Where Have All The Mercy Mains Gone: A Brief Analysis of NA Top 500 Ladder Mained Heroes
Tl;Dr — More than half of Mercy Mains dropped out of Top 500 or switched to another hero. Mercy Mains who stayed in Top 500 seemed to adapt to pick up Ana, Lucio, and Moira — also more main-tank mains in Top 500 than before.
At the end of December I made a small post about the differences in “Mained Heroes” across different regions Top 500 in Season 7. Since it has been a little over two weeks since the Swiss Medic was nerfed, I thought it would be good to check in and see how the people at the top who main her are doing in Season 8. I took a snapshot of the players in NA Top 500 on January 15th, and then one again on February 15th to see how the Mercy & Junk nerfs effected things.
As you can see from the above chart, the nerf definitely shifted things around a bit. Mercy went from the 2nd most mained hero (79 players in Top 500) to the 6th most (35 in Top 500) — with more than half of the players who mained her in January dropping out of the Top 500 or switching to another hero. Additionally, Dva Winston, Roadhog and Reinhardt all saw significant jumps in ‘main count’ — likely due to tank comp being viable again. Junkrat, who was also nerfed between Jan 15 and Feb 15, saw a big falloff as well — from 11 mains in the Top 500 to 3 Mains in February.
To figure out what separated the Mercy’s who dropped out from those who stayed — we can look at what their second most played hero was. Over half of the Mercy mains in January had Zenyatta as their 2nd most played, but that number dipped quite a bit in February to about a third. Moira, Lucio, and Ana all saw significant increases as ‘second most played’ heroes for Mercy mains — suggesting that Mercy players who managed to pick up those healers did a better job staying in than those who stuck to their old ways.
Conclusion: Not too much to say here. The numbers more or less speak for themselves, let me know what you think!
Weaknesses of Analysis: This analysis is blind to specific players — so if a Mercy main on Jan 15th became a Moira main Feb 15th, the numbers would show that a “Mercy Main” fell out of Top 500 in that time. Lastly, because of the way Decay works with Top 500, it would be impossible for anyone in Top 500 to stay there without playing at least a few games post-nerf, but they could play at just the minimum to stay in if they were high enough ranked initially.
