So… I pretty much agree. The way you describe impact vs power is pretty much my issue with Mercy, particularly Valkyrie.
I would immediately second some sort of support revamp around this idea, except… Mercy is not gonna be good unless you inject impact in her as well. If one nerfed Mercy’s healing and buffed her utility, one would end up not very far from where you started.
For one, Res doesn’t have enough room for changes. Compare it with Immortality Field and we are looking at a bunch of variables like lamp size, speed of toss, area of effect, activation delay, throwing arc, duration, drone health, could make LoS rules different, change the minimum “immortal life” from 40 to whatever and of course change the cooldown. There’s a lot of space to buff, nerf, squeeze, stretch and adjust in a variety of directions one could see fit, to make the ability fit the hero, not the other way around.
With Res though, we are extremely limited. You can toy around with cast time, movement speed penalty, cooldown, maybe even cast distance if you’re desperate, but it still one heck of a limited ability. There’s no such thing as “lets nerf Res’ power”, you can’t “adjust res by by 10%”. It’s a terrible ability to balance any game dev would avoid at any costs. But Blizz is “bold” - if nothing else - so they went with it anyway, knowing it doesn’t have a lot of granularity to be adjusted, no room to balance the ability to fit the hero… So the hero was adjusted to fit the ability instead.
Furthermore, it’s also a passive-only ability. To even cast it, much like healing, it means your enemies already got value. It’s the first move disadvantage already mentioned by KootiePatra, and a crippled version of it because you need to wait not only for damage and healing to be done, but for a kill to be confirmed. Can’t Res what is alive. That is just… Disgusting.
Even then Res’ design issues go even farther you see… You can target select for heal target between damaged team mates, but selecting a target for Res is quite rare. There’s a specific scenario where that happens: Multiple deaths have occurred but the fight is neither won nor lost yet, so you can select a dead team mate for Res and have an impact in the fight, and lets face it that is very rare in Overwatch, particularly at mid and above ranks. For every other case, your Res target selection is low impact - the fight was already won or lost regardless of Mercy’s game sense with Res. And that’s the exception, 9 times out of 10 youre rezzing one single target and have no choice over who it is.
And thus why her kit is in such heavy shackles and so many Mercy players would quite literally have this BS deleted for even the ever so slightly modicum of HP/s. I didn’t even mention the fact that Mercy needs to stay within 5m range for 1.75s. Terrible flow for a hero which is best played ping-ponging between team mates. In any other hero that would be major, in Mercy, that’s the least.
Immortality Field is literally a better designed version of Res, one similar to many ideas suggest as replaced by Mercy players who saw these issues as well. The so called “Halo” idea was quite popular. Blizz hears ya, Blizz don’t care.
So Res sucks. It’s low impact and it shouldn’t be buffed, even if it could be adjusted properly, which it can’t because of its limited design, which it leaves us with Damage Boost and… That’s it. I suppose DB could work. It’s an active version of healing and it does require more timing. Not much to say about it.
And then we get to Valkyrie, the most poorly thought out ability ever introduced to this game, and that’s after I trashed Res so much. It’s specifically designed to cover for skill and take away impact from Mercy player, it’s chain beams, flight, constant heal and infinite ammo. They cover for target selection, GA position, survival and even aiming. The almost full entirety of Mercy’s skill set - or her impact - is given hand-holding, a power, that does it for the player. And to make it worse, it’s the longest ult in the game, longer than most cooldowns in the game.
This may be one of the reasons devs themselves buffed it to smithereens before release, fell for their own trap of power versus impact trying to fix their own design mess - and broke the game for year and ruined Mercy in all likelihood forever.
And yet even in its most OP state, Valk has been called spectator mode, all the way back to its PTR days. I believe the impact versus power equation, as you put it, is disgustingly broken within Mercy, it literally doesn’t matter where or how much power one shoves in it, she’ll always be low impact.
So to turn this back around and promise I didn’t just spam your nice thread with my Mercy rant: I agree, period. Overall and I would approve of revamping the supports and said mentality in mind. We just did it with the shield tanks, so it’s not even far fetched.
However, Mercy would not work without an actual mechanical rework, at least some of her skill-covering powers have to go and Res is… Troublesome to even touch. Every other support though, seems ripe for the treatment, so the idea seems exciting.
Nevertheless, I have the exact same amount of dread about as excitement. Actual dread, because so commonly utiilty in Overwatch translates into CC. It’s Bash, Whip Shot, Sleep and Boop. Are we to buff all of these? I literally cannot take it anymore. My fight - nay, quest! - against CC is well documented, perhaps more so than my troubles with Mercy. CCs buffs cannot happen, period. The game is not going to break over it, it’s already broken, we’ve been over the edge for the longest time and finally Blizz started to address it, however slowly. I would happily volunteer the entire tank and support roster for harsh nerfs right now, if those were target at CC.
tl;dr: I agree and like this line of thought, but with my heavy reservations:
- Valk’s won’t work and would need a revamp, need to push impact through it, buffing utility won’t do.
- CC is already far too much so other utility needs to be the focus, but…
- Res is either too hard to adjust or shouldn’t be adjusted at all.