and it was more important to help the steding teammates then too die trying to save a cry baby.
I think it's hilarious that the people who play mercy, a hero based around supporting others, tend to have very well thought out and articulated communication for their hero in terms of health of the entire game, while the people who play one-shot characters like hog, sojourn, and ow1 doomfist, which are based around playing selfishly, tend to have a lot more emotional and poorly articulated arguments.
My stance on damage boost is that there’s 30+ heroes in the game but bc of 1 already overpowered hero ppl want it gone, before season 2 if I ever went mercy ppl would ask me to go kiriko or lucio all the time ( sometimes even Moira if they wanted me to healbot ) and like you said a lot of ppl put her in mid tiers bc she was good but not the best but since sojurn got nerfed she immediately went to s tier all bc of 1 hero, maybe if she enabled more than 1 hero to be overpowered if would agree to get rid of it but it’s so annoying ppl are taking their anger out on mercy bc sojourn is a problem
When I played overwatch I was a medic main and personally the only thing that really bothered me about mercy was the res ability. Like you said in the video, I felt it was clunky and unfun to use and when enemy players get resed it was always a bummer. I agree with the people who think it should be changed all together, but I have no idea what it could be changed to and also don't really play any more so I don't really have a horse in this race.
Alright Niandra, how's this idea: The more you damage boost, the weaker it gets, but the stronger the healing gets. The more you heal, the weaker it gets, but the stronger the damage boost gets. (Edit: Imagine a yellow/blue bar that fills more blue as you heal, and yellow as you dmg boost) (it would both nerf the pocketing problem at the higher ranks, and encourage more healthy non-"healbot" play at low ranks)
the thing about this discussion that makes it so hard is that, no matter how much people try to deny it, they do in fact take everything about it too personally. there's mercy players that take the possibly of her kit being unhealthy as a personal attack. there is no denying that, just like there is no denying that there are people that harass mercy because of her play style, or even other mercy players that harass mercy players that want her to be reworked. it is just one of those discussions that, no matter how hard people try, there are too many people that take it extremely personally, even with suggestions that could make mercy even better without breaking one character or making her entirely useless. it's hard to take either extreme seriously as a mercy player who wants her to be reworked, and a little disheartening to see certain big mercy players (not niandra) go completely insane over the whole discussion while parading around this idea that criticism to her kit = bad.
Dudes always have and always will be mad about Mercy for one stupid reason or the other because she's generally more popular with female players. This has been happening since the beginning of Overwatch 1, and if anyone thinks the hate Mercy gets has nothing to do with a certain degree of misogyny then they're hopelessly delusional. Meanwhile Reapers holding a button the entire game and getting rewarded for it.
fr it’s so frustrating that they took the time to adjust her staff-pistol switch, but still haven’t changed the valk beam break. tbh its my biggest pet peeve while playing mercy 😭
i have no idea about dmg boost since im an ana player but I feel like if rez is replaced, it should be shifted to a tool geared toward survivability. I think some sort of ability that adds decaying overhealth or, ideally, armor to the current target can help with her relatively low heal output and give her an ability that prevents death rather than reverses it. if they go with this route they can do something where it gives an armor buff if the target is being hit with the heal beam and a temporary movement and reload speed buff to the target if their being hit by the dmg boost beam (each depending on the beam in use at the time of casting the ability). this would probably warrant number changes to the damage boost so that the target doesn't become an absolute nightmare but I feel like it'll add a lot more depth
a couple fixes i’ve thought of for mercy are: 1. remove res and turn blue beam into an ability that shoots into the enemy and provides them with the buff (akin to kiriko orb) for a certain amount of time then make the secondary beam slight damage reduction while also giving mercy a small healing buff and also 2 make it to where res has a stack that builds up as mercy gets damage amplified/picking it up off dead enemies it’s with a max stack of 3 or something/ just making res revive with less health these are just some ideas and i’d like to hear any opinions
I got 2 idea First one,make mercy’s damage boost feels like an echo to the boosted damage, so that there is a small delay between the main damage. This makes that the damage boost no longer cause one shot. Or, makes mercy take 20% damage took by the damage boosted target, so that damage boosting is riskier. The enemy can do damage to the boosted hero to stop mercy from damage boosting. In both case, we can raise the boost ratio if mercy is too weak
I know I'm late but i genuinely think people just dont want supports to have good anything unless its healing for them. if you're not a support player than you want them to do nothing but be nerfed. the amount of people lately who i have seen get pissed off that cleanse and swift step is a thing for kiriko pisses me off so bad. and its so upsetting. everyone would rather blame support than themselves.
i wouldn't mind making rez a valk only ability, and we replace rez in her non valk set with some sort of single target buff like an "angelic blessing" or something that gives a speed boost/cleanse, or something giving a moblility buff/cleanse. when she valks then it is replaced by rez but the blessing becomes a one time aoe that goes off when she transforms. Maybe the blessing could also target enemies but it instead becomes and angelic curse that maybe debuffs their damage or fire rate but the first one could be the only one kept dmg boost could run on a decay or a resource meter that depletes fast but recharges upon mercy getting an elim or by converting the boosted damage done into the meter and while ulted the resource meter or decay just doesnt run out pistol buffs would be nice and a possible toggle so that ga can now targets enemies would be interesting but not needed
I think the damage boost problem is 2 parts. Its part sojourn one-shot, and part hard pocketing someone that can escape away and then kill you. Meaning the root is closer to impossible to kill someone that is hard pocket, because they have both the potential to kill you, ad can easily disengage to safety.
issue lies in the fact players don’t want supports to have fun. We need a shift to the point a lot of supports are strong and fun such as kiriko. Too many players I see assuming support is easy because they think it’s just heal botting and giving them a voice will just encourage changes to force us to heal bot. I think that should be a long term goal because forcing heal botters will completely kill the game. That’s why right now I only enjoy kiriko, Ana and zen as I feel I have meaningful impact in other ways, why should this be a fucking bad thing??
So, I'm not a Mercy player but I had some things that I wanted to share with you and see what you think. 1. Having Damage Boost be on a Resource Meter, so you have to think about when and where to use it. (You actually mentioned this later, my bad) 2. Having Mercy have the ability to give Overheal to her allies, up to a certain percentage of their normal health with a decay on it. Similar to what the Medic has in TF2, this means Mercy can essentially buff her allies health so whenever she damage boosts them or goes to heal someone else they have some cushion on them so they don't constantly need heals. 3. Having the amount of healing she does be based on a percentage of her target's health rather than a flat amount. 4. Having the amount of healing scale based on the damage her target has taken, so if they're just CONSTANTLY getting hit it doesn't feel so hard for whoever they're fighting to counter your healing if they can't seem to hit you or you're behind cover. 5. Having Res also be on a sort of resource meter that you have to build up through healing, buffing health, damage boosting, etc. These are all rough ideas, and none of them set in stone but it's something to think about. The goal is to give her value while it having counter play, and being engaging to use.
As far as balance goes, I think it is Sojourn who needs a nerf rather than Mercy. However, my take from playing her is that even though the movement is fun and res us satisfying to pull off, the focus on Damage Boost makes her feel a bit one-dimensional to play. I think it'd be interesting to put blue beam on a Defense Matrix style meter, and let her do both beams at the same time - either on seperate targets or a single ally, as that would make her staff more flexible overall. Regarding ressurect, I think that the limited chances to use it, but the huge potential impact, means it would feel more fair as an ultimate rather than as a cooldown - but if it takes half the round to charge, she should be able to grab her ally's soul from a distance and then cast it in a safe location. Her E could then be a brief free-fly, for keeping movement unpredictable, gaining/maintaining LOS on allies, etc. Finally, yes I would like an alt-fire for her pistol, to help round out her character, but it should play into her having high aim sensitivity, fast movement, and other tasks to get on with. I think a point blank attack, that does extra damage to critically injured targets, but uses up a huge chunk of ammo, would fit the bill.
My favourite idea for a Mercy rework - give a temporary boost to her beams when she swoops right next to someone and rebalance damage boost to be weaker outside of that. Makes damage boosting more skill based and Mercy has to place herself at risk more, but also makes her feel more active.
I would only give her some kind of nerf like if she heals or damage boosts someone for longer than 3-5 sec it lowers. Usually people are unable to kill pockets due to the insane healing
In my opinion from playing mercy since 2016. I can agree with sket... I forgot how to spell their name. I'm okay with damage boost and rez being changed as long ad they don't mess with her movemt, it would be more fun to be able to use an ability more often. I don't want it to be a cleanse only because it would also make JQ feel less fun cause then you have two people cleanse the bleed/wound. If they do change her damage boost and rez I think her ult would have to be looked at also due to the changes.
I agree with every single one of this discussion type videos every time lol you have such great opinions on the state of mercy or anything else. In my opinion, I just wish they would experiment and change parts of her kit in the experimental mode to test it out like they did in ow1 with other heroes. And I'm part of the group that thinks resurrect will only be fun and balanced as a ultimate and not a ability that is so boring to use, but resurrect even as a ult would be so difficult to balance so they don't make the same mistake as mass res
yeah please can they just release another experimental with some crazy stupid stuff like Ana with a grappling hook. Mercy with speedboost instead of damage boost. Sojourn railgun which heals on headshot. haha okey that would be something for april fools I guess. But just any changes would be good.
I've seen a lot of people complain about her not being able to die due to her movement and Regen ability which: 1: her Regen only activated after 5 seconds of not taking damage And 2: if you can't hit a mercy, get good. There's nothing else to it. Even if they DO nerf damage boost, at least valence it out with raising her healing or reducing a cooldown or something substantial
When I see mercy in a game, it's always followed by her having like 0- 800 dmg and 1-3 elims unless they go full tiktok battle mercy. I feel the damage boost issue isn't really character issue but a skill level issue as in great players can make use of a great combination while the lower tiered players use it to where it was originally assumed to be at. But the problem is in QP it's very common to mix those people together, and it sucks for those on the losing end and nothing something you can ditto if there is a skill difference. A cleanse would be awful a combination of kiriko and mercy cleanse would make anything pointless from ana, junker queen, and discord orb the cycle of abilities would make it unplayable
I think a self defense mechanic instead of damage boost would be interesting. Maybe a temporary enemy blind with a cooldown like how she performs in the PVE cinematic.
As a heavy Mercy player (and was Mercy one-trick for the first few years of OW1 actually) I would personally like to see damage boost get scrapped, and instead Mercy sorta "dual wields" the healing staff and her blaster at the same time. Probably some kind of system where you can't use both at the same time, or a limited bar to fire both at once -- but anything to get rid of Mercy's "need to switch weapons" to shoot her blaster. In general, playing Mercy, damage boosting just feels boring to me. Using the blaster feels bad solely because you can't weave it in between topping people off - switching to the blaster feels bad due to the time it takes (even with the buff to switch time), and it hurts your gameplay because allies may get burst down before you can switch back to heal. Simply letting the player shoot the blaster without changing weapons would help a lot. It doesn't need damage buffs or projectile speed buffs or anything to make her more DPS-heavy, that's it, IMO. Beyond that, perhaps an ability to give a single ally a modest attack speed buff wouldn't be bad. I know I'm not the only Mercy player that feels similarly regarding weapon switching and damage buffing, but, I can understand and respect the opinion of the Mercy players who don't want any of her power budget to be in something like this, and like her the way it is -- different opinions are fine :D
The problem with damage boost is that it is objectively more powerful than having a different support dealing damage, and that's because of how it interacts with breakpoints. Giving a hero like sojourn a oneshot again is much, much more valuable than having support damage against that hero. Another example (and perhaps the most egregious one) is pharah. We all know how oppressive pharmercy can be, so I don't feel the need to elaborate. To continue: Mercy pocketing is a 2v1, yes, but the issue is that the pocketed hero essentially gets the power of two heroes in one meaning that they don't need to rely on the other person to participate in a fight. Mercy pocketing is different from any other 2v1 because it will always be 1+1=2 (or 1+1>2 in the case of someone like sojourn/pharah due to breakpoints) because the power of the 2v1 is given to one person, not shared between two. You don't have to communicate or rely on the other person performing well to maximize an advantage in a 2v1 when getting pocketed by mercy. You inherently have an advantage when it's up to one person to perform well, not both participants. Mercy's only job is to stay alive and keep their pocket alive. All form of damage is concentrated to one point instead of spread out between two. An analogy would be like having two people punch a plank of wood compared to one person with the strength of two people. Yeah, two people should be able to break the plank of wood if they punch together, but they won't always be able, especially not in the middle of a team fight. However, the person with the strength of two people will always be able to break the plank of wood. It is flawed by its very design. In general, I don't think damage boosting belongs in the game in any form. Discord orb and blue beam especially need to go. Nano can probably stay because it's in the form of an ult, not a zero cooldown perma-active ability. What to replace it with? I honestly have no idea. Maybe you can decrease the number from 30% to something like 15%, so it isn't as strong but still feels nice to have. Buff her healing and maybe - big maybe - buff her movement. Alternatively replace it a damage resistance beam that reduces incoming damage by around 25%? Would probably encourage pocketing tanks more as a result. Still, you kind of need that extra damage from a support to win fights, so I don't know. The best solution would probably be to lower the damage boost number, give it some form of cooldown management like moira has with her healing so that it can't just be active forever, and give her a compensation buff with healing or movement. The best compensation would likely be giving her old movement back since this change would encourage switching between heroes who are playing aggressively and slightly boosting their damage while they try to make a play. tl;dr The devs kind of put themselves in a hole with mercy. Damage boost is necessary, but it has too much value in its current state due to breakpoints and uptime. It also gatekeeps a lot of dps heroes and keeps them below average but good with a pocket when they should be good on their own (newest one at the time of posting this is soldier). Damage boost needs to either be removed entirely and replaced with something else or nerfed significantly with compensation buffs to movement and healing
I think that this was a very thoughtful video and very correct. I'm not a Mercy player although I will play her if I need to so I typically come at her from the side of the person who has to play against her. That said, the only meta that I have ever felt was the fault of Mercy specifically as a character in need of balance was Moth meta. Ash and now Sojourn are the base numbers that her damage boost is acting on; they're the root cause of the issues but people are pointing at Mercy because the Overwatch community kind of has an overarching misunderstanding of more complicated mechanics (discord, damage boost, burn, you name it, if it's not a flat number they can look at most of then either hate it or don't understand it because math is bad or something). I truly believe rez could be removed from the game (not should necessarily, but that it might be better for everybody if it was replaced with something else) and in OW2 it's not particularly impactful anyway - the number of times Rez saves a fight vs immort or cleanse, or literally anything else is miniscule. What to do with the rest of Mercy's kit is a bigger question - I think damage boost should remain, we already have too many cleanses in the game and I think more is going to necessitate a rework of, as a for instance, Ana, and maybe a meter is the answer, but if it is then they'll have to meter the healing as well I would say, and I don't know if that's right either.
The thing that ticks me off tho...The VERY SAME PEOPLE who are complaining about db and rez are the same people in game who beg and cry and demand db and rez. 🙄🙄🙄
So as a humble Ana and Sombra enjoyer this is my idea if you guys promise not to troll with it. 1 make Mercy's damage boost be on a meter that refill from healing. The bar only depletes if her teammate are dealing damage, but the more depleted it becomes the stronger her heal is. This makes her more resource management with more ability to burst heal. This also means when she is "useless" waiting for more damage boost, she isn't useless since she has a save someone button in her pocket. 2 Change rez to the ability to pick up you allies and carry them. Basically giving another character Mercy's mobility for a short period of time. This allows her save people, taxi them, and let them quickly take space. Limit the carry size to 250 or 225 hp so you can't fly tanks around. Once she Valks, then it turns into a rez. This gives you an ability you can use more often, feels less bad for people to play against, keeps with her theme, keeps the rez in her kit, and compliments good movement and positioning more than rez does. This comes with the cavate with this is can't you can't abuse this to troll teammate in the long long list of ways you could troll people with her.
I don't play mercy but i think the problem with ressurect is only when she ressurects the tank,a posible fix could be to resurrect with half health or full cooldowns always
Okay how about something like this. 1 remove rez 2 replace the ult 3 replace damage boost with "charge" charge increases the move speed by 20% and the ult charge by 25% 4 new ablity is "staff overcharged" Apply both the heal beam and charge to the staff for 10 seconds.(both effects are simultaneously active on the target) 5 new ult would be "over charge" wich allows you to put your beam on dead allys and over the course of 5 seconds revive them, this would also activate the "overcharge" effect. This would be tied to a resorse that fills on assist with demishing returns. What do you think? I'd like to know if this is fair op or under powered
I agree with all of your points, apart from any world where she keeps res the way it is currently. I definitely understand why they had to introduce the balance change to res to increase the distance and ignore los after the animation was initiated back when they patched that in OW1, but the insane distances she can travel after initiating the res I think could go now, especially with less hard CC in the game. LOS change could stay I think. That's really where the feelsbadman moments come from for me.... boop her with Ball, she still gets the res. Concussion with Pharah, boop with Lucio, etc. etc. Some ability to have some counterplay - though agreed, getting them off can be tough-to-impossible sometimes - is necessary outside of the oppressive disaster that is Hog's hook. Last thing we need in the game is to reintroduce the CC circus we had in late stage OW1 but there's gotta be a balance somewhere in between and I think the overall distance traveled for her after initiating the res is a good place to start. That is, if they keep res at all lol
In OW every hero needs skill (to an extent) to be played at his full potential. A skilled widowmaker player can have the same impact as a good Mercy player on paper, but is it fair? Imagine that a widowmaker wins a fight by clicking 2 to 3 heads. Is it fair that a Mercy can have the same impact when her mechanics are non existent and all the macro she needs is to hide and SHIFT away as soon as someone starts to shoot her? There is no way her macro comes even close to Rein's or Winston's, playing in the frontlines, and in all roles you need good positioning so it's not like it's a skill that only she requires. So what does a Mercy require that other heroes dont? What part of her kit is so complicated that NO other player can play her at her full potential? I play mercy (in qp), i have a lot of hours on her, she's fun, perfect for when i don't feel like aiming or position myself in any complicated way, all i have to do is keep swapping between LMB and RMB and shift from time to time while chilling. If i want to play widowmaker i can't fucking chill because if i don't get picks i'm basically afk. I mean it's undeniable, you can watch it even in this video, all she does is keep down RMB and moving in circles. That's the extent of the skill she requires. So why is a player with those "skills" in GM with me? I can swap to Tracer if i need to, Ash, Soldier, Sojourn, McCree etc. Would you really feel confident in having a Mercy player play Ana and aim for your heals? Or play Brigitte in the frontlines under constant fire? WHY ARE MOST MERCY PLAYERS ONE TRICK MERCY ? That's just the reality of it, just cause you can play Mercy doesn't mean you can play any other hero, but generally speaking, playing any hero will simply require a few hours of adjusting for you to play Mercy somewhat decently. Of course this applies to people who can actually play the game, not your average plat player. Edit: just for clarification, i love a good Mercy player, I don't have a problem with Mercy players feeling like they're useful, they are indeed. My problem comes when they feel like they're as good as other heroes that require much more complicated mechanics and macro. Being as useful doesn't necessarily mean that you're as skilled.
my proposal i came up with after a short thinking time so my idea would be that the extra damage of damage boost can't kill but maybe increase the effect a bit a to compensate or give her some other buff that way sojourn couldn't one-tab people but it wouldn't make the damage boost useless, i haven't really thought it through too much, but it could maybe be a solution?
I'd like to see damage boost slowly build up to 20% buff and then tick down when the beam goes off. I'd want it to be possible to mostly cap 2 players with the buff if you are full-time damage boosting. It'd help solve Mercys running off with a DPS to flank, which normally indicates that player is gonna be pocketed that game, which doesn't feel very good for their team because they're down 2 players and is super tilting to play against for the other team. Mercys would feel more incentivized to stick with the team and not latch onto only one player all game. This isn't the fault of Mercy mains, but one DPS getting all the damage boosting(and prio heals when they are low health) gets the other DPS super jealous, which encourages toxicity in games. Especially in comp games, people like to say "dps diff" if one DPS is doing way better than the other, which is almost surely going to be the case if one is being pocketed. You have to be playing against someone way, way worse than you to out-damage them while they've got a Mercy running around with them all game.
Mercy should be buffed, not nerfed. Her impact es minimal like any other support right now. The fact that Soujorn is super op doesn't make Mercy powerful as well just because she has to pocket her. It is not Damage Boost, is Soujorn.
I've wanted them for years to give mercy an ability where she could heal and damage boost at the same, As long as it didn't last long and had a long cooldown it would be really cool and indirectly make valk SO much better, If they ever give her some sort of nerf I think this would be cool to have to compensate
I honestly I've been feeling like that personally that should be added into her valk, just a mixture of blue and yellow with damage boosting and healing at the same time haha
Whilst I do think that dmg boost makes balance more complicated, but with that said, I do think it is still well doable. When the team thinks of dmg, they (should) think of how it would be affected if there was a 30% dmg boost, and you'd be almost good to go. The whole issue I still have with Sojourn is that Mercy really isn't THAT big of an enabler to her. Remember, her railgun at 100% charge (a.k.a a second or so of spamming a shield/tank) leaves only 5 HEALTH. Just a bit of spam/help from teammates, and she's back to borderline one-shotting. A few bullets and she's at 50% charge, and bam, already able to kill. I'd rather have the balance team lower Sojourn's headshot multiplier, as that is one of the main culprits for her one-shotability
Imma be honest, I hope that if they give Mercy a different ability that it is not a cleanse. We’ve already seen what has happened when a cleanse such as Kiriko’s was put into the game and drastically change and put a chokehold on the meta we see today. I feel that Overwatch is in a tough problem where imo the characters are too diverse leading to such strong metas. Look at lucio, for the most part he has not shifted away from being a meta pick for months even years if you count OW1 due to his ability to consistently push faster rotations with speed boost and we can see that with Kiriko as well with her having the only full cleanse ability (You could count zarya but zarya can’t cleanse as well as Kiriko) . The only way I see this problem being fixed is either characters dumbed down or they release more characters faster, which is a lose lose for us players.
I don't love the idea that non-Mercy mains can't have good ideas about her since, like you said, her balance affects every other hero and players. But the conversations around her get really one sided fast when someone isn't there to counter them. But to that same feel, I think her damage boost is like lots of other abilities in the game; in that since the devs keep taking stuff out, more stuff sticks out. Like, yeah, it sucks having a Mercy damage boost Sojourn or Ashe in the past for one shots, but shouldn't there just be counter play to that? Like now we're having the conversation about Widow, Hog, and Hanzo and like idk, I feel like Brig armor packs were a small way to keep that relatively in check. Roadhog and Doom had meta times, but we know they're bad when they're not OP. Sombra could have been keeping them from going too wild. Kiriko just cleanses everything Ana can do? If Hack was a real lockout, Kiriko would cleanse that. Idk, seems like when there's less knobs to turn, balance gets harder. People want dmg boost and rez to go away. Next they want one shots. Then what, shields, healing, support abilities? I think a lot of players subtly just want Genji and Tracer for the entire game with nothing else...but that's not Overwatch.
My Ana hours played is about double the next closest hero. I play some Mercy too. Anyone who thinks it doesn't require skill hasn't played Mercy (or support much). My vote is to stop nerfing Mercy and leave her alone. If anything, they dropped her healing a tiny bit too much.
As long as blizzard designs heroes to have high based damage abilities or AAs we will have the conversation that mercy is a problem. We know from previous discussions that as soon as a hero gets to 150-190 damage on 1 ammo ability or AA that it will require damage boost to push from 2 hit to 1 hit range, mercy only becomes meta in them situations or shes “bad” when isn’t in them situations cause of her changes. Blizzard should of learnt from Ashe launch and nerfs, however they didn’t, i dont mind if some heroes have high burst in a combo, but they need to spread that damage around them abilities rather than focus it into 1… mercy’s damage boost would still be good pushing 4 to 3 or 3 to 2 breakpoint, just not be as obxious as 2 to 1.
One thing that I don't see brought up is yeah, they have to balance dps characters around Mercy, but is that a problem? They have to balance map geometry around Lucio, they're constantly bugfixing Reaper's teleport every season, every hero adds development load to the game. There's always going to be a oneshot threshold, the only question is do we want it to be 200 or 153? Or 160 if they want to nerf d-boost to 25%. Like, are there that many heroes where we want to give them abilities that deal over 160 damage un-boosted?
I actually feel like there's so many ways to make mercy a little more viable, while giving her less ways to break specific characters. First of all, reduce her damage boost to 20% and make all damage boost in the game not stack. Instead, the game should always prefer the highest damage boost that's currently influencing the player and use that value. Now that her and other characters damage orbs are less oppressive, give Mercy's blue beam the ability to add 12,5-20% damage mitigation/reduction to the target. That way the blue beam gets used more often, as many low rank mercy's ignore it as it feels like whenever you use the blue beam, your teammates just... Die. It also makes up for getting less ult charge by the nerfed amp. Doing max. 20% damage boost, while giving your teammate effectively 25-40 more HP on a 200HP Target shouldn't be too much of a problem, especially as if you'd heal someone during that same scenario, you'd heal for the same amount if not more, so it doesn't slow the fight down too much. It would also give her ult more value though, without being too much? Now, for the yellow/healing beam... Don't change the values, but add a 15% speedboost (that, again, doesn't stack. The game just uses the highest speedboost value that influences the target). I feel like it would give mercy just a little more synergy with some characters, to make her a more viable pick and maybe help out some characters that struggle right now. But that's just my opinion, maybe someone else has better ideas?
If they were to change up Mercy’s blue beam, reducing the damage increase by 10% and adding on like a 20% damage reduction to the selected target would be a nice payoff. Stops people from complaining about one shot potential and allows Mercy to maintain some form of strength in the meta. For Rez (even though I hate the idea of losing Rez cause it’s like Mercy’s signature ability), change the ability to like an Angel’s blessing that gives 40hp per second and small damage output and reduction buff for 5 or so seconds would allow Mercy to multitask her targets better and allow her to pocket a damage without needing to be seperate from her team.
Even though this is controversial and most of the people would disagree, I think mercy’s problem is her mobility. Before you comment something, let me say something. In competitive matches, the mercy player dies at most 1 time, the reason for that is at a certain point of skill mercy becomes a f 22 raptor and becomes a flying sonic the hedgehog. In my opinion, the problem with that is the fact she keeps putting constant value during a match, which doesn’t happen for any other support. Maybe if could kill her you should be able to reduce the stress that is fighting a boosted character infinitely and make it harder to rez. So I would nerf the cooldown of guardian angel by one second and the energy of the Jetpack in guardian angel slightly. Just to not gut the character completely buff her healing to 60 per sec and maybe the damage boost. Also nerf sourjorn and hog too lol
Tbh I feel like the best solution is to just ride it out bc it’s hard to touch anything that boost dmg without it becoming overwhelming or becoming underwhelming
I think Soujourn could be changed to have the railgun do lower damage but go through shields and characters (pierce). Nano boost would hs kill. Discord+MDB too.
I tried Mercy recently, but was I keeping her in low regards before; well, it was a mistake, it makes fun and takes good decisions to be useful, but you do your job more indirectly and enable the team to do theirs. Which is an interesting and different approach to the game. As I said elsewhere if they want to alleviate the situation, they could implement a kind of protection "no one-shot possible against full health targets" which would only allow a two-shot, thus requiring a small punch afterwards for targets at full health. It would prevent people being kicked out of the game directly while putting them at high risk after being hit by severe damage.
What about knocking Mercy's Rez cooldown to 15 seconds if reviving a support or dps character, however that character only lives for 10-15 seconds before immediately dying again without a chance of rez. If resurrecting a tank then the ability cooldown is the thirty seconds that it is now. Makes rez have more decision making and can be used more often for more impactful hits without complete demoralization of the opposing team. Your soldier has his ult but died on the way to the back of the point? Give him a rez and then he can fire his ult off as a last chance type of feeling.
wild card idea. mix damage boost into rez and rework the ability. give mercy the option to give a teammate damage boost for x amount of time (for now let's say 10 seconds) and puts it on a 15-20 second timer HOWEVER if she chooses to press the button on a dead teammate it does the normal rez WITH A TWIST. (shit on me for this idc cuz this is a wildcard idea that I thought would be funny) the rezed target starts with lowered hp (half or like 2/3ds the hp) and passively heals the rest over a 2-4 second time period. they will also received a nerfed version of the damage boost (let's say half the time, so 5 seconds) this gives mercy a decision to make every time she presses the button, does she either A. use it to give an alive teammate godly powers for a good period of time? or B. rez a teammate but at a greater risk of them dying off the bat but also given said person a fighting chance with the smaller dmg boost.(or idk just remove the dmg boost portion) this gives mercy for room for micro skill as well as macro skill. again this is a stupid wild card idea that nobody will see and or care about, but if anybody does see it and cares about feel free to go nuts with adjustments or just flaming me for even thinking of changing the all beautiful gaming concept that is mercy. also sojourn should have her headshots removed and just have piercing shots without ult okay baaaai :)
I would hate if they removed damage boost. If all you have as your main thing is healing, you'll be absolutely useless for a large portion of the game because people don't always need healing even in a team fight. I like seeking out who is playing effectively aggressive and damage boosting them, and that's not always the Soujourn. Damage boost is only ever as powerful as the one receiving it. You can't make damage boost start low and gradually ramp up either because that would encourage pocketing and her playstyle should include switching fast and often between targets. I also agree that rez is clunky and slow. I understand it's powerful, but frankly so is making someone invulnerable. And you're right. Most criticism on supports come from people who don't and wouldn't touch the class, which causes too many proposed solutions to just hinge on making the supports more like dps. That already happened with tanks, and I don’t play those anymore.
I’m concerned that the upcoming Roadhog changes will put him in a state where he can’t 1-shot hooked squishies on his own but can with damage boost on the follow-up shot.
Mercy is (and for the most part has been) the balancing punching bag. Streamers write her off as "no skill" and seem to resent that a character that doesn't just click heads gets any value at all. Alot of what you say about damage beam being the "default" mode spells it out: alot of the detractors think Mercy should literally be a healbot so they don't consider that a blue beam replacement needs to take the place of that "default" output.
I feel like the answer is pretty obvious. Set Sojourn’s charge shot to not be boostable, like when they changed dragon strike and tire. If a live service can’t be adaptable like this, what’s the point?
2:45 "damage boost nerfed ... Mercy falls behind other supports apart from mid/low ranks and casual" What would be so bad about that? Isn't that the point of her kit and design, to be easily accessible for new players, not to be played at the very peak of skill? And no she is not the only one, hog, Orisa, soldier, sym, junkrat, torb, brig, Moira. And I'm not saying these characters are all hard meta, but I definitely do think any of them should be. There is a place in the game for low skill medium reward characters and that's just where mercy belongs 🤷
From my own experience, I don't think the Mercy is the problem at the moment as much as other parts of the roster. The two biggest things I think are Hog being so strong as a result of Kiriko's addition that it generally counters dive (who typically can help deal with someone who is being boosted by Mercy), and that Sojourn has both high damage and high mobility.
I have to admit that I don't like Mercy's gameplay right now, because the most effective game at high ranks looks like you just can't let go of your dps for even a second! If you play with a team, then your team is immediately less likely to win. It's an uninteresting gameplay und that makes me feel like I'm an NPC😵But I don't think Mercy needs a change because I'm afraid of what they might do with her. However, the fact that Sajorn is so strong with Mercy is clearly not Mercy's problem and Sajorn needs to be changed. I'm very glad you're speaking out on this problem 💛 because in these discussions, among professional players and journalists, there is simply no one who has played Mercy for more than 100 hours or who would love to play her. For the most part they talk about Mercy as a damage amplifying NPC and don't understand her and the technical potential of her game. Because of this it is very important that players like you speak up about this, because if not you, then who? In general, it is very annoying that they do not take Mercy players seriously, even if they have a huge number of hours on the character and they play in the Grandmaster - Top500 ranks.
Mercy is an evasive healer. If Blizzard changes any of these, she changes on a fundamental level. Anything else can change and she'll still be the same.
Mercy's ult should be replaced with an ult called Food Baby, where her belly gets big and she burps out various snacks which give a healing buff to her team.
mentioning the ashe thing, where "mashe" was completely busted until they nerfed ashe's damage, was something i completely forgot about but really convinced me that it was never a mercy problem, just a "brand new dps hero being busted" problem. now, ashe isnt a garbage pick, mercy + ashe is still really good, ashe without a mercy is still really good, all to just drive the point home that they should really consider doing the same with sojourn instead of changing an ability that's been the same for all of overwatch history and wasnt a problem until a new dps character made it a problem again.
Exactly, after that nerf ashe was still a really good pick with and without a mercy
WHEN DOD THEY NERF AHSE?!!! I was like why do i feel so weak
Yeah, this has happened on several occasions where the dev team just release busted characters or busted reworks. Ashe, Sojourn, and briefly Hanzo after his rework, were all incredibly strong characters on release. Even if dmg boost didn't exist, and these characters were never nerfed, people would still be complaining about their insane damage output. Mercy simply magnified the underlying issue that was already present to begin with.
@@yeva8077 they nerfed ashe like 3 years ago, she hasn’t been nerfed recently
What no, it must be Mercy's fault. We have to blame the support!
I feel like, players don't like supports to be impactful, they like their healbots, but they don't want them to do anything outside of that, because it's frustrating. If they remove Mercy's damage boost what is stoping them from taking Lucio's speed boost or Ana's nade. Their job is to be there and to help the team run over the other, it includes healing or any other thing they can do. I'm just a bit mad that it is always DPS players complaining when they are the problem 99% of times. Brigg wasn't as bad as people say she was and still she got nerf to the ground, and now she's underwhelming. But we supports still try and we will still be trying even if we are the punching bag of the rest of the community.
Exactly! They want supports to be healbots that are easy for them to kill! If a support can do anyhting else than heal then they will instantly say that "its a dps with healing abilities", or that its "too strong" and should be removed from the game
I was with you until you said Brigg wasn't that bad, Brigg literally made goats, the thing that killed the first game, and then devolved into double shield. Brigg was a troubled character from the start, I do agree they nerfed her into the ground, but for now I'll say that was a necessary evil. Right now thanks to recent buffs, she's kind of pretty nice. Don't worry supports, you'll get your time to shine after this hog rework and sojourn nerf, the dev teams been talking about wanting to bolster the supports up.
@@ChaosBros goats wasn't just Brigg, it was a team effort Rein, Zarya and Lucio are all equal ti blame. Double shield is 100% tanks fault. And I feel like dos players hate goats so much because they feel useless, sadly that's how supports feel for lots of comps. And goats didn't kill ow1 nothing killed ow1 and the pro scene was doomed from the start so that's that too. Anyways i see your points and I understand but like i said in a bit mad supports keep getting the short end of the stick and now that we have "something" things we already had but now we are noticing in 5v5, now we are the issue.
@Another Loser that's the thing, it was Briggs fault, she was the enabler that started it, whether or not it was her fault alone, it is undeniable that she was definitely what needed to be added for the game to break. And you can't say it didn't kill the game be real, no one was having fun during the seasons where goats was meta. I understand what you mean about support players getting the short end of the stick, I love playing support and tank, and supports just been lagging behind the other roles, it's currently the most strained role right now because of hog and sojourn
All I'm saying is just hold out because the big support changes are coming as the balance devs have talked about wanting to fix it for a while, especially now since they have the hot fix system working, and they'll be off break now.
So I play support, love support; but I don't want to agree with saying Ana nade and Lucio speed aren't problematic to a degree.
Ana's nade is big boom or bust. You either get a huge anti, which either may or may not be cleansed or followed up on, or you wiff it, or ana relies on the lackluster support passive, or your other support for healing.
Or If you also use it to heal yourself or your allies, you're missing out on that big boom scenario.
I'd still love for her to have two grenades but have only reduced healing instead. That way, it'd be in line with the healing increase, and maybe if she used both on the enemy, then it'd be zero healing flat. Of course maybe decreased damage perhaps to compensate, im unsure. Or scrap that whole zero healing, maybe it just stacks the healing reduction from 50%-75%, or 50%-60%.
And lucio speed i'm really unsure of, he has always been good because of speed, and no one else has something like it. He has been fuel for a lot of metals and regardless, I still think he's aggravating for one reason or the other (His fire rate and boop)
But i know it'd probably hurt Lucio players to be rid of that entirely. I wish they'd at least get rid of one bullet he fires or at least get rid of the fire once, use boop combo 😭😭😭
There's a quote from Neil Gaiman I'm fond of: "when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Clearly, there is an issue right now, but hearing everyone blaming the support, AGAIN, is tiresome, especially after she's been fine for so long but now she has synergy with a character who's been problematic from the start.
The comment about Mercy pocketing making the duel a 2v1 i think is spot on. Not a whole lot of folks complaining if you get sniped by Ana AND Ashe because they both can team up and shoot long range shots, right? I mean, that's what they do.
What if the Winston and Genji dive together? We nerf Genji's ammo again?
Watch your mouth. You’ll give Blizzard more ideas for nerfs when Winston becomes meta again
People are so weird about duels in this game. Like, it's a team game, if I see you trying to 1v1 my other player, I'm going to help them?? So that they and we win?? I never understood why that bothered people lmao.
I think because it's easier to mentally visualize that you're getting attacked by two people, rather than double attacked by one. But also, when you're getting 2v1 by someone with a support is tough because you just have to kill the support, because the other player will just get healed...but most supports are either slippery or have odd hitboxes. So...idk, it feels different.
It's because many of the players bitching the loudest, don't want a team game. They want this to be another generic shooter game like Call of Duty, or Battlefield, where they can play at being the hero and carry the whole match on their back. All the buffs and debuffs in this game, make it more of a challenge to do that. And they hate team play. It's why Blizzard should just prioritize listening to people that actually love the universe, the unique identity of each character and class role, because they'd have reasonable feedback.
If the Mercy dies most of the time their pocket will soon follow. But I guess thats just too hard to understand
It's unfair how they want her to be useless because "she doesn't take skill" meanwhile she needs some insane macro and decision making in the higher ranks without a get out of jail free card unlike Kiriko
and you know what is so funny is that no aim = no skill but they don't say the same for rein or winston. i wonder why that is? 🤔
@@endless_del girl, i dont even play this game anymore, but people have Always said that about winston to the point at which "no brain, no aim, must be a Winston main" was something that people spammed at Monke players when they decided they had a problem with them
@@endless_del people hate noncombatants in combat games (I think because they have unusual gameplay, but it could just be people being jerks)
@@endless_del Because monkey and rien are playmakers and mercy is a spectator to the teamfight
@jaber5345 no, no she's not. A good mercy is the difference maker in close team fights
Mercy doesn't need changes, Sojourn does.
What about the long term? They are going to add more heroes that will be able to exploit damage boost and as current characters are buffed they will still need to account for damage boost
@@ReconNarwhalthey will do it in a way where it wont be op.
@@ReconNarwhal Overwatch only gets a new dps hero after 2023 so she'll be fine for the next year.
Exactly. Sojourn fees too overtuned and easy to carry. And Blizzard knows that. So They’re gonna nerf Genji again
@@bardock2614 Haha, that does seem like the way the trainwreck of OW2 works, yes....
I LOVED the hidden Mercy tip at 2:48, where you switched to healing bean and flew in front of the Soldier so he wouldn't die to the Mei, since your Ana was on the other side of the cart and wouldn't be able to save him. That's a Top Tier Mercy Player right there!
SAME this was jaw dropping to my silly little low plat heart lol
Now you can't do that move anymore 😢
Love how you are always the most reasonable, fair person when having discussions about OW. Would love if your input was taken more seriously by the Devs. You’d also make an amazing CM or member of the OW team honestly with how much you love and understand the game.
People seem to get really upset when supports aren’t just healbots
no one complains about the utility of any other support, with the exception of kiriko and tiktok dps moiras. mercy's utility is the least fun to play against and the easiest to reach damn near 100% of the hero's potential with.
@@buttermilkjesus8880 reaching 100% of mercy potential is not guaranteed every match, her entire kit forces you to use the map more then any other healer in the game, no other character besides maybe phara requires you to learn the map as much, not to mention the awareness you need to have to properly fly from target to target. Getting max potential o it if here requires just as much skill as any other hero in the game
@@buttermilkjesus8880 this just isn't true. prior to the release of ow2, immortality field was the thing everyone bitched about constantly, to the point where people were convinced it was going to be removed or reworked for ow2. Since clearly that hasn't happened, Mercy is the new utility to bitch about. And people still bitch about discord orb.
@@idcblue1527 you clearly didn't read what i said. very few players can get 100% out of a hero. it takes proportionately way less time invested and game knowledge to get 95% out of mercy than it does to get 95% out of any other hero.
@@destroying4ngel yeah because baptiste is less oppressive. if immortality field was as broken as you suggest surely he'd have a higher pick rate. the fact is - mercy's utility is the worst to play against and the blue beam is the easiest utility to get immense value out of.
They have never addressed the power creep from trying to kill the double shield meta. Everything has to be adjusted dmg wise I feel before reworks
This. The TTK has been out of control since double shields. Most of the DPS heroes need to be pulled back, damage wise. Overwatch has always had high TTK but when I quit in September 2022, like half the DPS roster could nearly instantly kill you. You can’t make one mistake, even a small one, without instantly dying at that point. I peaked a game from GM and comp wasn’t even fun at that level because of that.
I was watching that SVB podcast the other day and that part you mentioned took me by complete surprise, coupled with seeing all the Twitter discourse over the last few days. I love playing Mercy and even though I'm an OW2 newbie, I felt like I was starting to get much better (I have about 8x the playtime on her compared to ANY other hero in my career). I still really don't understand why all of this was directed onto Mercy, right when she had seemingly found a niche in the meta and I didn't feel like I was being shamed for picking her... We supports need all the help we can get, not nerfs or total reworks. If the enemy team refuses to go hitscan or does so and STILL can't get the Mercy, that's on them, not Mercy as a character - sincerely, a 24-year-old Male who mains Mercy
that svb podcast had me writing a whole dissertation lol but i calmed down and just appreciated how well svb reigned it in. the conversation about damage boost outside of ultimates is actually a good and fair one to have, but a lot of people bringing it up don't even consider that mercy brings almost none of her own damage to the table, and instead transfer it into her teammates. baptiste, ana, kiriko, etc. all have incredibly high damage output potential and on paper they all outclass mercy in terms of healing/damage potential, AND utility. the fact of the matter is that no other support can compete with one who can make sojourn broken, and quite frankly that is not mercy's problem.
Exactly why Mercy should keep damage boost. Because every other support outputs damage (and are expected to contribute) except for mercy.
Her damage boosted should really just be counted as her damage on the leaderboard.
@@bigfudge2031 that's my opinion on the matter as well. i'm open to changes though, i just don't see how any would be possible without having her be doing nothing for a significant portion of the match, unless they changed her entire playstyle and focused less on her staff and more on something else in her kit (like whatever they would replace blue beam with or the pistol). i actually think mercy is perfectly balanced as she is right now and doesn't need any changes. i even still think rez is fine in 5v5-- more impactful but harder to pull off is more than a fair trade off. though rez in particular i wouldn't mind seeing scrapped for something else as long as the new thing is at least just as good
@@endless_del I don't like rez either, I would like something more engaging.
But if rez is removed then 1 shots become even more oppressive without a rez to undo them.
Losing a tank is what made damage boost feel so much more threatening I feel. I do hate the pocket playstyle because it's not ever fun to go against or play with. But yeah removing damage boost would make more problems the same with discord on zen which is always a problem and a huge 1 with tank players. Supports are in a weird place rn
I feel like this goes all the way back to the og Pharah nerfs. Kinda hard to balance a hero when you have to consider how they interact with every other DPS.
That's personally why I want damage boost to get reworked. It's dumb how characters like Pharah unable to get buffs because the duo becomes too strong.
Sojourn could still basically delete you without a pocket because all it takes is a love tap. What happened with Ashe was good so Sojourn and other future heroes should follow this logic so that the same issues don't happen because balancing really is slow since right now, people are still waiting on those announced Hog changes.
I don't main Mercy myself but some suggestions could make for a nice idea like a resource bar or maybe she can press a button to have a different beam effect.
I wish she could receive some changes that would discourage pocketing a single character and instead be more of a utility to the entire team. I think half of the fun of mercy's kit is how quickly she can fly back and forth between teammates yet the current mets encourages you to just sit behind cover holding your damage beam on a sojourn.
ive always enjoyed playing team Mercy over pocket Mercy
If each character had a hidden number and the higher the number less effect they receive from mercy staff would be a "good" way to do this
I believe the best nerf for sojourn would be to remove the headshot multiplier, which to me would make the railgun more of a finish a player off tool instead of it being a one tap
Thank You for creating this video and its well balanced discussion on Mercy! Mercy got no balance changes recently, but a lot of people suddenly seem to be mad about her damage buff? Isn‘t that strange? Find the mistake ;-)
It's because the game went free to play. Newbs are bitching about the healer roles. I've been seeing a pattern of matches with teams that regardless of role, want to solo tank all damage, whilst doing dps, ignoring that there are even roles in the first place. I kinda miss the old days where players that bought the game, bought into it for its identity, so they knew what their role responsibilities were. There were complaints even then, but at least the stupid complaints were almost always a vocal minority.
i think a small change that would also benefit mercy more than 5 extra bullets, would be to buff the things shes already good at/help her survive. id love to see them add more range to guardian angel target. I always feel like i have to tell my team to just slow down for a second so they can taxi me so to speak. or even make it so she can crouch during rez (im pretty sure she can, at least it feels like she cant lol). but seriously, id love for them to just increase her GA target range just a good bit more. espessialy since we have one less person to GA to.
Non mercy main seriously need to keep their mouth shut and play mercy for a while to experience what are we facing in comp. Most of the people lowkey tell you choose mercy just for the dmg boost, if they nerfed dmg boost she is completely useless.
Im a GM mercy main on KR server for serveral years now and I can definitely say that dmg boost is powerful but also not, it really depends on your team comp and is your dps hitting sth, you basically praying for a good dps to dmg boost every game if not you really lose all your value.
And about rez, it is literally the easiest ability to get punish and counter, it left you and your whole team vulnerble when you try to pull off a rez. I believe that pistol uptime are way more than you try to rez.
So in this case, why they saying mercy is too powerful all so sudden when everyone call her bad or a niche pick back in season 1.
i think you have done an amazing job, you are a big help to the mercy community and even the overwatch community as a hole. you help starter mercys get better and even older ones. after quite a bit of the changes to mercy i have stopped playing her as often as i used too. because i feel like she is not a useful as she was before. but watching your videos and listening def helps me when how to use her properly and how damage boost is very imporant. i missed playing her so i have been playing her again and started to have more fun because of her moments still getting use to overwatch 2 of course. thank you for making these videos!
Ive been a mercy main since I started playing ow. I honestly love the suggestion of a drop off in dmg boost if you just pocket one target. Ive always hated hard pocketing just the one player. Her playstyle becomes so much more diverse, when you have to consider positioning - given the fact that you are gonna have to fly and help and boost all players. It adds another layer to mercy that I myself love. I dont think I would love the idea of a charge bar such as DM but I do think a similar thing related to a specific target would be a fantastic idea. This would also force a comp to play a little bit more diverse, and for the players themselves to also learn to get more value on their own - without the constant mercy pocket.
All in all I think that would be experienced as the mercy player as if you have more all around impact, and would make the game more diverse. I really hope blizzard can take an approach like this if they were to rework her.
I feel like damage boost definitely needs some kind of change. You said we'll continue to have this conversation in the future when more Soj/Ashe cases appear and I agree. I also just don't think damage boost is actually that good unless you're buffing an ult or changing a breakpoint. Giving a dps 30% more damage is often not more overall dps compared to if Mercy was hitting pistol shots. This is important if you're trying to break a shield or kill a tank. Something like Discord orb is also much more effective when trying to dps a tank down. Given that other supports can swap between damage and healing, or use their util on the fly, I think Mercy probably needs a change that allows her to have a combined beam or to use damage boost and healing at the same time. Of course there'd have to be compensation nerfs elsewhere.
i think people forget that a lot of abilities reflect the characters lore like moira does carry a rocket launcher in game cause that shit makes no sense she uses her biotic grasp to harm the enemy. mercy does not like to hurt others and tried to file a law suit on overwatch for using her technology to hurt people without her permission and this is reflected in how her kit works. she doesnt use her pistol often and shes more oriented in supporting and enabling the teamrather than doing the damage herself its the team doing the damage
I absolutely think the current problem is mainly sojourn. That said I do think that time has shown that mercy's movement changes were absolutely a buff to the character, raising both her skill floor and skill ceiling. It is thus going to make other things seem more OP. The idea of a mercy standing around a corner out of sight and damage boosting isn't new, but what she can do when you try to dive her or when you get an off angle on her is.
Rez replacement idea:
A time-limited-harmony-orb-like buff that auto-rezes an affected ally once if they were to die within the duration of the buff, and increases that ally's healing recieved when alive.
Basically preventing a death rather than undoing it, but, an affected hero would still be "reset", aka ults would end, nano removed, and so on, as doing it in a way where the buff just makes your hp jump to full or even half instead of 0 would make some combos too unstopable.
Numbers are up to debate
I've myself suggested and thought of this, figure it would work well and if it had a fast animation and equivalent cooldown, can serve the same benefit as Resurrect while being better for Mercy players and opponents alike.
I fell like the reason why sojourn is such a problem is because she has no downsides to being able to one shot.
Take example widomaker, she has to charge her one shot, stand practically very still since her movement is reduced, has reduced FOV, and then has to build up the charge again b/c she hit a body shot or in general missed.
Now take in account Hanson, another one shot potential character. He has a little bit better movement after charging his one shot, but still not great. Then his shot is not hit scan but a projectile and it has ab arc too.
Now Sojourn on the other hand has a potential one shot, with FULL movement capabilities that outclass soldier by miles and with some techs even widow, can hold onto the one shot with said full movement capabilities, and even has a small amount of poke damage.
The difference between the other two characters (Widow and Hanzo) is that Sojurn has full movement, better poke damage, and has better movement abilities along with the fact that she’s able to just one shot with a mercy pocket (and even then just shoot them one or twice and then fire the secondary fire and their dead :/ )
Overall I think it’s because of the very little downsides she has that make her better than the other snipers
Yes you can make an argument that she has a much slower one shot build up, which makes sense, if it weren’t for the fact that the people can try and play behind cover against the snipers where as sojurn can move from position to position every 7 seconds, unlike widows 14 sec cooldown, and Hanzo’ okayish dash away.
But hey this is just what I think and should be taken with a grain of salt, I’m not the best in the world (diamond support and tank anyway), so it’s most likely that there is some game knowledge I’m missing about why sojurn isn’t as broken as a one shot character as I’m making it seem
Good video, I agree with your sentiment and the arguments you make. I think Mercy mains like the amazing movement abilities as most of our kit. And the damage boost isn't the problem, it's a 2 person investment as you mentioned. I also think rez isn't a problem as long as there are oneshots, but people really underestimate how hard it is to get good rezzes off in any decent match
Thank you for being my favorite mercy content creator. Your takes are always thoughtful and non-toxic.
Leave Mercy alone, or I’m dropping OW2 altogether. I don’t care about whiny DPS, get better at aim and there will be no problem. Support is the least picked role, so maybe stop making this class so miserable to play. You want “fair fights”? Frick off to CoD, BF or Fortnite and leave OW what it always has been, a character based game with unique abilities.
You're being unreasonable. Let's all calm down.
the only thing i really want to come out of this debacle is for mercy’s movement to still be as fun as it is now. i love how it works and the tricks you can do with it. i can settle with reworks with her blue beam and res
She feels really hard to hit sometimes (might be a skill issue tbh, heard the same complaint a lot tho) but even that could be fixed without changing the movement. A large part of mercys wings don't have a hitbox in guardian angel and valkyrie, by just adjusting those they could make her slightly easier to hit while keeping the insane movement
The problem is with Mercys Dmg boost: If your DPS doesnt know what to do and hit shit, then there is a full ability on Mercys kit thats rather somehow useless. I know in the higher ranks it may not be such a problem...
But to me the bad matchmaking keeps putting me into hopeless matches in the gold ranks where u almost always have Bronze players in it... and so sometimes it would be a better idea to deal dmg myself than to dmg boost...
i main mercy and i definitely agree, sometimes i'll favor damage boost over healing by 70/30 and get less damage amplified than on a game where it's a 50/50 split... the value of mercy's damage boost relies on how much damage your team is actually doing. if we're being spawn camped and no one on our team has done over a thousand damage two minutes into the game then blue beam feels useless and i switch :/
Mercy becomes much better in higher ranks because the dps players in those ranks can aim much better. You should probably be yellow beaming a bit more and damage boosting dps when they’re ulting or something, to a point where you get out of metal ranks I guess. Sometimes just having heal beam on a dps is enough of a confidence boost for them too
@@rhett3185 Believe me, if youre stuck in gold you are stuck in gold. Faught my way up from bronze (why it put me there is a big question to me, since i used to be in at least plat/dia range in all time in OW1) and hit best gold 3. from there on the game fully turned on me and gave me 12(!) unwinable games in a row. with dps after almost the full match of around 10 minutes with about 1k to 2k dmg...
iam now at the point to learn bap like a mofo just to have a character that can at least try to compensate this for a bit.
I really like your idea about a “decaying” damage boost. For context, I’m a console Diamond tank player who used to play mostly flex supports when I played the role. The problem I think with Mercy is the ability to get value based off of somebody else’s skill. Aka the pocket mercy style you mentioned where they afk with damage boost on a dps. It could show up as a meter when you are boosting that specific target. My favorite part of mercy’s kit as I have transitioned into a main support player on the role, is her movement.
I like the concept but having to keep track of how much you're getting boosted by as dps sounds super annoying and inconsistent. It's already kind of hard to keep track of getting damage boosted or healed (or mercy doing something else), having to remember roughly how long they've been on damage boost sounds overwhelming and unintuitive
If all you’re doing while dmg boosting is taking a brain break then you’re not really playing mercy to her full capabilities.
I don't like the meter idea. I'd prefer it to be like a Symm style charge where you land damage to charge the boost. That way it's easier to keep track of as the boosted character.
I think Mercy does need changes. She is only viable because certain dps are viable, and that's an issue. Unlike other supports, how good she is heavily relies on her team.
eh i think she was hard slept on last season sojourn was just what was needed for people to expirement with her
Brig and Lucio are kind of like that too tho. They both require comps to work. Brig needs brawl or the enemy to play dive so you can play bodyguard brig. Lucio needs brawl or dive but not aerial dive so much. Mercy is just a bit more apparent with this due to her pocket nature.
Like Lucio with rein, zar or ram is dope, but Winton and dva just kind of go off and do their own thing. You could dive with them but it's much less impact than a full speed team behind a shield running at you.
Not saying your wrong or dumb or anything btw, no hate! just throwing my thoughts out to start good discussion
@@thepoofster2251 Lúcio doesn't need any comp to work with
@@sthepcorms6747 he doesn't pair well with mercy, zen or brig for supports. Hog and dva and ball don't really get benefit from him and every long range DPS or flyer doesn't pair well. You can play him, you just aren't supporting your team.
Say you have DVA, mercy, pharah, echo, imo Lucio would basically be a throw pick. Double sniper with hog, same thing
I recently had a Hanzo complain that I wasn't resing enough. I was resing, but it was other teammates or my res was blocked/cancelled do to dangerous positioning.
So many people don't understand that just becue you *can* res doesn't mean you *should*, a lot of times I would have died before I got the res or the other healer was dead, and it was more important to help the steding teammates then too die trying to save a cry baby.
I think it's hilarious that the people who play mercy, a hero based around supporting others, tend to have very well thought out and articulated communication for their hero in terms of health of the entire game, while the people who play one-shot characters like hog, sojourn, and ow1 doomfist, which are based around playing selfishly, tend to have a lot more emotional and poorly articulated arguments.
My stance on damage boost is that there’s 30+ heroes in the game but bc of 1 already overpowered hero ppl want it gone, before season 2 if I ever went mercy ppl would ask me to go kiriko or lucio all the time ( sometimes even Moira if they wanted me to healbot ) and like you said a lot of ppl put her in mid tiers bc she was good but not the best but since sojurn got nerfed she immediately went to s tier all bc of 1 hero, maybe if she enabled more than 1 hero to be overpowered if would agree to get rid of it but it’s so annoying ppl are taking their anger out on mercy bc sojourn is a problem
When I played overwatch I was a medic main and personally the only thing that really bothered me about mercy was the res ability. Like you said in the video, I felt it was clunky and unfun to use and when enemy players get resed it was always a bummer. I agree with the people who think it should be changed all together, but I have no idea what it could be changed to and also don't really play any more so I don't really have a horse in this race.
4:11 if they do anything I honestly would prefer this. Like that one experimental in overwatch 1 except that was her healing meter.
Alright Niandra, how's this idea:
The more you damage boost, the weaker it gets, but the stronger the healing gets.
The more you heal, the weaker it gets, but the stronger the damage boost gets. (Edit: Imagine a yellow/blue bar that fills more blue as you heal, and yellow as you dmg boost)
(it would both nerf the pocketing problem at the higher ranks, and encourage more healthy non-"healbot" play at low ranks)
she already got weak ass healing. just leave her alone and nerf sojourn
the thing about this discussion that makes it so hard is that, no matter how much people try to deny it, they do in fact take everything about it too personally. there's mercy players that take the possibly of her kit being unhealthy as a personal attack. there is no denying that, just like there is no denying that there are people that harass mercy because of her play style, or even other mercy players that harass mercy players that want her to be reworked.
it is just one of those discussions that, no matter how hard people try, there are too many people that take it extremely personally, even with suggestions that could make mercy even better without breaking one character or making her entirely useless. it's hard to take either extreme seriously as a mercy player who wants her to be reworked, and a little disheartening to see certain big mercy players (not niandra) go completely insane over the whole discussion while parading around this idea that criticism to her kit = bad.
Dudes always have and always will be mad about Mercy for one stupid reason or the other because she's generally more popular with female players. This has been happening since the beginning of Overwatch 1, and if anyone thinks the hate Mercy gets has nothing to do with a certain degree of misogyny then they're hopelessly delusional.
Meanwhile Reapers holding a button the entire game and getting rewarded for it.
fr it’s so frustrating that they took the time to adjust her staff-pistol switch, but still haven’t changed the valk beam break. tbh its my biggest pet peeve while playing mercy 😭
i have no idea about dmg boost since im an ana player but I feel like if rez is replaced, it should be shifted to a tool geared toward survivability. I think some sort of ability that adds decaying overhealth or, ideally, armor to the current target can help with her relatively low heal output and give her an ability that prevents death rather than reverses it.
if they go with this route they can do something where it gives an armor buff if the target is being hit with the heal beam and a temporary movement and reload speed buff to the target if their being hit by the dmg boost beam (each depending on the beam in use at the time of casting the ability).
this would probably warrant number changes to the damage boost so that the target doesn't become an absolute nightmare but I feel like it'll add a lot more depth
a couple fixes i’ve thought of for mercy are:
1. remove res and turn blue beam into an ability that shoots into the enemy and provides them with the buff (akin to kiriko orb) for a certain amount of time then make the secondary beam slight damage reduction while also giving mercy a small healing buff
and also
2 make it to where res has a stack that builds up as mercy gets damage amplified/picking it up off dead enemies it’s with a max stack of 3 or something/ just making res revive with less health
these are just some ideas and i’d like to hear any opinions
I got 2 idea
First one,make mercy’s damage boost feels like an echo to the boosted damage, so that there is a small delay between the main damage. This makes that the damage boost no longer cause one shot.
Or, makes mercy take 20% damage took by the damage boosted target, so that damage boosting is riskier. The enemy can do damage to the boosted hero to stop mercy from damage boosting.
In both case, we can raise the boost ratio if mercy is too weak
I know I'm late but i genuinely think people just dont want supports to have good anything unless its healing for them. if you're not a support player than you want them to do nothing but be nerfed. the amount of people lately who i have seen get pissed off that cleanse and swift step is a thing for kiriko pisses me off so bad. and its so upsetting. everyone would rather blame support than themselves.
Really good video, with some points I didn't think about.
i wouldn't mind making rez a valk only ability, and we replace rez in her non valk set with some sort of single target buff like an "angelic blessing" or something that gives a speed boost/cleanse, or something giving a moblility buff/cleanse.
when she valks then it is replaced by rez but the blessing becomes a one time aoe that goes off when she transforms.
Maybe the blessing could also target enemies but it instead becomes and angelic curse that maybe debuffs their damage or fire rate but the first one could be the only one kept
dmg boost could run on a decay or a resource meter that depletes fast but recharges upon mercy getting an elim or by converting the boosted damage done into the meter and while ulted the resource meter or decay just doesnt run out
pistol buffs would be nice and a possible toggle so that ga can now targets enemies would be interesting but not needed
I think the damage boost problem is 2 parts. Its part sojourn one-shot, and part hard pocketing someone that can escape away and then kill you. Meaning the root is closer to impossible to kill someone that is hard pocket, because they have both the potential to kill you, ad can easily disengage to safety.
Ok so its a 2v1 and the Mercy doesnt really have her own offensive capability
issue lies in the fact players don’t want supports to have fun. We need a shift to the point a lot of supports are strong and fun such as kiriko. Too many players I see assuming support is easy because they think it’s just heal botting and giving them a voice will just encourage changes to force us to heal bot. I think that should be a long term goal because forcing heal botters will completely kill the game. That’s why right now I only enjoy kiriko, Ana and zen as I feel I have meaningful impact in other ways, why should this be a fucking bad thing??
So, I'm not a Mercy player but I had some things that I wanted to share with you and see what you think.
1. Having Damage Boost be on a Resource Meter, so you have to think about when and where to use it. (You actually mentioned this later, my bad)
2. Having Mercy have the ability to give Overheal to her allies, up to a certain percentage of their normal health with a decay on it. Similar to what the Medic has in TF2, this means Mercy can essentially buff her allies health so whenever she damage boosts them or goes to heal someone else they have some cushion on them so they don't constantly need heals.
3. Having the amount of healing she does be based on a percentage of her target's health rather than a flat amount.
4. Having the amount of healing scale based on the damage her target has taken, so if they're just CONSTANTLY getting hit it doesn't feel so hard for whoever they're fighting to counter your healing if they can't seem to hit you or you're behind cover.
5. Having Res also be on a sort of resource meter that you have to build up through healing, buffing health, damage boosting, etc.
These are all rough ideas, and none of them set in stone but it's something to think about. The goal is to give her value while it having counter play, and being engaging to use.
As far as balance goes, I think it is Sojourn who needs a nerf rather than Mercy. However, my take from playing her is that even though the movement is fun and res us satisfying to pull off, the focus on Damage Boost makes her feel a bit one-dimensional to play.
I think it'd be interesting to put blue beam on a Defense Matrix style meter, and let her do both beams at the same time - either on seperate targets or a single ally, as that would make her staff more flexible overall.
Regarding ressurect, I think that the limited chances to use it, but the huge potential impact, means it would feel more fair as an ultimate rather than as a cooldown - but if it takes half the round to charge, she should be able to grab her ally's soul from a distance and then cast it in a safe location. Her E could then be a brief free-fly, for keeping movement unpredictable, gaining/maintaining LOS on allies, etc.
Finally, yes I would like an alt-fire for her pistol, to help round out her character, but it should play into her having high aim sensitivity, fast movement, and other tasks to get on with. I think a point blank attack, that does extra damage to critically injured targets, but uses up a huge chunk of ammo, would fit the bill.
My favourite idea for a Mercy rework - give a temporary boost to her beams when she swoops right next to someone and rebalance damage boost to be weaker outside of that. Makes damage boosting more skill based and Mercy has to place herself at risk more, but also makes her feel more active.
I would only give her some kind of nerf like if she heals or damage boosts someone for longer than 3-5 sec it lowers. Usually people are unable to kill pockets due to the insane healing
In my opinion from playing mercy since 2016. I can agree with sket... I forgot how to spell their name. I'm okay with damage boost and rez being changed as long ad they don't mess with her movemt, it would be more fun to be able to use an ability more often. I don't want it to be a cleanse only because it would also make JQ feel less fun cause then you have two people cleanse the bleed/wound. If they do change her damage boost and rez I think her ult would have to be looked at also due to the changes.
I agree with every single one of this discussion type videos every time lol you have such great opinions on the state of mercy or anything else. In my opinion, I just wish they would experiment and change parts of her kit in the experimental mode to test it out like they did in ow1 with other heroes. And I'm part of the group that thinks resurrect will only be fun and balanced as a ultimate and not a ability that is so boring to use, but resurrect even as a ult would be so difficult to balance so they don't make the same mistake as mass res
yeah please can they just release another experimental with some crazy stupid stuff like Ana with a grappling hook. Mercy with speedboost instead of damage boost. Sojourn railgun which heals on headshot. haha okey that would be something for april fools I guess. But just any changes would be good.
I've seen a lot of people complain about her not being able to die due to her movement and Regen ability which:
1: her Regen only activated after 5 seconds of not taking damage
And
2: if you can't hit a mercy, get good. There's nothing else to it.
Even if they DO nerf damage boost, at least valence it out with raising her healing or reducing a cooldown or something substantial
When I see mercy in a game, it's always followed by her having like 0- 800 dmg and 1-3 elims unless they go full tiktok battle mercy.
I feel the damage boost issue isn't really character issue but a skill level issue as in great players can make use of a great combination while the lower tiered players use it to where it was originally assumed to be at.
But the problem is in QP it's very common to mix those people together, and it sucks for those on the losing end and nothing something you can ditto if there is a skill difference.
A cleanse would be awful a combination of kiriko and mercy cleanse would make anything pointless from ana, junker queen, and discord orb the cycle of abilities would make it unplayable
I think a self defense mechanic instead of damage boost would be interesting. Maybe a temporary enemy blind with a cooldown like how she performs in the PVE cinematic.
As a heavy Mercy player (and was Mercy one-trick for the first few years of OW1 actually) I would personally like to see damage boost get scrapped, and instead Mercy sorta "dual wields" the healing staff and her blaster at the same time. Probably some kind of system where you can't use both at the same time, or a limited bar to fire both at once -- but anything to get rid of Mercy's "need to switch weapons" to shoot her blaster.
In general, playing Mercy, damage boosting just feels boring to me. Using the blaster feels bad solely because you can't weave it in between topping people off - switching to the blaster feels bad due to the time it takes (even with the buff to switch time), and it hurts your gameplay because allies may get burst down before you can switch back to heal.
Simply letting the player shoot the blaster without changing weapons would help a lot. It doesn't need damage buffs or projectile speed buffs or anything to make her more DPS-heavy, that's it, IMO. Beyond that, perhaps an ability to give a single ally a modest attack speed buff wouldn't be bad.
I know I'm not the only Mercy player that feels similarly regarding weapon switching and damage buffing, but, I can understand and respect the opinion of the Mercy players who don't want any of her power budget to be in something like this, and like her the way it is -- different opinions are fine :D
The problem with damage boost is that it is objectively more powerful than having a different support dealing damage, and that's because of how it interacts with breakpoints. Giving a hero like sojourn a oneshot again is much, much more valuable than having support damage against that hero. Another example (and perhaps the most egregious one) is pharah. We all know how oppressive pharmercy can be, so I don't feel the need to elaborate.
To continue: Mercy pocketing is a 2v1, yes, but the issue is that the pocketed hero essentially gets the power of two heroes in one meaning that they don't need to rely on the other person to participate in a fight. Mercy pocketing is different from any other 2v1 because it will always be 1+1=2 (or 1+1>2 in the case of someone like sojourn/pharah due to breakpoints) because the power of the 2v1 is given to one person, not shared between two. You don't have to communicate or rely on the other person performing well to maximize an advantage in a 2v1 when getting pocketed by mercy. You inherently have an advantage when it's up to one person to perform well, not both participants. Mercy's only job is to stay alive and keep their pocket alive. All form of damage is concentrated to one point instead of spread out between two. An analogy would be like having two people punch a plank of wood compared to one person with the strength of two people. Yeah, two people should be able to break the plank of wood if they punch together, but they won't always be able, especially not in the middle of a team fight. However, the person with the strength of two people will always be able to break the plank of wood. It is flawed by its very design.
In general, I don't think damage boosting belongs in the game in any form. Discord orb and blue beam especially need to go. Nano can probably stay because it's in the form of an ult, not a zero cooldown perma-active ability. What to replace it with? I honestly have no idea. Maybe you can decrease the number from 30% to something like 15%, so it isn't as strong but still feels nice to have. Buff her healing and maybe - big maybe - buff her movement. Alternatively replace it a damage resistance beam that reduces incoming damage by around 25%? Would probably encourage pocketing tanks more as a result. Still, you kind of need that extra damage from a support to win fights, so I don't know. The best solution would probably be to lower the damage boost number, give it some form of cooldown management like moira has with her healing so that it can't just be active forever, and give her a compensation buff with healing or movement. The best compensation would likely be giving her old movement back since this change would encourage switching between heroes who are playing aggressively and slightly boosting their damage while they try to make a play.
tl;dr The devs kind of put themselves in a hole with mercy. Damage boost is necessary, but it has too much value in its current state due to breakpoints and uptime. It also gatekeeps a lot of dps heroes and keeps them below average but good with a pocket when they should be good on their own (newest one at the time of posting this is soldier). Damage boost needs to either be removed entirely and replaced with something else or nerfed significantly with compensation buffs to movement and healing
I think that this was a very thoughtful video and very correct. I'm not a Mercy player although I will play her if I need to so I typically come at her from the side of the person who has to play against her. That said, the only meta that I have ever felt was the fault of Mercy specifically as a character in need of balance was Moth meta. Ash and now Sojourn are the base numbers that her damage boost is acting on; they're the root cause of the issues but people are pointing at Mercy because the Overwatch community kind of has an overarching misunderstanding of more complicated mechanics (discord, damage boost, burn, you name it, if it's not a flat number they can look at most of then either hate it or don't understand it because math is bad or something).
I truly believe rez could be removed from the game (not should necessarily, but that it might be better for everybody if it was replaced with something else) and in OW2 it's not particularly impactful anyway - the number of times Rez saves a fight vs immort or cleanse, or literally anything else is miniscule. What to do with the rest of Mercy's kit is a bigger question - I think damage boost should remain, we already have too many cleanses in the game and I think more is going to necessitate a rework of, as a for instance, Ana, and maybe a meter is the answer, but if it is then they'll have to meter the healing as well I would say, and I don't know if that's right either.
The thing that ticks me off tho...The VERY SAME PEOPLE who are complaining about db and rez are the same people in game who beg and cry and demand db and rez. 🙄🙄🙄
So as a humble Ana and Sombra enjoyer this is my idea if you guys promise not to troll with it.
1 make Mercy's damage boost be on a meter that refill from healing. The bar only depletes if her teammate are dealing damage, but the more depleted it becomes the stronger her heal is. This makes her more resource management with more ability to burst heal. This also means when she is "useless" waiting for more damage boost, she isn't useless since she has a save someone button in her pocket.
2 Change rez to the ability to pick up you allies and carry them. Basically giving another character Mercy's mobility for a short period of time. This allows her save people, taxi them, and let them quickly take space. Limit the carry size to 250 or 225 hp so you can't fly tanks around. Once she Valks, then it turns into a rez. This gives you an ability you can use more often, feels less bad for people to play against, keeps with her theme, keeps the rez in her kit, and compliments good movement and positioning more than rez does. This comes with the cavate with this is can't you can't abuse this to troll teammate in the long long list of ways you could troll people with her.
I don't play mercy but i think the problem with ressurect is only when she ressurects the tank,a posible fix could be to resurrect with half health or full cooldowns always
Okay how about something like this.
1 remove rez
2 replace the ult
3 replace damage boost with "charge" charge increases the move speed by 20% and the ult charge by 25%
4 new ablity is "staff overcharged"
Apply both the heal beam and charge to the staff for 10 seconds.(both effects are simultaneously active on the target)
5 new ult would be "over charge" wich allows you to put your beam on dead allys and over the course of 5 seconds revive them, this would also activate the "overcharge" effect. This would be tied to a resorse that fills on assist with demishing returns.
What do you think? I'd like to know if this is fair op or under powered
I agree with all of your points, apart from any world where she keeps res the way it is currently. I definitely understand why they had to introduce the balance change to res to increase the distance and ignore los after the animation was initiated back when they patched that in OW1, but the insane distances she can travel after initiating the res I think could go now, especially with less hard CC in the game. LOS change could stay I think. That's really where the feelsbadman moments come from for me.... boop her with Ball, she still gets the res. Concussion with Pharah, boop with Lucio, etc. etc. Some ability to have some counterplay - though agreed, getting them off can be tough-to-impossible sometimes - is necessary outside of the oppressive disaster that is Hog's hook. Last thing we need in the game is to reintroduce the CC circus we had in late stage OW1 but there's gotta be a balance somewhere in between and I think the overall distance traveled for her after initiating the res is a good place to start.
That is, if they keep res at all lol
In OW every hero needs skill (to an extent) to be played at his full potential. A skilled widowmaker player can have the same impact as a good Mercy player on paper, but is it fair? Imagine that a widowmaker wins a fight by clicking 2 to 3 heads. Is it fair that a Mercy can have the same impact when her mechanics are non existent and all the macro she needs is to hide and SHIFT away as soon as someone starts to shoot her? There is no way her macro comes even close to Rein's or Winston's, playing in the frontlines, and in all roles you need good positioning so it's not like it's a skill that only she requires. So what does a Mercy require that other heroes dont? What part of her kit is so complicated that NO other player can play her at her full potential?
I play mercy (in qp), i have a lot of hours on her, she's fun, perfect for when i don't feel like aiming or position myself in any complicated way, all i have to do is keep swapping between LMB and RMB and shift from time to time while chilling. If i want to play widowmaker i can't fucking chill because if i don't get picks i'm basically afk.
I mean it's undeniable, you can watch it even in this video, all she does is keep down RMB and moving in circles. That's the extent of the skill she requires.
So why is a player with those "skills" in GM with me? I can swap to Tracer if i need to, Ash, Soldier, Sojourn, McCree etc. Would you really feel confident in having a Mercy player play Ana and aim for your heals? Or play Brigitte in the frontlines under constant fire? WHY ARE MOST MERCY PLAYERS ONE TRICK MERCY ? That's just the reality of it, just cause you can play Mercy doesn't mean you can play any other hero, but generally speaking, playing any hero will simply require a few hours of adjusting for you to play Mercy somewhat decently. Of course this applies to people who can actually play the game, not your average plat player.
Edit: just for clarification, i love a good Mercy player, I don't have a problem with Mercy players feeling like they're useful, they are indeed. My problem comes when they feel like they're as good as other heroes that require much more complicated mechanics and macro. Being as useful doesn't necessarily mean that you're as skilled.
my proposal i came up with after a short thinking time
so my idea would be that the extra damage of damage boost can't kill but maybe increase the effect a bit a to compensate or give her some other buff
that way sojourn couldn't one-tab people but it wouldn't make the damage boost useless, i haven't really thought it through too much, but it could maybe be a solution?
I'd like to see damage boost slowly build up to 20% buff and then tick down when the beam goes off. I'd want it to be possible to mostly cap 2 players with the buff if you are full-time damage boosting. It'd help solve Mercys running off with a DPS to flank, which normally indicates that player is gonna be pocketed that game, which doesn't feel very good for their team because they're down 2 players and is super tilting to play against for the other team. Mercys would feel more incentivized to stick with the team and not latch onto only one player all game.
This isn't the fault of Mercy mains, but one DPS getting all the damage boosting(and prio heals when they are low health) gets the other DPS super jealous, which encourages toxicity in games. Especially in comp games, people like to say "dps diff" if one DPS is doing way better than the other, which is almost surely going to be the case if one is being pocketed. You have to be playing against someone way, way worse than you to out-damage them while they've got a Mercy running around with them all game.
Mercy should be buffed, not nerfed. Her impact es minimal like any other support right now. The fact that Soujorn is super op doesn't make Mercy powerful as well just because she has to pocket her. It is not Damage Boost, is Soujorn.
I've wanted them for years to give mercy an ability where she could heal and damage boost at the same, As long as it didn't last long and had a long cooldown it would be really cool and indirectly make valk SO much better, If they ever give her some sort of nerf I think this would be cool to have to compensate
I honestly I've been feeling like that personally that should be added into her valk, just a mixture of blue and yellow with damage boosting and healing at the same time haha
Whilst I do think that dmg boost makes balance more complicated, but with that said, I do think it is still well doable. When the team thinks of dmg, they (should) think of how it would be affected if there was a 30% dmg boost, and you'd be almost good to go.
The whole issue I still have with Sojourn is that Mercy really isn't THAT big of an enabler to her. Remember, her railgun at 100% charge (a.k.a a second or so of spamming a shield/tank) leaves only 5 HEALTH. Just a bit of spam/help from teammates, and she's back to borderline one-shotting. A few bullets and she's at 50% charge, and bam, already able to kill. I'd rather have the balance team lower Sojourn's headshot multiplier, as that is one of the main culprits for her one-shotability
Imma be honest, I hope that if they give Mercy a different ability that it is not a cleanse. We’ve already seen what has happened when a cleanse such as Kiriko’s was put into the game and drastically change and put a chokehold on the meta we see today. I feel that Overwatch is in a tough problem where imo the characters are too diverse leading to such strong metas. Look at lucio, for the most part he has not shifted away from being a meta pick for months even years if you count OW1 due to his ability to consistently push faster rotations with speed boost and we can see that with Kiriko as well with her having the only full cleanse ability (You could count zarya but zarya can’t cleanse as well as Kiriko) . The only way I see this problem being fixed is either characters dumbed down or they release more characters faster, which is a lose lose for us players.
it would also shift mercys nature entirely because cleanse is usually so useful within tank fights- mercy would kiss pocketing goodbye
I don't love the idea that non-Mercy mains can't have good ideas about her since, like you said, her balance affects every other hero and players. But the conversations around her get really one sided fast when someone isn't there to counter them.
But to that same feel, I think her damage boost is like lots of other abilities in the game; in that since the devs keep taking stuff out, more stuff sticks out. Like, yeah, it sucks having a Mercy damage boost Sojourn or Ashe in the past for one shots, but shouldn't there just be counter play to that? Like now we're having the conversation about Widow, Hog, and Hanzo and like idk, I feel like Brig armor packs were a small way to keep that relatively in check. Roadhog and Doom had meta times, but we know they're bad when they're not OP. Sombra could have been keeping them from going too wild. Kiriko just cleanses everything Ana can do? If Hack was a real lockout, Kiriko would cleanse that. Idk, seems like when there's less knobs to turn, balance gets harder.
People want dmg boost and rez to go away. Next they want one shots. Then what, shields, healing, support abilities? I think a lot of players subtly just want Genji and Tracer for the entire game with nothing else...but that's not Overwatch.
You give a great overview of the discussion and make some very insightful points. Thanks!
My Ana hours played is about double the next closest hero. I play some Mercy too. Anyone who thinks it doesn't require skill hasn't played Mercy (or support much). My vote is to stop nerfing Mercy and leave her alone. If anything, they dropped her healing a tiny bit too much.
As long as blizzard designs heroes to have high based damage abilities or AAs we will have the conversation that mercy is a problem. We know from previous discussions that as soon as a hero gets to 150-190 damage on 1 ammo ability or AA that it will require damage boost to push from 2 hit to 1 hit range, mercy only becomes meta in them situations or shes “bad” when isn’t in them situations cause of her changes.
Blizzard should of learnt from Ashe launch and nerfs, however they didn’t, i dont mind if some heroes have high burst in a combo, but they need to spread that damage around them abilities rather than focus it into 1… mercy’s damage boost would still be good pushing 4 to 3 or 3 to 2 breakpoint, just not be as obxious as 2 to 1.
One thing that I don't see brought up is yeah, they have to balance dps characters around Mercy, but is that a problem? They have to balance map geometry around Lucio, they're constantly bugfixing Reaper's teleport every season, every hero adds development load to the game.
There's always going to be a oneshot threshold, the only question is do we want it to be 200 or 153? Or 160 if they want to nerf d-boost to 25%. Like, are there that many heroes where we want to give them abilities that deal over 160 damage un-boosted?
I actually feel like there's so many ways to make mercy a little more viable, while giving her less ways to break specific characters.
First of all, reduce her damage boost to 20% and make all damage boost in the game not stack. Instead, the game should always prefer the highest damage boost that's currently influencing the player and use that value.
Now that her and other characters damage orbs are less oppressive, give Mercy's blue beam the ability to add 12,5-20% damage mitigation/reduction to the target. That way the blue beam gets used more often, as many low rank mercy's ignore it as it feels like whenever you use the blue beam, your teammates just... Die. It also makes up for getting less ult charge by the nerfed amp.
Doing max. 20% damage boost, while giving your teammate effectively 25-40 more HP on a 200HP Target shouldn't be too much of a problem, especially as if you'd heal someone during that same scenario, you'd heal for the same amount if not more, so it doesn't slow the fight down too much. It would also give her ult more value though, without being too much?
Now, for the yellow/healing beam... Don't change the values, but add a 15% speedboost (that, again, doesn't stack. The game just uses the highest speedboost value that influences the target). I feel like it would give mercy just a little more synergy with some characters, to make her a more viable pick and maybe help out some characters that struggle right now.
But that's just my opinion, maybe someone else has better ideas?
Totaly agree!
If they were to change up Mercy’s blue beam, reducing the damage increase by 10% and adding on like a 20% damage reduction to the selected target would be a nice payoff. Stops people from complaining about one shot potential and allows Mercy to maintain some form of strength in the meta.
For Rez (even though I hate the idea of losing Rez cause it’s like Mercy’s signature ability), change the ability to like an Angel’s blessing that gives 40hp per second and small damage output and reduction buff for 5 or so seconds would allow Mercy to multitask her targets better and allow her to pocket a damage without needing to be seperate from her team.
It’s seems like streamers call for anything they don’t like playing against regardless of its strength to get nerfed
Even though this is controversial and most of the people would disagree, I think mercy’s problem is her mobility. Before you comment something, let me say something. In competitive matches, the mercy player dies at most 1 time, the reason for that is at a certain point of skill mercy becomes a f 22 raptor and becomes a flying sonic the hedgehog. In my opinion, the problem with that is the fact she keeps putting constant value during a match, which doesn’t happen for any other support. Maybe if could kill her you should be able to reduce the stress that is fighting a boosted character infinitely and make it harder to rez. So I would nerf the cooldown of guardian angel by one second and the energy of the Jetpack in guardian angel slightly. Just to not gut the character completely buff her healing to 60 per sec and maybe the damage boost. Also nerf sourjorn and hog too lol
Tbh I feel like the best solution is to just ride it out bc it’s hard to touch anything that boost dmg without it becoming overwhelming or becoming underwhelming
I think Soujourn could be changed to have the railgun do lower damage but go through shields and characters (pierce). Nano boost would hs kill. Discord+MDB too.
I tried Mercy recently, but was I keeping her in low regards before; well, it was a mistake, it makes fun and takes good decisions to be useful, but you do your job more indirectly and enable the team to do theirs. Which is an interesting and different approach to the game.
As I said elsewhere if they want to alleviate the situation, they could implement a kind of protection "no one-shot possible against full health targets" which would only allow a two-shot, thus requiring a small punch afterwards for targets at full health.
It would prevent people being kicked out of the game directly while putting them at high risk after being hit by severe damage.
What about knocking Mercy's Rez cooldown to 15 seconds if reviving a support or dps character, however that character only lives for 10-15 seconds before immediately dying again without a chance of rez. If resurrecting a tank then the ability cooldown is the thirty seconds that it is now. Makes rez have more decision making and can be used more often for more impactful hits without complete demoralization of the opposing team. Your soldier has his ult but died on the way to the back of the point? Give him a rez and then he can fire his ult off as a last chance type of feeling.
wild card idea.
mix damage boost into rez and rework the ability.
give mercy the option to give a teammate damage boost for x amount of time (for now let's say 10 seconds) and puts it on a 15-20 second timer
HOWEVER if she chooses to press the button on a dead teammate it does the normal rez WITH A TWIST. (shit on me for this idc cuz this is a wildcard idea that I thought would be funny)
the rezed target starts with lowered hp (half or like 2/3ds the hp) and passively heals the rest over a 2-4 second time period. they will also received a nerfed version of the damage boost (let's say half the time, so 5 seconds)
this gives mercy a decision to make every time she presses the button, does she either A. use it to give an alive teammate godly powers for a good period of time? or B. rez a teammate but at a greater risk of them dying off the bat but also given said person a fighting chance with the smaller dmg boost.(or idk just remove the dmg boost portion)
this gives mercy for room for micro skill as well as macro skill.
again this is a stupid wild card idea that nobody will see and or care about, but if anybody does see it and cares about feel free to go nuts with adjustments or just flaming me for even thinking of changing the all beautiful gaming concept that is mercy.
also sojourn should have her headshots removed and just have piercing shots without ult okay baaaai :)
I would hate if they removed damage boost. If all you have as your main thing is healing, you'll be absolutely useless for a large portion of the game because people don't always need healing even in a team fight. I like seeking out who is playing effectively aggressive and damage boosting them, and that's not always the Soujourn. Damage boost is only ever as powerful as the one receiving it. You can't make damage boost start low and gradually ramp up either because that would encourage pocketing and her playstyle should include switching fast and often between targets. I also agree that rez is clunky and slow. I understand it's powerful, but frankly so is making someone invulnerable.
And you're right. Most criticism on supports come from people who don't and wouldn't touch the class, which causes too many proposed solutions to just hinge on making the supports more like dps. That already happened with tanks, and I don’t play those anymore.
I’m concerned that the upcoming Roadhog changes will put him in a state where he can’t 1-shot hooked squishies on his own but can with damage boost on the follow-up shot.
really great video.
I think Mercy isn't the issue. i just hope they don't make her damage heavy, she's one of the characters i enjoy playing the most.
Mercy is (and for the most part has been) the balancing punching bag. Streamers write her off as "no skill" and seem to resent that a character that doesn't just click heads gets any value at all. Alot of what you say about damage beam being the "default" mode spells it out: alot of the detractors think Mercy should literally be a healbot so they don't consider that a blue beam replacement needs to take the place of that "default" output.
I feel like the answer is pretty obvious. Set Sojourn’s charge shot to not be boostable, like when they changed dragon strike and tire. If a live service can’t be adaptable like this, what’s the point?
2:45 "damage boost nerfed ... Mercy falls behind other supports apart from mid/low ranks and casual"
What would be so bad about that?
Isn't that the point of her kit and design, to be easily accessible for new players, not to be played at the very peak of skill? And no she is not the only one, hog, Orisa, soldier, sym, junkrat, torb, brig, Moira. And I'm not saying these characters are all hard meta, but I definitely do think any of them should be. There is a place in the game for low skill medium reward characters and that's just where mercy belongs 🤷
From my own experience, I don't think the Mercy is the problem at the moment as much as other parts of the roster. The two biggest things I think are Hog being so strong as a result of Kiriko's addition that it generally counters dive (who typically can help deal with someone who is being boosted by Mercy), and that Sojourn has both high damage and high mobility.
I have to admit that I don't like Mercy's gameplay right now, because the most effective game at high ranks looks like you just can't let go of your dps for even a second! If you play with a team, then your team is immediately less likely to win. It's an uninteresting gameplay und that makes me feel like I'm an NPC😵But I don't think Mercy needs a change because I'm afraid of what they might do with her. However, the fact that Sajorn is so strong with Mercy is clearly not Mercy's problem and Sajorn needs to be changed.
I'm very glad you're speaking out on this problem 💛 because in these discussions, among professional players and journalists, there is simply no one who has played Mercy for more than 100 hours or who would love to play her. For the most part they talk about Mercy as a damage amplifying NPC and don't understand her and the technical potential of her game. Because of this it is very important that players like you speak up about this, because if not you, then who? In general, it is very annoying that they do not take Mercy players seriously, even if they have a huge number of hours on the character and they play in the Grandmaster - Top500 ranks.
Mercy is an evasive healer. If Blizzard changes any of these, she changes on a fundamental level.
Anything else can change and she'll still be the same.
Mercy's ult should be replaced with an ult called Food Baby, where her belly gets big and she burps out various snacks which give a healing buff to her team.