This is a thread for ideas to make Mercy more engaging, reinforce the fun parts of her gameplay to be even more fun (in a balanced way ofc), and make it more challenging to master Mercy overall.
Constructive criticism and debate is welcomed. If you’re just here to heckle, then you are not welcomed.
I don’t think rez is working out as a cooldown ability. It’s overpowered when it feels decent to use, but it feels like doodoo to use when it’s balanced. It’s cooldown is so long that it doesn’t add any real cooldown management to Mercy’s kit, and it’s tied up so much of Mercy’s power budget that the rest of her kit had to be hamstrung to make E rez work out. It’s a lose/lose/lose/lose scenario.
That being said, I think that as an ult, a single-target rez would be kinda underpowered. The Rez mechanic itself is already super situational, and it’s downtime as an ult is going to be much longer than 30 seconds.
(It’s crazy how currently you can rez, die, and have another rez ready by the time you finish hiking back to the point. That’s bonkers! I wanna have to EARN my rezzes!)
I’d prefer a lot more flexibility and more complex decision making involved in using rez, especially if it’s an ult. A higher skill celling, if you will. I’d also like a way for it to help living teammates, so that you don’t need to “wait for your teammates to die” in order to help them with a healer’s ult.
I propose that rez as an ult be treated like the inverse of Tracer’s pulse bomb: an itty bitty AoE (only a little bigger than E-rez’s range) that also sends out a burst heal. If it’s used without any dead teammates in range, the burst heal doubles in strength.
The idea I’m going for is to give players a choice between solo-rezzing that super-important ally, tempo rezzing 2-3 players to keep the fight going, or using the ult for it’s new “burst heal properties”.
As for the E ability, I’ve seen people float the idea of making Valkyrie a cooldown ability but I have very conflicted feelings about that.
On the one hand, it would be much faster to implement Valk as an E than making a new ability from scratch - all the coding, animation, and bugfixing for Valkyrie has already been done. Plus a lot of players have gotten attached to Valkyrie, so it would make sense to keep in in Mercy’s kit for their sakes.
On the other hand, I believe that Mercy’s E needs to fulfill specific criteria in order for the rework to be a success - and Valkyrie doesn’t fill any of them.
What I want for a Mercy E is something that gives her more tasks to manage in her base gameplay. I want it to offer the player new playmaking opportunities, and new forms of skill expression to master.
Since Valkyrie is an extension/mutation of Mercy’s base gameplay, I don’t associate it with any of the things on my checklist.
However! The things that make Valk appealing don’t have to leave Mercy’s kit entirely. I think that some QoL tuning to Mercy’s existing mobility could achieve the same effect as Valk’s flight… (in the hands of a skilled player).
Details on that
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Add a “contextual” option to Guardian Angel’s targeting system. This is a hybrid between the “GA prefers beam target on/off” settings, where Mercy flies to who she targets… But if she isn’t targeting anyone, Mercy is pulled to her beam target by default.
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Slow down Mercy’s passive featherfall so it acts more like a glide. Mercy would then be able to glide between most platforms unassisted, and combined with her superjump Mercy could reach areas that normally would have required a teammate to be up there first.
I do have a specific E ability for Mercy in mind: something I call “Adrenaline Shot”.
Mercy selects an ally, then applies an adrenaline shot that lasts for several seconds. While it’s active, the target gets:
A Heal over Time effect
CC resistance. Status effects (cc, boops and stuns) still affect them, but they wear off much faster than normal.
The purpose of Adrenaline Shot is twofold:
First, to give Mercy a middle ground between-
“my healing beam is getting the job done just fine, everything is fine”
and
“oh god my base healing isn’t enough healing, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket TIME TO USE MAH ULT”
Every main healer added to Overwatch since launch has come with some form of “backup heals” to fall back on when their base healing is getting overwhelmed. E.g. Ana nade, Moira orb, Bap burst… I say it’s high time Mercy was updated to reflect the new standard for primary healers.
Second, add a counter to the rising tide of crowd control by giving it to the hero that was all but made for the job.
If anyone can cure nasty ailments like poison, blunt-force trauma, poison created from Mercy’s own tech, hypothermia and more, it’s the Angel Doctor Priestess Waifu.
Mercy is all the tropes that are associated with cleansing status effects rolled into one character. It’d be criminal to give a cleansing ability to anyone else!
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