With the chaos of its launch (hopefully?) now behind it, Overwatch 2 is ready to talk about the future – or at least the immediate future. Blizzard posted a lengthy unsigned dev blog last night discussing its design plans.
“While some heroes are performing better than others, and there are differences across player skill levels, we have been happy to see that no hero’s overall power level is far out of line with our goals,” the studio opines. “Every hero on the roster has a win-rate between 45% and 55%, and we are not planning any immediate balance changes based on what we are seeing, with the exception of a targeted adjustment to Zarya in Total Mayhem which should go live with our next major patch on October 25. Instead, our team is planning to make a series of balance changes for Season Two that are in line with our design goal of ensuring the overall game feels balanced and fair while giving each season a more distinct identity. While we’ll continue looking at hero performance and listening to player feedback prior to finalizing any specific changes to balance for Season Two, we want to share more about what we are seeing so far.”
Specifically, that means:
- “keep[ing] an eye on” tanks to stop “death ball” team comps;
- nerfing overpowered DPS heroes and buffing the weaker ones;
- merely watching Kiriko, who has apparently balanced out as folks learn her (and how to counter her);
- tweaking maps and the map pool;
- and fixing the annoying bugs with player ranking, as well as with rubber-banding and hit registration.
Finally, Blizzard addresses “misconceptions” about PC controller settings, which it reminds players doesn’t affect “mouse input latency or precision.”
