New Mercy buffs arrive with Overwatch Halloween event

With the 2021 Halloween Terror event live, the Overwatch team has also added Mercy movement buffs for her shift ability, Guardian Angel. With Mercy’s ultimate allowing her to become the most mobile hero in the game, small issues have persisted with her shift. Now, in this seasonal event, the team has added changes hoping to fix those issues.

Guardian Angel gets a significant update

Since Guardian Angel improves all of Mercy’s abilities, the added movement with her flying has caused problems for players focused on ranking up with her. For example, with her movement, flying to players with your shift ability can change drastically when in Guardian Angel. You can fly to the wrong target, and with her ability cooldown at two seconds, you may get caught in crucial fights.

The Halloween event’s recent change fixes that issue very easily. Now, going into your control settings for Mercy, there is an updated option named ‘Guardian Angel Target Priority’. This lets you choose from three options: Facing Target Only, Prefer Beam Target and Prefer Facing Target. The first option means that when you use Guardian Angel by pressing shift to a teammate, it will go towards the allies you face. The second option, Prefer Beam Target, means when you press shift you will go to the ally you are beaming. If you are healing nobody, it defaults back to who you are facing. Lastly, Prefer Facing Target, is the opposite of the second option, so when you press shift you will go to who you face, but if nobody is there, it will go to your beamed target.

How this change helps Mercy players

This is a big change, as before the only option was just to prefer beam target. Now, these buffs let you be more specific with your Mercy movement. With Mercy being a target for enemies, her Guardian Angel ability is her escape. Now, the choice to move to your beamed target or not isn’t a binary one. The added choice to move over to teammates with both facing and beam priority helps. This will lead to less confusion for Mercy players, especially when flying all over the map with her ultimate Valkyrie.