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Overwatch 2 Twitter Q&A Summary - Upcoming Season 2 Changes, Hero Balance
Overwatch
Publié
31/10/2022 à 04:00
par
gibsy
Blizzard recently hosted a Twitter space with Lead Hero Designer Alec Dawson, going into detail on their how they approach Hero Balance for Overwatch 2.
Below are the highlights from the space, which includes the details and reasoning for the upcoming changes on November 15th!
Seasonal Balance Approach
- Blizzard will do minor and major patches for hero balance. Minor patches during the season, while major patches will be with season launches. Major patches will be more proactive and include more design changes, as opposed to tuning changes with heroes. For example, blizzard is looking at potentially changing Brigette’s ultimate for a future season launch.
- Midseason balance patches should be about 4 weeks into the season. The Season One mid season balance change is a bit later due to issues on Blizzard's end.
Midseason Changes
- Sombra’s damage was too high, and Blizzard wants to prevent chain hacking since they believed it was too powerful and too frustrating to play against. Blizzard is still trying to find a sweet spot for Sombra.
- Genji was performing very well at all levels of play. Blizzard believes Genji’s burst damage was too high compared to other flanking heroes like Reaper and wants to bring Genji more in line with them.
- Blizzard wants Zarya players to have to put more thought into their ability usage. Currently, Zarya’s uptime on her Bubble’s was so high she could just kind of walk forward mindlessly and have little room for counter play.
- Blizzard was concerned D.va would be too weak on the launch of Overwatch 2, because she performed quite poorly during the betas for Overwatch 2, so blizzard is rolling back some of the buffs she received prior to launch.
- This type of balancing is what you should expect from a minor patch.
- The Kiriko swift step change is not meant to be a balance change, but more of a Quality-of-Life change for opponents, to prevent things like Kiriko teleporting into a reaper ultimate and not dying. Blizzard is keeping an eye on her balance wise for Season 2.
Season Two Changes
- Blizzard is trying to find more of an identity for Doomfist and is thinking about buffing his power block to put more of an emphasis on his empowered rocket punch.
- Sojourn is under performing in lower ranks and doesn’t become very strong until Masters+, so they are looking at ways to nerf her in higher rankings while potentially buffing her for lower rankings. They still want to keep her identity, but also reduce frustrating moments where she one-shots you from across the map.
- Blizzard is also looking at Cassidy for changes.
Q&A
Question:
Are there any plans to buff the weaker tanks? Wrecking ball, Doom fist, and Junker Queen all feel very weak and impossible to play in a 1 tank format.
Answer: Blizzard is actively looking at Junker Queen and Wrecking Ball for buffs. JQ buffs would look at her self-efficiency vs. providing sustain for her whole team. Ball is a bit tricker, he’s on a knife’s edge for balance.
Question:
How do you go about balancing ow2? Do you listen more to the top levels of play, or do you mostly just look at general win rates and balance off of that?
Answer: In short, it’s a combination of intuition, feedback, and data. We try to look at changes that account for how that character is being played across ranks and retain character identity.
Question:
How do you guys feel about Tank diversity, particularly in terms of tanks who share composition style (Rein/JQ/Zarya/Orisa all brawl, for example)? How much of improving that plays into hero design vs balance vs map design? Also, any Symmetra beam change updates?
Answer: Plays a significant role, at the outset of a new Hero we establish what archetype they fit into for game needs. Our goal is to have more diversity for different tank playstyles and finding new spaces for the role in general.
Question:
Can we expect Sojourn nerfs? I’ve seen her in almost every comp game I’ve played this season (around 315 at this point) and her kit is just too strong compared to other dps :/
Answer: She's top of mind for Season 2 changes. Particularly looking at her one-shot capability without losing hero identity too much.
Question:
Can we expect any buffs to Mercy? Her movement feels great, but it seems like she lacks the playmaking impact that other supports have.
Answer: Overall players are still learning and adjusting to her new movement capabilities. We want to give that a little bit of time and see how those learnings translate to win rate. May see some small tweaks through that timeframe though.
Question:
Hello Alec, what are your thoughts about Tracer at the moment. She feels weak because she can no longer go all out on her target and recall since she lacks the damage to do so. Should Tracer players find a better way to utilize the hero, or is she underperfoming overall?
Answer: She's been overshadowed by some of the other flankers in the Hero lineup so far (due to meta and other hero strength). Believe she will find a home/composition with these changes and others coming. If she doesn’t, we'll be taking a closer look at her.
Question:
So if a hero is over performing in high elo but under performing in low elo, they don’t receive immediate nerfs? Shouldn’t the game be balanced from top down?
Answer: We mainly nerf heroes due to their performance in high elo, so yes the game is primarily balanced from top down. When it comes to changes, we do our best to find changes that hit that top level efficiency without butchering the Hero at lower ranks. It’s hard to do but it's the goal.
Question:
Will there be any buffs to the healers damage, just so healers can defend themselves?
Answer: Defending yourself as a support can come through in a variety of ways. We want to be very careful with just buffing their damage, as they'd turn into DPS Heroes with healing. Movement is a much safer option as it keeps the Support-Tank-DPS paradigm intact.
Question:
Can you comment on where Symmetra is in development. Is there any plans to buff or change her kit? What is her identity in Overwatch 2 since she can do a little bit of everything.
Answer: Symmetra is doing quite well across most of our ranks! In the right hands, we've seen players find great usage with her current kit. She does however have a low pickrate and we hear a lot of feedback about her. Expect to see some small tweaks to her kit in Season 2.
Question:
With the current state that Bastion is in, is there any tweaks or reworks in the pipeline atm? Bastion feels significantly weaker compared to the rest of the dps cast and performs worse than the overwatch 1 counterpart for the hero.
Answer: So the Bastion bug with tons of artillery fire was actually quite eye-opening, players still avoided it! A few changes in mind but we want to shorten the window before the projectile drops so players can feel more effective during Configuration Artillery.
Question:
Hey Alec, is there a metric to track which heroes fall below average pick rate? Does the balance team see it as a major concern if there is a certain hero(es) that are played at a low outlier rate? Would that be territory for a buff or a wait and see approach?
Answer: It's ok to have niche Heroes but it raises questions. Is the kit lacking? Are players tired of the kit? Outside of winrate changes: Players enjoy hero but low pickrate = less likely to do something. Players do not enjoy hero with low pickrate = more likely to do something.
Question:
Are you considering to look at the dps passive due to how the speed boost that gets provided from it benefits certain heroes like flankers a lot more than other dps? Also would you rebalance heroes like genji if the dps passive does get changed?
Answer: Yes, DPS Passive is at the top for changes in Season 2. For reasons you bring up but also sentiment that it is hard to aim with on certain Heroes.
We'd want to see how Heroes like Genji perform with the passive changes first, then evaluate from there. Open to readjusting though.
Question:
Hi! Do you have plans on reworking Moira? I think you guys mentioned it in the past, but we haven't heard about that for a while now. Thanks for the amazing work btw! ♥
Answer: For Moira, want to make sure we get it right. Tons of people love her playstyle, so we want any added utility to not break her flow and approachability. Have some ideas, but down the road a bit.
Question:
Any plans for making new support characters? They desperately need more characters.
Answer: Yes, it's one of our long-term focuses. Right now the pool is quite small for two players to choose from. May see more new supports than other roles to bolster that pool.
Also, there's still lots of interesting space for us to explore as designers when making supports!
Question:
Hey Alec, I wanted to ask if the balance team or other parts of the dev team are planning on being more vocal through the overwatch official channels moving forward? even a 'we hear you' kinda thing. It was great to hear you guys officially talk about the Doomfist issues
Answer: Yes and you'll find us trying that through a variety of platforms. Today went rather well, hopefully we can make that a scheduled chat.
From the design side, we want to share as much as possible. Will probably see some blog posts that dive into our philosophies.
Question:
How do you guys feel about Roadhog right now? Common sentiment is that he's pretty weak and I've had people complain when I pick him, but he's honestly felt pretty strong and his competition is getting nerfed too.
Answer: These recent changes could be big for Roadhog, we know he also pairs pretty well with Kiriko as she can take care of a lot of his weaknesses.
So in the wait and see phase, but we have tinkered with some changes to his kit. Nothing we love just yet.
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