The latest PTR balance changes have just hit the live game.
A handful of changes for Overwatch heroes Mercy and Lucio have been applied to the live game client. The news was confirmed on the game’s official forums late yesterday evening, and adds a buff to Lucio’s wall-riding speed along with a nerf to Mercy’s Valkyrie Ultimate.
A recent bug fix took some of the extra zip out of the speed burst achieved by Lucio after finishing a Wall Ride manoeuvre. To compensate for this, the temporary speed boost has been increased by 65%. This should even things out while still preserving the value of the original fix, according to the developers.
More dramatic changes have been applied to Mercy. Although her Guardian Angel ability now allows her to glide beyond her travel target using the jump button or key, the cooldown is now no longer reset when Resurrect has been activated.
As for her recently introduced new Valkyrie Ultimate ability, it no longer resets or reduces Resurrection’s cooldown, although it does provide an additional bonus use of the ability. The developers argue this provides Mercy with more versatility, and makes resurrecting a pair of teammates less of a fiddly affair.
A few minor changes were also slipped in with these more significant updates. Zenyatta now has a few extra voicelines to suit his Cultist Zenyatta skin (added with the recent Halloween Terror event), while those playing on the PC version of the game can now set their social status to Online, Away, Busy or Appear Offline.
This isn’t the first time that the new version of Mercy has been sent back to the drawing board since her rebirth a month or two back. Don’t be surprised if a further round of tweaks makes it onto the game’s test server in the weeks to come.
