Potential Solutions
I am literally copy/pasting this entire section from one of my previous posts, “Overwrite - Let’s Fix Everything: Part 2”.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/overwrite-lets-fix-everything-part-2/4520
Yes, that was a shameless plug. Want something?
Please note that the following text was typed up a little over a month ago, so any statistics included may not be exact for today’s numbers.
CTRL+V in 3… 2… 1…
Build 1:
Resurrect: Removed as a usable ability unless Valkyrie is active. One again sets Guardian Angel’s cooldown to 0 upon use. Does not have a cast time.
Resurrect needs to be locked behind an ultimate if it is not an ultimate by itself. It is impossible to balance Resurrect and simultaneously make it feel good to use if it is locked behind a basic cooldown.
Double Jump: By pressing the jump key twice in rapid succession, the player gains extra lift, the animation showing Mercy’s wings activating to give her an altitude boost. This can be used to establish LoS to targets on high ground, or get a better view of allies who are currently obscured by closer allies. It cannot be used more than once since touching the ground.
This is mainly out of preference, but Mercy would feel better if she wasn’t 100% dependant on allies to not be a sitting duck.
Valkyrie 2.0:
- Duration reduced to 8 seconds.
- Free flight removed.
- Current beam setup removed.
- Regeneration passive during Valkyrie removed.
- GA range during Valkyrie reduced from 50 meters to 35 meters (30 is normal GA range).
- Resurrect becomes available when Valkyrie is activated. Upon using it, it has a 3 second cooldown, and will continue to run on 3 second cooldowns for the rest of the ultimate.
- Once the ultimate ends, if Resurrect is not on cooldown, the player has 6 seconds to use it before it is no longer usable. If it is on cooldown, the ability completes its cooldown and then has 5 seconds to be used before becoming unavailable.
- New passive while Valkyrie is active- Angelic Presence: All allies within 8 meters of Mercy including herself receive an uninterrupted 10 health per second.
- Mercy no longer points her staff at her allies and engages a healing stream, she now swings her staff in an upward arc at a rate of once per second whilst using one of her streams (damage boost or healing). Each swing causes an eight-meter cone AoE effect of the current beam, but amplified because this is an ultimate.
- If Mercy’s healing stream is activated when she swings, all allies within the AoE receive a burst 100 HP. If her damage stream is activated when she swings, all allies within the AoE receive a 60% increase in damage for 1 second.
- Pistol damage during Valkyrie increased from 20 to 25.
- Mercy’s base movement speed and Angelic Descent horizontal speed increased by 0.6 to 6.1 (5.5 is the base movement speed for all heroes except Genji and Tracer, 7.1 is Lucio’s speed aura).
This forces Mercy to be in the fight, as Mercy has neither the free flight, nor a 30 meter beam range. Being this close to the fight will jeopardize the player, yet it still open lots of opportunities for the player to feel heroic. The reduced duration and increased stats makes Valkyrie more potent but for a shorter duration and less annoying to play against, as Mercy is now directly in the fight rather than 30 meters away. Because Mercy is now forced to be in the fight, commitment is required to use Valkyrie, and the player must use it carefully because of the reduced range and duration. Target prioritization will need to be considered in the event that not all players can be healed in a single arc of Mercy’s staff.
Variant 1:
Rather than a Double Jump ability, 3 seconds of free flight at base movement speed are granted to the player upon hitting the jump key twice in rapid succession. This ability has a 7 second cooldown, which begins once its 3 second duration has ended. This results in a maximum uptime of 30%. Can be used in Valkyrie.
This is mainly to appease the players who enjoyed the free flight granted by Valkyrie and want to keep it to some degree. Note that none of the other bonuses from the current version of Valkyrie (chain beams, range increase, etc.) apply to this ability.
Variant 2:
Free flight is added to Valkyrie.
This variant was created for the same reason Variant 1 was created; to appease the players who enjoyed free flight. I, personally, would not prefer this variant, but it would still be miles better than Mercy’s current iteration.
Build 2:
Valkyrie:
- Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
- All outputs (healing, damage amplification, pistol damage) increased by 50%, Meaning: Healing → 90 HPS, damage boost → 45% increase, pistol → 30 damage.
- Primary beam range reduced from 30 meters to 20 meters.
This makes Valkyrie more potent with a shorter duration, making it feel more impactful. The reduced beam range is to prevent players from spending the entire fight in the skybox, and makes it feel a little more fair to play against.
Resurrect:
- Players can now reduce the cooldown time for Resurrect by healing/dealing damage/amplifying damage.
- Cooldown is doubled or tripled.
- Movement penalty upon activation reduced from 75% to 50%.
- Mercy can now heal, damage boost, and shoot while reviving.
If this change is executed properly, this could overall be a cooldown nerf to Resurrect without feeling like it. The cast time was modified in order to make Mercy feel less helpless upon using Resurrect.
Variant 1:
Duration of Valkyrie reduced to 8 seconds, outputs increased by 60%: 96 HPS, 48% amplification, 32 pistol damage.
This is basically the same as the above version but even shorter and more potent.
Variant 2:
Valkyrie has a 10 second duration, primary beam target receives 120 HPS/60% damage increase, secondary beams apply 80 HPS/40% damage increase.
The goal for this was to create a need to prioritize targets. To do this, the strength of the primary beam was increased while the strength of the secondary beams were decreased.
Variant 3:
Valkyrie has an 8 second duration, primary beam target receives 128 HPS/64% damage increase, secondary beams apply 85 HPS/43% damage increase. Mercy’s blaster deals 32 damage.
Variants 1 and 2 mixed together.
Build 3:
Guardian Angel:
- GA modifications from Mercy 2.x applied.
Resurrect:
- Range reduced to from 15 meters to 10 meters.
- Line of sight requirement added.
Valkyrie:
- Added as an E ability.
- 4 second duration, 12 second cooldown. Cooldown begins once the ability’s duration has been exhausted, allowing for a 25% uptime at the very most.
- Primary beam range only extends to 20 meters, down from 30.
- Movement speed reduced from 9 meters/second to 6.5 meters/second.
- Guardian Angel range is not extended when Valkyrie is active.
- Passive self-regeneration is no longer constant.
A revert is the most definite fix. The line of sight requirement and range decrease were applied to Resurrect for two reasons; one, to compensate for Valkyrie becoming an E ability, and two, to incentivise tempo-resurrections without forcing them. Note that the charge requirement was not increased for the latter of those two reasons.
Variant 1:
Resurrect has a 15 meter range and no line of sight requirement, but can Resurrect a maximum of 3 players at once. If more than 3 players are within range, the 3 closest players to Mercy are revived.
Just an idea. There really isn’t any justification for this idea, and there doesn’t really need to be.
Variant 2:
Valkyrie no longer grants free flight, GA range is once again extended, beam range is again set to 30 meters. A double jump ability is added to Mercy’s kit.
This allows Valkyrie to be used to heal allies that are otherwise unreachable, but does not make Mercy herself unreachable. The double-jump was added to provide Mercy with a little independant mobility.
Variant 3:
Valkyrie’s primary beam applies 80 HPS/40% damage increase, secondary beams apply 53 HPS/27% damage increase.
Valkyrie but with the added requirement of healing prioritization.
Variant 4:
Any combination of Variants 1, 2, and 3.
Have fun.
Build 4:
A build I stole from ReinStein (with permission, so i didn’t actually steal it) and then modified:
Valkyrie:
Resurrect:
- Is once again Mercy’s ultimate.
- Now uses a charge/stack-based system, stores a maximum of 3 stacks. 1320 ultimate charge is required to gain a single stack of Resurrect.
- Cast time removed.
- Resets GA cooldown upon use.
- Otherwise functions like Resurrect does currently.
This fixes the issue that Resurrect is not earned and adds variation to its availability. I didn’t just pull 1320 charge out of my butt; I took the amount of ultimate charge the average competitive Mercy player was earning every game by healing/damaging/amplifying (11562.4), added the passive ultimate gain from existing for 10 minutes (3000 charge) to total 14562.4, and decided I wanted the average Mercy to earn 11 Resurrect charges/game. 14562.4/11 ~ 1320 (rounding to the nearest ten). For reference, Resurrect from Mercy 1.x required 1625 ultimate charge.
New E ability: Alter Stream
- Pressing E activates Mercy’s chain beams, which function as they currently do in Valkyrie but without the primary beam range increase. Pressing E again returns the beams to normal.
- The strength of Mercy’s beams is decreased, reducing her damage boost amplification to only 10% and her healing to only 20 HPS.
- This ability has no cooldown.
This adds more depth to Mercy’s allied prioritization, allowing her to choose between affecting one ally with a potent beam or multiple with weaker beams.
Changes to damage boost in relation to ultimate charge:
- Ultimate charge is no longer generated based on how much damage a target amplified by Mercy is dealing, but by how much damage is amplified.
- For every 2 damage amplified, Mercy gains 5 ultimate charge points.
There’s a reason for this change. If you are not interested in watching me crunch numbers, I suggest you skip over this part. If you enjoy math like I occasionally do, feel free to stick around.
Currently, the amount of charge Mercy gains from amplifying teammates is determined by the total amount of damage the ally in question is dealing to enemies. Note that this is not the base damage, but the amount of damage the ally is dealing total, after Mercy’s 30% damage increase is factored in. This is then fed through a 2/3 conversion ratio before giving us the final amount of ultimate charge gained through damage amplification. In other words…
If [player currently being amplified by Mercy] deals 200 base damage to [enemy], Mercy’s 30% amplification increases that damage by 60, resulting in a total of 260 damage dealt. This number is then multiplied by 2 and divided by 3 (because reasons, the developers slapped a random conversion ratio on top of this), resulting in a grand total of 173.3333… ultimate charge gained from this endeavor. 60 damage amplified resulted in 173.3333… charge points.
Why the developers made this conversion so unnecessarily complicated is beyond me, but I digress. The reason this is no longer an effective system is because of the proposed E. Why? Let’s compare Mercy’s normal damage boost to the suggested chain boost:
For Mercy’s normal boost, she gains 173.3 charge for 60 damage.
For Mercy’s group boost, let’s assume she is increasing the damage output of three allies, all of whom are dealing 200 damage. With Mercy’s 10% increase, she is increasing the damage of each ally by 20, for a total of 60 damage amplified. However, the targets she is boosting are dealing a total of 660 damage. If we slap this into the same conversions currently in place for Mercy’s damage stream, we get 440 ultimate charge gained; here lies the issue.
Normal: 60 damage amplified = 173.3 charge.
Chained to three allies: 60 damage amplified = 440 charge.
The amount of charge gained is not consistent with the amount of impact Mercy is creating; this is why I very strongly suggest that Mercy’s charge gain from damage boost is determined by how much damage is amplified rather than how much damage the affected allies are dealing.
If we want the current charge rate for Mercy’s beam to remain unchanged while solving the issue, we simply divide the amount of charge gained from the normal scenario by the amount of damage amplified in that same scenario:
173.33…/60 = 2.88…
So, for every 1 damage amplified, Mercy receives 2.88… ult charge. Because Mercy has the potential to gain ult at a faster rate by amplifying/healing more than three targets, however, I figured it would be better for Mercy to gain 2.5 charge/1 damage amplified to counterbalance. Hence the 5 charge for every 2 damage amplified.
Variant 1:
Resurrect stores up to five stacks. The range of Resurrect is increased to 15 meters and all allies within the radius (and within LoS) are Resurrected upon a single use of Resurrect. Mercy receives one second of invulnerability upon using Resurrect, and she can only use Resurrect once every ten seconds. If she uses her ultimate, it is put on a ten second cooldown.
This makes Resurrect feel more epic to use, but still actively incentivizes tempo-resurrections rather than mass-resurrections because of the line-of-sight requirement and limited invulnerability. The cooldown upon using Resurrect is inflicted for two reasons; One, to prevent Mercy players from abusing the invulnerability by chaining Resurrections, and two, to make the Mercy player think carefully about how they use Resurrect. Ten seconds is the same time it takes a player to respawn after death, so a Mercy must consider how they use Resurrect if multiple allies are down at once and some are not reachable.