Screenshot: Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch‘s Mercy now has the potential to be flying death machine thanks to a major new update to the character, which has completely changed her ultimate ability.
Mercy’s ultimate resurrection ability has been a staple of Blizzard’s FPS since the game’s launch, though it has also been a massive thorn in the side of the team opposing her. The ability, which allows her to instantly revive any downed teammates within her vicinity, is routinely the game-winning move, allowing a team to come back from the brink of defeat in order to push the payload a little further or capture the control point.
Blizzard has now revised this ultimate, instead making it one of her standard abilities complete with its own cooldown timer, and only allowing Mercy to revive one fallen teammate at a time. Her new ult, branded “Valkyrie,” now makes her completely airborne, improves her healing and damage boosting capabilities, allows her to resurrect teammates faster, along with chaining her beams to multiple allies at once. It also gives her higher damage output, which is having the inadvertent side-effect of making her a one woman war machine when she takes to the skies. Check out this Play of the Game which shows a Mercy, damage boosted by Ana, destroying her opposing team in the Overwatch PTR:
Mercy Becomes A Death Machine In New ‘Overwatch’ Update
Blizzard have acknowledged that this is an issue, with the developer’s Geoff Goodman telling players on the game’s forums:
“Her gun while using Valkyrie is a bit too strong at the moment. The idea is for it to have some extra juice to be able to use it in more niche situations. Right now, it is strong enough that it is feeling like the primary way to use the ultimate, which isn’t intended.
There is likely to be a good amount of tuning happening throughout this PTR cycle to iron this kind of stuff out.”
Though Blizzard has introduced major changes to an Overwatch heroes in the past — Symmetra’s abilities received a substantial overhaul after it was decided that she wasn’t useful compared to the game’s other characters — Mercy’s abilities have been a crucial element of the game up until now. Players will now have to readjust their strategies to make way for this new ultimate, as Blizzard brings an end to “heroes never die” once and for all.
