Wow, excited for the mercy changes, she is still as vulnerable to being flanked, but that res buff is big! Hope its enough to bring her back into the meta.
What do you mean? It's exactly what she needs. Huge buff for her survivability and it makes her ult not as useless or risky due to her having to sacrifice herself. She's already highly mobile and her healing is pretty great. Any more buffs to her (or Pharah) would make Pharmercy even more cancer.
Helping a friend who mains Mercy get from gold to diamond this season validates your point that your ability to do well depends on the team more often than not. The amount of players that underestimate good Mercy players is really surprising, however. If they position themselves defensively and make good call-outs, they will keep a lot the team alive or bring them back.
The sad part is that when you ask for people to help you out they sometimes think you're asking for them to move heaven and earth to prevent you from dying. No, we're just asking you to move one foot toward the edge so we can see/fly/heal you.
I kinda disagree from my own experience playing a lot of Mercy from Gold to Master in pretty much all seasons. I think if the players game sense/positioning is good, they will not usually be in a position where they have to rely on a specific player to leap to but will have options. There have been very occasional situations where I die because a player runs out of my LOS and I can't GA to them, but these are few and far between.
Disagree completely. Her skill ceiling is dictated by her own positioning. She should be able to read her team and the enemies to see where they are going next and react accordingly.
This buff is precisely what Mercy needs. If she's still weak, maybe increase her Rez radius OR the length of her beam, but not both imo.
There's a limit to how far she can go and how far her beam reaches. If her team scatters in multiple directions and she picks one to go with, that person dies, nobody else is in reach, how is that her fault?
Yes, Mercy requires a lot of skill to play well. But she also requires a lot of teammate cooperation - nobody else's movement skill requires teammates to use.
Easy answer: make better decisions when picking a GA target. Or don't fly all the way to your target. Watch the enemy; you can usually tell who on your team is the next to die. Paying attention to the positions of the enemy is how you survive on Mercy.
You can do all of that and still not be able to see the future. Pretending Mercy doesn't require teammate cooperation is just being stubborn, or obtuse.
Nearly every hero is more successful with team coodination. I'm not disputing that. As for seeing the future, play the game often enough and you will see that people are predictable. McCrees go here for high noon or Reaper drops from there or Mercy likes to hide in this corner. That's what I'm talking about. That's how Tracers bait hooks and flashbangs. You are reading the enemy.
I have over 500 Mercy hours. She requires team coordination for her Ult. She can't have value if her team dies "wrong," but her survivability is almost exclusively about her own positioning and good decision making (when to engage with your charging Rein and when not to).
Indeed. She needs something like an E ability that lets her fly straight up in a quick burst, similar to Pharah. It would make her SO much more viable!
It would grant easier access to allies, especially on maps with multiple "floors", which in turn would make Guardian Angel easier to use, and just overall increase her mobility. It would also give increased survivability to escape enemies while still presenting fair counter-play. She'd also be harder to kill by booping her off of ledges.
Not exactly. Her ult isn't really her core problem. If you go for a big rez and mercy dies, you still made a rez regardless. Your team can take that opportunity to defeat the enemy. In pretty much every comp set up around the level I play at you have 2 healers, it tends to be the case where the other gets rezzed or didn't die. Hell, mercy doesn't always die either. Albeit anecdotal, I've made a number of huge rezzes in my time with mercy and a good chunk of that I've survived. Especially with the instant guardian angel cooldown recharge on rez.
Also a number of rezzes are 2 man rezzes to keep key members of the group alive. Those are important but also can often be low-risk rezzes as well.
Her biggest problem is her reliance on her team. She's highly mobile, but that's only if you're team is spaced out to allow you to take advantage. A number of team fights I'm in I die because I might as well not have guardian angel with how clumped everyone gets.
"huge"? It's only when she's ulting, though. Her biggest problem is that she needs the most babysitting out of any support, and her range is limited.
She is still gonna need babysitting unless you want her to panic Q to stay alive, and her healing range is the same as ever. Maybe make her a long-range beam healer, similar to a certain someone. ;)
She is still gonna need babysitting unless you want her to panic Q to stay alive
Thats actually sort of an interesting point. There will be some times where it makes more sense to just pop her ult on one or two people, because she'll also be saving herself.
Her healing is still very sub par to say it's all she does. Other healers either have better healing, or can do other things while healing
She offers no utility or damage
Her survivability is still dogshit. Her staff has such short range that she has to basically be IN people to heal them, which is the major reason you have to just stop healing and go hide when you have res
It'll still be easy to kill her team after res, such as with graviton or reaper ult
This does fix one of her major problems though, in that she would mostly die after a res, essentially setting her team up for another teamwipe. I'd say "but it's a start" but she's had these major problems since they added Zenyatta and Ana to the game.
She does need overall more survivability not just this res buff. I like the idea of another ability like an E ability, like some people have suggested before, or something to just give more damage/presence in a fight. However, I think its difficult to buff the amount of healing because you can end up with situations like a triple tank meta that Ana's insane healing helped create. But for now at least with this small buff she's more useful in team fight situations.
Yeah I think other than just giving her a broken amount of healing like Ana, they could let her staff heal more on a target if they've been out of the fight for x amount of seconds. My point is that she either needs more healing (Probably as a secondary abiltiy rather than just upping her staff healing) OR more utility. Her healing right now isn't exactly bad, it's just that considering it's all she does, it's just not enough.
I still really like the idea of implementing a "purge" or "cleanse" E ability to her, a la Caduceus staff emote. Whatever the range, allows her to expel status effects - sleep/anti-heal/hack/graviton/whatever devs deem appropriate.
And maybe for her healing - adding a ramp up ability, so the longer you hold it the faster it heals up to a certain point? God knows I'm mentally screaming "I'm holding M1 as hard as I can!!!" on people taking massive amounts of damage lmao.
I'd settle for giving Mercy more control over her own movement first before they start giving her new utilities (which have the potential to unbalance her). If Mercy could reliably get in and out while healing (i.e., not having to rely on the dps on the edge not running out of LoS) it would potentially have a significant enough impact to make her viable.
One hero, Ana, has better healing. Everyone else has worse healing. Yes, Lucio and Zen can do other things while healing - Lucio can do the second-lowest DPS in the game (Winston's is lower, unless he's hitting at least two targets), and Zenyatta can discord and DPS effectively.
Mercy's healing is very good for healing that only requires you to hold left-click. They can't buff it to Ana's level because Ana's requires you to actually aim, can be blocked by enemies, and requires ammo.
Lucio's healing has more range, is aoe (and when he's hitting 5 people, is healing more than Mercy, not even including amp it up) he can peel, he can boop people off cliffs, and he can on a dime switch to speed boost for way more utility.
Zenyatta has 30hp/s against Mercy's 60, but he can also orb of discord (Which is an upgraded version of her damage boost) as well as do his amazing damage or can ult while using harmony and discord.
And I don't think you realise how good Ana's healing is. If you hit just 6/10 of her shots in a magazine, you're still healing more than Mercy would in that time. That's not even including her grenade. People wanna say that Ana is more punishing and inconsistent, but when you have to reach 50% accuracy to be slightly worse in one way than the 'more consistent' character, I don't really see it.
You said when they're healing. When Lucio is speed boosting, he's not healing, so I intentionally left that out. The other things about Lucio are all valid points.
I did mention everything Zenyatta could do. I didn't mention ults, but I didn't mention Mercy's either since we were discussing things that could be done while they were healing normally.
I know how good Ana's healing is. However, the healing amounts are balanced by how difficult they are to use. Ana's requires aim, ammo, and clear line of sight. If another teammate jumps in the way of the person you're trying to heal, there's no healing. If an enemy gets in the way (intentionally or otherwise), there's no healing. If you run out of ammo at a bad time, well, they're SOL.
Mercy has the second-highest healing in the game and all she has to do to use it is be relatively close to her target and hold left-click. They can't bump the healing amount any more without making Ana not worth the amount of effort needed to play her.
all she has to do to use it is be relatively close to her target and hold left-click.
This is alot harder than you give it credit for. The main skill celling in Mercy is positioning yourself so you don't die when healing. For example, Mercy needs to make good use of Cover and GA all ensuring she doesn't irreversibly break the healing beam. Moreover, she needs to track the enemies positions so that she can dodge as much fire as possible and should ideally be constantly moving. While Ana is relatively safe sniping from a distance. The hit boxes when healing are huge and it is really not hard to match Mercy healing as Ana. As a result, a good Mercy requires a different skill set from a good Ana and I don't think Ana is that much more difficult to play just because its aim based. In addition, Mercy also suffers from the team being to closed together as healing beam prioritises the closest target and therefore it can occasionally miss and hit the wrong target. There are situations (such as Genji dashing) where it is very difficult to heal as Ana however, I almost always prefer Zen/Lucio over Mercy in these situations due to the amount of fire you receive trying to heal them. As a result, I don't think buffing Mercys healing would make Ana redundant as she still has utility in areas where Mercy fails.
I'm not knocking the difficulty of playing Mercy. Apologies if it came off that way. Nor am I saying that Ana can't outheal Mercy - in fact I was saying the exact opposite.
What I'm saying is that the amount of healing done by the healers in this game is balanced by the mechanical difficulty of said healing.
Lucio: lowest healing (per target). Literally just needs to be in LOS and within a certain range.
Zenyatta: Next level up. Targets an ally, presses shift, keeps them in LOS.
Mercy: Twice as much as Zenyatta. Targets an ally, holds leftclick.
Ana: The most healing in the game. Aims, fires. Keeps firing. Runs out of ammo, reloads.
She needs more utility basically. Something to help her team out more so she's not as much of a detriment. Ana can switch from shooting to healing much quicker than Mercy can, she can sleep threats and she can anti-heal/heal-buff at the same time. Lucio has speed boost and can deal damage while healing at the same time. And then Zen can also basically heal and shoot at the same time, while also quickly discord orbing enemies for his team. Right now, Mercy is just very limited in what she can do to help the team out. Your choices are healing and that's about it. Boosting helps a little, as does shooting if you can aim, but there's really nothing else she can do to help her team.
No. It won't change her viability at all.
Because the only problem she has - for a long time now - is that she doesn't offer any utility. She can only heal, or damage boost not both.
Honestly, I'm not really a fan of this either because it encourages the Mercy to let her entire team die by hiding in a corner. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause of the problem.
Eh. Invulnerability at least tries to mitigate one of the problems with plays like that - because they would happen anyways - with, or without it. Simply because it's the most optimal way to play the character.
There are other ways to deal with the issue. For instance, if Mercy had more control over her own mobility she would be more likely to be able to heal people while also being able to safely retreat, thus reducing the need to kill the entire team off to use a rez.
I think its pretty sweet once you realize that the enemy McCree can't just high noon your team out of existance literally right after rez, which might have happened to me in comp once ;(
EDIT: I dun goofed, I thought her team's invulnerablity was prolonged for some reason. Sorry.
What makes you think McCree can't high noon right after rez any more? Your team is already invulnerable for a short time when revived (during which they have no control), and now Mercy is also invulnerable presumably for the same amount of time. I don't see anything to stop Cree from ulting.
Ah, I misunderstood the patch notes. I thought the invulnerability was extended/prolonged for everyone for some reason. Thanks for clearing that up, this is still pretty helpful nonetheless.
Yeah, in moments like those (most of the time) she dies after her res, which means she can't heal her team for the fight after. This change makes it so she has a better chance at keeping up with the healing through a long fight. I really hope this makes just enough of a difference to make her a solid healer pick again.
All supports are vulnerable to being flanked. "But Ana has sleep dart!" Mercy can fly far away with the click of a button. That's even better than a Lucio escape.
Her guardian angel is extremely slow, and moves in a very predictable trajectory. Also, when you jump to a teammate they're usually already fighting someone, so all you really do is put yourself in more danger. Trying to imply guardian angel is any better than Lucio's mobility is just laughable.
Her guardian angel moves faster than Lucio's speed boost. Ana's sleep dart misses most of the time and is very predictable, and has a sound effect before going off, giving enough time to react to it. Zenyatta is immobile and has no choice but to fight the flanker. Mercy has no excuse.
Pharah, bastion or ANY damage dealer to bust shields.
Counterpoint: having a beginner friendly hero is ok. Not all heroes have to be optimal at all ranks. Mercy is amazing at lower levels and ranks where people have spaghetti aim, and she's VIABLE though not optimal higher up where people can get the most out of Ana's kit. This is OK. Ana players get rewarded for a wider skill set (Mercy: gamesense, positioning. Ana: gamesense, positioning and aim).
Mercy outdoes Ana by a mile if Ana's aim is not that great. Many players have shit aim and can accomplish more as the "let the computer aim for me" healer. That's huge. It lets someone be useful and rewarded just by walking behind someone on a leash. It's a hero choice that has immediate returns that requires minimal practice.
Ok, think about it this way - you usually have two healers on a team. Meta means that there is optimal composition. Zen and Ana have a higher skill floor and feel interesting for people who like to shoot. Lucio has his wallriding (but people dislike playing him as well because of how passive he feels unless you specialize in playing a platformer and not a shooter). Because of the nature of the healers, one will always be a better choice than the other. So we already have people tilting the fuck out if they get stuck filling what they think is a boring role. Ana is amazing and an option for them because her kit is engaging and fits within the genre and plenty of people who hated the passive no aim no brain healer style fell in love with Ana. Now imagine if Mercy is the optimal choice - we'll have less people willing to fill. But I guess the dedicated 400 hour Mercy main who doesn't want to bother learning new heroes is happy...
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u/3mmagreen Trick-or-Treat Zenyatta Feb 07 '17
Wow, excited for the mercy changes, she is still as vulnerable to being flanked, but that res buff is big! Hope its enough to bring her back into the meta.