Let’s look at these changes and how they will actually effect her playstyle and gameplay.
Increasing the CD of GA drastically discourages the ping-pong, teamwide healing style that has already been suboptimal for years. I’d even argue it might flat out render it impossible to effectively pull off, as the extra second on the CD will simply not allow you to physically keep up with flying from person to person.
This means that Mercy will be even further encouraged to sit in the backline, out of risk, with her long-ranged hitscan DPS to pocket them. Which is literally what players complain about.
The healing change also does the same thing. It encourages you to use damage boost more heavily, wait until your target is low HP, and then heal them up with INSANE heals. Good luck being Tracer or Winston or Genji trying to kill the pocket Sojourn or Widowmaker through Mercy’s 70 constant HPS, which will also be feeding Mercy 20 constant self healing at the same time.
These changes HEAVILY encourage a hard-pocket backline playstyle and outright destroy a teamwide triage healer, which is literally what they said their goal was for her in the patch notes. I’m not sure how they thought nerfing GA CD and making her heals worse would make her a better teamwide support, but here we are.
Even SEAGULL of all people said, to the Dev’s face on stream just now, that these changes are confusing, don’t really make sense for the identity of the hero as a mobile slippery character, and that the healing change will just further encourage damage boosting which is what the community is complaining about anyways. The Devs said that they are listening to our feedback on this, so PLEASE don’t stop criticizing these changes.
Another thing to consider that I haven’t seen anyone mention is how this affects rez. If you GA to a soul, rez them, you now have to stand there and wait .75 seconds before you can GA away, instead of leaving instantly. This is going to feel absolutely awful.
It’s also just outright destroying the fun factor of the hero. Mercy’s beams are not interactive. You click them once, they auto-toggle onto someone. You can look around freely while beaming people. Other heroes have their gameplay revolve around their primary fire, their guns and attacks.
Mercy’s gameplay loop revolves around her movement. Guardian Angel IS her core gameplay mechanic in the way that Soldier’s is his Pulse Rifle or Widow’s is her scoped shot. Applying a 67% downtime nerf to her only interesting, fun, enjoyable mechanic is going to outright destroy the enjoyment level of playing the hero, because you will just be standing there for much longer periods of time now, doing nothing except watching your beam target.
I agree that the new OW2 Guardian Angel is too strong and too easy. But that could have been way more easily solved by simply hard-nerfing the maximum distance of the boost. There’s no reason that you should be able to GA 20-30 m to someone, and then turn and GA another 20 meters in a different direction. It’s essentially 2 GA’s in one at the longer distances, which I understand is entirely unbalanced.
They should have simply capped the maximum boost distance to 10-12 meters, and implemented the superjump/backwards GA speed nerfs. They could have even had those specific interactions have a longer CD, as they are cheesey.
At the end of the day they really need to look at peeling back this CD nerf and figuring out another way to balance her mobility. Or, you know, just revert back to the OW1 GA that worked perfectly fine for 6 years. Just a thought.
The healing nerf is also definitely not going to have the effect they intend of making her a teamwide healer and is just going to make her pocket strategy way more frustrating to play against, especially as divers, thus further promoting a hitscan counter-matchup meta when you are facing a pocketed-hitscan. Zzz. Everything players hate about fighting a long-ranged pocketed Mercy matchup is just getting amplified by this new healing and regen change.
Have fun out there, I’ll be playing Cassidy and Soldier until these changes are further iterated upon.