Ideas to make Mercy's movement more fluid

General Discussion
1

The most fun part about playing Mercy is her movement with GA (Guardian Angel) and AD (Angelic Descent). I thought I might share some ideas to improve Mercy’s movement to make it feel more fluid.

Angelic Decent

Current: Mercy immediately falls slowly to the ground.

Proposal: The angle at which Mercy falls to the ground is made noticeably smoother, letting her travel much farther through the air with Angelic Descent before hitting the ground.

What it does: Angelic Decent is upgraded from a featherfall to a true glide that can be used to travel between platforms. E.g. Mercy’s ally wanders out of reach while she’s on a ledge. Instead of leaving high ground, Mercy would glide over to a ledge that’s closer to her ally.

Guardian Angel

Current: Mercy flies to an ally. How she does this depends on the targeting mode chosen in the options menu under “advanced settings”.

Targeting mode descriptions

“Prefer Beam Target: On”
Pulls Mercy to her beam target when she activates GA.

This lets Mercy apply the leniency of her beam to GA: she can fly backwards, around corners, and over ledges with Prefer Beam Target On. It lets Mercy be much more evasive when caught in close quarters combat, at the cost of having to completely disconnect her beam if she wants to fly to someone else.

“Prefer Beam Target: Off”
Makes Mercy manually target an ally to fly to.

With Prefer Beam Target Off, Mercy does not need to disconnect her beam to fly to someone else. This lets her heal or boost an ally even as she’s flying away from them, allowing Mercy to min/max her healing uptime even while she’s running for her life, and micromanage her team’s health over wide areas… but at the cost of being screwed if they spread out too far. Mercy can’t effectively use this version of GA for evasion when that happens.

Proposal: A third targeting mode option is added. “Prefer beam target: contextual” combines the behaviors of the default targeting modes.

When this third option is selected, which ally Mercy flies to is based on whether or not she has one lined up in her crosshairs at the time of GA activation. If Mercy is targeting an ally when she uses GA, she’ll fly to them. If Mercy is not targeting an ally, she’ll fly to her beam target by default.

What it does: Guardian Angel currently behaves like an entirely different ability when you change the targeting settings, to the point of having to completely re-learn your positioning and evasion patterns when you switch. A third option that combines the best of both worlds would smooth out the creases between them, and give even veteran Mercy players more to learn in order to master the use of Guardian Angel.

Bunnyhop/Angel hop

Current: Pressing “jump” during GA cancels it and makes Mercy slingshot past her cancel point at a notable speed. With the precise use of a bug (where you crouch before using GA and jump at exactly the right time) Mercy will instead cancel GA to spring into a superjump of varying heights.

Both techniques (bunnyhop and superjump) are considered part of Guardian Angel’s uptime, so GA’s cooldown doesn’t start until the bunnyhop/superjump finishes.

Proposal: The superjump bug is made official. Pressing crouch at any time during GA will cancel it into a superjump of a standardized height.

What it does: making the superjump more accessible and consistent will give Mercy the much-coveted (sort of) independent vertical mobility that her players have wanted for a long time now. It can be used for re-positioning, evasion, or even just getting a better view of what’s going on. When combined with the upgraded Angelic Decent, Mercy would be able use a teammate as a jump pad to get to a ledge from just about anywhere. Just be careful of snipers!

5 Likes
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Id love for superjump to be made official. I use it all the time and hitting shift+ctrl with ring finger+pinky and being at right distance all during combat is not always easy to do when you gotta get up high somewhere

3 Likes
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I do love the second and third suggestions, both fantastic ideas. But the first I’m unsure of, it seems like it would be an unnecessary change.

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The first is a bit wordy, but the intent is to tweak Mercy’s passive featherfall into a glide. The only real difference between the two is the angle at which the player descends.

Hm… I’d better just edit it to say that. The “hangtime” thing might be a bit much.

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I tend to like ur mercy suggestions if ur the same person i think you are idk but if you are aye you keep doin you :+1:

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I guess I just personally like the way it works as it is, movement just slow enough without feeling overly slow.

I would say that the speed she decends was probably considered for balance purposes, to make her need to use GA more often or make more conscious decisions of when to use it possibly. Just random thoughts.

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Yeah, and it’s harder to execute on console too… I love these ideas.

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I wouldn’t want to actually slow down Mercy during Angelic Descent. Her horizontal movement speed would remain the same, but I want her vertical decent to be an actual glide instead of a featherfall.

I remember papa Jeff mentioning in an old interview that they originally designed Overwatch with fall damage as a mechanic. They’ve obviously removed that since then, but I wonder if Mercy got Angelic Decent during that early time in order to make her an exception to fall damage.

1 Like
9

The fall damage bit is definitely an interesting thing to know, makes mercy’s design more interesting from where it came from.

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I actually thought there was fall damage when I first started playing. And I like the idea of a third ga beam target priority

11

The way Mercy Guardian Angels is me when my dad comes home with strawberry-filled powdered doughnuts. :star_struck:

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The second is a good QoL change. I think it would make mercies super fun movement even funner. 10/10

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Oh yassss

Lower Mercy’s skill ceiling by making Angelic Rise more consistent/much easier to perform…

Exactly what we wanted

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Being able to consistently use it raises her skill ceiling though. Something that’s unreliable to use doesn’t make a character better, and detracts from their usefulness potentially tremendously when it fails.

Not to mention it’s a bug, is it not? Bugs are not part of a character’s skill, hard to use or otherwise.

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15

This.

There’s also the point of standardizing the jump height by making the superjump official. As it is now, the superjump can take you anywhere from the height of a double jump to higher than Pharah’s jump jet. That can be a death sentence in either situation if the height isn’t what the you were aiming for in that moment. Being inconsistent is a big detractor for any ability’s value - and that includes the superjump bug.

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This situation is similar to both mercy’s hop, but also more closely to brigitte’s shield bash superjump she had. Things like these are unintended bugs and need to be removed. But like with the hop, this bug would be a reasonable official addition if made reliable and consistent.

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:relaxed: Exactly!

And while Brig’s jump bug looked pretty strange (why would a heavily armored sheildmaiden suddenly take to the skies?), Mercy’s superjump makes perfect sense for a character who was designed with a set of wings.

I’d like to think that if Mercy’s base mobility was polished up, she’d have a mobility skill ceiling that resembles Lucio’s. A good Mercy wouldn’t need Valkyrie to never touch the ground!

1 Like
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Focusing more on staying alive will naturally up Mercy’s influence on the game, so buffing those aspects of her will give her a similar skill set to Lucio as you say. And by making her able to keep herself alive more, she will heal more while also being more interesting to play at the same time.

I feel this is a good direction to take the character. :+1:

1 Like