Junkrat Never Dies

A story of Resurrection prioritization in the preseason. Data for this analysis was pulled from www.winstonslabs.com.

Mercy is pretty strong right now — That’s not exactly the most unique or interesting insight into the game. So, lets go a little deeper and investigate one of the core things that makes Mercy so powerful — her Resurrection.

In the OWL Preseason there were a total of 11.25 total play hours. Mercy was played for a total of 19.68 hours, the most used hero by a small margin over Dva. What’s possibly more startling, however, is just how many heroes never died. Not including Mercy deaths, there were a total of 4,424 deaths in the preseason, 3,704 of which occurred while Mercy was being played on the dying hero’s team — a whopping 22.5% (or 834) of which were undone by Mercy pressing E.

As of this time it is impossible to do a really in depth analysis of Resurrection priority — we do not have good info on revives that were interrupted, or where the revive target was in relation to Mercy and the danger. However, we can take a look at the basic data we have and understand which heroes were deemed the most valuable. As you can see in Chart 1 below, not every hero go the same amount of love from the Swiss Doctor. Winston is the most resurrected hero — and one’s initial instinct might be to accept and rationalize that. You can argue that Winston is a high health hero, and therefore resurrections on him provide more value than a low health hero. However, if you look at the most resurrected heroes you can see it matches up well with the most played heroes.

Chart 1: Total Resurrections by Hero

I wanted to normalize the resurrection priority for play time, so I looked at ‘percent of deaths resurrected’ instead of just the raw numbers. As you can see in Chart 2 below, Winston was not the most resurrected hero when you account for play time / deaths. There are many factors that will determine who a Mercy chooses to resurrect —With richer data, and more games played, we should be able to determine the true causes of resurrection priority, but in the mean time if we take these numbers as given — I would suggest the following insight. Heroes such as Tracer, Genji, and Dva might be of high-value to the team, but they generally die in places that are not safe for Mercy, which leads to their lower resurrection rate. Junkrat, on the other hand, is a very high damage DPS who is generally playing in the back already pocketed by Mercy, making him both a high priority and a low risk Res target.

Chart 2: Resurrection Percentages

Looking forward to seeing how these numbers change as we move through the season, especially when Mercy receives her supersize nerf. Let me know what you think about these results, or if I missed something!s