As fine-tuned as Overwatch tries to be (you leave your own opinions about how successful that’s been), sometimes you have to try some radical things just to see what happens. Enter Experimental mode, the mode that’s going to try a few new things in the team-based shooter, starting with a triple damage composition.
According to the developer update video starring game director Jeff Kaplan, the Experimental card isn’t for game balancing or bug shakedown, but for trying radically different things to see whether they work or not. With today’s update, there will be a new team makeup that consists of one tank, two support players, and three damage dealers, shifting away from two of each role. The idea for this makeup came out of discussions on how to make damage queue times faster.
In addition to the developer update video, there’s an in-house interview with Kaplan and principal game designer Michael Heiberg that similarly goes into the reasoning behind this mode as well as details changes that will be made in the mode to D.Va, Roadhog, and Zarya — characters that are considered to be off-tanks; for example, Roadhog now emits a healing gas cloud around himself when he uses Take a Breather.
