Today, Blizzard rolled out some changes to the live game of Overwatch that have been out for several weeks now on the game’s Public Test Region (PTR). These changes include:
- One new map called Junkertown based on the home of two well-known characters, Roadhog and Junkrat
- Balancing changes to D.Va
- Balancing changes to Mercy
- Quality of Life changes to Reinhardt
D.Va has been a controversial character in Overwatch’s pro scene. With her ability, Defense Matrix, she has the ability to negate enemy shots, abilities, and ultimate abilities. This allows her to quickly change the pace of a match when she can completely negate a player’s most powerful ability (ex. Soldier 76’s Tactical Visor, Hanzo’s Dragonstrike, and Zarya’s Graviton Surge), making her one of the most powerful heroes in the game. Blizzard has tweaked her a bit to make her a lesser threat, but still very viable. These changes include her being able to fire her Fusion Cannons while flying, giving her a new ability called Micro Missiles (these can be fired while D.Va is firing her Fusion Cannons or using one of her other abilities), and finally, Defense Matrix depletes its resources twice as fast, although it now regenerates 12.5% per second. This has been increased from 10%.
Mercy is receiving a complete rework, changing her role drastically. Given a new ultimate, Valkyrie, Mercy’s previous passive playstyle has been flipped, making her part of the action. The new ultimate ability “unleashes the full power of Mercy’s Valkyrie suit”, making her kit ultra powerful and granting her the ability to fly around with her passive, Hover. Her Resurrect goes from being her ultimate ability to now being one of her standards that lets her resurrect one dead teammate and has a thirty-second cooldown. Blizzard has stated they wanted to keep Mercy’s resurrect ability in the game, but it caused too many problems as it was in the live game. It made a
Mercy player hide until her whole team died at once, then come in for her Play of the Game (POTG) resurrect. This wasn’t fun to play against, nor was it fun to actually play. Blizzard made these changes to make her more active in the fight while still maintaining her importance.
Finally, Reinhardt received a small change that allows the player to move their camera around so they can see their team behind them without moving Reinhardt’s shield. This should be a great relief for many of the Reinhardt mains out there.