Overwatch PTR Is Tweaking Mercy & Lúcio

Published: October 12, 2017 6:20 PM /

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Overwatch Laranja Lucio Witch Mercy Junkenstin

The Overwatch PTR (Public Test Realm) is currently tweaking Mercy and Lúcio according to a pair of posts by Principal Designer Geoff Goodman on the game's PTR Feedback forums. The first post is a continuation of a thread that detailed earlier changes in the works for Mercy's Valkyrie Ultimate ability and the second post is a reply to a thread by Battle.net user Dixx who had some complaints relating to Lúcio's momentum in the game.

Mercy's Valkyrie Ultimate is being tweaked to reduce the effectiveness of her Resurrect ability and change the way a momentum bug affected her Guardian Angel ability. The first change for the interaction between Resurrect and Valkyrie was to remove the cooldown reset and increased cooldown speed altogether; instead, players would be able to resurrect fallen allies from twice as far away. This change has since been shelved in favor of a different change: players will now gain a single "Resurrect" charge that lasts for the duration of the Valkyrie Ultimate. The cooldown for Resurrect still does not reset upon activation of the Ultimate, but this extra charge should provide heroes a measure of "burst rezzing" that should maintain its viability.

As for her Guardian Angel ability, the behavior from a previous bug that allowed Mercy to slingshot past Guardian Angel targets is now being tested as a deliberate movement ability. Players can use the jump key to slingshot past their target and continue on for a short distance afterward; this will provide more or less the same effects as the previous momentum bug in a more consistent fashion.

Lúcio suffered from a bug where players could spam jump commands and gain a speed boost while wall riding. The bug was removed in a recent patch to the game, but this also resulted in the reduction of overall speed for players who made use of the bug. Mr. Goodman stated in a post that while the bug was unintentional, the team is looking into increasing his speed in specific scenarios to compensate.

Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan followed up in another post by stating that their plan will include adding in some additional speed boost to players jumping off of walls without having to make use of macros as they did before. However, since the original live tweaks were put into place, some players have stated that the healing hero hailing from Brazil felt "heavy" and as a result Mr. Goodman is looking into adding some additional vertical boost to further ensure that the hero's speed remains as viable as it was before.

Blizzard has not stated when they expect these changes to be pushed through to the live game or if they will go through any additional iterations. If they do go through, two of the game's healers should be a little more consistent in their movement speed and teams going up against Mercy will have to deal with slightly fewer overall resurrects. For the moment, the Halloween Terror 2017 event is currently underway in Overwatch and will be until November 1, 2017.

What do you think of the upcoming changes in the works for Mercy & Lúcio? Do you think either of these heroes needed to be changed at all or were there problems that Blizzard needed to address? Let us know in the comments below!

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One of my earliest memories is playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I've had a controller in my hand since I was 4 and I… More about Robert N

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Release Date
May 24, 2016 (Calendar)
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