Mercy rework moves her ultimate and gives her a new one

In a Developer Update today, Jeff Kaplan, Game Director for Overwatch, popped in to let all of us know that Mercy would be seeing some drastic changes to her abilities.

The first comes in the form of her old ultimate, Resurrect. Instead of having this iconic ability (after all, it is what Heroes Never Die is named after) hidden behind a charge timer, it has been added to Mercy’s base kit instead. However, now it will only raise one hero from the dead, rather than an entire squad. The cooldown on this will be fairly long but it should still be more frequent than her ultimate.

Speaking of ultimates, Mercy is getting a new one. With Resurrect getting reworked and placed on her E key, the ult will be replaced with Valkyrie. Valkyrie allows Mercy to fly (actually fly, not hover or Pharah boost) and extends the power of all of her abilities. Activating Valkyrie allows Mercy to shoot her beams from farther away (as well as letting those beams chain to nearby allies), instantly makes Resurrect available (even if it was on cooldown) and increases the fire rate and damage of her pistol. Essentially, it turns Mercy into Super Mercy, which seems pretty cool.

Kaplan listed a few reasons for the changes, but mainly focused on the hide and go rez nature of Mercy before. Essentially, it feels bad to ask your team to die so you can get an awesome reset with Resurrection. Similarly, it feels really disheartening on the enemy team to work really hard for a team wipe only to have the enemy Mercy ruin everything. He hopes that these new changes will fix that problem and wants to hear from Mercy players as well as people who don’t really enjoy playing against the Swiss angel.