How to master Valkyrie (an ez guide)

Oh, I completely agree!! I don’t think it should be changed. I just suck with it. XD should create a custom game and practice only her sleep dart to help me grasp it better.

I am basically a pro now

Brigitte does not counter tracer because of the combo tho she counters her because of the armor.

I’d call it a combination of both really. Armor stops tracer from getting the most of her damage, and brigitte can play backline protector stopping tracer from harassing it.

Because, given enough reaction speed on Mercy part, it will be nano boost on drugs.

Well, for starters if no one who mains her can ‘figure it out’, it seems likely to me that the thing you’re wanting them to figure out isn’t all that great. Like - in my general experience, gaming tends to have a sort of natural plateau when it comes to balancing. People figure out what works and what doesn’t, and if her ult was really as good as everyone wants to convince me it is, I don’t think I’d see quite so many Mercy posts talking about how infinitely boring and unimportant it is?

And hey, I don’t main her, and it seems like everyone is having a conflict between how useful something can be to a match and how fun a hero should be to play, which are two totally different categories of judgment. You can have both, or one and not the other, and I think a lot of folks miss Mercy being more active, engaging and fun with more decision making processes compared to her newer self - which, who knows, might be ‘more usefu’, ergo the conflict.

So like… Eh, if people want to like Valk more power to them. I still think it’s just really underwhelmingly designed and it’s just the same thing you were doing before, which to me does not scream ‘ultimate ability’ in any fashion. That alone makes it a poor ult to me. But that’s my category for judging things, a combination of fun and use. No one should be fun and useless, no one should be useful and boring.

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And yet if you leave out all the DPS Moira, a Moira’s average healing could out heal 60hp/s Mercy and had a huge impact on surviving a team fight comparatively. And then she also gets the ability to deal her own damage between healing or whilst there is an orb it play. It is so quick to switch between what you need in the moment with Moira and it isn’t hard to be consistent with her. During her escape, she is NOT ABLE TO BE DAMAGED, that makes it very good for escaping, that makes it very good for being able to stay alive in a team fight because you escape and don’t take damage when doing so giving you time to perhaps heal up back to full and heal your team, etc. She brings more healing potential and fight potential than Mercy ever could.

Mercy is became brain dead and stale with 2.0 and managed to become actually OP with 2.0 because rez on an E will never work because so long as you reverse the first pick, you prevent the enemy team rushing in and thus prevent a snowball before it starts, instead of trying to stop it.

I don’t want Rez on an E (never did) if it means that the main job of supporting is taken away and makes my character feel more useless where I want it to count the most. Valkyrie already felt brain dead because no matter the skill level, in the end it has the same result and there is nothing to improve on.

Mercy 2.0 is a failure. OP solely because she can Rez first pick and all of the negative effects they put on it reflect that it is still meant to sit in the place of an ult because no other basic ability in the game has Movement Reduction, Bright Glowy I’m Here Animation and A Cast Time. Only ultimates have that.

They need to admit they messed because nerfing her base kit for an ability that CANNOT STAY THERE will never work.

Now see, this would make a whole lot of sense, except in GM only Mercy steal outheals Moira. You are not realizing just how useful her ease of mechanics are with her heal rate, and I don’t think you want too.

She does the same amount of damage as lucio on average. Like. Yeah that’s real game changing. Or… the damage she does, she has to do in order to maintain healing less then mercy, by about 1k… Well, more now, by about 1k again.

Yes, Moira’s escape does have the one benefit of one whole second she can’t be damaged over mercy’s escape. While mercy gets double the distance, plus an added bunny hop mechanic that takes her further, four times less the cooldown and it brings her to a team mate so she’s now in a 2v1 situation.

I don’t even know why you’re trying to downplay mercy’s GA. It’s actually the most fun thing about her.

Have you… played Moira, like, at all? Her invincibility window is not nearly as long as you think it is.

I’d argue the opposite tbh.

You sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the best escape, the best self sustain, the best utility, the easiest healing mechanics and until just last week the best healing average on top of everything, with an ultimate that makes all of it even better?

You can continue to hate on res, and that’s cool, you do you. Honestly it is relatively balanced for how it is now, with plenty of counter play. It’s not nearly as bad you’re trying to make it seem. If she didn’t have the best of at least one of the things on top of res on e, she would be in a better spot balance wise. And that’s been proven, the moment her healing wasn’t 4k above ana’s and 1k above moira’s, we started to see people playing more main healers, and mercy’s pick rate is still not horrible.

Should i give you a moment?

Yes, I have played Moira and I easily outhealed my own Mercy stats on her in comp games. More so now with the recent changes to the two of them. I saw my team hindered by my Mercy plays even though I was working harder than I ever had before at a character I spent over 200 hours on and yet on Moira I didn’t have to work as hard at the job I signed on for. I was more consistent and saving my teams lives more than I was with Mercy. I finished the game with 4% more damage taken in heals than I averaged on Mercy at 60hp/s.

I used Moira’s fade to survive much longer on points than with Mercy, I survive more ults because of fade. I am self sufficient because of fade. I can stay with my team in an engagement more often than not because of fade.

GA is good for sure, it keeps Mercy highly mobile and that works for her and perhaps because of the bunny hop they could change her passive healing to make it not as good because then it relies on the Mercy using her movement to survive, etc. But she is not invulnerable, a good Mercy just gain greater advantage from the passive healing because they know how to use their mobility. You can’t have great sustain and great mobility, it’s not fair and I recognize that. But that doesn’t mean Moira’s fade is not fantastic, because I have felt it in action and I know it is a really good survival tool.

Mercy 2.0 is brain dead and stale because Valkyrie is pretty much the same at all levels of play. I cannot improve anymore with it, I cannot use it in multiple ways that show how skillful I am with my character. There are no exciting ways to use it to have different impacts, it is what I do normally but with chaining which nullifies the skills of single target healing I have learned. It is boring, no level of flying that comes with it makes it better.

Rez on a cooldown doesn’t work because if you have to put ultimate penalties on it to try and make it work and then have to punish the rest of the kit trying to make it not OP, then it isn’t working. No other basic abilities in the game have the same kind of penalties Rez does, only ultimates have that because it is supposed to be risk vs reward. Pharah being a still target in the sky for high damage. High noon, low mobility and a cast time for instant kills at the end. I don’t want to type out all the ults, but you get me. Then all of these have their own little cast times, etc. If you need to put these penalties on a basic ability and yet it still possessing the ability to be over powered, then it isn’t working as a basic ability. Reversing the first pick of the match will never be balanced, that first pick in the poke battle prevents a push and that means the time before the first proper team fight begins is delayed and both teams go back to poking until they can try and capitalize on a death again. Perhaps by the time they get another kill Mercy might get Rez back and when their team mate dies again, she can bring them back. The point is, rez is mostly used to cancel a first attempt at a push which means the rez can be performed safely. Mid-fight rez is too risky and therefore not as often is it done. Rez is also still averaging the same rez stats as mass rez and yet it still is seeming to be more impactful. That should be raising alarm bells that it cannot stay on E.

Mercy’s pick rate is likely to remain high, no matter how her win rate has begun to drop. People like to play Mercy. It would be the same with D.va. These two characters possess a fairly high female player base because people have fallen in love with these characters. Both of these characters could be shoved so far into F tier and they would likely still see fairly high pick rates, which would end up causing more toxicity in the community because people won’t want others playing an unviable character and yet people will still be playing both of them quite often.

Titanium has written a very in depth post with explanations, statistics, the whole works. Far more than I could ever express clearly and in depth about Mercy and how both compare to each other and how what they intended did not occur with Mercy 2.0.

I have a feeling we might never agree on what each other has to say. People have opinions and that’s all good. Glad to have a discussion with you. :slight_smile:

You hold down left click… and heals come out… forever… through barriers… and you can look the opposite way.

Are you actually jealous that Moira out heals Mercy, when Mercy has more utility and better survivability than Moira does.

aaha that was a funny one, poor Mercy, revert her!!!

You should add that you need to hide behind walls when the enemy has ults, hitscan etc…wait…Valkyrie was supposed to remove that!

I have over 200 hours on Mercy, I worked hard to be able to be the best support I could be on her. I had people commend me on my Mercy ability for my level of play even though I am only in gold. It wasn’t easy to reach that high number of healing, even on the old healing numbers and I saw it time and time again when other Mercy players of my rank could barely reach 20% damage taken in heals per match and I was dropping 30% with ease and on rare occasions going as high as 50% depending on how weird the QP or comp matches were.

So when I can drop 34%+ damage taken in heals without even really trying and have gold elims in a game with fairly decent damage (no medal but still more than I would on Mercy) and with only just as few deaths or sometimes fewer on a character that I don’t have that much time on?
Yeah, I am a bit frustrated about that.

I don’t want anything about Moira to change however, I feel that Moira is actually fairly balanced.

I want Mercy to be changed. I would rather see resurrect removed entirely from the game, to avoid issues that ruin her base kit.

I mean, when Tracer’s pulse bomb was deemed too strong, they didn’t balance it out by taking away blinks or her rewind. They nerfed the bomb. Is it so wrong to want the aspect of a kit that is too strong to be nerfed of removed if it means the rest of the character remains in an acceptable state?

I mean, that’s honorable and I’m not trying to belittle you about how good you are at healing when I say this… but there is more to supports than just healing. This is now true for Mercy too.

Ah yes, a damage boost that is situational.
A rez, that only can be used either in cover or with the safety of like a whole team thus is only really good at reversing a first pick where it is strongest anyway and keeps it an OP ability.
And flying around which is only good for surviving to keep me doing my job which coincidentally is most often healing.

Now, can you tell me what she did before this rework?

There was a risk. It felt challenging and rewarding to heal.

Sure, this 50hp/s makes healing challenging but not in a sense it challenges a Mercy, but because 50hp/s is not really enough to do your job.

The challenge of old Mercy was lower passive healing in combination with no sling boost. Both of these two things made her incredibly vulnerable and made it the reason she had to be baby-sat in the past. One of these two things would have probably given enough balance to make this less of an issue, not both. But still, even a Mercy who played her before they gave her both things knew the thrill of having to survive and actually doing so when jumping in with a team mate to heal and boost them. It was a matter of pride, knowing the danger and being able to survive it. There is no reward for pre-team fight risks, etc anymore. That was the kind of stuff that gave you ult charge.

There was no first pick rez, which meant the fight would come rolling in and you had a purpose beyond stopping that and you had proper choices on how to use your ult. You could rez anywhere between one to five people, and depending on when, where, how and why you chose to use, it felt impactful if done right and punished when the choice was wrong. There was more strategy to it, more thought. They took away exactly what they claimed they were giving to her. Mercy’s ultimate wasn’t just a “hold for a five man”, it was a choice to keep the team fight rolling, perhaps you are using it to bait out ults earlier on so you can push them back further which means they have to expend more ults until the next choke point, etc.

Yeah, she may have had less utility before, but she felt impactful and like she required proper thought, games sense and strategy.

I would rather lose rez, just to feel impactful in that same way again. To feel free to think and use the game sense I have learned to strategize with my team.

The only thing about Rez was that it was activated after a fight and that made people feel cheated of kills, but there are ways to make adjustments to that, such as a pre-cast and anyone who died while it was pre-casted gets brought back or whatever. But there is also mass or single target invulnerability route (that wouldn’t heal them to full, just have damage paused at the health they were at and they would have to be healed) which is just as impactful and gives Mercy are more active chance at saving lives and could actually warrant a lower healing rate.

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I can sympathise with your other points, but

How exactly did you punish that? Especially once they gave her the invulnerability. Either she flew in and insta ressed it or she flew in and ressed it while invincible and you can’t do anything to stop it. The only way to counter mass res was finding the hiding mercy in the middle of a team fight.

Like, there was a plethora of hiding spots, and guides on these hiding spots that made it nearly impossible unless you visually saw her trying to hide.

I rezzed in hiding, perhaps twice ever.
Every other time I rezzed out in the open.

Rez was punished by killing them all over again, which wasn’t that hard to do. A team that could not coordinate themselves after being brought back in the same positions they just died in, were easily wiped out again and done so without any ults involved. And in the early days, Mercy’s that were not as good as jumping in for the rez usually did not survive until their team got back which meant their team didn’t have a main healer for the fight ahead if they managed to coordinate themselves at all.

Rez was also countered by not letting her do her job to get it. It took over 5 minutes for rez to charge naturally. A game could end in that time. If you keep from her job and her team, they are out of a healer and will likely be waiting an awful long time for rez to even be up. Can’t rez consistently if you have spent most of the game dead because you won’t have earned ult.

Yes, I will agree it was hard to counter as it happened and that hiding was sh***y, hiding was also more rare of the ways it was used and just because that team was revived, their success was not a guarantee.

If rez was always so powerful, then it would have been a viable alternative to Ana. It was not. Mercy players were flamed hard for not playing Ana, even if they did have the ability to heal 3 tanks enough to make it for a mass rez.

Of course giving invulnerability and then nerfing into the dust the only other main support at the time would have bad ramifications. Everything else that came with Mercy 2.0 and beyond has just made things more of a mess. If the rework was successful, we wouldn’t be 11 nerfs deep and likely still counting.

It’s a joke is referring to, solely, the idea that all you do in Valk is sit up there at the skybox. of course there’s more complex stuff to it.

there’s a massive difference between “oppressive healing” and “can’t heal anything at all.” Oppressive healing was Ana being able to completely prevent D.va from being demeched during season 3 which led to a tank heavy meta, and a soldier 76. Can’t heal anything at all is watching a teammate you’re beams on get slaughtered by a player that’s really not doing all that much damage. Mercy’s healing, while consistent, has never been considered ‘strong’, apart from the fact it doesnt get blocked by barriers, and that was before some serious damage creep into the game. You could feasibly outheal a mercy as Brigitte, Lucio or Zenyatta, provided she’s being focused down enough and you’re able to stay alive, and that did happen occasionally- it’s happening a lot more after the nerf. Other healers also have sources of damage to offer the team. as many mercy mains will inform you, her main offering to the team, even now, is the fact that she can rez someone every 30 seconds. Nerfing her healing just means that she’s just going to be more of a rez focused character, not less of one. Furthermore. Mercy becoming useless isnt the same as the other characters, the ones struggling, actually being good. Ana will still not be meta if she doesn’t have some careful buffs applied to her- Moira will simply reenter the meta after having been gone for a few months. I’m still waiting on another buff to her damage to play her consistently, because, all things being honest. I want to play ana i just dont want to throw lol (esp on my platform of ps4). Another key is that Lucio, while seeing some new playtime, is still being crowded out by Zenyatta due to the general mobility creep of the game and the fact that he cannot consistently get his team out of many situations a Zenyatta could- due to the fact Zen’s ult lasts seconds less.

Your second point: I can’t argue about if it was better or worse. The game felt better back then because it was newer, and metas were changing drastically from season to season (Beyblade, world of tanks,) and then we settled into a long stretch of…the same, really. Dive dominated, and with Ana’s nerfs there was no one that could compete with Mercy, leading to a massive overhaul of her character. I doubt you can compare it justly to back then, because all of us are colored by how we remember it. I can affirmatively tell you she is boring to tears to play at points, and furthermore, the fact that Valk negates her weaknesses as a hero is a negative to the ult. Ana’s should know all too well that they refuse to give her self healing because its supposed to be her “weakness”. Well, Mercy’s weakness is supposed to be her single-target nature and her general lack of self-reliant mobility…two things negated by Valk. Ana’s should be demanding that her ult be changed too, simply due to the fact Nano doesnt negate any of ana’s weaknesses and in fact, highlights them- (Nano not having enough range, for example, in spite of her being a sniper).

Next. while I loathe using them for stats, the OWL has proven, definitively, that Valk is in fact the least impactful ult in the whole game. it Doesnt give any team an “edge” that they weren’t already going to have. Mercy dying will always make a fight change, because it goes from 6v6 to 5v6, whether valk is used or not.

And finally, you pompous individual. As you should fully understand from this point: mercy mains have adapted the most out of everyone in the community. No other hero, apart from Symm now, has gone through such a colossal overhaul, and has had smaller rehauls over the course of that time period. We’re all aware that they’ve been changing her for the sake of other players- its primarily why we complain. A lot of us have offered constructive ways to not have rez as an ult, but that arent so tedious or otherwise just overpowered. And yet they just keep beating this dead horse and making us all suffer for it.

If a n y o n e else in the game was completely reworked because they were considered “unfun” to play against we could fully expect riots from those who played that person. Look at how genjis respond when their mobility is changed slightly, and you’ll get a small sliver of what sort of apocalyptic event might occur if Blizzard essentially completely overhauled their hero.

And I hope that calling us stupid makes u feel better abt urself boo. Mercy mains arent wrong to feel like we’ve been ignored when we’ve been complaining about her for the past year now.

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