They nerfed her healing to 45 hps above 50% hp. and they gave a 150% modifier to her healing with that baseline.
That is 67 hps. A buff to the 55 hps she has now. And a nerf to her hps now.
The buff to critical health targets is a buff in sustained fights where players often reach critical health. And a nerf to her hps when most member stay above 50% health ( so they aren’t in danger of dying unless there is huge burst).
As a healer you are interested in keeping hp pools within a safe range so you will want to heal above the burst potentials of your enemy. In this game mercy can even heal through death which she maitains.
This 150% modifier to critical health targets extends with her ultimate which remains 60 hps and turns into 90 hps aoe healing.
It is compensation buffs because if it was a plain nerf she would just receive mobility nerfs. But they did give her a power exchange. In my opinion it isn’t as bad as mercy player say since she had a bit too much mobility with the new tech they added officially in ow2, GA Jump. They kept this tech in the game and made it official and have to consider it for balancing.
There were numerous issues with mercy in season 2, her high pick rate, her high surviability, her synergies with hitscan heroes.
They opted to not mess with the damage boosting and rez and opt for giving her more moments of danger = counterplay.
S1 players were still adapting to her crazy mobility, and mercy mains were starting to realize mercie’s hypermobility. In season 2 I saw more mercies greatly adapt to her hypermobility and not get killed much, which was probably seen by devs and many players as well, who opted to ignore the mercy because she just wasn’t a viable target.
The devs sort of mentioned this in the blog post, I have experienced this myself in my games where no one ever shoots the mercy and we have to focus the other support.
I did watch the video and know she isn’t happy with this change, but I also know devs have stats on season 2 and can explain the issues since they stated that guardian angel/mercy’s mobility needed to be addressed.
They probably have stats to see how impactful damage boost is, or see issues like in lower ranks mercy just wasn’t dying as much for example.
Especially when she is with a Pharah spamming guardian angel for example very hard to hit.
This is one of those changes that might be better for the game, while putting that power into more of her healing. Which I can understand. I am excited to try these changes out myself. Wasn’t a huge fan of facing enemies that spammed this ability myself.
For Guardian Angel, the cooldown increase is necessary to reduce the greatly increased mobility resulting from the recent rework to the jump cancel. It enabled Mercy to quickly launch herself long distances in any direction and be overly evasive for such a short downtime.