It’s actually the ult that makes a huge difference. All of Mercy’s gameplay was tuned relative to her ultimate’s power.
With Mass Rez, your positioning was always about weighing safety to build ult charge. Your risk and reward was about playing close to the action to build that last 4% of ultimate charge in order to extend a teamfight.
Your decisionmaking was tested. When do you disengage? When do you risk a teamfight? When do you force the enemy’s ultimate economy? All of that was dependent on your Mass Rez.
Now that Mass Rez is gone, and Single Rez has a slow, Mercy’s gameplay actually changes in almost immeasurable but very present and indirect ways.
- You stay back all of the time, and constantly look to disengage whenever you can.
- You almost never swoop in. You only Single Rez in safety, because otherwise you die and feed.
- Most of the time, you’re running back from spawn room due to how often the enemy focuses you… in which case, you’re constantly asking for someone to fetch you like a child at daycare.
- Get killed with Valkyrie? No one cares.
- Trying to stall? Good luck, you don’t have invulnerability anymore.
The rework closed doors and opened new ones. The nerfs shut several of those doors that you have a very one-dimensional character who feels like a chore to play rather than an excitement.
Valkyrie might be strong still… it might even be balanced statistically and Competitively, but there’s only one way to play Mercy now.
The kit might be mostly the same, but the method of play and the risk/reward relative to playing that kit, has transformed, that now all decisions are made to be safe, as opposed to being risky.
That’s the difference. There’s now a very definitive clear line of a “wrong” way to play Mercy, whereas launch Mercy had some blurred lines (which made her fun).