Mass Resurrect and Valkyrie are both fatally flawed

General Discussion
1

Let’s look at Mass Resurrect first.

Mass Resurrect’s fatal flaw relates back to it being frustrating to play against. Now I know what you are thinking “What ultimate isn’t frustrating?” I agree… but it goes deeper.

The difference is a fun little part of human psychology… Loss Aversion. Humans absolutely HATE it when they feel like someone has stolen something from them. Whoever got those kills that got resurrected usually felt like they earned them, they were theirs… aaand Mercy just flew in and stole them all. Games are designed to engage and entertain humans. Having something in the game that goes against a basic part of human nature is… not a terrible idea per se, but it should absolutely NOT be done lightly and if done, should be the game’s main thing. Playing with the player’s loss aversion is not the point of Overwatch, so Mass Resurrect had to go.

Valkyrie has a different fatal flaw. It’s flaw stems from language.

Language is incredibly important. Like… ridiculously so. I seem to recall an instance where Blizzard implemented an exp penalty for being logged on too long and players complained. They renamed it to bonus rest exp and… everyone liked it. Same mechanic, framed differently, completely different response.

Valkyrie is Mercy’s ultimate. What does the word ultimate mean? Well if we pop over to www.merriam-webster.com, definition 1-c seems to be the most applicable to our situation. It reads “the best or most extreme of its kind”. Does that description fit? Well let’s look at the things it does to try to answer that.

Valkyrie does AoE heals. Is it the best at that? Trying to claim that Valkyrie is better at AoE healing than Transcendence is a very very hard sell.
How about Team Damage boost? Orisa’s super charger does 20% more.
Flight? It is debatable whether Valkyrie’s flight and Pharah’s flight is better.
Diving people? Dragon blade and Pulse bomb are better at that. Even DVa flying in with all guns blazing is probably better.
Getting back to point to contest? The entirety of Hammond’s base kit works way better for that.

Valkyrie is not “the best or most extreme of its kind”. It just isn’t. Players expect it to be though… because the game is calling it an ultimate. It also cannot be buffed to be ultimate in one of its current use cases because that would invalidate a different ultimate in the game.

tl;dr: Both of Mercy’s ults are bad and she needs a rework.

7 Likes
2

Does’t hurt that activating Valkryie is equivocally to letting the game play itself for 15 seconds.

4 Likes
3

Hey, good post. I can’t claim you’re right, because I don’t have the knowledge, but I believe what you say. It’s a shame most people on the forums are not here for this kind of well-thought stuff tho

4

uhhh I see Mass Rez is still being discussed to this day, but this post talks about the most valid argument I have ever seen against Mass Rez. Maybe you should take a look. I know this topic is a month old but it wasn’t ever acknowledge by anyone taking part in the Mercy debate, as far as I know

It made a very good point, and I kinda changed my mind because of it

5

Meh. I don’t really care about loss aversion. Moroever, this applies to rez overall. Not mass Rez. And it doesn’t even really do that. No one cared about teleporter doing the same. :woman_shrugging:t5:
I’m not in favor of mass Rez but it’s pretty irrelevant to me if some people had bad feels. They still won the fight over 50% of the times huge rez went into effect anyway.

6

I’m just curious about where you got this data.

Source pls?

7

Agreed… Both mass-rez and Valkyrie are terrible for the game and for Mercy. Whoever designed these ults should be ashamed and accept a portion of responsibility for all the toxicity that exists towards Mercy players today.

8

… Win rates of Mercy herself?

9

Mass Rez was designed for a more situational niche version of the game. It was fine in that context

10

If Mass Res wasn’t common in the first place (which many Mercy mains will tell you), then it’s a little foolish to equate the entirety of her winrate to a niche and situational play.

11

I think rez should go - it’s the bane of all Mercy’s problems, new and old.

1 Like
12

Yeah I don’t care about a psychological mecanism either :joy:

It’s 2 very different things for the human brain

13

Huge rez was a pretty big problem after invulnerability… I don’t need Mercy mains to tell me otherwise

14

It does, but riddle me this… How often do single kills happen? How often do 3+ multi kills happen? Resurrect is “stealing” kills, but single target Res is taking something that is significantly more common so it doesn’t feel nearly as bad.

So that’s partly because no one played Symmetra. That’s also partly because TP doesn’t negate kills. It gets guys back to the fight faster, but they still had the full respawn time and all.

2 Likes
15

Have you talked about this notion in other Mercy threads ? Because I feel like it could be the missing piece for why Mass Rez was not healthy, and why nobody couldn’t really explain why

16

I’m just saying don’t try to cite “facts” from false assumptions and circumstantial evidence. There’s more to a winrate than occasionally using an ult that may or may not work out.

It’s like saying games are decided by Hammond placing a minefielf or Sym using a Wall. It’s just not that simple.

20

I have occasionally mentioned these lines of thought elsewhere. Never got a whole lot of interest on either.

Truthfully I’m a little surprised it’s getting attention now when I wrote it a month ago. I mean it is still relevant, I’m just surprised.

21

Yeah I really wanted people to look at it, imo it’s way more important than most people think, when debating Resurrect
I wish people realize that

I don’t have very high expectation tho, the forums are not often a good place to actually discuss things

22

… but it was pretty clear or else you wouldn’t have seen an sr exploit conditional on Rez numbers… Mercy’s started using huge Rez… Sr surge…

23

There wouldn’t have been an exploit if it were commonplace, as the exploit only worked by getting above average numbers.

If everyone were doing it, then that inflated stat would be the average, thus there would be no exploit possible.

It also stands to reason that since we know it wasn’t done by everyone, it’s incorrect to say her winrate directly reflected the success rate of Mass Res’s, which, again, was the point in my original response in how your “stats” are, at best, misleading, and are otherwise just outright wrong.

1 Like