Waching daily Aug 24 2017

What's up, everyone.

This is Jeff, here with another developer update to tell you about something super awesome,

which is big changes coming for Mercy.

Now, Mercy is one of the top played characters in Overwatch, so I know there are many, many

of you out there who are Mercy mains, who are suddenly worried: "What are you doing to

my beloved Mercy?

Please don't wreck her.

Keep her awesome.

We love Mercy so much."

We love Mercy, too.

We wanted to put a lot of focus and attention into improving the Mercy play experience.

And I think it's important for me to start with: Why are we changing Mercy in the first place?

So, one of the problems we see with Mercy right now is there's a weird behavior that's

encouraged by the core, fundamental design of the hero, which is that, if you are a Mercy

player and you're healing your team and your ultimate is up or close to being up, you have

this weird moment where you stop healing your team, you go into hiding, and you start to

tell your team: "Everybody die together!

Die on the point.

Die on the point.

I have rez."

There are people who might not be listening to you on your team, who are now yelling at

you: "Why aren't you healing?

Why aren't you healing?"

They go off and die somewhere else.

Anyway, the team eventually wipes and then Mercy swoops in and does her big Resurrect.

There's a couple things we really don't like about this.

One, we think it's wrong to tell a main healing character to go off and hide somewhere and

stop healing for some period of time.

The other thing is, that on the receiving end, like, let's say you're on a team that

puts a lot of effort into getting a full team wipe.

You use a Zarya Graviton Surge and maybe have Pharah rain justice from above on top of that.

You wipe out the entire enemy team.

It's pretty disheartening to have Mercy just erase that moment with a full team rez.

So, we felt like her Resurrect was something that needed to be addressed.

The other thing that we here hearing frequently from Mercy players is: "Hey, Mercy doesn't

have an alternate ability.

She has Guardian Angel, which is a ton of fun.

It's super useful.

I'm using it all the time.

But how come Mercy has one less ability?"

So, we're making some big changes to Mercy.

The first change that I'll let you know about, and it's going to seem a little bit shocking

at first, is that her ultimate is no longer Resurrect.

Resurrect is becoming her second ability.

So, now she'll have Guardian Angel and Resurrect.

Now, there are some changes coming to Resurrect.

Resurrect is now single-target only, but it's on a cooldown.

So, you don't have to worry about generating an ult all the time.

It is a rather long cooldown, so you won't see players constantly resurrected, but it

becomes a really cool strategic moment in deciding to who to resurrect and when.

So, now Resurrect is a common ability on Mercy rather than her ultimate ability.

Now, Overwatch in lot of ways has heroes who are defined by their ultimate abilities, and

we knew how amazing Resurrect was as an ultimate ability for Mercy, so we felt like we really

had to come up with something special for Mercy players so that they felt like their

new ultimate was really worthy of the hero that they've come to love and respect so much.

So, Mercy will be getting an ultimate that's called Valkyrie.

And Valkyrie does a lot of things, so let me walk you through all of them.

First and foremost, when Mercy activates Valkyrie ...she can fly.

And I don't mean she can Pharah boost in the air briefly.

I mean she can fly.

And it's super fun.

You have complete control of your character.

After all, Mercy has those wings, we might as well put them to real use.

I mean, Guardian Angel is pretty good, but imagine flying with Mercy, how much fun it could be.

The other cool thing about Mercy when she's in Valkyrie is that everything she does is

basically better.

So, Guardian Angel now goes much farther than it did before, so she can reach targets much easier.

Her beams now go farther, both healing and damage boost beams can reach much farther

than they could.

The coolest part about the beams is now they chain to multiple targets.

So, if you have multiple teammates who are in need of healing and they're grouped up

the beam will hit all of them and they'll all be getting healed or they're all be getting

damage boosted.

Also, for those of you Battle Mercys out there, and I know you exist, her gun is now better

when she's in Valkyrie mode.

She can shoot faster and it does more damage, which is basically, like, me saying in two

ways: "She can do more damage."

I think the thing that you'll like about it the most is the ability to fly.

I think the flying really opens up those moments for Mercy where she's getting attacked,

her teammates aren't really helping her out, she needs a chance to get away, and really just

sort of flying...

The other thing you can do is swoop in and save people at the right time.

And, by the way, your Resurrect refreshes right when you use the ultimate ability.

Now, on the PTR we're going to be experimenting with different versions of the Resurrect and

how it works with Valkyrie.

Right out the gate, you'll see that she can use Resurrect even faster when she's in Valkyrie.

So, in a lot of ways, you now have Battle Mercy, flies to the air, sees her teammates

in trouble all around the battlefield, and then flies to them, either heals them or,

if they happen to die, she's gonna, you know, resurrect different ones of them.

We feel like Mercy will feel a lot more engaging to play than standing around the corner, hiding,

waiting for that moment to press the ultimate.

So, we really hope that you respond well to these changes to Mercy.

We know that she is a character that's played almost second-to-none, so we think we're going

to get a ton of feedback from you.

And we're really eager to hear...we want to hear what the Mercy players have to say and

we want to hear what people who have played on the receiving end of that team-wide resurrect

feel and how they feel about Valkyrie.

How do you feel like the balance is?

Is it fun to play against?

Do you understand what's going on?

So, we think this will be a good, healthy change for the game overall, so we look forward

to what you have to say there.

Now, I also what to give you a heads up that, eventually -- and not all these are going

to happen right away -- there's going to be some changes to some other heroes as well.

I don't want to instill panic in anybody, but we are going to take another look at D.Va.

We're doing some experiments to her right now.

And to be clear about what we're looking at on D.Va specifically is Defense Matrix.

We've heard both from D.Va players and from players playing against D.Va

that Defense Matrix can feel almost smothering.

What I mean by this is: As a D.Va player, you feel almost required to maximize your

uptime with this ability because it is so powerful.

And, on the receiving end, at times it feels like there's no counter to Defense Matrix.

If you take something like Orisa's shield or Reinhardt's shield, you understand when

that ability is going to be on cooldown.

Like, you see Reinhardt's shield is cracking and it's going to go down, and you know if

you destroy it you've got a window of opportunity there against Reinhardt.

Where D.Va, with Defense Matrix, it's pretty much up all the time.

And, even when she lowers it, she can feather it very quickly to deny certain crucial abilities

such as Zarya's ultimate, which is Graviton Surge, for example.

It's a little bit devastating right now, so we're looking at changes to D.Va to lessen

the impact of Defense Matrix without injuring the character's ability to perform her primary role,

which is that of tank.

So, please don't panic.

We're not going to overly hurt D.Va.

We're also looking to give her other fun things to do and we have a couple of experiments

in play right now internally that we believe will make her more skillful and more fun to play offensively,

which is something that we've hear a lot from our D.Va players, as well.

That they're looking for something to do besides just holding that Defense Matrix button down.

These changes will be coming out soon.

We will provide you with more details as soon as we have something that we feel is worthy

of your time and attention and playable on the PTR.

So, hopefully as soon as possible.

It's what our focus is right now.

Overall, even though we've had some of these heroes in the game since Day 1, we feel like

it's our responsibility to always look after both the players of these heroes and the people

who are on the other side, which is our player base in its entirety, and make sure that everybody's

playing out as fun as possible.

Rest assured, if things aren't playing out well on the PTR, or if things happen to go

live and they're not playing out perfectly or to the community's liking, we will go back

and keep looking at these things.

We look forward to your discussion.

We look forward to those of you who go to the PTR and actually check these things out.

And we also look forward to people's impressions.

Let us know what you think of these changes and have fun with them!

We'll check in next time.

Bye!