Neptuno Watches Over You: Analysis of Mercy Resurrections in Stage 1 and Stage 2 of OWL
Mercy was practically a perma-pick in Stage 1, but some serious nerfs significantly reduced her popularity in Stage 2. Since her Resurrection ability has always been a hot topic, this article focuses on how Res was used in the two stages! All data presented in this article comes from the great folks over at www.winstonslab.com
Setting the Stage. Mercy was pretty much always played in Stage 1 of OWL — of 108 possible play hours she was played for 105 of them (97% play time). In Stage 2 however, her pick rate dropped to a much more reasonable level — 41 hours of 111 possible play hours (37% play time). The nerfs to Mercy gutted more than just her resurrection, reducing both the length and overall power of her ult, but the Resurrection aspect of her kit was the most heavily gutted. So let’s look a little more closely at how resurrection was used in Stage 1 vs Stage 2.
Mercy resurrected 18.8% of all deaths in Stage 1, compared to only 4.5% of deaths in Stage 2. Of course, a large part of this difference is simply due to her being played less. If we look at only deaths that occurred when a Mercy was on the team of the dying player (subsequently referred to as “Mercy Deaths” in this article), that number changes quite a bit — Mercy resurrected 22.5% of the Mercy Deaths in Stage 1, and 15.1% of the Mercy Deaths in Stage 2.
But not all heroes received Mercy’s mercy in equal parts — the angel doctor clearly played favorites in both stages. In order to ensure reliable results, I only included heroes who died at least 100 times with a Mercy on their team for the below analysis. D.Va was the least revived across both stages, being resurrected 11.6% and 5.8% of her Mercy Deaths in Stage 1 and 2 respectively. In Stage 1, Pharah and McCree appeared to be Mercy’s favorite, having almost 30% of their Mercy Deaths resurrected. However, in Stage 2, Mercy favored these heroes less, instead resurrecting Junkrat (23.2%) and Widowmaker (23.2%) being the highest priortized corpses.
It doesn’t take an OWL Analyst to deduce that Mercy tends to favor heroes that she 1) Already pockets anyway and 2) Tend to die towards the backline where she is safer to resurrect them. D.Va, who might not be a more risky revive than Winston, has an additional vulnerability which is that after she is resurrected, she still needs to get back into her mech to be useful, making her a very undesirable target.
I wanted to examine this trend from a different perspective — so I looked at which heroes had the largest percent of their kills undone by mercy as well. Similarly to the Resurrection Priority analysis, I only included kills where the enemy team had a Mercy in the denominator. Additionally, as stated above, only heroes who had 100 kills against a team with a Mercy were included below. The results again are relatively unsurprising. Lucio, Winston, Orisa, and Roadhog — all heroes with a high number of environmental kills (which cannot be resurrected) — were the least likely to have their Kills undone by Mercy. In both Stages, Widowmaker had about 1/4 of her Kills resurrected by a Mercy — Which makes sense seeing as Widowmaker is a sniper and usually kills enemies from a great distance.
The final item I wanted to examine was to look at which Mercy’s were the most effective across each stage. To get rid of any erroneous results, I only looked at players who played at least 2 hours of mercy in Stage 1 and Stage 2. The first thing to note is that I did not temper these results for any team related stats which means there is likely bias in the outcome. For example, Ark played on NYXL, a team that won the vast majority of its matches and had the fewest deaths — therefore the fact that Ark had both the lowest deaths/10 and resurrections/10 in Stage 1 does not necessarily indicate he was the safest and least ‘revivey’ Mercy.
In both Stages, Philly’s Own Alberto “Neptuno” Molinillo Gonzalez was the Mercy with the most active ‘E’. He also was the deadliest Mercy in Stage 1, achieving the highest final blows per 10 minutes — and was the second deadliest Mercy in stage 2, finishing just behind Harryhook from the Dallas Fuel.
To conclude — Alberto you are a precious precious human being and we should all feel safer with you watching over us. I realized the other day it had been over a Month since I had published anything on this blog — which sucks because I really do enjoy writing. I’ll try to keep these slightly more regular. If there are any topics you would like to see me dive into, feel free to shoot me a DM on twitter @Beezy1515
