According to a very disappointed Reddit user, a Mercy player recently won a competitive Overwatch game by submerging herself completely in a bush. Hey! Cut it out, stop laughing. This isn’t a product of Rule 34 or your Discord friend’s sick, twisted fantasy, it’s real life. And it’s effective—safe in the confines of the high-fidelity, frothy bush, Mercy successfully dodged the entire enemy team.
Tragically for them, Mercy’s bush respite was the start of their demise. As original Reddit poster u/SponsorTomix said, “I just lost a comp game because enemy Mercy was contesting the payload from a bush.” In the video, Mercy player Gladowl simply flounces over to the bush and emotes to sink into it. From there, the payload is contested, and the entire enemy team jumps around in confusion as they try and fail to move it.
The whole thing troubled u/SponsorTomix. “We had no idea what was happening,” the Reddit user told a commenter about their team’s headless chicken behavior. “We thought it was some kind of bug, and we only found out what happened because Mercy wrote about it on the chat after the game.”
It’s better now that we all know, however, that it’s not only Mercy players who are prone to hiding in bushes.
“Numbani has bushes that Lucios tend to hide in too, mostly the ones near the last defenders spawn,” one popular comment said. “This bush [that’s in the video], and the one right out of spawn in Rialto. I just shoot there as soon as I come across it,” said another.
But Mercy’s bush tactics (you might have learned how to do that in college one time) are less an act of genius and more a touch of luck. If even one enemy had their graphics set to low, that bush would have looked a lot less full, or might have not even been there at all. This is an unfortunate act of bush erasure, and not to mention a strange mismatch in advantages for players.
“I have everything set to low, and was so confused why there was a mercy just [away from keyboard-ing] there one game,” one top comment says. “Killed her, and she immediately hit me with the ‘?????????’ I thought I fucked up and broke some moral code between supports.”
Bush responsibly, please.
