Mercy, PTR Process
turikk: Mercy. So uhh…
Jeff: WHAT’S THERE TO TALK ABOUT WITH MERCY?
turikk: So we all know Mercy’s had some big changes, including one to her core ability, resurrection. Do you guys find it difficult to make changes to kits that are core parts of the identity?
Jeff: Yes.
turikk: Okay. [studio laughter] Next question!
Jeff: Mercy is a challenge, and great example of that. At this point in Overwatch's age, people are very emotionally attached to the characters, which is what we want. There are times we want to be extremely careful about making change - we always say, in videogames: any change is bad. It doesn’t matter what the change is, any time you change what a player thinks about something it’s bad and scary. In the case of mercy, what we’d run into was the fantasy of what the character exactly was: primary healer, angelic mobility, diving to people to save them with rez as a very defining ability.
The problem with it was that the ‘right way to play’ her had developed into actually stopping healing sometimes. There were certain moments where Mercy would drop off, knowing it was the right thing to do (she could bring you and four of your buddies back in a smart play), but it felt wrong for everybody else. The other thing was that teams could set up awesome Zarya/Pharah combo s- graviton into rocket barrage, only for them to be erased entirely, and that was super frustrating.
turikk: Have you ever thought about removing resurrect altogether?
Jeff: We talk about it because the community talks about it; it comes up threads a lot. But it feels very extreme, and it doesn’t feel like we’re doing our job if we don’t try to balance it first. People complain that we don’t listen to PTR feedback, but we really try to. But I want people to go back and read threads during the period when we first put Valkyrie on the PTR. The two leading things we heard were -- from Mercy mains -- we heard that she was awful now and she’d never be played again, and from non-Mercy mains was that she was a DPS killing machine. That was the level of feedback we got from the PTR. We didn’t get a lot of talk about the resurrect coming back too quickly. It took for us to start watching pro players and playing the game ourselves for us to say “this is out of hand”.
Our goal now on the PTR is to fix it: we have 10 different fixes to try if this one doesn’t work out. We’ve tried a bunch of them internally and feel comfortable enough with this one to put it onto the PTR. This week, even, between BlizzCon rehearsals, we’ve been sitting on the PTR and testing Mercy for balance. We think she’s in a decent place now: it feels great when you’re resurrected and it’s a little less devastating for the other team. If it’s not, though, I hope everybody has faith that we can do another patch- we’re never at the end of testing and trying. We don’t want Mercy to go away, but we don’t want rez to define her.
Bill: One question [I saw] talked about speed of [change] iteration. One source looked at the speed of Lucio changes versus Mercy changes. With Mercy, it’s a lot of watching people play and seeing how that affects a match. With Lucio, the feedback is very quantitative and easy for us to apply. So, it’s easier to get quicker iterations out for Lucio than Mercy, because Mercy has a more overarching balance effect on the game.
Varsinkin uusi rezz hero. Ei kiitos ja toinen mitä peli ei tarvi niin shieldei ainakaan noita massiivisia reinon winstonin orisan tyylisiä.
