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

Big surprise folks — Mercy was played a lot less in Stage 2

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.

Heroes Never Die…In Stage 1

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.