Mercy streamer unhappy with Season Four’s “unfun” Guardian Angel rework

Kurt Perry
mercy flies down to heal teammate in overwatch 2 zero hour trailer

Overwatch 2 streamer and Mercy main Skiesti has spoken out against the rework and nerfs of the support heroes’ Guardian Angel ability.

Leading up to Season 4 Blizzard confirmed plans to rework Mercy’s Guardian Angel that lets her fly to teammates. This decision was made in response to complaints that the support hero was too strong throughout Season 3.

The Season 4 update for Overwatch 2 saw Mercy’s Guardian Angel ability reworked. The cooldown to use Guardian Angel was reduced from 2.5 to 1.5 seconds. However, the cooldown when combining Guardian Angel with Jump or Crouch was increased from 1.0 to 1.5 seconds and can no longer be manually interrupted.

Mercy mains are upset about Guardian Angel nerf

Skiesti took to Twitter to vocalize her frustrations on the changes: “Playing Mercy feels genuinely unfun right now and it sucks. I really enjoy using her micro movement, especially for repositioning and not just ‘GA [Guardian Angel] straight line’.”

Skiesti also spoke about her perceived inconsistencies regarding how the balancing of different heroes is handled: “Cool that D.Va has 4 sec Boost, Lucio has 4 sec Boop, Doomfist has 4 sec Punch but if you do a micro movement on [Guardian Angel] which requires your allies, you get 3 secs.”

A response to Skiesti’s tweet hypothesized that the Mercy changes were a result of overly eager devs: “I think that’s the power of a complaining community being heard way too much by the developers! They seem too eager to please everyone, and those things end up happening.”

Some replies were more bothered about the changes made to Mercy’s healing than the rework of Guardian Angel: “I know it’s selfish but girl do I miss that healing!”

For now, Mercy players will have to put up with the nerfs and see if a later mid-season patch reverts any of these changes.

About The Author

Kurt Perry is a British games writer who started at Dexerto in April 2023. He graduated from Staffordshire University in 2019 with a BA in Games Journalism and PR. Prior to joining Dexerto, Kurt contributed 900 articles for PC Invasion including over 350 guides. He's an all-rounder who is particularly knowledgeable about Call of Duty, Destiny, and Pokemon.