I’ve been saying for  a while that Mercy needed some changes.  Note that I didn’t say BUFFS, because she was basically fine, OP in some instances if one wishes to be fair. 3 major things in my mind.

Her rez encouraged game play of getting her ult, and then hiding and 1. not healing and 2. encouraging her team to all die in one place so she could swoop in and mass rez.  This was beneficial because she could return more than one person from dead to full health which is much better than healing a single person.  And since she couldn’t rez when she was dead, she had to hide and therefore stop healing.

I felt this was dumb because as a healer, my job is to heal, not avoid healing.  I refused to hide and big rez, and got called an idiot.  Yes, it was ideal to big rez and reset a fight but, I refused to do it on the grounds that it was dumb game play.

The other issue was her ability to reset fights.  I’ve done it myself plenty of times, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating game play.  For example, a Zarya ult leads into a quad kill from a Pharah/Junkrat/Mccree/whatever.  Oh wait, that hiding Mercy now flys in and UNDO BUTTONS the entire mass kill.  Oh my, wasn’t that fun!  Or your team is trying to take point B and you kill the tank and 2 dps and you’re about to… NO THAT’S OK MERCY JUST Murazond’s Hourglass the fight back to before the kills happened.  It was amazingly annoying to only get somewhere if the healer was dead or had their rez down. Especially when the healer is encouraged to HIDE.

The last thing was her mobility.  Yes, the guardian thing is really nice, but you are dependent on your team mates being in range and positioned decently.  You can’t fly to the Genji flanking across the map or the Tracer camping the enemy spawn.   I was hoping for a wings based disengage or something.

Instead, I got fixes to everything I was displeased about.  Her rez is no longer an ultimate, it’s on a timer.  She can only rez one person.  This fixes team rez resets and hiding to use a big rez.

Her new ultimate allows her to FLY, heal and damage boost from longer distances, guardian fly from farther, heal and damage boost more, AND her gun is stronger.

So, THANKS BLIZZARD in a non-sarcastic fashion! And like the D.va suggested fix (got called an idiot for saying she should be safe from her own ult, and got downvoted to hell), I was right again.

Pharah for me is hit or miss (haha) on if I do really well with her or not.

Her rockets have a travel time so hitting people in a current game status where everyone is VERY MOBILE is hard, or in the case of Widowmaker, characters that seem to have a hitbox of a sewing pin. I just happened to get really lucky this time.  It also seems counter-intuitive but her ultimate seems to do fuck-all if you use it from really high in the air.  Sneaking up and blasting people in the face is dumb, but that’s what works the best.   Why is it dumb? Well because you yell “JUSTICE RAINS FROM ABOVE” soon as you start it and are completely stationary until it’s done or you die, with dying happening probably 90% of the time.

The only other character I can think of with such a dumb way of delivering an ult is McCree, who lights up like a bulb, walks extremely slowly, and announces it with “It’s HIGH NOON”.  Then (as I understand it) the longer he holds the ult, more damage is does.  He also has to try to flank and get in a weird place to use it successfully.

Everyone else can either be highly active during their ult (S76, Winston, whoever got Ana’s ult, Rein, Roadhog, Zen, Genji, etc) or they throw it and be on their merry way (D.va, Mei, Tracer, Widow, Mercy, Lucio).  Pharah, Junkrat, and McCree are the only ones who have to stop and “hold” it for a bit.

People think Pharah is OP so, doubt anything will get done.

Wellp, they fixed the duplicate problem.  The only issue now is, you get no coins, like, at all.  I’ve done about 25 levels since the event has come out.  I had just enough coins to purchase Mercy’s skin at 3,000 coins prior to the event.   I think I had about 50 left over.  You wanna know how many coins I have now? Oh, about 256.  After at least 25 boxes.

Why is this? Well when you get 2-4 duplicates per box, you got a little bit of coins for the duplicates.  The only summer skin I’ve picked up from a box is Junkrats.  Everything else has been non-duplicate player icons, sprays, voice lines, you know, kind of lame stuff.  (I did get D.va’s game emote though, pretty cool).

I surmised earlier than the overall skin drop rate and event skin drop rate was nerfed severely after the winter holiday event, during the Chinese New Year event.  So, you don’t get event skins with any regularity.  You don’t get duplicates to earn coins to buy the very expensive 3,000 coin event skins.  And now, coins almost never drop either.

For some reason, Blizzard put in weapons completed done in a gold skin that rewards people with a bunch of competitive wins.  Like 3,000 points worth.  Just like silver and gold portraits, all that means is YOU PLAYED A LOT.  So oooh look that Widow has a golden gun.  Big deal, they just played a lot and got enough points.  It’s not an indication of skill on any particular class.

I personally haven’t done much competitive because golden “guns” doesn’t motivate me.  First off, it barely looks any different at all on some skins.  I believe Mercy in particular has a skin that already has a golden weapon.

The gold barely makes a difference on some characters, like here’s a Reaper example.

Regular weapon (Halloween skin)

Gold weapon

It barely seems worth the work to me.  Maybe if it had a Power Torrent enchant or something.