After a long awaited Mercy nerf made Valkyrie less a much less mobile and game-changing ultimate. But after this nerf, what will happen to the current competitive meta? Well first lets go through the nerf part by part.
1.) When activating Valkyrie, resurrect is no longer instant.
OK, starting off with a very important nerf. This nerf makes Valkyrie much less mobile and able to swoop in revive your team and be done with it. With this in place you can be sure that Mercy will be much easier to kill and will die much more often. It makes Mercy players much more likely strategize when and where to rez, instead of charging very deep into the enemy territory to revive your teams Genji. But this nerf leads us straight into the next one.
2.) Upon activating Valkyrie, you are no longer granted extra resurrects.
Wow. This is probably the most important part of this nerf. Not allowing Valkyrie to revive more people? No wonder they added the last nerf. This means that Mercy will stay with healing the team and sticking with them, as opposed to resurrecting your team. But this does raise a problem, rezing a member of your team 4-8 times per game? Well, we’ll get to that later. Mercy players will not activate Valkyrie once members of the team have died, they are more likely to activate Valk to help your team push forward as a group. But nevermind the many concerns i have, lets go on to the next one.
3.) Valkyrie’s Guardian Angel speed boost has been reduced by 50%.
Overall, this is the nerf that makes Valkyrie much less mobile. The reduced speed goes along with the “No more res during Valk” nerf. If she doesn’t have any rezs, then she does not need to speed to an enemy so fast right? Well, one concern that i have it if Mercy is getting targeted by the enemy Soldier or something of the sort, escaping will be much harder. I guess that was part of the nerf though, making Valkyrie less mobile. Next.
4.) Valkyrie duration time reduced from 20s to 15s.
Hmm. Its hard to think about this one. I think that it is a good move and that this will surely help dismantle the Mercy meta, but with all the other nerfs, I think that they should have left the duration alone. Or they could have reduced the time and the Guardian Angel speed and left everything else alone. This would have nerfed Mercy enough that she would still be a viable hero pick, but much less likely to be picked.
My Reaction
Does this mean that I can finally play Zenyatta in comp? But seriously, in this patch they nerfed Mercy very hard. I like the idea of reduced duration, reduced GA speed, and slower resurrects, but resurrect did not need to be changed. Yes she could have still turned a 6 vs 6 to a 8 vs 6 but it would take a lot more skill to do so. On a professional level Mercy could try to sneek in the resurrects but a good Tracer or Soldier could kill her very quickly. In the current meta I think that Zenyatta, Moira, and Lucio will become, once again, part of the dive comp. I do not think that we will see much of a rise of Ana because she needs the long sight lines like that of Numbani. If i had one word to describe the new meta it would be: Mercyless.
-Dr. Porkchop