E.g. if holding both primary and alt fire at once made her damage boost and heal simultaneously but her health depletes while doing so.
EDIT: or hitting reload while her staff is equipped could temporarily magnify her chosen beam (more heals/stronger damage boost) but drain health over time.
Do you think it would make her risk/reward management more interesting?
It might. It doesn’t feel thematically fitting for Mercy; seems like that would be more of a Moira kind of thing. But from a risk/reward standpoint, spending health to boost output seems sound.
She’s already one of the lowest hitpointed characters in the game, and one of the most valuable kills to secure; forcing her to give up her own HP just to be able to compete with other healers who don’t need to hurt themselves to do their job would make her just that much more difficult to play. It’s an interesting concept for a new healer, but I don’t think it should be applied to Mercy when she’s already struggling to maintain a competitive edge.
Moira does seem like the type to sacrifice her heath for science (that spray with her mutating hand looks painful), but when it comes to healing she seems to prefer sacrificing her enemies’ health instead!
If they just reverted the most recent nerf she would be fine.
Oh definitely. But she hasn’t minded doing self experimentation instead, and the whole health drain mechanic… to me it would seem a much shorter leap if Moira gained a health sacrificing mechanic. For Mercy it would just feel really weird.
Not that Moira needs buffs or such. Just talking about themes, here.
Ideally this wouldn’t be needed to compete with other healers in terms of raw healing - but it might allow Mercies with good awareness to damage boost a bit more without sacrificing healing ouput!
There are also moments where her beam target might die before she does despite her healing. In such cases, doing this move could give her target the time and power to defeat their enemies, allowing both Mercy and her target to survive albeit in critical condition. Better than her target dying and leaving Mercy alone anyway.
Wouldn’t this make Mercy’s kit, uh, “unfun” as people like to say? Isn’t one of the whole fun parts of Mercy, and one of the only tactical thoughts Mercy generally has to make, is that she has to juggle providing healing and damage boost? Isn’t this what separates good Mercys from bad Mercys, the ability to do both by managing them well enough?
I mean if Valkyrie takes away too much from Mercy’s kit, then this would be doing the same except it also kills Mercy in the process. That sounds like the very definition of unfun, giving up your own hit points just to make your job easier.
This would either be a redundant ability as Mercy could just manage her beams well like she’s expected to now except she doesn’t spend her own health to do it, or it would be a raw increase in power if it was somehow more useful, especially considering that Mercy already has a good self-heal in which to regain any health she spends. Mercy is already easy enough to get a grasp of, this type of ability would do nothing but make it easier to be bad.
Doesn’t necessarily have to heal and damage boost at once, that was one e.g.
It could also provide extra emergency healing or whatever other effect would be most enriching to her gameplay
That said, there are occasions where being able to damage boost and heal at the same time (even at the expense of health) would win fights which would have otherwise been lost; e.g. an ulting Soldier who is under fire and will die before his enemies do unless he is both healed and boosted
It’s a neat idea, but I think it’s more suited to a warlock type character.