Toxicity and matchmaking issues are also under further investigation.
Overwatch Support hero extraordinaire Mercy has gone through a number of rebalancing efforts since her redesign went live on the game servers in September.
Now it appears that game director Jeff Kaplan agrees with the community that she remains too overpowered and represents a compulsory pick in every team. Unsurprising it’s the regularly reworked Resurrect skill – which brings one or more fallen teammates back to life in battle – that’s proving problematic.
The team are investigating ways of toning down this skill, but don’t expect any details ahead of the changes being launched on the Overwatch test server. Here’s what Kaplan had to say on the official forums earlier this morning:
“We’ve been discussing the state of the Mercy rework a lot and listening to all of the feedback. Overall, we feel like the new direction for Mercy is much better for both Mercy and non-Mercy players. But we do feel like she’s too dominant right now.
“In particular, we feel like the resurrect ability is changing the tone of the game to a degree which is simply too powerful. As such, we’re experimenting with different toned-down versions of the ability. After all, resurrect is no longer an ultimate and is now an on-cooldown ability so it needs to be less powerful.
“I know that you’re going to want more details but we’re nearing a point with internal iteration where we feel comfortable putting something on the PTR soon. We’d rather have you play the changes than theorycraft them.”
In the remainder of the post, Kaplan mentions further tinkering that’s taking place with the Competitive Play matchmaking system, but again the team are not ready to discuss details publicly just yet.
He also repeats his plea from last month that the community continues to do what it can to tackle in-game toxicity, and continue using the reporting systems so that action can be taken against offenders.
As soon as we have firm details of the new Mercy changes – as well as the two other topics raised in the post – we’ll update the site.
