There’s a whole lot of things going on with Valkyrie that make it bad and uninteresting to use. Let’s go through them shall we?
- Valkyrie is 15 seconds long.
That makes it tied for longest ultimate in the game. An ultimate that is that long cannot be particularly strong, otherwise it would be ridiculously overpowered. Picture a 15s long Tac Visor or a 15s Dragonblade, yeah that’d be broken.
So if a long ultimate cannot rely on its raw power to be interesting or fun… what can it do? Well it has to rely on what’s known as a “Difference of Kind”. The best example of this I can give is Nidalee’s ultimate from League of Legends. Her ult actually has infinite duration. How is it balanced and interesting? It literally swaps out her entire kit. In human form she is a Poke based Mage and in cougar form she is a melee range assasin; her ult allows her to swap between the two… nearly at will. Which form is better? Well… that depends on the situation, raw power wise, in theory they’re balanced. Yeah… Mercy’s ult doesn’t do that. At all. You’re still doing the exact same thing you were doing before.
- Valkyrie “enhances” Mercy’s current kit.
Now, you can make an ultimate that is an empowered version of your normal kit. Problem is you are hamstringing yourself as far as making it interesting through providing a different experience for your players. You can include some difference in kind as part of the enhancement but it is potentially still a problem.
So… how do you make an “enhance” ultimate fun to use? Short answer, make it short and punchy. There’s actually another example of this to be found in League of Legends. The champion Karma has an enhance ultimate that works. How does it work? You activate your ultimate and then your next spell cast and ONLY your next spell cast is empowered. All of the empowered spells have significant improvements to the abilities primary use (usually over double the power) PLUS they add an extra thing that isn’t in the base ability. In short, Karma’s ult provides a short punch of extreme power with a bit of extra spice thrown in. Again… this isn’t what Valkyrie does in the slightest. Valkyrie pretty much provides zero spike of impact because it just applies her normal heal and boost to everyone.
- Valkyrie’s primary draw is supposed to be the chain beams which are basically an aura.
This is a problem for 2 reasons. Firstly, auras barely feel better to use than that same ability as a single target ability. Why? Because you rarely can see ALL the effects your aura is having. If you’re lucky you can see… maybe 2 of your targets. Also the AoE nature of it makes how useful it is incredibly variable. “How many people are in range?” “How many of those people actually need this effect right now?”. However… AoE does without a doubt make the thing stronger… so it couldn’t possibly actually have the raw power of the single target version. Add that up and you’ve got Auras generally feeling worse than their single target versions even though they are close to the same strength.
The second problem is that… Mercy’s Auras are healing and damage boost. Trans and Supercharger exist… so that limits how powerful Mercy’s aura’s can be because hers are more flexible… and if the more flexible ult is close enough in power to the non flexible ult… why would you ever use the inflexible ult? You wouldn’t. So Valk’s auras have to be kept weak to not overshadow Trans and Supercharger.
- Flight and Beam buffs.
So Valkyrie gives both Flight and a range and AoE buffs to Mercy’s beams. This is a problem. Flight is great… it gives Mercy the ability to get wherever she needs to go much quicker than she can in normal form. Range and AoE buffs to Mercy’s beams make it so she doesn’t need to move as much. With a 30 meter range… how likely is it that there’s actually someone out of range? How likely is it that that other guy who needs healing you aren’t currently healing isn’t within your 10m chain range?
Do you see the problem here? Oh hey here’s a cool new mechanic that lets you get wherever you need to go. Oh and also some buffs that make it so you… don’t actually need to go anywhere at all. Yay? Did anyone think this through?
So yeah, those are my reasons for thinking that Valkyrie cannot be made into a fun and impactful ult without rework levels of changes.
tl,dr:
Valkyrie is a long, kit empowering ult which cuts it off from being able to be interesting either via impact spike or feeling different to use.
Valkyrie’s “primary use” is an aura… auras are nearly impossible to make feel impactful.
Valkyrie giving Mercy unrivaled mobility and removing any reason to use it is just mean.