With the countdown to the next Overwatch 2 beta only heating up, the game's developers have not been shy in engaging in dialogue on the overall direction of the title live on various content creators' streams.
While Orisa, Doomfist and Zenyatta are confirmed to be in the crosshairs for changes, in contrast to others such as Sombra, one of the underlying design developments to keep up with for OW2 has been regarding Mercy's super jump ability.
On that note, Blizzard lead hero designer Geoff Goodman recently joined SVB and ML7 on stream to discuss changes coming yet again to Mercy's kit in the next Overwatch 2 beta.
During the first OW2 beta, the devs first announced their desire to not only improve Mercy's vertical movement, but also make her kit more accessible and consistent for the average player.
On May 12, Blizzard took its first steps towards delivering on its promise, making it so that Mercyâs Super Jump was streamlined and added as a official feature of her Guardian Angel ability. By using the crouch key, players could cancel Mercy's flight towards an ally and launch high into the air all without having to get all the precise timings down of the OG technique.
"In some ways this new cancel boost is even stronger than the original technique," Blizzard's May 12 patch notes read, "since players are able to do this at any time rather than requiring them to be near their target."
As announced Goodman on Wednesday, Mercy's Super Jump has been tinkered with once again.
"The way itâs currently working in beta two," Goodman said on stream, "you auto-launch in the air if you reach your target all the way. You can cancel it still any way you want to, but if you don't do anything, you just hit the button and let it go, you'll launch in the air."
Essentially, this means that players will get the Super Jump if they crouch cancel the Guardian Angel ability or simply let it play out all the way and reach their teammate. In those instances where it might not be good to Super Jump, either early or at the end of the Guardian Angel ability, players can jump cancel it.
Ultimately, Goodman admitted that the dev team is still trying to figure out the best control configuration for the auto-jump mechanic and that they will be looking to get more feedback in the next beta.
"It's possible this doesn't work. I mean, this is why we're trying and this is what the beta is for: to definitely get feedback on it. It's possible when you're in the middle of chaos and you forget to cancel in some way and you get launched in the air when you didn't mean to and get sniped or something, you're going to hate it so we'll go back to the drawing board on it. This is kind of something we'd like to try and see how it feels."