from a user experience/gameplay perspective, the issues around valk and res are that even when they successfully get value, it doesn’t feel like the player had much input/contribution in making that value happen. like ana’s sleep and nade and mercy’s superjump feel great because you making a play with them was 90% of the time you executing it right as a player and it was all on you executing it right. whereas res and valk are like “teeaaaam, DO something” and/or “eeeenemy, don’t do something”.
And specifically about mercy res which is her “the mercy player’s the mercy player’s
Except mercy doesn’t have a say in the actual risk v reward. she just makes a judgement call, not actually be able to do anything about tipping the actual risk vs reward in her favor. If it’s actually unsafe, mercy’s judgement call value is limited by her trying to make a good judgement of not res’ing, otherwise whether she gets it off is just relying on your team covering for you or the enemy team being incompetent. If it is safe, then mercy’s judgement call value is limited to her judgement.
Even if you have 100% accuracy in estimating whether a soul is safe to res or not, the mercy player has no say in the actual risk because that’s determined by factors that mercy has no say over: i.e.
where the corpse is relative to everyone else’s positioning and sight lines
enemies’ incompetence
allies’ competence
i.e. her input doesn’t feel like hers, or “feels like she has no impact”.
This is not the case for ana sleep, ana nade, mercy superjump, etc. because the player can take them into their own hands. mercy wants high ground but no teammate on high ground? cool a good mercy can take matters into their own handss and superjump there. there’s a shield blocking nade or sleep, I can take a different angle via flank or using arc of projectile or just simply taking a diff position. res has not similar room. it’s just estimating a hidden variable that’s determined by something/someone else.
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