Blizzard's Overwatch Catch-All

Rock on Mino!

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We met the most wholesome opponents this evening, and Skraut terorrized them.

They were using the wrong strat!

The right one would have been that the entire team crouches so that they cannot be seen.

hbi's EMP followed by my D.Va bomb onto the point

Axel wrote:

hbi's EMP followed by my D.Va bomb onto the point

Super cool way to view it. You got my trans in there that kept you alive from the Hanzo Dragon and Orisa (whom Marsh took out) on the stairway to then bomb. Perfect timing and bomb placement. What was great was that you and hbi were talking and coordinating the whole time leading up to it. Probably should have ended our night with that!

3or4monsters wrote:

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We met the most wholesome opponents this evening, and Skraut terorrized them.

So, it's funny, I'm horrible at getting headshots. I've never really been good at it in any first person shooter, but I am particularly bad at it in Overwatch. I guess that comes from playing so much with Torb and his dropping shots, and with Bastion who doesn't get any headshot advantage. Just point center mass and fire. Except there is one character who is shorter than the rest, and when you tend to aim at a certain height, it hits him in the head...

Twice in that match I denied the enemy Torb his ult. The first time, I just happened to have the blaster out, and as he hit his ult, I hit him with 4 straight blaster headshots, he got one shot of goo off and that was it.

The second time was him just being stupid. Mercy's blaster is one of the quickest ways of dropping a Torb turret. So I started unloading on it from really long range while it was targeting someone else. So I had a long stream of shots headed in the turrets direction when he stepped in front of the turret to throw goo behind our Rein. I heard the headshot sound a few times as he triggered the ult. No goo.

I did start deliberately hunting him though after I knew it was getting to him that he was getting Mercy killed

I have mixed feelings about this.

Other patch notes on PTR:

Spoiler:

General

  • Global ultimate cost increased 12%
  • Slowing Effects: Instead of stacking together, friendly and enemy slowing effects are now separate and movement speed will be reduced by whichever is slower.

Developer Comment: Ultimates are coming up too often considering how high impact they are. We are reducing how quickly they are built so less fights will be determined by ultimate usage. The slows change will mostly impact heroes which can slow themselves, such as Widowmaker while scoping, or Reinhardt while holding his shield. In these cases, enemy slows such as Symmetra turrets or Mei’s freeze will not hinder these heroes unless they stop slowing themselves or the enemy slow value passes their own slow value.

Ashe

  • Reload Time per round decreased from 0.3 seconds to 0.25

Developer Comment: Ashe's time to fully reload felt overly restrictive. However, a long reload time is an intended downside to balance out the power of her gun so we want to be careful not to eliminate that completely.

Brigitte

Inspire (Passive)

  • Healing amount increased from 100 to 130
  • Self-healing from Inspire is now halved

Repair Pack

  • Now has 3 charges
  • Healing amount changed from 150 to 120
  • Now heals over 2 seconds instead of instantly
  • If you throw multiple packs at the same person, the current duration will be extended by 2 seconds

Whip Shot

  • Out-going velocity increased from 60 to 80
  • Retracting time reduced from 0.6 seconds to 0.3

Barrier Shield

  • Barrier health reduced from 500 to 200

Shield Bash

  • Stun duration reduced from 0.9 seconds to 0.75

Rally

  • Ultimate cost increased 10%

Doomfist

Melee

  • Quick melee no longer pauses ammo reload.

Hanzo

Storm Arrows

  • Storm Arrows ammo reduced from 6 to 5

Developer Comment: The overall damage output of Storm Arrows was too high so we’re reducing the maximum number of shots.

Moira

Fade

  • Can now be used while stunned.

Developer Comment: Moira has always been good at healing and dealing damage, but she offers very little utility compared to the other healers. This change reinforces her evasive nature and allows her potentially save her team from area stuns such as Reinhardt’s Earthshatter.

Orisa

Protective Barrier

  • Cooldown increased from 8 seconds to 9

Developer Comment: A common point of feedback for playing against Orisa was that it doesn’t feel useful to shoot the barrier as it comes back so quickly. Increasing the cooldown of Protective Barrier will make destroying it more rewarding.

Reinhardt

New Passive: “Steadfast”

  • Reduces knock back effects by 30%

Developer Comment: As a frontline, melee-range tank Reinhardt was more adversely affected by knock back abilities than most heroes. To reduce some of this frustration and enable Reinhardt to more easily fulfill his role, he is now more resistant to being knocked back.

Sombra

Hack

  • Duration on enemy players reduced from 6 seconds to 5

EMP

  • Activation time increased from 0.5 seconds to 0.65

Developer Comment: Hack is a potent disable with a long duration. Reducing the duration slightly will make it feel less oppressive as the hacked player without reducing its effectiveness too greatly. The increased cast time on EMP allows for more time to react and opens up more counterplay for the opposing team.

Symmetra

Teleporter

  • Now lasts an infinite duration until destroyed
  • Players can destroy their Teleporter with the ability 2 input
  • Cooldown now starts when Teleporter is destroyed
  • Cooldown increased from 12 seconds to 15
  • Maximum range increased from 25 meters to 30
  • Teleporter breaks if the entrance is more than 40 meters from the exit.
  • Teleport re-use time increased from 1 second to 1.5

Developer Comment: Symmetra’s Teleporter is an interesting tool but often felt too restricting to use. Making the Teleporter last forever opens up new opportunities for how Symmetra is used in various maps and group compositions.

Tracer

Pulse Bomb

  • Damage increased from 300 to 350

Developer Comment: Pulse Bomb was reduced in power some time ago to make sure it was not overly punishing to Tanks, which are much easier to stick the bomb to. While this is still a goal, we’re restoring some of this lost power to help deal with other hefty targets such as Bastion, or enemies with bonus armor from Brigitte.

Wrecking Ball

Minefield

  • Increased projectile speed from 10 to 13, causing the mines to spread out more. This makes it easier to create a wider minefield, especially from the high in the air.
  • Reduced the activation time from 0.25 seconds to 0.1

Developer Comment: Wrecking Ball has a very active playstyle, but often it felt difficult to make good use out of his ultimate. This change allows him to spread out his Minefield further if he wants, while still allowing for a tighter cluster if he activates it near the ground.

BUG FIXES

General

  • Subtitles: Subtitles now display when spectating while waiting to respawn.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause damage to not be dealt if a damage dealing ability was rapidly gaining/losing targets, like a Zarya trying to track a fast moving hero.
  • Charging heroes (Reinhardt, Doomfist, Brigitte) should more consistently knock each other down when colliding.
  • Some abilities will now appear smoother during slowed down time (end of round or custom game), notably Dragon Strike and Roadhog Hook

Heroes

Doomfist

  • Improved ability for Doomfist to get through doorways while using Rocket Punch and clipping the corner.
  • Rocket Punch will now consistently destroy translocator and not be stopped by it, similar to Symmetra turrets.
  • Targets hit by Rocket Punch will now go directly backwards, instead of maintaining any lateral momentum they had.
  • Targets that are stun immune but not knockback immune (Zarya's Particle Barrier, Zen during Transcendence ) are no longer able to affect knockback trajectory.
  • Fixed a bug where if Doomfist used Meteor Strike while crouched he would move slowly for the entirely of the ultimate.
  • Fixed a bug where Doomfist would move backwards slightly slower during Meteor Strike

D.Va

  • Fixed a bug that prevented D.Va's Defense Matrix from pointing down when D.Va was aiming downward while moving.

Lucio

  • Fixed some false positives with Lucio's animation land prediction when wallriding.

Zarya

  • Fixed a bug that caused Zarya's weapon and arm to animate oddly during her emotes when viewed in third person.
Overwatch Developer wrote:

Ashe

Reload Time per round decreased from 0.3 seconds to 0.25

Developer Comment: Ashe's time to fully reload felt overly restrictive. However, a long reload time is an intended downside to balance out the power of her gun so we want to be careful not to eliminate that completely.

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Highlights:

* Brigitte: Joins Mercy in the "I was an actually effective support so I got nerfed into the ground" club.
* Hanjo: Storm Arrows mildly nerfed, is still a literal pile of human garbage.
* Moira: Can Fade while stunned. Will be even more unkillable in low rankings while still being unplayed at higher rankings.
* Reinhardt: Gets knocked back 30% less. Might be the only change here I unambiguously like.
* Sym: Teleporter lasts forever unless destroyed, can also be manually destroyed like Torb's turret. A number of minor adjustments to her tele stats. Doubt any of it will make a huge difference, but it could be cool.

Pretty sure I dislike the idea of enforced 2/2/2. Yes, joining up with pubbies and getting matched with 5 DPS-main assholes who won't fill is an annoyance, but from a design perspective it forces Blizz to rebalance roles to be largely interchangeable, which is a problem when the majority of characters are role hybrids in some way, shape, or form.

The changes to Brig are a case in point. Can't have a hybrid support / tank now that that makes Brig comps the de facto only way to play triple tank, so better nerf everything that made her unique and turn her into one more AOE healer with little survivability.

And I'm envisioning the 5-dps problem being replaced by "2/2/2" comps with two DPSes, two tanks that play like DPSes (Roadhog / D.Va anyone?), and two supports that play like DPSes (Zen / some douche trying to play Ana as if she were Widow).

We'll see how it plays out in practice, but I'm not optimistic about this change.

hbi2k wrote:

Highlights:

* Brigitte: Joins Mercy in the "I was an actually effective support so I got nerfed into the ground" club.
* Hanjo: Storm Arrows mildly nerfed, is still a literal pile of human garbage.
* Moira: Can Fade while stunned. Will be even more unkillable in low rankings while still being unplayed at higher rankings.
* Reinhardt: Gets knocked back 30% less. Might be the only change here I unambiguously like.
* Sym: Teleporter lasts forever unless destroyed, can also be manually destroyed like Torb's turret. A number of minor adjustments to her tele stats. Doubt any of it will make a huge difference, but it could be cool.

That Brigitte set of changes makes no sense. They reduce her shield by more than HALF, AND the amount she gets healed by inspire? How is she supposed to get into range and sustain for the inspire heal at all now?

Valmorian wrote:

That Brigitte set of changes makes no sense. They reduce her shield by more than HALF, AND the amount she gets healed by inspire? How is she supposed to get into range and sustain for the inspire heal at all now?

She's not, just like Mercy isn't supposed to ever actually get a rez off.

I used to get irritated by the "Blizz hates support players" tinfoil-hat crowd, but now I'm starting to wonder if they might not have a point.

Respectfully disagree, she can certainly still survive, she just needs to be more aware of her tanks, like a support should be. She's a support character, I appreciate that she's going to be doing more support and less front-line unkillable murderbeast.

I mean, obviously we'll have to reserve judgment until the changes go live and we see how they actually play, but the thing is that we already have six squishy supports that die if you breath on them funny, we don't need all seven to be like that. My concern is that this makes her into Slower Lucio.

Minotaar wrote:

Respectfully disagree, she can certainly still survive, she just needs to be more aware of her tanks, like a support should be. She's a support character, I appreciate that she's going to be doing more support and less front-line unkillable murderbeast.

For any other healer, I'd agree. However, her main healing ability is only triggered by melee attacks. That puts her in a significantly larger amount of risk than all the others.

hbi2k wrote:

Highlights:

* Brigitte: Joins Mercy in the "I was an actually effective support so I got nerfed into the ground" club.

That happened long ago. Brig is only really effective in goats and other short range comps or on the last point of 2cp/cart maps. While the changes are pretty major I think it makes her a more game sense based character with a higher ceiling. She still has 250 health and a shield effectively giving her 450 health. She can still 1v1 anyone at close range but she can't just stand there and flail away. More skill will be required in 1v1s. Despite loving the character I haven't played brig the last two seasons much at all after one tricking her for two seasons. I have hope that this will make her more viable in more comps.

The biggest nerf for Brig is the 350 damage pulse bomb. Brig is supposed to counter tracer not the other way around.

Valmorian wrote:
Minotaar wrote:

Respectfully disagree, she can certainly still survive, she just needs to be more aware of her tanks, like a support should be. She's a support character, I appreciate that she's going to be doing more support and less front-line unkillable murderbeast.

For any other healer, I'd agree. However, her main healing ability is only triggered by melee attacks. That puts her in a significantly larger amount of risk than all the others.

This is mitigated somewhat by the buffs to whip shot.

EvilHomer3k wrote:
Valmorian wrote:
Minotaar wrote:

Respectfully disagree, she can certainly still survive, she just needs to be more aware of her tanks, like a support should be. She's a support character, I appreciate that she's going to be doing more support and less front-line unkillable murderbeast.

For any other healer, I'd agree. However, her main healing ability is only triggered by melee attacks. That puts her in a significantly larger amount of risk than all the others.

This is mitigated somewhat by the buffs to whip shot.

Also by the complete rework of her armor packs. I'd contest that *those* are her main healing and the passive healing is just...passive. She's a hero that's going to do well in tight spaces, we might just see much more switching per portion of a map like pros do.

Minotaar wrote:

Also by the complete rework of her armor packs. I'd contest that *those* are her main healing and the passive healing is just...passive. She's a hero that's going to do well in tight spaces, we might just see much more switching per portion of a map like pros do.

I can see that's where they are trying to steer her, but I'm trying to figure out what her position is. She doesn't have the mobility of Mercy or Lucio, the Utility and anti heal of Ana, the Sustain and emergency invulnerability of Baptiste or the Debuff of Zenyatta. It's hard to tell what exactly she DOES bring that wouldn't be better served by a different healer. I guess MAYBE peeling? But with the nerfs to her own survivability, I'm wondering if she wouldn't just get killed herself, anyway. Without the self heal of her melee, I'm not convinced she'd survive 1v1's as often.

Edit: I guess she does get SOME self-healing, so there's that I suppose.. Hmmm, I wonder if it'll be enough to offset the other nerfs. A 200 HP shield is pretty fragile.

Watching Seagull play Brig on PTR Comp, she looks just fine. Then again, it is Seagull.

FYI, his 1.5 hour in person interview with Jeff on Twitch is worth the listen. Guessing he will have on YouTube before too long.

I played a few rounds on the PTR playing Brig. Some thoughts so far.

The shield change isn't a big deal. It breaks a lot faster but as long as you play near cover you should be fine. You can't walk out into the open and expect your shield to save you.

The self-healing nerf is a bigger issue. Mid-fight standing in the back if you get hit you have no healing. My moira was ignoring me so I was at 50 health and no shield for a solid 10 seconds spamming the Genji button and then died to a random zarya RC. Same thing happened in close fights where Moira would ignore me while I couldn't heal fast enough to survive (first point of King's Row defense). Mid-fight with inspire up I simply couldn't heal quickly. With the nerf she is self healing for 8 hps. That's not anywhere near enough. She is now the worst self-healer in the game by far. I think this needs to be buffed back to pre-nerf levels but I'm still getting used to it. Brig will need another healer to heal her much more often.

Whip shot - This is so much better. Things are much easier to hit now. The bad is you still have to use this way too often to trigger inspire and it pushes people away every time.

Armor Pack - this is great. It doesn't instaheal but it works well. It's actually very workable with dive characters. I could overheal a doom, dva, and winston all pre-dive. It is on a similar cooldown as sym turrets. I really like this change.

My healing on King's Row with a full hold on defense and pushing offense all the way was 2k over my normal healing (12k vs 10k average).

Overall, I think Brig is much more viable as a healer but I think she needs a little more. Her escape is terrible and is used so often for other things as to be useless. Unless she gets more shield or healing I think she'll be a little underpowered (though I'm not yet used to playing her this way). I think she's in a better spot than she currently is, though.

Role que by itself is well done. You can select multiple roles and will join the first available. It gives an estimated wait time for all roles. DPS and tank que was 10 minutes, healer was at 5. I did have a hiccup where I selected healer and got a tank role for some reason. Left and came back and had my healer role (same game as it was comp). Not sure what happened there. Seems to work fine from what I can tell. For solo comp this should be a lot more enjoyable.

For some reason the PTR was all in german.

Ugh, been dreading this. I saw this thread had a slew of comments and thought "dammit here comes role queue"

To me the beauty and appeal of Overwatch has always been that hero swaps are available and impactful. It makes you feel like no game is ever really unwinnable, because there always might have been a swap you could have made that would have made things click.

Enforced roles sort of punt that out the window. You can be sitting in an unwinnable game, certain you know what needs to change but unable to change anything. Like a WoW healer whose tank keeps standing in the fire. To me, not having situations like that has been the main thing that made Overwatch unique.

But the main thing I hate here is that enforced roles introduce fault to the game. Today, if your team is running Lucio/Zen and the healing isn't enough, that's not anybody's fault per se - it's a problem that everyone has a way of solving, so nobody's any more or less responsible for solving it. Tomorrow, keeping the team healed is the "job" of two specific people, and if healing isn't there teams will blame them (in some cases, rightly so!). It's hard to imagine this playing out without people getting more toxic, as they blame losses on whichever two people they think weren't doing their "job".

Then in the longer term, it seems inevitable that it will lead to characters getting more same-ey and less interesting (starting with Brig). Enforced role counts make it harder to justify a pick that brings high utility but less "role effectiveness", like Mei/Roadhog etc. So those characters start to look like troll picks, then their utility (or hybrid-ness) gets nerfed and they get molded more into a core role, and everyone looks more and more like a WoW character.

Obviously I'll give it a chance but for the life of me I can't see how this makes the game better. The main argument from Jeff seemed to be that ELO ratings will get more accurate. Hooray..?

Oh, and that doesn't even touch on the OWL side of things. It's pretty weird for Jeff to say "we're not trying to control the meta" with a straight face, while announcing that OWL teams will now be required to do something that they virtually never did when they had a choice.

fenomas wrote:

Oh, and that doesn't even touch on the OWL side of things. It's pretty weird for Jeff to say "we're not trying to control the meta" with a straight face, while announcing that OWL teams will now be required to do something that they virtually never did when they had a choice.

I’d offer a respectful counter to your last point. The GOATS meta didn’t end because of some patch or rework Blizzard put it. It ended because a few teams got tired of the same thing, tried out new compositions (4 DPS, No Tank, etc) and found what worked for them. The stage championships were between two meta breaking teams. GOATS was still totally viable and could win, it did win (Vancouver was 6-1 for the stage and 21-7 on map count)

I’d hazard we'll see a similar shift in the 2-2-2 meta where some team will find the secret sauce (hint: it won’t be a top tier team, it’ll be a lower tier team or some team not even in OWL) and it will instantly become “the 2-2-2 meta”. It’ll win stage 4 playoffs. Then it’ll be some team who can’t pull of the current meta well, experimenting with a new composition, sneaks into season playoffs and rolls the current 2-2-2 meta with their unique style.

staygold wrote:
fenomas wrote:

Oh, and that doesn't even touch on the OWL side of things. It's pretty weird for Jeff to say "we're not trying to control the meta" with a straight face, while announcing that OWL teams will now be required to do something that they virtually never did when they had a choice.

I’d off a counter to your last point. The GOATS meta didn’t end because of some patch or rework Blizzard put it. It ended because a few teams got tired of the same thing, tried out new compositions (4 DPS, No Tank, etc) and found what worked for them. The stage championships were between two meta breaking teams. GOATS was still totally viable and could win, it did win (Vancouver was 6-1 for the stage and 21-7 on map count)

Doesnt this support his point? GOATS hasn't ended despite all the nerfs to try to make it end. How many patches did blizzard have where they nerfed goats characters? Lucio had been perfectly fine for almost 3 years but needed a nerf suddenly? DVa was nerfed twice. Brig was nerfed half a dozen times. Blizzard was actively trying to kill GOATS for almost a year but it's still not dead. 2-2-2 role lock will end goats and I am sure goats played a part in role lock coming out. Then Jeff talking about people being more creative under constraints. It's true. Look at Shakespeare. I'm fine with role lock but stop feeding us spam and telling us it's filet mignon.

staygold wrote:

I’d off a counter to your last point. The GOATS meta didn’t end because of some patch or rework Blizzard put it. It ended because a few teams got tired of the same thing, tried out new compositions

....I guess my meaning clearly didn't get across but I don't know how else to say it. My point was that I don't think I've ever seen an OWL team play an entire match solely as 2-2-2, but next stage all teams will be required to do so. Isn't that controlling the meta?

(Side note: can we keep OWL results in spoilers please? I'm halfway through the playoffs, was going to watch the finals over the weekend.)

Edit: I didn't mean to suggest that role lock was meant to break GOATS, particularly. Obviously it does, in practice, but whether that was part of the motivation or not is beside the point. I'm saying: you can't suddenly disallow the large majority of comps that teams actually play and then claim you're not trying to control the meta.

fenomas wrote:

To me the beauty and appeal of Overwatch has always been that hero swaps are available and impactful. It makes you feel like no game is ever really unwinnable, because there always might have been a swap you could have made that would have made things click.

Enforced roles sort of punt that out the window. You can be sitting in an unwinnable game, certain you know what needs to change but unable to change anything. Like a WoW healer whose tank keeps standing in the fire. To me, not having situations like that has been the main thing that made Overwatch unique.

How many times, in Goodger games, have we been getting stomped and turned it around because the healer said "I want to go Winston and jump on their sniper, can someone else take heals?" or the Junkrat said, "can someone go hitscan to deal with their Pharah and I will switch off DPS?"

A lot less opportunity for that if you can only switch within the same role.

Do I love role queue? No. Do I hate role queue? No. Do I think it will make things a wee bit better? I hope so. In a way it's almost Mystery Heroesish... can't Female Doggo about comp if you don't control comp. Obviously that's not as much the case with role queue -- there will always be those who complain about some aspect, whether the particular pick within the role or the effectiveness -- but less.

I suspect (read: hope) we'll see this evolve in a future update to allow people to role swap. If I have that "they're countering all the things I'm proficient at for this role, can anyone swap with me?" thought and select a request to swap roles in the UI and a teammate agrees to swap roles with me in spawn we can perform the swap. Maybe that's dreaming and technically infeasible with the modifications to the role-specific SR calculation, but you never know.

There is enough options within each role to make choosing the right one for the right situation a valuable skill. I have specific classes i pick depending on map attacking/defending/challenges from the other team.

Did the Mexico World Cup team just leak the next hero?

Mantid wrote:

Did the Mexico World Cup team just leak the next hero?

So Zero might be after that?