Summary:
Developers recently made the Guardian Angel speed subject to movement speed modifications in custom games. This is destroying my custom games community, and it should be fixed by allowing the speed of the GA to be adjusted separately.
A few months back, developers changed custom games so that the movement speed of mercy players in custom games amplified the speed of the Guardian Angel. In effect, this meant that when a mercy is made to be faster in any way, the mercy also flies faster through the air.
Before the change, a mercy could run around the map like a bullet but when shift is pressed, she would fly slowly towards her target, but now, the always flies much faster than her walk speed.
This makes perfect sense from a developer standpoint, it just makes sense that the GA should work this way.
But this is forcing the Mercy Vs Rein community to be something it isn’t. Mercy Vs Rein used to be a game of runner and chaser, where the reinhardts ruthlessly hunted down mercys at ground level. The Mercys get a hit of adrenaline and often get the pants scared off them, and the reins get the joy of mass murder.
The GA used to be mainly for getting back from off the cliff or changing directions quickly in midair, but if you held it for too long you would be quickly killed.
Now, the Guardian Angel is at the center of the game. The “Zoom” as we sometimes call it can be abused to make the mercys almost unkillable, even for people who have played the gamemode for years. The mercys can superjump up to the skybox and hover there, or they can do a thing where the GA dives them down and immediently back up in a big V, often propeling her across the map.
Nowadays there usually isn’t a Mercy Vs Rein up at any given time, but you can experience this by setting mercy to 300% speed, and then expirimenting with mercy jumps and techs. Once you superjump into the skybox, GA back down but immediently press space to launch yourself higher and farther.
You can imagine what this does to a game of tag. While Mercy is easy to play decently well, rein is almost impossible without great aim and loads of experience and map knowledge (You wouldn’t beleive the places Mercies can get to).
This discourages new players and makes the game much more frustrating and less fun for veterans, and there is no way to fix it without making GA jerky and largely ineffective for superjumping.
But if GA speed could be modified independently in Custom games or workshop settings, this could be fixed, and our gamemode could be revived. A few months ago there would be 2-4 servers up and any given time, now there are 0. Most of it’s players have mostly left Overwatch for Among Us, Minecraft, or other games.
But it’s not too late to fix it.
