This past weekend during the OWL finals, Blizzard’s remaining Overwatch team dropped some big reveals for the team-based shooter’s sequel. Specifically, it shared planned reworks for the characters Sombra and Bastion, both of whom are getting some pretty significant changes.
In Bastion’s case, he will now be able to move while in sentry form but at a lower speed, lose the ability to self-heal, gain a new sticky grenade, and replace his former ultimate with an artillery strike that can be manually fired anywhere on the map three different times. His primary weapon while in walker mode is also seeing its fire spread reduced to zero and an increased damage falloff to become more accurate at longer ranges, though its rate of fire in sentry mode will also be reduced.
As for Sombra, her hack ability is seeing a wealth of changes including faster cooldown, a longer duration, the ability for teammates see hacked enemies through walls, and the ability no longer breaking stealth (though she will be slightly visible while hacking). In trade, the ability lock duration of a hack is reduced to one second and health pack hack duration is reduced to 30 seconds. Additionally, her EMP ultimate no longer deals shield-specific damage but it will deal 40% of any enemy’s current HP caught in the blast.
Meanwhile, eagle-eyed Overwatch fans noticed that a reference to Jeff Kaplan has seemingly been removed from Overwatch 2, as seen in the video. Like Wowhead, we assume this is part of Blizzard’s plan to remove all real-person references from its games. Kaplan, who left Blizzard abruptly earlier this year, has not been named as a perpetrator in the company’s many scandals.
As for the OWL grand finals themselves? The Shanghai Dragons came through.
And with that, the #OWL2021 Grand Finals has crowned its champion! https://t.co/BtqkiHFTlJ
— Overwatch League (@overwatchleague) September 26, 2021
