Overwatch Mercy Update Turns Her Into An Unstoppable Angel Of Death

Yesterday, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan took to YouTube to announce some big changes coming to everyone's favorite guardian angel, Mercy. The changes that were revealed certainly weren't minor, shaking up the way Mercy plays dramatically. These changes were made in response to way many Mercy fans were playing – lying in wait for their team to wipe and then coming in with a big Resurrec to bring them all back to life.

Kaplan and his team didn't like that for a number of reasons. The first is that if Mercy is hiding and waiting for her team to die, she's not actually doing her job as a healer. The second is that Mercy players would often encourage their team to die on the point so they'd be able to get a big Ressurect off easily. A healer encouraging their team to die, as you can imagine, is a bit antithetical to Blizzard's vision to the role.

So, which changes were made? Mercy's Ressurect was turned into an alternate ability that has a 30 second cooldown, a shorter range, and only works on one person. Her new ultimate is called Valkyrie, which allows Mercy to fly around the battlefield, buffs the power of all of her skills, and make her hit harder and fire faster with her pistol. Her pistol also gets unlimited ammo too, because somehow Valkyrie didn't sound powerful enough when it was being tested.

Mercy's new rework is now live on Overwatch's public test realm, and it's becoming clear that Valkyrie turns her into quite the fearsome warrior. This is especially true when she's under the effects of Ana's Nano-Boost. With unlimited ammo, increased damage, and increased projectile speed, Ana's Nano-Boost turns Mercy into a killing machine. Various clips and GIFs have already been shared to the Overwatch subreddit, showing just how much Mercy dominates when Valkyrie and Nano-Boost are active at the same time.

If Mercy is reliant on another character to output this damage, then you'd normally be able to make the argument that she isn't overpowered on her own. That argument would work under normal circumstances, but the problem is that Ana is currently a hero with a very high pick rate. Couple that with the fact that many teams like to run two supports, and you have the recipe for a meta dominated by Mercy and Ana.

So, with all of that in mind, we probably shouldn't expect Valkyrie to stay at this level of power for very long. It's live on the PTR now if you want to check out her changes, but you might want to do that soon, because we're not sure that Blizzard will allow Valkyrie to hit the live servers in its current form. What do you think of Mercy's changes? Head down to the comment section and let us know!