Her guardian angel has certainly been improved, but I’d say that overall Mercy has gotten less engaging since her 1.0 version.
Multirez remains controversial to this very day, but the fact remains that it was Mercy’s big power moment, her main source of player agency, and where most of her skill expression manifested through mastery of gamesense and battlefield awareness.
The Valkyrie rework hasn’t given Mercy any acceptable substitutes for these gameplay elements.
Mercy no longer has anything that can be accurately be described as a “big power moment”. Mercy’s player agency is at an all time low, and Mercy’s skill ceiling has been significantly lowered.
Nearly all of Mercy’s value is bound to team-dependent abilities that derive their value from the skill of Mercy’s teammates instead of Mercy herself.
Instead of adding new skills to master, Mercy’s E and Q abilities undermine and sabotage the skill expression of Mercy’s base kit: beam juggling and survival through GA management. E-Rez forces Mercy to stop healing and stand still, while Valkyrie juggles Mercy’s beams for her and invalidates GA skills with free flight and permaregen.
And while the skill celling of GA management has gone up through the roof, the skill celling of Mercy’s beam juggling has been noticably lowered.
The healing nerf from 60 to 50 hps gives Mercy significantly less time to juggle her damage boost. Allies you could have saved by the skin of your teeth with 60hps (if you got there early enough) now die under 50hps no matter what you do.
The damage boost mechanic being changed from “applied even the blow lands” to “applied even the shot is fired” denies Mercy the skill expression of playing attention to her team’s attacks, and juggling her beams to boost a shot just as it landed.
Some team dependence is fine, but Mercy’s kit has become so oversaturated with it that her value is more decided by her team’s ability to make use of her, instead of the Mercy player’s ability to make use of their own kit.
I still love Mercy’s base gameplay of lock-on beams and guardian angel, but it feels like a foundation with no building on top.