Let’s imagine the devs want to fix Mercy with a few tweaks, and a few other low effort changes.
Well, if they did all this, they’d be drowned in tons of extra Support players for weeks.
MERCY CHANGES
- Increase the healing to 60hps, 65 in Valk
- Drop the weapon swap from 0.51sec to 0.1sec
- Give a 15m radius 60hps AOE heal during the 0.5sec Valk Cast Time
- Since apparently it’s difficult to not disconnect the heal beam during Valk Cast.
- Cut the Valk Ult duration in half
- Cut the Valk Ult charge cost in half
- Giving more utility/damage/peels/selfheals etc, and closer to the ideal of “Rez as Ult, Valk as ability” without making people freak out about instant rezzes.
- Give an options menu choice to turn off GAJump and use the old SuperJump/Slingshot instead
- Casting Rez during GAJump, either lowers the GAJump height gain, or ignores height in terms of canceling the Rez.
- Throw in a challenge event for a Pink recolor of that Atlantic Mercy Skin.
Boom, done.
For about 30 minutes work, a few event .PNG images, and a skin recolor. You get yourself a ton of Mercy players, for next to no effort.
As for the balance changes specifically.
I figure, especially in the OWL offseason, they don’t need to be that precious about number-tweak balance changes.
If it’s really horrible, they can just turn it back in like 5 minutes, without even turning off the servers. They are literally just server-side variable changes.
Especially since it’s not like they usually nail it on balance patches, whenever they take a a bunch of time on balancing. It’s probably going to be slightly imperfect, regardless of what they do. So instead, just do it sooner. Just set some Community fore-warning/expectations ahead of time, that they might revert/nerf it later if it ends up being too much.