If anyone had asked whether something like this would have made it into the brightly coloured, quasi-cartoonish style that Blizzard is known for, back when it was first talked about, I might well have chuckled and given it's implementation a whimsical ponder-
-and whatever I might have come up with back then, would not have been even close to what was unleashed on the playerbase, this first of seasons for a brand new Overwatch.
Let's make one thing clear:
Whether you love the cat, loathe the cat, throw it at the deep end of the ban pool, or fly into inaccessible spots with the full intention of voice-lining the enemy team into a tilt so deep, they spend ultimates trying to remove you from it, this is one thing clear that I think everyone can agree on-
Freedom of movement + a smaller hitbox that puts her on par with Mercy during Valkyrie, perhaps even better as far as survivability.
An AoE boop with significant healing and some damage
A primary fire with targeted mechanics for healing and damage.
A speed boost on a resource.
Permanent access to the skybox, horizon out of bounds, and underbox of any map with these available.
Significant resistance to most soft CC effects due to the freedom of movement/speed boost.
And a giant AoE hard CC knockdown ultimate that also happens to kidnap an enemy, locking them out of movement/mobility over a significant period of time.
The Lifeline tether is...gimmicky, serviceable for taxiing and ult combos, but feels mostly like a bonus that can be (and is) ignored...just because everything else about her is so demanding of enemy attention, while crucially being independent of allied attention, that it makes Lifeline very easy to dimiss.
Separately, many of these mechanics and applications are pretty strong, but combined together, the sheer volume of value that is extractable at the lowest end cannot be understated.
Just existing in the sky above the enemy and shooting down into head hitboxes, while demanding they look up and away from the rest of the battlefield provides a massive volume of resource protection and management to the rest of her team...
...and you can do this infinitely, while constantly having an escape tool that very few other heroes can punish.
Her healing output is fairly significant on top of it all; hilariously, the only reason she might not have much healing by the end of a given match, is because of how useful and critically impressive the rest of the kit is when used to Duel, Harass, and Disrupt the enemy team at a moment's notice. It's entirely worthwhile to push healing as a secondary priority if you can secure eliminations, disrupt formations, and be a genuine nuisance to even modest effect.
All of these are also easy to learn and difficult to punish, making her a menace at all levels, even professional play. Outside of Competitive Bans as well, she represents a lodestone against which most players are going to need to find some way of navigating around, just for the sake of their own sanity and willingness to play.
All of that said, most of these issues hides behind a design philosophy that, for lack of a better description, hinges on one thing:
This makes changing, adjusting, or altering any of the above kit a bit of a tightrope, as the community was always going to cleave hard to a release like this that marries the urge for more Oddball characters with the heavy aesthetic cuteness that Overwatch has become known for:
An overpowered monster that is also going to sell skins like hotcakes, needs to be viable across multiple vectors of play.
Throw in hero bans for competitive and there's not a lot of rationale that says "fixing" the above issues is worth the cost.
Adjusting the cat in anyway has to take into account all of the above issues, while trying to pick apart what can work as replacement. Even then, the aforementioned mountain that is Da Cuteā¢ pretty much makes any major adjustments, a minefield this Development Team would probably be better off leaving alone.
There is a...single path though, that, despite still being a hardsell, the theory suggests would be a long term solution to both, adjust the cat for a better, more healthy design and...addresses a unique problem in the cast that has been lingering for some years now. In other words:
Turn the Cat into the new Mercy
I don't mean adjust the kit to some significant degree that tailors the cat to play exactly like Mercy; I mean that, at a foundation, she already does.
Much of the Cat's kit, has similar enough tradeoff and skill transference that Mercy players can find a secondary level of on-boarding.
Freedom of movement in Valk, as already stated, has a lot of similarities to the Cat's own standard, while the utility of each Hero's tether is a viable consideration that only really requires a shift in how it's applied to teammates or-
Mercy's Damage Boost tether is a trust exercise that your teammate will hit their shots
The Cat's tether is a trust exercise that the Cat will take a teammate to a useful location where the most, if not more than the most can be done
And both have healing that is very well suited for keeping low targets alive, long enough to reach safety
All of these have enough foundational similarity that they translate in an on-boarding fashion. I might even go as far as to say, they belong in a category together the same way the Devs tried (and failed) to make Lifeweaver and Mercy seem too.
The only off-putting part is the same one that makes the Cat problematic to begin with; her Damage potential.
Which is why the answer is to just remove the damage from her primary fire.
With no damage on her primary fire, she has no reason or excuse to go into constant Duel, Harass, and Disrupt mode throughout a match and instead spends the majority of her time doing healbot things (important at low ranks/broad MMR, while entirely dismissed at high level play).
This leaves a lot more targeted focus for her Utility when saving teammates, setting up plays, and doing boops on enemies to maximum effect -- the sort of utility that makes Mercy worth choosing, while maintaining survivability at all costs; something the Cat is exceptional at to begin with, due to the Speed Boost resource, Freedom of Movement, and Permanent high ground.
If the Cat's offensive focus is limited to choosing windows to apply her Ult, her Purr boop, and Lifeline (while maybe looking for the occasional low enemy target to boop + melee to death opportunistically), it leaves her open to playing more for her team and looking to operate as a strong glue in a lot of backlines.
Her partner Support doesn't have to worry about the Cat wandering off to Troll nearly as much and leave them to be easily isolated and targeted.
This change also keeps intact, the aesthetics of the character and her popularity. She becomes the new Mercy in all but name, allowing for the skin sales to flow, and the general population to continue to enjoy her without needless reworks or redesigns in the future-
-and, lastly, it serves as an off-ramp for most Mercy players who have been stuck with a truly unique hero and very little transferable skillsets. They now have an alternative option to go with, if things aren't working out on their preferred hero, to switch to and provide a similar, if more dynamic level of Support to their team.
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