2017 was the rebirth of Overwatch’s Guardian Angel, with Mercy getting a fairly massive set of reworks to make her less of a stalemate character.
We’ve seen a few changes made to her formula since then, but the PTR update for Overwatch today has seen the Nerfhammer fall exceptionally hard on her head.
Blizzards Geoff Goodman posted the following notes:
With this latest PTR update, we’ve made the following hero changes:
Junkrat
* Concussion Mine
Will now deal less damage to targets farther away from the explosion’s center
Mercy
Valkyrie
* No longer makes Resurrect instant
* No longer grants a bonus charge of Resurrect
* The speed boost that Guardian Angel receives has been decreased by 50%
* Duration reduced from 20 seconds to 15 seconds
Junkrat has been enjoying the flexibility his double-charge Concussion Mine provides, but it has now become a bit too easy to throw out huge bursts damage in a large area. With this change he can still dish out similar damage but he must now be more accurate with his tosses.
Mercy’s recent Resurrect changes have helped in allowing enemies to have more counter play in dealing with her, but she was able to use Resurrect through Valkyrie enough to largely mitigate the impact of the previous changes. Additionally, we’re toning back the amount of mobility Valkyrie provides through Guardian Angel and reducing its duration to overall reduce the power of this ability.
We will likely be iterating on these changes in the coming weeks.
A little tweak to Junkrat is no surprise, but those are some HEAVY numbers for everyone’s favourite mother figure. Another interesting note would be the fact that by adding back in the cast time to resurrect during her Ultimate, you are effectively portioning a section of that Ults duration to getting a Res off. 15 seconds is still a very long time, but having to wait to get that important res off will feel like an eternity.
The flight speed on guardian angel being halved speaks volumes to how Blizzard may feel about rapid movement in the frenetic competitive atmosphere. Where moment to moment action can be incredibly vast, having a winged wellness warrior come screaming into view, blasting you with her (deceptively strong) pistol may just be too much.
With nerfs as massive as these, one can only assume that Blizzard will start from the bottom and build up to where Mercy can be considered to be in a better spot – so please, get on the PTR and provide feedback!
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
