Mercy’s Resurrect gets more changes on the Overwatch PTR

Mercy, and particularly her Resurrect ability, have been in the sights of the Overwatch development team for the past few months. It’s very difficult to balance around a resurrect ability in a way which doesn’t completely hamstring the heroes which have it, which is probably why it seems like they’re throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. They’ve made some controversial changes, and now they’re bringing a new iteration to the Overwatch PTR.

First, they changed things so Mercy can’t just fly into the fray with Guardian Angel and resurrect her entire team, like Chips did several times during last weekend’s Overwatch Contenders Season 1 finals. Now, she has a single res with a long cooldown and extremely short range on her E key, and her ultimate ability is Valkyrie.

During Valkyrie, Mercy can straight-up fly, her gun does more damage, and her beams can bounce, much like a Shaman’s Chain Heal in WoW. Additionally, when you use Valkyrie, her res finishes its cooldown immediately and has a reduced cooldown — so in clutch situations, most players would res, immediately pop Valkyrie, then res again, and still get in an extra ‘free’ res at the end due to cooldown reduction. At least, that’s how Valkyrie works on live — the PTR is a different story.

In the latest PTR build, the devs are changing up the synergy with res and Valkyrie again. In this build, they’re giving a second charge of res when Valkyrie is used, hopefully making things less clunky. If you don’t use the extra res by the time Valkyrie expires, you lose the charge. However, the tradeoff is that the cooldown reduction of Resurrect during Valkyrie has been removed.

{PB}In the patch which initially changed her ult, her Guardian Angel was also changed to preserve momentum. As an example, sometimes when she got booped by Lucio, she would fly off the map. This was found to be a bug, as it also affected Lucio’s wall riding momentum, and has since been fixed. However, lots of Mercy players were upset it was reverted, as they felt this gave her more escape options — a valuable thing for such a squishy, prime target.

In this patch, the momentum preservation isn’t quite back in its old form, but she can now ‘slingshot’ herself with Guardian Angel, hopefully in a way that’s easier for players to predict and therefore play around. Mercy’s lack of escape and need for proximity to her team to heal make her a really juicy target in most situations, so a boost to her survival would also help her viability in the long run.

Blizzard took to the forums to discuss these changes — as well as some to Lucio’s speed boost — which you can read in full below: