By Marshall Lemon
Mercy is getting major changes that won’t feel like nerfs at all.
Mercy is arguably the most popular Overwatch hero, beloved by her teammates and an excellent choice for new players. So when Blizzard says it’s making major changes to Mercy, a nervous reaction is expected – but there’s good news too.
In a new Developer Update, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan outlined the intended changes and logic behind them. The most significant change is that Mercy’s Resurrection Ultimate is being removed – but only as an Ultimate. Instead, Mercy can use Resurrection as a secondary ability with a cooldown. While Resurrection will have a fairly long cooldown period, it does mean you can potentially resurrect characters more often than an Ultimate would allow. The trade-off? Resurrections only target a single player – so you’ll have to choose which player makes a comeback.
But that’s not all, Mercy will also get a new Ultimate ability to replace Resurrection. According to Kaplan, this new Ultimate is called “Valkyrie”, which boosts all stats from healing beam range, to bullet damage, to cooldown rate. On top of that, Mercy’s healing beams will chain while the Ultimate is active, letting you support more heroes at once. Finally, Valkyrie grants Mercy the ability to fly – not just a hover like Pharah uses, but fully-guided flight. In other words, when Valkyrie is active, Mercy will be able to move around the battlefield like an almost-literal angel.
Blizzard is still ironing out Mercy’s changes, and will be testing various builds on Public Test Servers in the days ahead. Once Mercy’s rebalancing is complete, Blizzard hopes to do similar overhauls to other characters – and according to Kaplan, D’va is next. You can find out more details in the attached video.
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