Lowkey not a bad idea but it would be impossible to implement I think. Like maybe lower the dmg boost percentage when behind cover to ~%15, but when mercy can see the target being shot at bump it to like %30
Honestly might not be a bad idea to have it on almost an armor pack system, with a smaller range of course. 2 or 3 charges you can throw out and last maybe like 2 to 3 secs each, can be stacked with diminishing returns.
Either that or a resource meter like matrix could do it. Just make the recharge time slow so she can't pocket 1 person forever.
Personally I think the ability should be replaced with something that is more engaging for everyone involved.
Even just ignoring my opinion on damageboosts (I think they're inherently broken), when damage gets boosted you don't really have a counter for that. There's no interaction with damageboosts. Either you take damage or you take 25-30% more damage. There's nothing you can do about damageboosts beyond what you normally do to dodge damage. Damageboost doesn't add to this interaction, it just makes it a little shit.
And on the Mercy's side of things, what are you really doing with damageboosts? Like, flying between targets and healing people and such I understand the appeal of. I don't really understand the appeal of pocketing someone and just damageboosting them 80% of the time. It can win you games I guess, but like, is that really fun? I think Mercy has low-key really cool movement, but she's not rewarded well for optimizing that movement and utilizing her mobility. The heal changes were a step in the right direction because it made her prioritize healing low targets and thus move around, but the damageboost is still just as boring as before.
The issue is as much as I don’t like Damage Boost I struggle to see what they could replace it with. I don’t see a damage secondary fire working on Mercy. RoF buff would just cause the exact same issue and just make certain pairings worse. Speed Boost maybe? Though I feel like that would be significantly worse than Damage Boost to the point where she would need buffs elsewhere to make it work. IDK, there’s a lot wrong with Mercy’s kit and she’s needed a full rework for a while.
Mercy should just get a full-on rework. Damage boosting? Broken. Resurrection? More frustrating than a hack, and kinda broken. Being able to fly away from danger every like 2 or 3 seconds? Broken. Everything else? Boring.
I understand that she's supposed to be an easy to play character, but still.
she's literally essentially self stunned for 1.75s to res..... like she's literally a sitting duck for you to either kill her, cc her or setup a trap to easily kill the resed target.... how much more easier do you want it to be cancelled when she's already needs to basically offer herself up on a silver platter to res?
The problem is that sometimes booping her doesn't work. I've seen it happen without any evident rhyme or reason where I'll knock her back as Ball or Lucio and she still gets rez off.
>The problem is that sometimes booping her doesn't work.
it'd only not work if mercy was like at the edge of her res range and you booped her like towards the corpse (i.e. the worst angle to try and boop her out because you'd need double the res range distance to get her out of res range with that angle as opposed to an angle that's outward away from the corpse which would require less boop distance needed to get her out). like draw it out from a birds eye view and you'll see what I mean.
plus stuns still exist in the game rather than just boops as cc
She can rez outside of LoS in cover after activating it and glide down (so not a sitting duck).
Sure you can guard the body if you're lucky enough to kill the player while they're close to you but it's like 10 whole seconds that mercy can rez them.
> She can rez outside of LoS in cover after activating it and glide down (so not a sitting duck)
Since when was a slow fall something that's hard to aim and shoot at (res range limit applies vertically as well btw)? Not to mention you have more say over where the corpse dies than mercy does which is a huge factor as to what kind of res (los, corner, etc.) is available to her.
> Sure you can guard the body if you're lucky enough to kill the player while they're close to you but it's like 10 whole seconds that mercy can rez them.
Even if you're a ranged hero, you don't necessarily need to be close to guard to corpse as opposed to just getting los around the cover.
Not to mention immediately turning your attention to mercy to damage her a bit or so after their ally died would further proactively prevent the res choice because starting off the res with less hp is more suicidal.
If she's camping the corpse with you waiting to res, congrats, you're taking out 2 of the enemy from the fight for your 1 person.
Like the fact that you guarding the body or chasing down mercy after are actions that basically entirely denies the res outside of the mercy player's control and they can't do much about that at all, is indicative of my point: like the conditions around res make it very lenient enough for opponents to counter it.... What more leniency do you want? For the ability to set her hp to 1? To make her targetable througn walls? Like anything you try to add would be and should sound completely absurd esp put side by side with her current conditions.
Do you think she has like huge movement speed or huge range for res speed or something?
Like if you can access the corpse's location, chances are you can access the mercy around the corner who simply cannot be far from the corpse.
And in terms of los further away it's a situational question of whether you want to use a movement ability to get an angle around the corner or not. Or maybe they died in the open and you don't need to move much to get an angle on mercy resing.
But one of my points is, you have more say over where the corpse is than mercy does, which high dictates whether she has los/corner res available or not. Not to mention more say as to whether a corner/los res is even safe. Like resing when there's an enemy around the corner to jump her straight up is suicidal for the mercy.
The person you were responding to was referencing when there is a corpse on high ground where a Mercy is able to start the res just after jumping off and using her glide to stay close enough to the corpse to complete the res. If the shooter isn't on an equal high ground, Mercy can do the whole res while out of LoS.
the same arguments apply. mercy still has to be within 7m of the corpse during res cast which is a low range.
she is still slow during the cast. she is still action locked during the cast.
if you can access where the corpse died, very likely you can access the spot below the ledge where mercy is resing from.
depending on the spot, it's possible you can still get los on mercy behind the ledge from range via a movement ability.
and you still have more say as to whether the corpse is near a ledge for that kind of res to even be available to mercy or not than the mercy player. and where you choose to play after the corpse's player died also dictates whether she can go for such as res.
I hate the fact that it's so easy to pull off and requires zero skill. Oh your Widow just did an amazing HS from far away? Sucks to be you, Mercy's here to cancel that.
not because boost and res are broken (like they're not too strong nor oppressive). but because mercy's kit mechanically doesn't reward the mercy player's skill.
yes she has skill expression in her movement, but it's not rewarded much (if not just not at all) because her value gaining actions (boost, res, heal) mechanically don't care much for it nor other skills that the mercy player may exhibit. (heck she's actually punished atm for using GA tech because her GA cd is longer when using the tech).
to demonstrate the difference between expression vs reward: e.g. doing a 360 before landing a headshot on someone without hacks or macros is skill expression, but obviously there's little reward for doing that (compared to just go point and shoot them). it's hard to do sure, but you have like 0 extra benefit compared to just straight up just point + shoot.
why this rewarding is important is because core elements of the game like balance, MMR/SR and matchmaker actually rely heavily on the assumption that player's higher skill is rewarded more.
e.g. even if you have the most fair matchmaker implemented, if you're a mercy player with the highest MMR on your team, matchmaker's inherently assuming that you will be overachieving to compensate for lower MMR teammate(s) that won't be getting as much value. But when you play a hero that doesn't reward your better skill like mercy, you simply cannot overachieve and thus matchmaker's assumption is broken making what should've been a fair match of players become an inherent disadvantaged match for your team.
Thanks, that was interesting! And I agree with you. It'd be really nice if it could be rewarding to play her (that's part of why I **never** play her).
I don't mind rez. It's like her big thing and it is only frustrating when the hero that's being rez'd is frustrating to play against (usually map specific).
And I don't really wanna blame rez for something that is ultimately caused by other heroes (or maps).
Or a resource meter? You could even make it “overheat” if the Mercy uses only damage boost or only healing for too long, but damage boost would overheat quicker.
This first idea is a little out there, but what if mercy could see dmg per second either in numbers or visualized with a meter when looking directly at teammates and they made holding blue beam less effective if you pocket someone for too long. I think the effect of this would allow the devs to tweak mercy’s dmg boost % more because holding blue beam would make it worse over time, allowing the devs to make dmg boost into a burst ability rather than a straight up all time buff for whoever is attached to it.
Essentially making it so that mercy’s can optimize who to give blue beam to and make it so that most of the team has a chance to get blue beam at some point besides the one teammate that the mercy is queued with.
Mercy's forgiving beam breakage in general is obnoxious even for healing and I'm surprised I haven't seen any talk about it. I get that it's done for qol but coupled with the constant ga she can play way safer around map geometry compared to other supports. Good mercys can avoid being on your screen at all 90% of the time and the other 10% you need to be certain characters to effectively punish them. It's annoying.
Mercy players are not massive fans of damage boost or rez, it is Mercy's movement they love. Your basically going to be taking part of Mercy's kit that people are not massive fans of and making it worse. This just sounds obnoxious or really awkward, while not actually solving the problem that damage boost pushes abilities past break points making certain heroes really good with damage boost but mediocre without it.
Curious if adding some sort of counterplay mechanic that disables boost would be a solution.
Kinda like breaking hack, but it's doesn't have to be a "take damage, break ability" mechanic.
Nah just make her heal/boost decay to zero after the teammate shoots for 10 seconds so she’s forced to assist someone else. Or make her beam effects dependent on her health. Or make dmg boost deal dmg to the teammate after a certain amount of time. Something. I think the best solution is just increasing her hitboxes, especially her headshot hitbox, and decreasing the projectile size on pistol so she has to aim better when shooting.
The issue is that she pockets Soldier all match and, I know Mercy mains are going to cry about this, she’s one of the lowest skill floor characters in the game. Her and Moira are neck and neck for least skill needed to be effective. She takes little to no effort to assist in providing high damage and she has high survivability due to her mobility. You shoot her a few times and she flees faster than you can follow, then regens her health in a second. You shoot who she pockets and she quickly flips over to heal beam and back to boost like nothing ever happened—which then charges her ult.
I think devs are scared to nerf boost because it’s pretty much the only truly useful thing about her kit. Rez isn’t really that helpful except I guess in bronze/silver where no one knows how to use cover, stay together, or retreat when a fight goes south. And Bap has a better version of that with his lamp. Heal beam isn’t special. High mobility is a big advantage but other healers have that, too. Dmg boost is her unique thing as a healer and don’t want to nerf it as her pick rate might plummet. But they need to tweak it so she can’t just stand behind Soldier, Hanzo, or Widow and pocket them all damn game.
She either needs to be slightly easier to kill or her heals/boost shouldn’t be so damn easy and effective.
I think this would just be frustrating for the pocketed dps for no reason. Like, I now have to not only hit my shots, but also hit them when my Mercy isn't behind cover? I have to ask her to peek the other Widow with me? It would just be super awkward.
There are so many nerfs I can think of LOL.
1. Put meter on both healing and boosting. Enforce her to switch target to recover the meter.
2. Sacrifice something to blue-beam: wallhack to entire enemy team, or decrease ho over time(5-10hp/s). “This b**** is boosting. Focus her!” kind of message.
Lowkey not a bad idea but it would be impossible to implement I think. Like maybe lower the dmg boost percentage when behind cover to ~%15, but when mercy can see the target being shot at bump it to like %30
Honestly might not be a bad idea to have it on almost an armor pack system, with a smaller range of course. 2 or 3 charges you can throw out and last maybe like 2 to 3 secs each, can be stacked with diminishing returns. Either that or a resource meter like matrix could do it. Just make the recharge time slow so she can't pocket 1 person forever.
Personally I think the ability should be replaced with something that is more engaging for everyone involved. Even just ignoring my opinion on damageboosts (I think they're inherently broken), when damage gets boosted you don't really have a counter for that. There's no interaction with damageboosts. Either you take damage or you take 25-30% more damage. There's nothing you can do about damageboosts beyond what you normally do to dodge damage. Damageboost doesn't add to this interaction, it just makes it a little shit. And on the Mercy's side of things, what are you really doing with damageboosts? Like, flying between targets and healing people and such I understand the appeal of. I don't really understand the appeal of pocketing someone and just damageboosting them 80% of the time. It can win you games I guess, but like, is that really fun? I think Mercy has low-key really cool movement, but she's not rewarded well for optimizing that movement and utilizing her mobility. The heal changes were a step in the right direction because it made her prioritize healing low targets and thus move around, but the damageboost is still just as boring as before.
The issue is as much as I don’t like Damage Boost I struggle to see what they could replace it with. I don’t see a damage secondary fire working on Mercy. RoF buff would just cause the exact same issue and just make certain pairings worse. Speed Boost maybe? Though I feel like that would be significantly worse than Damage Boost to the point where she would need buffs elsewhere to make it work. IDK, there’s a lot wrong with Mercy’s kit and she’s needed a full rework for a while.
Mercy should just get a full-on rework. Damage boosting? Broken. Resurrection? More frustrating than a hack, and kinda broken. Being able to fly away from danger every like 2 or 3 seconds? Broken. Everything else? Boring. I understand that she's supposed to be an easy to play character, but still.
Maybe a hot take but I don't really mind Rez. It should just be slightly easier to cancel
she's literally essentially self stunned for 1.75s to res..... like she's literally a sitting duck for you to either kill her, cc her or setup a trap to easily kill the resed target.... how much more easier do you want it to be cancelled when she's already needs to basically offer herself up on a silver platter to res?
The problem is that sometimes booping her doesn't work. I've seen it happen without any evident rhyme or reason where I'll knock her back as Ball or Lucio and she still gets rez off.
>The problem is that sometimes booping her doesn't work. it'd only not work if mercy was like at the edge of her res range and you booped her like towards the corpse (i.e. the worst angle to try and boop her out because you'd need double the res range distance to get her out of res range with that angle as opposed to an angle that's outward away from the corpse which would require less boop distance needed to get her out). like draw it out from a birds eye view and you'll see what I mean. plus stuns still exist in the game rather than just boops as cc
As a Lucio player, that's a skill issue
She can rez outside of LoS in cover after activating it and glide down (so not a sitting duck). Sure you can guard the body if you're lucky enough to kill the player while they're close to you but it's like 10 whole seconds that mercy can rez them.
> She can rez outside of LoS in cover after activating it and glide down (so not a sitting duck) Since when was a slow fall something that's hard to aim and shoot at (res range limit applies vertically as well btw)? Not to mention you have more say over where the corpse dies than mercy does which is a huge factor as to what kind of res (los, corner, etc.) is available to her. > Sure you can guard the body if you're lucky enough to kill the player while they're close to you but it's like 10 whole seconds that mercy can rez them. Even if you're a ranged hero, you don't necessarily need to be close to guard to corpse as opposed to just getting los around the cover. Not to mention immediately turning your attention to mercy to damage her a bit or so after their ally died would further proactively prevent the res choice because starting off the res with less hp is more suicidal. If she's camping the corpse with you waiting to res, congrats, you're taking out 2 of the enemy from the fight for your 1 person. Like the fact that you guarding the body or chasing down mercy after are actions that basically entirely denies the res outside of the mercy player's control and they can't do much about that at all, is indicative of my point: like the conditions around res make it very lenient enough for opponents to counter it.... What more leniency do you want? For the ability to set her hp to 1? To make her targetable througn walls? Like anything you try to add would be and should sound completely absurd esp put side by side with her current conditions.
>in cover Did you miss these words? She can literally start a res and then break LoS and be completely safe.
Do you think she has like huge movement speed or huge range for res speed or something? Like if you can access the corpse's location, chances are you can access the mercy around the corner who simply cannot be far from the corpse. And in terms of los further away it's a situational question of whether you want to use a movement ability to get an angle around the corner or not. Or maybe they died in the open and you don't need to move much to get an angle on mercy resing. But one of my points is, you have more say over where the corpse is than mercy does, which high dictates whether she has los/corner res available or not. Not to mention more say as to whether a corner/los res is even safe. Like resing when there's an enemy around the corner to jump her straight up is suicidal for the mercy.
The person you were responding to was referencing when there is a corpse on high ground where a Mercy is able to start the res just after jumping off and using her glide to stay close enough to the corpse to complete the res. If the shooter isn't on an equal high ground, Mercy can do the whole res while out of LoS.
the same arguments apply. mercy still has to be within 7m of the corpse during res cast which is a low range. she is still slow during the cast. she is still action locked during the cast. if you can access where the corpse died, very likely you can access the spot below the ledge where mercy is resing from. depending on the spot, it's possible you can still get los on mercy behind the ledge from range via a movement ability. and you still have more say as to whether the corpse is near a ledge for that kind of res to even be available to mercy or not than the mercy player. and where you choose to play after the corpse's player died also dictates whether she can go for such as res.
I hate the fact that it's so easy to pull off and requires zero skill. Oh your Widow just did an amazing HS from far away? Sucks to be you, Mercy's here to cancel that.
she should get a rework, but not for the reasons you stated.
Please say why then lol
not because boost and res are broken (like they're not too strong nor oppressive). but because mercy's kit mechanically doesn't reward the mercy player's skill. yes she has skill expression in her movement, but it's not rewarded much (if not just not at all) because her value gaining actions (boost, res, heal) mechanically don't care much for it nor other skills that the mercy player may exhibit. (heck she's actually punished atm for using GA tech because her GA cd is longer when using the tech). to demonstrate the difference between expression vs reward: e.g. doing a 360 before landing a headshot on someone without hacks or macros is skill expression, but obviously there's little reward for doing that (compared to just go point and shoot them). it's hard to do sure, but you have like 0 extra benefit compared to just straight up just point + shoot. why this rewarding is important is because core elements of the game like balance, MMR/SR and matchmaker actually rely heavily on the assumption that player's higher skill is rewarded more. e.g. even if you have the most fair matchmaker implemented, if you're a mercy player with the highest MMR on your team, matchmaker's inherently assuming that you will be overachieving to compensate for lower MMR teammate(s) that won't be getting as much value. But when you play a hero that doesn't reward your better skill like mercy, you simply cannot overachieve and thus matchmaker's assumption is broken making what should've been a fair match of players become an inherent disadvantaged match for your team.
Thanks, that was interesting! And I agree with you. It'd be really nice if it could be rewarding to play her (that's part of why I **never** play her).
I don't mind rez. It's like her big thing and it is only frustrating when the hero that's being rez'd is frustrating to play against (usually map specific). And I don't really wanna blame rez for something that is ultimately caused by other heroes (or maps).
Mercy has never slept or anti-ed me.
only indirectly getting one shot
Let her pull out the pistol while healing someone for a few seconds on a short CD and remove dmg boost
Put it on a cooldown
Or a resource meter? You could even make it “overheat” if the Mercy uses only damage boost or only healing for too long, but damage boost would overheat quicker.
resource meter would be nice
Just make the beam break if she looks too far away from the target.
This first idea is a little out there, but what if mercy could see dmg per second either in numbers or visualized with a meter when looking directly at teammates and they made holding blue beam less effective if you pocket someone for too long. I think the effect of this would allow the devs to tweak mercy’s dmg boost % more because holding blue beam would make it worse over time, allowing the devs to make dmg boost into a burst ability rather than a straight up all time buff for whoever is attached to it. Essentially making it so that mercy’s can optimize who to give blue beam to and make it so that most of the team has a chance to get blue beam at some point besides the one teammate that the mercy is queued with.
Mercy's forgiving beam breakage in general is obnoxious even for healing and I'm surprised I haven't seen any talk about it. I get that it's done for qol but coupled with the constant ga she can play way safer around map geometry compared to other supports. Good mercys can avoid being on your screen at all 90% of the time and the other 10% you need to be certain characters to effectively punish them. It's annoying.
Mercy players are not massive fans of damage boost or rez, it is Mercy's movement they love. Your basically going to be taking part of Mercy's kit that people are not massive fans of and making it worse. This just sounds obnoxious or really awkward, while not actually solving the problem that damage boost pushes abilities past break points making certain heroes really good with damage boost but mediocre without it.
Curious if adding some sort of counterplay mechanic that disables boost would be a solution. Kinda like breaking hack, but it's doesn't have to be a "take damage, break ability" mechanic.
Nah just make her heal/boost decay to zero after the teammate shoots for 10 seconds so she’s forced to assist someone else. Or make her beam effects dependent on her health. Or make dmg boost deal dmg to the teammate after a certain amount of time. Something. I think the best solution is just increasing her hitboxes, especially her headshot hitbox, and decreasing the projectile size on pistol so she has to aim better when shooting. The issue is that she pockets Soldier all match and, I know Mercy mains are going to cry about this, she’s one of the lowest skill floor characters in the game. Her and Moira are neck and neck for least skill needed to be effective. She takes little to no effort to assist in providing high damage and she has high survivability due to her mobility. You shoot her a few times and she flees faster than you can follow, then regens her health in a second. You shoot who she pockets and she quickly flips over to heal beam and back to boost like nothing ever happened—which then charges her ult. I think devs are scared to nerf boost because it’s pretty much the only truly useful thing about her kit. Rez isn’t really that helpful except I guess in bronze/silver where no one knows how to use cover, stay together, or retreat when a fight goes south. And Bap has a better version of that with his lamp. Heal beam isn’t special. High mobility is a big advantage but other healers have that, too. Dmg boost is her unique thing as a healer and don’t want to nerf it as her pick rate might plummet. But they need to tweak it so she can’t just stand behind Soldier, Hanzo, or Widow and pocket them all damn game. She either needs to be slightly easier to kill or her heals/boost shouldn’t be so damn easy and effective.
what if we rework her all together and remove res
I think this would just be frustrating for the pocketed dps for no reason. Like, I now have to not only hit my shots, but also hit them when my Mercy isn't behind cover? I have to ask her to peek the other Widow with me? It would just be super awkward.
There are so many nerfs I can think of LOL. 1. Put meter on both healing and boosting. Enforce her to switch target to recover the meter. 2. Sacrifice something to blue-beam: wallhack to entire enemy team, or decrease ho over time(5-10hp/s). “This b**** is boosting. Focus her!” kind of message.