Overwatch

That's because the game never tells you that you can actually cancel the wall, so even many of those Mei who aren't deliberately trolling simply don't know this.

It's also easy for people to get distracted in the heat of battle and not take it down at an appropriate time (or be unaware that it's blocking someone who might be off to the side flanking because there's usually little communication).

FE: New Mystery Fresh Cart Lunatic 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Expert Unicorn Overlord 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshi

There's actually been suggestions that teammate should be able to shoot through friendly Mei's wall. But coding that into the game might be too hard.
@Pushover Media Critic Oh, I see. Well, these

are already in game. But this: is not. And that's actually is a problem, cause her team can't even protect her Ults since there's a high chance they don't know where it is. The only downside to adding this is that it might show up on the kill cam.

As in, treating Mei's wall like a Rein shield? That might work, though it might also be a bit too powerful.

FE: New Mystery Fresh Cart Lunatic 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Expert Unicorn Overlord 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshi

Yeah, far too OP. Imagine the horrors that could inflict with a Soldier ult or a Mc Cree ult.

I mean, maybe they could change it so that each of the five sections of Mei's wall individually lower and raise automatically to let teammates through, but that's less of a quality-of-life change and more of a straight buff.

x4

Yes and no. Sym gives out a voice line that her ult is under attack, but it doesn't help since its usually dead by the time anyone hears it and no one knows where it is anyway. Giving and outline of it at all times would allow easy communication for where it is, where you're exiting the teleporter to, and also tell everyone that its under attack.

At the moment, her turrets don't give a voice line that they're attacking someone nor do they outline the attacker through walls. And I think they should if Sym is to be an anti-flanker which would allow me to decide if I want to go in on someone, and it makes a big difference if that someone is a Sombra or a Roadhog.

It shouldn't be hard to remove such stuff from the kill feed though. As far as I'm aware, teleporters are removed from them already so removing the outline from everyone else's should be simple enough.

Huh.

In a span of 2 hours of play, I got myself three achievements, Pixel for Ana and Mccree, and the Ult one for Soldier 76. I wonder if today is the day I finally get myself the Lucio pixel achievement...

---

EDIT: While I didn't get the Lucio achievement, I got an opportunity to learn that, yes, all 6 Support Hero CAN make a damn powerful team.

edited 12th Jan '18 1:00:16 AM by dRoy

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

It was really satisfying to watch Dallas Fuel with XQC on board lose to Seoul Dynasty yesterday.

Sounds like you've had your own victory by proxy thanks to schadenfreude.

Mega Man fanatic extraordinaire

Here's a nice moment from Philedelphia Fusion (aka the Mc Donalds team) at 9:50 where Valk!Mercy with Zen's help gets a nice 2-kill. Note that they're fighing 4v5 and both the DPS are dead. Also, that Mercy just a moment before kill the ulting Junk without Ult. Pretty sweet play.

edited 12th Jan '18 6:22:26 AM by HottoKenai

In OWL, the same five heroes were played an average of 80% of the time.

Mercy, D.Va, Winston, Zenyatta and Tracer.

On every map and mode.

For comparison, the sixth most played hero, Genji, was only played 26% of the time.

Yet the developers were "impressed" with the diversity of heroes being used so far.

The only way it could get less diverse is if the game still allowed multiple copies of the same hero to a team and they ran two D.Vas instead of a Winston.

edited 14th Jan '18 7:46:13 AM by CitizenH

It's still an improvement over the World Cup, which had both teams run dive comp every single time.

This time people actually switched compositions once in a while.

I presume Torbjorn, Symmetra, and Bastion were never played at all?

Don't stop, just proceed, 'cause this is what you need-proceed, just proceed, 'cause this is what you need!

Torb and Bastion saw some play.

Symmetra remains at 0% pickrate.

Uni cat

Bastion is not uncommon at all anymore because of Junkertown.

The bottom 5 pickrates as of Friday were:

Sombra 2.41% Doomfist 1.07% Torbjörn 0.47% Mei 0.31% Symmetra 0.00%

The numbers will change when they put the weekend data in, because I saw Mei being used for the beginning of Junkertown and Doomfist got brought out on Horizon for the stall brawl on the last point in overtime.

edited 14th Jan '18 9:24:08 AM by CitizenH

Watching OWL more and seeing Junkrats always hide and wait to press Q and kill people with the tire reminds me about how DPS players bitched about a certain support hiding and doing the opposite with her Q press...

Because things are only okay and take skill when a DPS does it.

The difference is that a Mercy hiding isn't an intended playstyle since you are supposed to be with the team.

Don't forget that those mercies also left their teams to die which could backfire horribly

Uni cat

Hiding is okay when doing well at your role means hiding, it's really not that hard to differentiate.

What justifies flanking, going alone instead of staying with your team to help them win the fight through numerical surperiroity is to capitalize on catching the enemy team off-guard and be more effective than as just another damage dealer on the front. So of course playing well any damage dealer will at some point involve hiding and not directly helping the team because the payoff of dealing crippling damage to the team is worth risking to put the team at a temporrary 5vs6 situation.

that's just not what happens when mercy was actively stopping to fulfill her role as a healer in order to get the best out of her ult, because rezzing people is not the same thing than keeping the team alive, the basic definition of the role of a support.

The parralel was brought up five hundred times or so in this thread alone and wasn't valid the 500 first time. It won't be any more relevant to bring it up for the 501th tilme.

edited 14th Jan '18 3:30:36 PM by Yumil

"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."

How is it not? Hiding and knowing when to go in seems like a valid strategy if you're any type of support hero.

IDK, I'm not that big into shooters, so it feels like they're pounding players to play a certain way, sorta slamming the Mercy character into a round hole she was never meant to fit in.

edited 14th Jan '18 3:34:26 PM by MegaJ

bailing out a critical situation so you can live to fight for another day is totally okay : doing the opposite would be the stupid thing.

But the problem is that it's not what was happened with mercy. what was happening is that people playing mercy were letting their team die in order to pull of 5-man rezzes even though that was not the smart thing to do.

And they're not exactly to blame, though, we aren't accusing them of doing it out of sheer slefishness. But that's what the game mechanics and the fact that you aren't an omniscient observer of the fight but an actor of said fight with limited informations on the situation were encouraging you to do, because you were actively encouraged to do something largely suboptimal for your team and teherefore, detrimental to your chances of victory, because in the flow of the battle from your player standpoint it looked like the best thing to do.

And the fact the mechanics were encouraging you to do that is what is not okay from a game design standpoint.

(Or what blizzard deemed not okay, at any rate : there's certainly room for a civilized discussion about it, after all Scatter arrow is also a really big offender to that kind of thing and it still is the same after all this time. But it needs to stop being compared to dps flanking and become his own debate instead of relying on a paralel that doesn't work nearly as much as some would want it to.)

Except you can't change the very nature of a hero shooter, so the only way to get rid of the playstyle was to remove rez, because you can't remove the limited informations and gameplay mechanics.

edited 14th Jan '18 4:10:35 PM by Yumil

"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."

Hmmm. Back with Old Mercy, I would hold my ult while still being in the fight and hiding to save us from a team wiping ult. I never thought it was different from a Zenyatta ult but to each his own.

I just can't play as her anymore, I played with her for Total Mayhem, and rezzing one player feels like it takes 6 minutes long.

edited 14th Jan '18 3:41:08 PM by MegaJ

Besides, the Junkrat comparison is silly because Junkrat isn't supposed to ult in plain sight.

Uni cat

i get your point, and I believe the difference doesn't become really signficiant until you get quite far into the skill ceiling and the whole high-level play, but from what i can infer, there's a basic difference in that zen ult Heals, but does not revive. Nobody's questionning why zenyatta isn't ultring when three people are out of commission : there's nothing he can do about it. You may ask " but why did he not prevented them from dying if he had his ult ?" well first, because transcendance isn't a general ult negater. He can't do shit about rip tire. he can't do shit about NERF THIS. He can't save anyone from tracer's ult. So in fact there isn't as much overlap between when using his ult is relevant and when old mercy's ult was as you would initially think.

Which can become a more general thing that is basically : zen can't keep everyone alive just by himself. But it doesn't mean he can't change the game with his ult if he uses right.

A simple case of zen misusing his ult is the very low-level tactic called "transcendance hold" which consist of zen basically wasting his ult to hold the point like mei or reaper would do with their basic skills. That's also a case of ult misuse, but because the situation is much more clearly a low-level play it doesn't create any debate : it's one of the first things you should learn to not do as zenyatta unless we're talking about situations so hypothetical they might as well not exist in the grand scheme of things.

So yeah, all in all, zen ult's heals. that's what he does as a support. If you're using your ult to heal a single person at a point where nothing justifies it in the game, that's a bad move because you're doing your job of a healer badly, and you should get called out for it. (in a civlized way, mind you). When mercy's starting to worry more about how many she's going to res with her ult than actually keeping the team alive, that's a bad play and you should get called out for it, but since you're maximizing the potential of your ult it looks fine from inside the game. Basically, there's much more overlap between a genuinely good play and just fishing for a 5 man res, which makes the problem much harder to identify and therefore, to rule out as a bad thing to do.

Using the ult in plain sight CAN work if you maximize the advantage of doing so : you set in the middle of such a huge mess nobody can't efficently focus on you and you capitalize on the extremely short windup to detonate it the first frame it's possible. It can makes for mad team wipes if you get lucky enough to pull it off. But that's a extremely situationnal thing to do and ultimately I believe no competent team would fall for it, or would let that kind of situation happen in the first place.

edited 14th Jan '18 3:57:27 PM by Yumil

"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."