Well then.  Mercy has been through a lot of changes but most of which has been with her rez.  She started out where her ult was her rez that worked in an AOE fashion that would rez anyone near you with a counter to see how many dead souls were in your area.  You couldn’t move while rezzing but it was instant so you barely stopped moving at all.

I’m not going to talk again about how “hold ult rez and hide” game play was stupid, but not being able to move while rezzing was problematic because you were the only living target when casting the rez which usually meant getting headshot or otherwise gibbed soon as you cast it.

Then they made it castable while moving.  That was very nice but again you were still the only living and vulnerable target in the area (because the people rezzed are invulnerable for a second or two after rez) and usually got destroyed anyway.

They made Guardian Spirit be usable much more often which helped but, a smart ass Widow or whatever could still get you mid-flight which stunk.

THEN Mercy got to be invulnerable also when rezzing.  You know what that was good for? Yep, doing a single rez to live through standing in Hanzo’s ult like a moron, or surviving some other kind of nonsense.  So on top of the “hide and rez” bullshit you could cheat death at specific times. And of course the rez-reset stuff that made me want to throw my keyboard.

Needless to say all of that was a problem one way or another so they changed it where rez is now single target, and  you have to be quite close to the dead person to do it.  You got a double rez during your ult which does something else entirely now.

Only… the cool down imo was way way too frequent so you could take down a big target like a tank and expect a team with Mercy to just immediately bring them back up.  Every.  Damn.  time.   I’d almost say it was worse than the AOE rez because she wasn’t encouraged to save it for a good huge rez because it took a while to charge up, but the AOE rez was worse. But, not by much.

I heard a nerf is coming down where in addition to being close to the dead person, the cast time will now be something like 2 seconds.  That’s… curious.  I had hoped for a longer rez CD but, that may be a double bang by making the Mercy extra vulnerable both by getting closer AND being still.  She just might get shot before the rez and now the team is also down a healer.  Seems like a bit much but we’ll see.

Maybe I’m still salty about being headshot during a guardian spirit instant rez.

Ever since the Chinese New Years event, possibly even the winter holiday, it was pretty obvious you have to buy boxes to get anything.

For instance I earned probably 25 boxes by playing during the summer games, and got 1-2 skins, neither of which I wanted.  I already talked about the coin nerf so I won’t do it again but for this Halloween event I got 2 new skin.  TWO.  I never play Zarya but I got her new Halloween skin and Torb’s skin. I really didn’t want either but they are ok.   I also got Hanzo’s last years Halloween skin, and some non-event skins, but mostly voice lines, sprays, and player icons. Lots and lots of sprays, sometimes even duplicate sprays!  Ravenshield commented that he was getting a lot of duplicates, but I thought he was exaggerating.  Because they fixed duplicates, right?

He wasn’t.

I also couldn’t get anywhere near 3,000 coins to buy a skin of my choice.  I spent 3k on Mercy’s skin at the summer event, which was the last one, but barely earned 1k since then.

I hit roughly around 2200 the last day of the event, not enough to get any skin.  I really wanted the Symmetra skin, Ana’s, possibly McCree’s too.  Nope, I got NONE of those.  I bought 10 boxes and still got no Halloween skins, but barely got enough coins to purchase a single one, Symmetra’s.

Same problem with the summer games, bought Mercy’s new skin but then had no more money.  They really need to reduce the cost of skins, but, I bet they won’t because as I said, YOU HAVE TO BUY BOXES TO GET WHAT YOU WANT.  That is clear.

I’ve been saying for  a while that Mercy needed some changes.  Note that I didn’t say BUFFS, because she was basically fine, OP in some instances if one wishes to be fair. 3 major things in my mind.

Her rez encouraged game play of getting her ult, and then hiding and 1. not healing and 2. encouraging her team to all die in one place so she could swoop in and mass rez.  This was beneficial because she could return more than one person from dead to full health which is much better than healing a single person.  And since she couldn’t rez when she was dead, she had to hide and therefore stop healing.

I felt this was dumb because as a healer, my job is to heal, not avoid healing.  I refused to hide and big rez, and got called an idiot.  Yes, it was ideal to big rez and reset a fight but, I refused to do it on the grounds that it was dumb game play.

The other issue was her ability to reset fights.  I’ve done it myself plenty of times, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating game play.  For example, a Zarya ult leads into a quad kill from a Pharah/Junkrat/Mccree/whatever.  Oh wait, that hiding Mercy now flys in and UNDO BUTTONS the entire mass kill.  Oh my, wasn’t that fun!  Or your team is trying to take point B and you kill the tank and 2 dps and you’re about to… NO THAT’S OK MERCY JUST Murazond’s Hourglass the fight back to before the kills happened.  It was amazingly annoying to only get somewhere if the healer was dead or had their rez down. Especially when the healer is encouraged to HIDE.

The last thing was her mobility.  Yes, the guardian thing is really nice, but you are dependent on your team mates being in range and positioned decently.  You can’t fly to the Genji flanking across the map or the Tracer camping the enemy spawn.   I was hoping for a wings based disengage or something.

Instead, I got fixes to everything I was displeased about.  Her rez is no longer an ultimate, it’s on a timer.  She can only rez one person.  This fixes team rez resets and hiding to use a big rez.

Her new ultimate allows her to FLY, heal and damage boost from longer distances, guardian fly from farther, heal and damage boost more, AND her gun is stronger.

So, THANKS BLIZZARD in a non-sarcastic fashion! And like the D.va suggested fix (got called an idiot for saying she should be safe from her own ult, and got downvoted to hell), I was right again.

Pharah for me is hit or miss (haha) on if I do really well with her or not.

Her rockets have a travel time so hitting people in a current game status where everyone is VERY MOBILE is hard, or in the case of Widowmaker, characters that seem to have a hitbox of a sewing pin. I just happened to get really lucky this time.  It also seems counter-intuitive but her ultimate seems to do fuck-all if you use it from really high in the air.  Sneaking up and blasting people in the face is dumb, but that’s what works the best.   Why is it dumb? Well because you yell “JUSTICE RAINS FROM ABOVE” soon as you start it and are completely stationary until it’s done or you die, with dying happening probably 90% of the time.

The only other character I can think of with such a dumb way of delivering an ult is McCree, who lights up like a bulb, walks extremely slowly, and announces it with “It’s HIGH NOON”.  Then (as I understand it) the longer he holds the ult, more damage is does.  He also has to try to flank and get in a weird place to use it successfully.

Everyone else can either be highly active during their ult (S76, Winston, whoever got Ana’s ult, Rein, Roadhog, Zen, Genji, etc) or they throw it and be on their merry way (D.va, Mei, Tracer, Widow, Mercy, Lucio).  Pharah, Junkrat, and McCree are the only ones who have to stop and “hold” it for a bit.

People think Pharah is OP so, doubt anything will get done.

Wellp, they fixed the duplicate problem.  The only issue now is, you get no coins, like, at all.  I’ve done about 25 levels since the event has come out.  I had just enough coins to purchase Mercy’s skin at 3,000 coins prior to the event.   I think I had about 50 left over.  You wanna know how many coins I have now? Oh, about 256.  After at least 25 boxes.

Why is this? Well when you get 2-4 duplicates per box, you got a little bit of coins for the duplicates.  The only summer skin I’ve picked up from a box is Junkrats.  Everything else has been non-duplicate player icons, sprays, voice lines, you know, kind of lame stuff.  (I did get D.va’s game emote though, pretty cool).

I surmised earlier than the overall skin drop rate and event skin drop rate was nerfed severely after the winter holiday event, during the Chinese New Year event.  So, you don’t get event skins with any regularity.  You don’t get duplicates to earn coins to buy the very expensive 3,000 coin event skins.  And now, coins almost never drop either.