Looking for high-rated replays that use the Mercy

I'd hate to see the Aeon T2 gunship changed just to make the Mercy useful, but that might be what happens.

The way I see it, the Mercy should focus on one of three factors. Either be cheap to use if it has low HP and damage, decide if it wants to be AoE or area denial and then be good at it but maintain low HP and current price, or have enough HP to ensure its deployment if it's neither of those.

I appreciate the discussion all Regardless of the reasons it is not used now, be it b/c Gunships are better or the damage/utility is too weak, if we are acknowledging that it is not at all used, then that should be addressed. I am admittedly still at a loss as to why the unit was changed in the first place. Because some of the pros don't like snipes and forget to build flak, or otherwise protect your ACU at the front? The old Mercy was far more valuable hitting T4s, HQs, and even T3 Mexes.

@immortal-d there's a part in Sladows balance change FAQ about mercies.
In essence:
Flak won't save you reliably (nor would any form of AA). If a single scout plane flies over your AA they will all lock on to it and shoot, while turning away from the front, so if 8 mercies now appear behind the scout your AA turrets will
A: not change their target from the scout until it's dead.
B: even if they change their target or you right click the mercies, their turn speed will be too slow to hit the mercy early enough.
Furthermore it's weird that the projectiles track their target to the end of the world basically.
Corsair, Notha, Janus and even strat snipe attempts can be delayed or even entirely prevented by trying to dodge the bombs, which is impossible against mercies since their projectile tracks with 100% accuracy.

So to be save from mercies your AA would need to be way in front of your com and would need to be set to only target mercies. But in this case your AA just gets shredded by enemy tanks, so that is also not an option.
In the end a well executed mercy snipe would kill a com without any chance for your opponent to prevent it, without incurring heavy losses even without you actually going for the snipe. (be it either by sacrificing AA in front of his army or babysitting the com with inties that could be used somewhere else)

I’ve been sniped by mercies while standing in a triangle of t1 aa turrets due to targeting manipulation

@nex Fascinating. Does that mean updating the tracking priority is either not possible or far more difficult? Or perhaps making the bomb portion not permanent lock-on? If Mercy could be dodged the same as Notha & Corsair, that would solve all the issues I have seen raised here.

@immortal-d said in Looking for high-rated replays that use the Mercy:

if we are acknowledging that it is not at all used, then that should be addressed.

While this is true in general, there are way too many things on the to do. Mongoose, Hoplites, UEF T2 navy, Absolvers, t3 mobile arty, SACUs ... all could use a better usage. But it takes a lot of time. And so far priorities were to e.g. change units which game-mechanic simply doesn't fit the simulated world of FA (as Nex mentioned, see my FAQ on the FAF-Discord > balance-threads) or major problems such as Cybrans not having anything to counter sniperbots or the insane domination of T3 air. Noone is denying there is ton of stuff to do, but we do not have the capacity of changing everything as each single change is discussed for quite a while, nor does the balance team get paid so they have to invest their (currently limited) freetime.

On top of that, the moment an experimental change was made (e.g. the Fatboy in the current FAF Develop) ppl are also not pleased cuz everyone has a different perspective on something. So that's additional stuff to deal with. This comment I'm writing atm, also additional work. This one doesn't take long, but if you follow more discussions, you easily reach an hr per day just for replying to balance-stuff / following it.

@sladow-noob Fair points, and I am aware that development & maintenance of this game is a labor of love (I certainly would not mind some of my donation going towards a stipend). Mercy in particular stood out to me as going from 100 to 0, whereas the other units you listed still see moderate use (perhaps limited use in the case of Absolver). In any case, I suppose that settles my original query here.

@immortal-d Funnily enough the Absolver suffers the same problem as the Mercy does. Aeon has sniperbots and mobile shields, meaning it doesn't rely on Absolver. Ofc you can mix in a couple, but that's rather a luxus-problem and are not needed (Cybran could definitely need them though).
Same with the Mercy and the Gunship.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ping me on the Discord or DM me.

I'd like to see the mercy not have the activation and it just has to straight run into the target to blow up, might help with targeting and hitting the mercy

@immortal-d it's not about priority. You'd need to set your AA to completely ignore everything except mercys and even then it'll be RNG whether they point in roughly the right direction, because the mercy just splits so far away from the target and turret rotation + projectile flight time just take too long.
making the bomb not (fully) tracking and making the split projectiles be targetable by AA might work to make it a more interactive unit and could have been an interesting change too, but whoever found the time to do it decided to take this way, so that's how it is now.