Overwatch 2 Season 3 kicks off on February 7 and Blizzard has released the patch notes ahead of the new season, detailing upcoming changes. This update includes a ton of hero changes, including some changes aimed at nerfing Mercy.
Mercy is receiving the largest amount of changes with the upcoming patch, with her movement ability cooldown going from 1.5 to 2.5 seconds. In addition to that, her healing per second is being reduced from 55 to 45, but her healing will now be increased by 50% for teammates under half health. Mercy is also losing the support passive where she heals over time, with her now receiving self-healing equivalent to 25% of her output. All of these changes are meant to limit how much time she can spend damage boosting high damage heroes like Sojourn, Widowmaker, and Ashe, forcing her to spend more time healing her teammates to refill her own health.
Wrecking Ball is receiving some buffs in the upcoming patch, making him a bit more self-reliant. 150 of his health pool is being converted into shields, which recharge over time. His Pile Driver ability is having its cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds and the arming time on his Minefield ultimate is dropping from 1.5 seconds to 1 second, although the ultimate cost is being increased by 9%.
Reinhardt is also receiving some buffs in the upcoming patch, with one nerf as well. Reinhardt’s Fire Strike is being increased from 90 damage to 100 damage, allowing him to kill any 200 health heroes if he lands both charges on it. The knockback range of his main attack is being reduced by about 40%, in an effort to prevent Reinhardt from accidentally knocking enemies out of his melee range. The direct hit damage of his ultimate ability Earthshatter is being reduced from 250 to 170, in an effort to prevent him from killing someone in one-shot. This does not impact the amount of damage that further away enemies take and the amount of time enemies are knocked down is being increased from 2.5 seconds to 2.75.
Another significant change is that all tank heroes will have a reduced amount of health when playing in non-role queue playlists, since teams could choose to have more than one tank on their team in these modes. There are also a number of minor hero tweaks included in this patch, like Cassidy having his damage falloff range shortened, Torbjorn’s turret having its health reduced, and Junkrat’s concussion mine having its damage reduced.
You can read the full Overwatch 2 Season 3 patch notes on the official website or below:
Journey across the frozen Antarctic Peninsula. Discover the abandoned station where the Overwatch Ecopoint team once searched for the source of a dangerous anomaly threatening the world and explore the wreckage of the icebreaker ship that failed to rescue Mei-Ling Zhou and her friends.
Players can now activate Streamer Protect options in-game settings. These options will provide players with ways to hide identifying information when livestreaming matches.
Accessibility Improvements
Challenges
Endorsements
Game Report
Mystery Heroes Changes
Overwatch Credits are back
Ping System Update
Season 3 competitive play begins now! Here are some of the latest updates aimed at improving the competitive experience in Overwatch 2:
Workshop Moderation Tools
We added new menu options when reporting a player. Our goal is to give players more ways to report inappropriate behavior so that we can take action in a timely manner. As a result, you can select the category and sub-category that best explain why you are reporting the player or their custom content. The major categories include:
ALL HEROES
Developer Comment: As part of this patch, there was a tuning pass for how often ultimate abilities are being generated, so expect to see several ultimate cost adjustments across multiple heroes.
TANK ROLE PASSIVE
Developer Comment: This change to the tank HP pools helps to address the relative power of those heroes in game modes where there can be multiple of them on the same team.
D.Va
Doomfist
Junkerqueen
Developer Comment: The overall base health for Junkerqueen is increased by 25 HP.
Orisa
Augmented Fusion Driver
Ramattra
Annihilation
Developer Comment: The idea of an ultimate ability potentially lasting forever is an exciting concept, but the reality is that if it’s too easy to do it causes a lot of frustrations and with Ramattra’s ultimate in particular, an excessive amount of visual noise. We’re limiting the maximum duration to 20 seconds, which is still highly impactful for most team fights, but it guarantees it’ll end in a reasonable amount of time.
Reinhardt
Charge
Fire Strike
Earthshatter
Rocket Hammer
Developer Comment: In similar fashion to Roadhog’s Chain Hook combo changes last season, we’d generally like to avoid heroes in the Tank role from killing enemies in one shot. Earthshatter direct hit damage is being reduced with that goal in mind. In most cases, targets on the receiving end would die anyway during the knockdown stun, but it does open up some potential for their allies to intervene.
For now, we’re fine with Charge pin staying lethal to many characters due to the difficulty and risk involved. The Fire Strike damage increase does mean it could once again one-shot when combined with Baptiste’s Amplification Matrix, but that requires an ultimate combo with another hero. We’ll see how it plays out and adjust if necessary.
The Rocket Hammer knockback reduction sounds like a loss of power though it is actually aiming to reduce the number of times Reinhardt accidentally knocks enemies out of his melee range.
Roadhog
Whole Hog
Developer Comment: Allowing Roadhog to use abilities during his ultimate made it much more reliable in a solo tank environment, though doing so was often much like just canceling the ultimate as it ran out of time. We’re adding a couple seconds to the maximum duration to increase the flexibility of player choices during the Whole Hog ultimate, but we’ll keep an eye on if it’s simply too much damage or knockback overall.
Sigma
Gravitic Flux
Winston
Barrier Projector
Wrecking Ball
Pile Driver
Minefield
Developer Comments: Wrecking Ball received some of the fewest changes in the transition to 5v5 as he proved to be one of the most effective solo tanks in early testing. His extreme mobility and massive health pool enable him to choose when to fight much more freely than other heroes. These changes are aimed at reducing his downtime so he can press that advantage even further. The regenerating shield health pool often leads to not needing to search for as many health packs before getting back in position.
Zarya
Graviton Surge
Ultimate cost increased 8%
Cassidy
Combat Roll
Peacekeeper
Developer Comment: Combat Roll not being blocked by players is mostly a small quality-of-life change to make the ability feel smoother, particularly when rolling in a direction that you’re not facing.
Junkrat
Concussion Mine
Developer Comment: As the Concussion Mine already has damage falloff the further from the explosion the enemy player is, lowering the maximum damage will require Junkrat to be slightly more accurate to achieve the same lethality with some of his combos.
Mei
Blizzard
Pharah
Barrage
Reaper
Death Blossom
Soldier:76
Heavy Pulse Rifle
Developer Comment: This is more an adjustment for the gun feels rather than strictly trying to add power, but it does have an effect on both. It makes the weapon handle more similar to the original version in that you can burst fire more accurately before the recoil kicks in.
Sombra
Machine Pistol
Hack
Developer Comments: Sombra is underperforming after her last round of changes. While we make progress on a small rework for her abilities, this damage increase will help strengthen Sombra even against targets that aren’t affected by her Hack effect. It’s a small increase per projectile, but it adds up quickly due to her fast fire rate. The health pack duration increase is a minor buff to avoid needing to re-hack them quite so often.
Symmetra
Photon Barrier
Torbjorn
Deploy Turret
Developer Comment: With the move to 5v5 and one less player to shoot at it, Torbjorn’s turret tends to survive longer than ever. We’re reducing its health slightly to help it feel less like a sixth player and be easier to deal with once someone turns their attention to it.
Widowmaker
Developer Comment: We experimented with Widowmaker at 200 health for a while due to concerns that the increased power of tanks made her too vulnerable to them. Ultimately she gains more advantages from 5v5 than she loses so we’re returning her back to 175 HP to better enable more heroes to contest her lethal ranged capabilities.
Ana
Biotic Grenade
Brigitte
Repair Pack
Rally
Developer Comment: Repair Pack having a small amount of instant healing will help Brigitte have more agency in saving an injured ally and generally makes the ability feel more responsive and impactful.
Lucio
Sound Barrier
Mercy
Guardian Angel
Caduceus Staff
Regeneration Passive
New Passive: “Sympathetic Recovery”
Developer Comment: Replacing Mercy’s Regeneration passive with a more interesting interaction was something we wanted to do after all support heroes gained a similar version of it through their Role Passive.
For the Caduceus Staff change, this will empower Mercy even more as a triage healer and enable her to more often save low health allies. The overall time it takes to fully heal a 200-health hero from 1 hp is about the same as before.
For Guardian Angel, the cooldown increase is necessary to reduce the greatly increased mobility resulting from the recent rework to the jump cancel. It enabled Mercy to quickly launch herself long distances in any direction and be overly evasive for such a short downtime.
Moira
Coalescence
Zenyatta
Orb of Destruction
Developer Comment: We’ve been discussing options to potentially increase Zenyatta’s survivability. We’ve seen previously in the beta that Zenyatta is on somewhat of a knife’s edge for balance. Even just 25 more shield health pushed him into overpowered-must-pick territory at the pro level. To balance his powerful damage output, the lack of mobility is an intentional disadvantage by design, so we’d prefer not to change that too much. Instead, we’re adding more ammo to lengthen the times between when Zenyatta is most vulnerable, which is when he is reloading.
Push
Hybrid
Escort
Control
Ping System
Other Fixes
Blizzard World
Busan
Dorado
Esperança
Oasis
Colosseo
Shambali Monastery
Ana
Doomfist
Genji
Junkerqueen
Junkrat
Kiriko
Mercy
Moira
Ramattra
Sigma
Sombra
Symmetra
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