personally what I think mercy needs right now is faster cast time during valkyrie
buffing her heals will just make pocketed DPS more annoying to play against and Blizzard isn’t considering to buff any healer’s heals anytime soon.
if mercy is supposed to be a healer with mediocre yet consistent healing then why does she have an ability that takes a lot of healing downtime from her?
(and yes, I am a mercy main.)
They have to improve her weapon and the weapon switch time and stop
It is not that Mercy simply needs buffs: she needs a power redistribution.
Plus a new ult. Valk may be powerful, but it feels bad.
So long as Mercy has that rez, the rest of her kit can’t have much power. The only buff I could potentially see is 55HPS, but I think her getting even that is unlikely. If people want Mercy buffs, she needs a rez nerf first. Sure, it’s an irritating ability that is easily punished, but bringing back a teammate will always be extremely strong, which harms the rest of her kit.
Plus, as others have mentioned, her heals are consistent (no hitting shots, no resource meter, heck, no need to even look at the person you’re healing.) True, burst heals are king in this game at the moment and that’s why she seems so weak, but Mercy still tends to outheal most other healers due to her consistency and survivability. It’d be difficult for them to buff her without her feeling like too much tbh.
Those are not the buffs she needs. Her healing is fine as it is. What she needs is a redistribution of power and a return to her intended design philosophy of a strong single target and consistent healer with her weaknesses being reliance on teammates and lack of self-peeling/damage.
Valkyrie eliminates all of her weaknesses and makes her more boring to play since the fun of having to juggle your healing or gracefully weave in and out between allies is gone.
And her consistency is gutted with resurrect as it is. It forces Mercy to do all the things the developers stated they didnt like about the original resurrect in that Mercy has to hide if she wants to get one off in the middle of combat and stop healing or doing anything while casting it.
I would remove Valkyrie and resurrect and give her something else at this point or remove Valkyrie’s chain beams and increase its healing to 70 or 75, increase her speed in valkyrie, remove infinite ammo and instead increase the firerate, lower its duration to 10 seconds and give something like what she had in the storm rising cinematic, a blind or something.
The problem they had was that resurrects power was supposed to be offset by the fact that it was only useable once every 30 seconds, but because of its interaction with valkyrie and the cooldown refresh it provided, it was much stronger and useable much more frequently.
The current resurrect is not consistent and is balanced more like an ultimate than a base ability and when they added her cast time they left the interaction with Valkyrie so of course it was only used in valkyrie. They shouldve removed the way it interacted with valkyrie first and left its weakness in it having a 30 second cooldown.
Ideally as I said, I would remove both abilities since in her current state, I do not see either ability as being a “core part of Mercy’s gameplay” since even at a 30 second cooldown, the average resurrects per 10 minutes is around 6-7 meaning it is used far less often than that.
I dont think it could be balanced as a base ability and given its frequency of use it isnt iconic to her gameplay except in the fact that it has the same problem the original resurrect had and that the developers tried to fix several times until they just gave her invulnerability. That problem being that she would often have to sacrifice herself to resurrect and to get any team fight impact thats often what you have to do, or not use it at all.
considering every healer now has healing more in line with her 50 hps she really won’t need much.
I agree that Mercy needs help, but what you’re suggesting is likely to unfortunately be overpowered in reality.
The areas she does need help with however:
The big question is how can we sensibly go about improving Mercy’s state without making the same or at least near similar mistake that the balancing team did with the poorly executed and somewhat messy rework.