The PTR of Overwatch brings drastic changes for Mercy. There is a new Ultimate – and the mass resurrection is gone!
A few days ago, the developers at Blizzard announced that there will be some big changes in Overwatch. These include not only changes to the ranked system, but also major adjustments to the heroes.
Now Mercy is in the developers’ sights. In a new Developer Update, Jeff Kaplan talked about the changes that will be made to our favorite healer from Switzerland.
Farewell, group res
Mercy loses her old Ultimate. The mass resurrection will be removed from the game. Instead, Mercy will get a single-target resurrection as a normal ability! The range is drastically reduced (5 meters) and Mercy is no longer invulnerable while casting.
Mercy’s new Ultimate Valkyrie does several things. The ultimate has a duration of 20 seconds and allows for interesting new playstyles:
- Mercy can fly with full control for the duration of the ability.
- Caduceus: The healing and damage boost have a larger range and bounce to all allies in the immediate vicinity.
- Caduceus Blaster (pistol): Has infinite ammunition while dealing more damage and the fire rate is increased.
- Guardian Angel has greater range and faster movement speed.
- Mercy’s passive self-healing is not interrupted by damage.
- Activating Valkyrie resets the cooldown on resurrection and reduces it to 10 seconds while Valkyrie is active.
The reason for the change is that they want to avoid “annoying” gameplay. It feels wrong for Mercy to have to hide, telling the team to “die” so she can fly in and resurrect everyone. At the same time, a mass resurrection has ruined the feeling of success from cool combos when, for example, Zarya and Pharah took out the whole team together.
Aside from that, the update has another change for Reinhardt. He can now rotate the camera while holding up his shield with the left mouse button pressed to gain more insight into the battlefield.
In addition, there are the previously mentioned changes for D.Va.
These changes are active on the PTR and can be tested (PC version of Overwatch).
In ranked, you will soon lose every rank if you cannot maintain it!
