I love the new Marcy changes. I’m still rather new to the game, but I put in a decent amount of time with Mercy prior to patch 1.19 to give me a decent perspective.

I’m a lot more engaged this time around. Constanty looking for rez worthy teammates feels ike I’m doing more than just topping people off. It isn’t much, sure, and at that skill level you may get skilled out if you can’t keep up with everyone else, but still. Mercy feels like a nice middle of the road. I don’t feel like her ULT is useless to me anymore because I’m not just looking for more than 2 people on my team to die. All this to say I think the Mercy rework changes a lot of stuff not just for her character, but for the meta as a whole, for the better.

One of the biggest changes, obviously, is Mercy’s resurrection Ability as her Ultimate ability. We will get into the ultimate changes as a whole shortly, but right now I want to talk about the rez specifically. One of the biggest gaps in gameplay mechanics I see is reward vs enjoyment. The more rewarding for the team a skill is, the less fun it is for the player to execute. This is as true maybe less so than it was with WoW, but the argument is still the same. A team needs a healer when everyone wants to DPS. Early on the WoW days, groups would often fall apart before they even started due to no healer. As patches came out, more and more healers started to pop up. It looks like they learned from that trying to make healers as cool as possible. (Lucio, anyone?)

One of the biggest arguments against her rez ability was how crappy it felt for the opposing team. Imagine you worked so hard for a team wipe, only to have it erased completely by Mercy’s rez. I find this to be a really silly argument. (Made by Jeff Kaplan himself, no less).

I do not doubt this happens, in fact, I’ve had it done to me countless times. But first off, it isn’t hard to tell when your opposing team has the ULT ability. So it isn’t like you can’t see it coming. the other thing, at least in lower levels of the game, is how many times did you get that team kill simply because their Mercy was calling out to have everyone die on the point?

Either way, it was easy to tell when she had her ultimate ability, and to target her. That just comes down to bad team management. If you’re playing with a group that isn’t communicating and not focus firing the healer at any moment they appear, you’re rolling the dice anyhow.

She can now rez on a cool down, and only once hero every 30 seconds. What this means is that feeling still happens, but it is much smaller. You get that rush of joy from solo killing whoever, only to have it taken away. Well guess what? In Quick Play there is a good chance that person had no idea the rez was coming and you can probably drop them again pretty quickly and then take the Mercy out. 

Next up is ultimate flexibility. Mercy, along with a few others, can only use their ultimate in one specific scenario. The ability to use it at the right time takes skill, sure, but unless a teammate was down you had no reason to pop you’re ultimate. Not anymore.

If you’re steam rolling a team, you can use your ultimate as a final push to a check point, giving your whole team the massive damage boost, and healing almost the whole team when you need (IF you’re communicating well). You can use it to drop some flanker who keeps messing with you. You can use it to fly out of the sticky situation. The possibilities are… well not endless, but a lot more versatile than they were in the beginning.

Looking at the state of ultimates in the game, and support heroes as a whole, all of their ultimates could use a little rework. Zenyatta’s is a little one dimensional as well. So is Lucio’s.

At the higher levels of the game this changes, and I can’t really speak to how pro’s use Zenyatta’s ultimate, but allowing lower skill capped people to experience the versatility of someone’s ability can’t be a bad thing. Plus this just allows pro’s to come up with even more interesting ways to use the ability. It’s win / win.

The only problem I see with a major rework like this is leaving other heroes in the dust. I see a lot less people playing Lucio these days. I’m sure this will fade as time goes on, but the one thing I don’t want to see is massive changes to heroes, and then those heroes being instalocked on every match.