First off: thank you for reading my rework idea and putting in your two cents. I’d like to continue the discussion and elucidate the reasoning behind some of my decisions.
The bust heal on rez: at first, I wanted to just make it heal everyone back to full. But then I realized that it would bring in another tank meta, so I lowered it to only fully healing squishies. Anything more would devalue squishy heroes in favor of tanks.
I agree with you on LoS only being for solid objects.
The E ability has quite the story behind it.
At first, I was dead set on Mercy having bust utility as an E (like a cleanse), so that she wouldn’t be so ult-dependent and could make a direct contribution during non-ult fights.
Then I had an epiphany.
First off, a cleanse wouldn’t work because of the way it would alter Mercy’s relationship with Ana. Ana is supposed to counter Mercy, not the other way around.
Second: giving Mercy strong burst utility would have her edging in on territory that’s not hers to take (e.g. Ana, Lucio, Brigitte).
Third: the human element. If it were up to me, I’d make the superjump bug an official feature and dump Valkyrie in the compost. But. Many players have come to love Valkyrie and the freedom it provides. Many never knew Mercy before she was able to fly, and would be justifiably upset that the Angel with wings isn’t able to properly use them anymore. If Valkyrie went away completely, their experience would be wrecked like ours was wrecked when mass rez was removed.
Fourth: appealing to the devs. They spent a lot of time coding and animating Valkyrie, and I assume that they would be loathe to throw all that work out. Plus, it’s easier to modify an existing asset than it is to create a new one from scratch.
So, I was faced with a puzzle: how do I give flight to an already mobile hero without overpowering them?
The immediate, most obvious answer would be to give it a low uptime. But players would be very unimpressed with such a “simple movement ability” having an extremely long cooldown. Other movement abilities are normally on a much lower cooldown.
So, what kind of bells and whistles can be added to make the low uptime feel justified for the players? Plus, there’s still the problem of risking Mercy becoming ult-dependent if something isn’t done about it.
That’s when I juiced up the beams a bit. A bit of extra healing to appeal to players who want to literally swoop in and rescue allies, and a small speed augmentation to damage boost to help allies kite enemies and confirm kills on fleeing targets (because raising damage boost past 30% is mathematically a Bad Idea).
I do expect Mercy to get some kind of durability nerf to balance out the extra mobility. Raising her regeneration delay from 1 second to 2 sounds like the ideal solution.