I'm looking for someone to play PTR competitive with; quote for my username.
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Mercy is a strong character but she's not the best in the game. I'm sitting at somewhere around 600 games played with her and I think that there are certainly no shortage of things that keep her in check. I'd say she doesn't need any changes with the game how it is, but if Lucio gets nerfed that could easily change. I'd put her at #2 in the support category (behind Lucio) and somewhere in the top third overall.
Strengths:
- Mercy works on basically every map and against almost all team compositions. She has very high mobility in most situations and her toolset is so non-specific that there aren't really any things in particular her that render her irrelevant. Ironically, because she should lose to basically anyone in a 1v1, Mercy has no particular hard counters and the only character that is especially good at trivializing her is Winston, but he can be managed in other ways and with the assistance of your team.
- In terms of single-target healing there is no equal. Because of this, Mercy has a greater power than the other healers to determine the outcome of a fight without using her ult. A Mercy who is playing well is capable of providing the necessary leverage to prevent their teammates from losing fights that they otherwise would have lost. Lucio's dominance is predicated on the fact that he essentially gives his entire team an inflated life pool when they're standing near him; Mercy's healing rate is so quick that she can render a single character effectively impervious to all but the strongest of attacks, which is an ability unique to her. The value of this in 1v1 is obvious, but its benefit is only multiplicative over the course of team fights and games.
- Her ult is really good and charges very quickly; this combination of traits makes it probably the best in the game. Not too much else to say about the upsides of this ult; you're dead, now you're not. You can render plays of extraordinary teamplay irrelevant with the touch of a button and you can allow your team to retain its momentum if they hit a bump in the road at a relatively low cost.
- Her pistol isn't that bad. If you can aim (sorry console players), Mercy can defend herself well enough the squishier portion of the cast to at least force them to run away instead of pursuing her. I have killed numerous Tracers, Torbjorns, Zenyattas, D. Vas and even Reapers as Mercy just by shooting people in the head a few times. It's also good for destroying turrets and otherwise just bothering people at a long range since there's no dropoff.
- Mercy is difficult to kill without an ult. She has a decent-sized health pool which regenerates very quickly and her mobility lets her be quick and unpredictable at the same time, so smart players playing on smart teams are usually able to stay alive as Mercy for a good length of time.
Weaknesses:
- If you're playing on a team with no tank and/or a team composed entirely of MLG wannabe flankers, you're going to have a bad time. Mercy's movement mechanic is reliant on having LoS to at least one other player and really doesn't mesh well with this style of play. Playing a "pocket" Mercy is just asking to get focused and is bound to make you drastically underutilized, so Mercy only works well on the kind of teams that do team stuff. This is perhaps her biggest flaw in solo queue and I suspect is the reason that she's sitting at the bottom of the leaderboards for winrate (yeah, she's totally overpowered guys): Unlike Lucio, Mercy can't bring her team together and certainly can't lead a charge. She's entirely dependent on your teammates making reasonable decisions.
- Her ult is very, very difficult to use optimally and is often not a massive game-changer because of this. Mercies have to be super careful not to accidentally get revives that are too small or revives that don't really benefit their team or, worse yet, actually benefit the other team by feeding them meter; you need to really be reading the game well to get a good ult and for all of its potential it is probably the ult that is most frequently underutilized. Mercy players basically have to keep track of everyone else's ult status if they want to revive properly and they have to be sure not to be killed themselves if she wants to be able to use her ult effectively in the first place. What good is saving your ult to prevent a multikill riptire if you are also killed by the multikill riptire? Not only did you not save your teammates in this instance, you also probably didn't save them in other instances where you could. It's an ult that inspires a lot of terror but is definitely one of the most difficult in the game to use effectively. There are a lot of ways to cope with this but they serve to diminish the x-factor value of her ult and make it work a whole lot more like Symmetra's.
- Without a vigilant team, Mercy will be blown up religiously by a significant percentage of the game's ults. Of particular prominence are Genji's and Junkrat's, which are essentially a free kill against her if ypur team doesn't act quickly. The point here is that all of the work you do as Mercy to prevent yourself from dying (which is, for sure, the most difficult part of playing Mercy) can be rendered irrelevant by many ults, allowing otherwise small kills to become plays.
- Her performance in bulk healing is a distant second to Lucio. You will almost never beat Lucio in healing done, especially in KotH. The practical gameplay implications of this are few since the vast majority of this healing has no effect on the game at all, but they're there: Lucio does better against the slow burn than Mercy does, and because he keeps up his team by... existing, it's far easier for him to keep his team in the game during long engagements than it is for Mercy. Mercy must constantly divide her focus between her own survival and that of her teammates, and when that split focus reaches critical mass it can give the opposing team significant leverage.
- Mercy's utility outside of straight healing is fairly limited. I said before that her gun is quite handy and this is true, but all of the supports save Lucio have more useful guns and Lucio gets to use his more. Her damage beam is very, very strong in some situations but it doesn't quite match Lucio's speed boost and ability to spontaneously kill characters in one maneuver, especially when it comes to KotH. In relation to Zenyatta she comes off looking pretty good in the utility department (nevermind healing) but he's a different creature altogether.
Tl;dr: Mercy is excellent but Lucio is better. She's fine; maybe buff Zenyatta.
