Valkyrie is awesome (video evidence)

General Discussion
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Whoops, I forgot a couple of them and goofed on some numbers. Bolded are corrections:

Mercy at 60hps

Outheals:

  1. Mei’s primary does 45 damage per second.
  2. Mei’s Blizzard does 20 damage per second.
  3. Torbs Turret (before rework) did 56 DPS.
  4. Winstons Primal Rage does 40 damage per second. (Totally forgot it hits for low amounts)
  5. Syms turrets (before rework) did 25.5 meaning that you could out heal 2 of them. (Completely spaced the individual turrets due to Sym always doing carwash)
  6. Moira’s secondary (Biotic Grasp) at 50 damage per second. (I could have sworn this was 60 dps, hence I counted it in the “ties” group)

Ties:

  1. Winston’s primary fire at 60 damage per second (while she can gain headway while Winston is reloading, but the point is that if Winston starts attacking someone at the same time as Mercy starts healing them, they wont die).

Mercy at 50 hps

Outheals:

  1. Mei’s primary does 45 damage per second.
  2. Mei’s Blizzard does 20 damage per second.
  3. Winston’s Primal Rage (again, completely forgot how low it hits for).

Ties:

  1. Syms turrets hit for 50 dps each. (Could have sworn this was 60. Honestly I’ve never played new Sym since I quit playing before she hit live, so was going off recollection).
  2. Moira’s secondary (Biotic Grasp) at 50 damage per second. (Again, I could have sworn this was 60 dps, hence not counting it.)

What I meant by it is there are that many things in the entire game that Mercy can physically outheal. Meaning if you are counting on just using her healing for survival, you are GOING to die against almost everything in the game unless there is fall off, accuracy, or taking cover to keep you alive. With no burst healing and no way to amplify her healing on a single target, that means if someone is taking damage from any source other than one of those listed above they are either going to die or potentially are going to die depending on the enemy/ally and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it but watch, or swap to damage amp/pistol to try to kill them first.

As Jeff said during the rework, " we think it’s wrong to tell a main healing character to go off and hide somewhere and stop healing for some period of time." (Around 1:30 to 1:45 of the August 24, 2017 dev update video).

Mercy’s kit in many ways literally encourages you to accept the futility of the situation and just eat a death and reset with your team in far too many situations. Purely because you can’t do anything to stop people from dying. With complete indifference towards how healthy of a design choice it was, it can’t be denied that Mass Rez filled part of the hole that problem created by giving you a way other than healing to bring the fight back and potentially swing the fight in your teams favor when certain criteria were met. Those criteria being:

  1. The enemy didn’t kill your team in the right order and are not stopping you, the support, who they KNOW has this ability from using this ability. (Aka, the enemy team is playing stupid)
  2. You and the team mates who are still alive can survive long enough for the Rez effect to wear off (not making stupid plays, aka playing properly).
    Optional swing criteria:
  3. The enemy burned too many Ults. Effectively someone Q’ed and the rest of the team over committed more ults than they needed to. (Aka, the enemy team playing stupid.)

This encouraged you to stick in the fight or work with your team to orchestrate a swing rather than simply accept that if your static unchanging heals couldn’t cut it that you couldn’t do anything to save your teammates. At this point I will also remind you that initially Mercy was the ONLY primary healer besides Lucios huge aura that healed a few points per second, and that there are still extremely few healers compared to DPS. Making the case that “its the only hero in the game with this type of mechanic” is pretty obvious since heros with the mechanic to heal or restore the team in many ways is practically an endangered species and even more so back when Mass Rez was still in the game. How many other people have a huge aoe heal over time that can prevent the team from dying to any of the Ults that don’t one shot people? Only Zen. How many people can block a one shot with infinite damage? Only Zarya. How many people can block death from Rip Tire? Only Lucio. How many people could stop massive over commitment of resources to cap the second CP? Only Mass Rez Mercy. Saying something is unhealthy purely because no one else can do it is not valid in my opinion because we have a LOT of abilities that fit that same bill when looking past the surface of the ability. Besides that, would your argument instantly change if Blizzard brought in a second hero with resurrection mechanics? I doubt it but I also know one of your big issues was with the rez being able to bring back up to 5 people at a time.

Yes, Mercy is the only hero who can bring people back from death, and that is exactly why the ONLY universal value in a game is getting picks. Picks should matter but the same complaint of Mass Rez lacking proper counter play also applies to the action of getting a pick; there is no counter play that lets your team regain the advantage other than burn more resources from a now more limited pool of available resources to try to level the playing field.

If you want the game to be a dumb shooter, you want no way to counter the value of a pick. If you want a game with more strategy with both mechanical heavy and strategy heavy playstyles both to be options, you need ways to counter every scenario. Including the currently insanely huge value of getting any pick regardless of if it was fluke, smart play, or the proper target priority.

Lacking a way to negate a pick means target priority is significantly less valuable than if that pick can be reversesd, and that would make a WORLD of difference in how the game plays and would facilitate so many different ways to play the game other than who can get the first pick.

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205

Stop trolling, Pls remove Valkyrie.

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This is exactly the problem. The fact that Rez count, death count, and kill count were the ONLY things that gave Mercy any form of real SR means the only thing that gained any meaningful SR was anything that inflated those stats. Hide and Rez lost more matches but it massively abused a very broken SR system. That is literally how statistics works, and it is literally the reason that the cancerous play style even continued. (I’m going to attempt to explain this, but I’m on a mobile on a long trip home and this is after a few holiday nogs, so no promises how clear this will be).

I accept that the devs changed Mercy because they don’t like that the play style could ever exist but I don’t that it HAD to be done that way, or that it was unfixable. Especially since the “Hide and Rez” was literally a play style that lost more than it won, and was counter productive and exploited a lack of counterability.

Lets just say that there are 5 criteria that your SR is judged on.
Lets say that the performance based system values those 5 things like this:

  1. 5% (Damage dealt)
  2. 5% (Healing)
  3. 15% (eliminations)
  4. 25% (deaths)
  5. 25% (Resurrections)

This would mean if you kept everyone healed, there’d be low numbers of Rezes and you’d be getting lower potential SR than someone who is letting people die to maximize Rezes. It also means if you avoid death and only engage when you know it is safe you also get really good gains even if you’re less involved with the fights. As you are less involved with the fight you let more people die which means you’re getting more opportunities for Rezes and if you’re zipping in only to Rez and abusing the invulnerability so you are dying less meaning you get even more SR. Those who aren’t doing either of those things means you are getting fewer Rezes, and because you are in the fight more you die more gaining less SR because both stats are lower.

Now, this would logically show hide and Rez is definitely more rewarding than playing involved in the fight and saving people. Now throw in performance based SR rewards based on how much “above” average you are doing. This inflates hide and Rez rewards even more and reduces proper play rewards even more. Now add into the fact that with people being incentivized to abuse this and people actively abusing it because its not getting fixed means the average stats keep creeping towards hide and Rez play style stats which means those who don’t engage in it get even less fire and even less reward because they are creeping lower and lower as the stat inflation gets worse and worse.

Now, if you were playing the way you were supposed to and had really high stats in category 1, 2, and 3, but low in 4, and 5, half of what you are being rated on would be abnormally unrewarding. Say after the match you kept everyone alive, healed like mad, engaged in the fights and died with the team to avoid staggering, and based on the end result your stats came out with you getting 2 times as much reward for your 1, 2, and 3 stats, but only half as much reward for your 4 and 5 stats. That’d give you roughly 75% of what is expected. Imagine if you got half of your 1, 2, and 3 stat reward and double your 4 and 5 reward. That’d put you at 112.5% reward.

Take 25 SR for a win and -25 for a loss. Lets apply some simple performance adjustments with over simplified numbers and see what would happen with some rating rewards.

75% performance reward of a 25SR win would be 18SR.
75% performance adjustment on a 25SR loss would be 31 SR loss.
That would require roughly somewhere over a 60% win rate to break even.
(Consequently this was the exact type of rankings I was winning/losing even with at the time exceptionally high stats spare for a higher than average death count, and a lower than average Rez count, but with a 65% win rate I was very very slowly going down.)

112.5% performance reward of a 25SR win would be 28SR.
112.5% performance adjustment on a 25SR loss would be 22 SR loss.
That would require roughly over a 40% win rate to go up in rank. (Some people were even below 40% and still maintaining or going up in rank, which again this reinforces.)

So far this is matching exactly what happend, and the fact that bad play was gaining rank and proper play was under rewarding matches exactly what was happening. This meant people were being rewarded and incentivized to play in a way that let people die just to Rez more of them. This made those who played this way keep going up in rank making the play style more common as you went up in rank because those who didn’t engage in it would keep going down in rank. Hmm, that would explain why those who were high rank saw people doing mostly just this.

Again, this WAS happening. And it could have been stopped if more and clearer proper counter play was added to Mass Rez, and if this rank incentivization in the ranking system was stopped. But there are those who will never accept this and will never acknowledge this.

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Mass Rez DID counter Burst Damage. After the fact, to be sure, but it DID counter it. THAT, that right there is what Mercy is missing now, a way to counter Burst. Along with countering throwing 4-6 Ults at 5 players and thinking that you won the game. Remember Ult Economy, that went out for Mercy after the 5th or 6th Nerf to a “Successful Rework”.
On that note, if Valkyrie Rework was such a “Successful Rework”, why was Mercy Nerfed 15 times for balance?

Top that off, you admit that much of your videos are in Quick Play. No offense but, you do know that there is a vast difference between Quick Play and Competitive Matches don’t you?

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Why does Mercy’s ult need to counter burst damage, though? There are already three support ults that can do that. Valkyrie is the only one that can counter sustained damage for more than a few seconds. It’s best to pair Mery with a support who has a burst counter.

As far as quickplay, yes I’m aware there’s a difference but that’s what I played that week because I wanted to play with my friends. You’ll notice, though, that both my team and the enemy team had pretty solid comps in most of these games. When everyone is actually trying to win, quickplay can still be a competitive experience. I just threw these fun Valkyrie moments out over a span of two days of play in the mode I was playing. I promise that I use it very similarly in competitive. It can actually even be easier there sometimes because I’m more likely to have a second support and decent team communication in competitive, both of which help Valkyrie immensely.

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This is amazing! I always thought Mass Rez was more troll-y than impactful. I think Mercy could benefit from a small healing buff still, but I really do enjoy Valkerie. I can stay safe in the sky, or dive in.

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I kind of like Valkyrie. My concern is only her 50 hps.

But I think Valkyrie would be much more enjoyable if main beam was stronger and chain healing weaker. Just saying.

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I really enjoy watching your mercy plays. You sure know how to utilize your pistol! I’m going to try some of the stuff in your videos. Thank you!!:heart:️:heart:️

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So… every single one of those you pulled your pistol and burned someone down, with the exception of number 8 which you yourself say “This wasn’t super exciting” and even then you did pull your blaster… you just didn’t kill the Tracer.

I see zero exciting examples of Valkyrie that do not involve her blaster in your list.

With that in mind…

Here’s Geoff Goodman saying flat out, point blank that Mercy’s pistol is not supposed to be the main way to use the ultimate.

Yet here we are… back to using the pistol seeming like the best, most fun way to use her ultimate because after the initial PTR pistol nerfs, everything else has gotten nerfed to the point where the pistol feels the best again.

This isn’t proof that Mercy is fine… this is proof that Blizzard seriously messed up Mercy’s rework.

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I did pull the pistol out in all of these clips, but the reason I did that is to show Valkyrie’s versatility. I purposefully tried to do as many different things as possible during each activation to show that the ability is most effective when Mercy varies her abilities throughout the fifteen seconds she gets in Valk. It’s very rare that a full fifteen seconds of solid healing or damage boosting is needed. More often than not, it’s the smart play for Mercy to take a few seconds to shoot at somebody after the team is topped off unless there’s a coordinated push happening, at which point damage boosting would be smarter.

There are times when I just use Valkyrie for healing, but I didn’t post videos of those because they’re not exciting. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. I also wouldn’t want to watch a video of Widow popping her visor or Zenyatta using Transcendence because neither are very interesting even though they’re both very strong and impactful abilities.

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“Her job is to heal. We want healing to feel good for her and to feel good for the people she’s healing. Healing is the thing that is core and primary to Mercy above all. Secondary to that it would be her mobility. We don’t want her focus to be resurrect.”

You see the disconnect… right?

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I wish they would just get rid of E rez. Give her another ability that would make Valk feel better to use.

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The ability does clash with what some believe to be Mercy’s primary function. I’ve admitted a bit further up in the thread that putting such an involved, unintuitive ultimate on a hero who’s intended to be accessible and straightforward (as far as her role goes) is an odd choice, but I’m glad it was made nonetheless. I’d rather not get hung up on labels. I don’t want to be limited to one aspect of Mercy’s kit just because it’s her “job”. I spend about 90% of my time healing on Mercy, so I’m still doing that, but I still take any opportunity I can get more involved and innovative and I don’t think that’s a problem.

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Hello world! It’s very anxiety inducing to be silenced when someone makes a literal topic to counter your argument. Infuriating, really. At long last, here I am.

I’ve watched all the vids and you certainly are a great Mercy, but I’m not bad either. I know how to use Valkyrie and I can make use of it. Your clips are nice but I don’t see anything game changing. Valkyrie still the same, you didn’t invent a new way to use it that I had missed somehow. It’s just not there.

I must say my point got missed completely in shuffle. I said I wanted a VOD review not because I literally wanted someone to show instead of tell, but because I was tired of the argument that I can’t use Valkyrie. Animetic’s videos have been posted here too for the same reason. You certainly put a lot of effort in it and that’s thankful, but I’m sorry, It’s a non-argument and irrelevant when we’re talking about design choices, player feedback and so on, putting it in nice topic doesn’t change that.

And for the sake of argument, lets go with it, lets say I don’t know how to use Valk (which it isn’t true), but lets go with it. I don’t think the issues that I raise about Valkyrie change at all. Those issues relate with Valkyrie’s design and how it fits with Mercy’s kit, it barely relates (if at all) with how powerful it is or how good it can be at capping a point.

I’ve put it in a lot more detail in here, if anyone is interested. The tldr is that Valk covers way, way too many skills deficiencies of Mercy’s already shallow skill pool and that hurts Mercy’s kit. Combine that with how chain beam keeps her base kit shackled (another issue I did not talk about in that particular topic) and I believe it’s fair to say Valk is one of the worst ults in the game design-wise (not balance-wise, mind you) and that’s why it needs tweaking/rework/whatever.

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I was wondering if you’d ever seen the thread. That sucks about being silenced. It’s cool you came back to discuss once you could, though.

Anyway, I read the thread you linked. You make a good point that Valkyrie pretty much removes the skill deficiencies associated with Mercy’s base kit. The reason I don’t have a problem with that is that I think it opens up a big opportunity for Mercy to show off decision-making and game sense.

The way I look at it, the more Mercy can do the more is expected of her and, when she’s in Valkyrie, there’s a lot she can do. It’s kind of a “With great power comes great responsibility” situation. While she doesn’t have to worry about things like beam management or mobility, which she normally does, she does have to worry about whether she’s using her full fifteen seconds to the best of her ability and to the maximum potential. I’m not saying she doesn’t to worry about decision-making outside of Valkyrie. She definitely does. It’s just that she has to do it on a much larger scale while Valk is up. It’s kind of like being the mayor when her ult isn’t up (she has a lot of decisions to make but her options are only limited to what’s around her and what she can reach) compared to being the president when her ult is active (she can do pretty much anything she chooses to do but there’s a lot of pressure to pick the right thing).

My favorite thing about Valkyrie is the options it gives you. While I enjoy that, I’ll admit that it can be problematic when paired with Mercy’s design. There’s a discussion further up in the thread I had with Lazypeon where they made a good point about Valkyrie being an odd fit for Mercy, who’s intended to be a very straight-forward, easily-accessible option. I’ll agree that it is a strange fit for her, but I’m happy with it as somebody who really likes to push things to the limit in any game I’m playing. I get that that might not be what everyone wants. Sometimes people just want a strong and consistent healer and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I made this thread hoping to inspire people to try to use Valkyrie to its full potential regardless of what role they believe Mercy should fill. I hope that it sticks around because I don’t want Mercy to be a healbot, which pairs nicely with my hatred of snipers. I don’t think anyone’s wrong in this discussion since it doesn’t come down to an issue of balance. It’s all preference.

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That’s simply not enough, every button press in the game requires that, not to the same extent of course but it’s always there. I didn’t even mention that in the thread because game sense and decision making is there by default, you don’t press WASD without it.

That’s yet another issue to add in the Valkyrie pile. Its power is spread out across too many things, like Bilbo, it’s butter over too much bread. “Swiss-army knife ult” you called it and I certainly agree. It’s not a great tool for anything, but it’s serviceable for many things.

I heard Valkyrie was an idea scrapped from alpha. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can certainly see it why it should have stayed in the garbage bin.

Rework is a strong word, but I believe Valk should be tweaked. For one, to be better overall (I don’t think it’s good design even in a vacuum), second to fit Mercy’s kit (it clashes with her design in more ways than one), third because I don’t think it’s expensive to do so, simple tweaks would go a long way and fourth I believe there’s certain tweaks that wouldn’t change what players such as yourself like about it, a win-win scenario is possible.

Remove chain beam, make the pistol more damaging instead of more forgiving, make GA better but don’t give infinite mobility, give one full health bar or some immunity frames instead of insane self heal, etc. In other words make Valk less forgiving and more skillful, she doesn’t need a high skill ceiling, but if the ult didn’t drop said ceiling on the players toes, that would be great.

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I think the power comes from the possibilities. The enemy team doesn’t know what to expect when they hear German shouting. She might be healing her team, starting a push, or she might be charging at somebody. You know what’s happening when you hear Transcendence or Sound Barrier activate or pretty much any other ult in the game for that matter.

I’d say Valkyrie is a great tool for mobility but you’re right that it’s mostly only serviceable for everything else when you examine each aspect of it individually. I think mixing it all together is what does it for me, though. I’d rather have an all-you-can-eat amount of pretty good pizza than a small amount of great pizza.

The changes you suggested are solid, though. If they do make changes, I hope very much that they still allow for me to have several options for how to use the ult. I don’t want to be pidgeon-holed into a single usage purpose like most of the other ults. It needs to stay dynamic and exciting for me to be happy with it.

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Valkyrie does a lot of things.
More dmg, AoE heal/boost, self healing and mobility.

But it does none of them in a way that is very impactful.
The AoE heal isn’t enough to counter Ultimates like Zen and Lucio can.
The AoE boost is a weaker Orisa Ultimate (and that one is already trash tier).
The Blaster and Mobility feel fun to use but actually lure you into abandoning your team and getting yourself into a bad position.

Also most Mercy Players don’t really have the aim to gain full profit from the Blaster on the Rank they are as a Support Main (and the weird giant reticle doesn’t help either).

It just feels like a lot of stuff mashed together without having a plan what the player should be doing with it and it actually reflects in the way players are using the ultimate. They don’t know when they are supposed to push Q and if they do, they mostly behave like someone who didn’t expect to get nano boosted.

Just keeping the mobility and either unnerf her blaster OR let her AoE heal and boost at the same time.

Just give the ultimate a direction and allow it to have the impact that other ultimates have.

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These highlights clearly showcase how impactful Valkyrie is. Mercy is viable and she works. Some people here just want to make Mercy OP again unfortunately.

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Pressing Q to kill off a Sniper while putting your own life on the line and leaving your team behind as a main healer isn’t exactly what I would call an Support-Ultimate worthy game impact.

And that is what most of those Highlights were showing.

Sure. Sometimes it will work and it will feel awesome for the Mercy player and serve as a fun to watch highlight.

But in the end this list of highlights is nothing but a collection of “best case scenarios” that says nothing about how impactful the ultimate is on average.

As a tank main I HATE it when the Mercy on our team uses her ultimate, simply because in most of the cases the situation tends to get much more dangerous and unpredictable for me.

Seeing any other Support Ultimate ready makes me able to plan ahead and feel confident about the next team fight.

Mercys ultimate simply doesn’t right now.

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