[2023] We’re the Overwatch 2 Hero Balance team, and in 24 hours we’ll be here to answer your questions about S3 Hero Balance and the upcoming midseason update on 7 March. Ask us Almost Anything!

Hero passives are super interesting because they often can define heroes and actively change the way the kit is played. Since many passives have fewer restrictions than active abilities (due to the lack of cooldowns), certain passives become the defining feature of the kit. Lucio's Wall Ride is a great example of a passive that completely changes how a character would play. If he lacked wall riding, his style of supporting via harassment and displacement would be significantly hindered, and he would likely focus a lot more on getting value from Crossfade. It's also just super fun to have unrestricted strong movement. Other characters's passives might be less defining compared to Lucio's, but they still can push the player towards playing in specific ways. Sombra's Opportunist pushes players towards eliminating critically injured enemies, but it doesn't define her gameplay loop like Lucio's Wall Ride does.

When it comes to changing hero passives, I think everyone's open towards anything that will improve the game, but there definitely are difficulties when it comes to changing abilities that players have grown attached to. We have more flexibility in adjusting role passives, which we’ve done a few times since our beta last year.

One of the things we are currently working on is bringing the community into the fold more on the data we are seeing. We want to inform our players as best we can in order to have better discussions around balance changes and the reasons behind them.

That said, we don’t want to be in a place where we publish all current live data as that can have very unwanted meta effects. If players feel stuck playing meta heroes at times, having official live data could only further cement those sorts of feelings, even if players can have success on a wide range of heroes. Data only tells part of the story when considering the experience of playing with or against a hero.

So what y’all will continue to see are some data shared in livestreams, retrospectives that tell the story of hero performance over a season, and quick updates on the top performers in a particular meta. Hopefully these initiatives start to spark more fruitful conversations surrounding hero balance. We’ll also look at new ways to share general data around win rates in the future.

There are two issues at play here. The first is that we have reduced SR decay this Season and increased the rate that SR decay is removed when you win games in preparation for removing this system entirely for Season 4. This means that players are reaching their true ranks more quickly than they ever have in OW2. OW2 really does have a different metagame and emphasizes a different skillset than OW1 did, so it is inevitable that some players will find themselves higher ranked in OW2 than they did in OW1.

The second is that our first two seasons had a small amount of unintentional SR deflation, so we've mostly corrected that issue in Season 3. At the highest ranks (like GM where you and your friends are) we've learned we had an inaccuracy in our formula that resulted in an overcorrection.

We agree that confusion caused by these titles is problematic and we’re working on a solution for Season 4!

I’ll answer the first question here, we'll cover the Mercy questions in another reply :).

The Moira conversation can be tricky as she offers a sought-out playstyle for many Support players, but she still lacks the utility we want in the Support role. With the Necrotic Orb changes in the beta, it broke Moira’s flow and pushed her in a passive direction. So there’s some things we want to keep intact with any future changes: Moira still having this identity of being able to dish out damage (though maybe tuned down just a tad) and remain a comfort pick for many players as well as preserving her current flow. It’s a tough challenge so we will see where we end up, we’ll share more here as things develop.

In Season 4 we’re removing SR decay, meaning that in most cases your SR and your MMR will be the same so this should directly help with this issue. We’re also working on a way to display the percentage of players in your division that you are ranked higher than, so that you have a more accurate picture of your progress toward ranking up.

This is an interesting one since I often play Pharah even without Mercy, so I’m probably biased there. Pharah is a hero that is tough to find buffs for (and she performs better on the stats side than most so it always becomes a question of if she even needs changes). She is quite situational as a pick but very capable of taking over the game in the right circumstances and is sort of a harder skill check for the enemy team than most heroes in terms of trying to counter her. I wouldn’t put that all on the Mercy combo, but it is very powerful.

We’ve considered potentially reworking Pharah to make her more interactive, but it would be a dicey one since to make big changes there, it would likely mean she has to lose the air time she is capable of. Her design started as the ‘rocket launcher’ hero but her identity quickly shifted to the ‘always flying’ hero. Losing that would likely alienate a large portion of her fans.

Gonna have to wait a little longer, but I’ll echo something Aaron said earlier that the next hero will have really exciting ways of interacting with your team 👀. Can’t wait to share more soon!

This is something we are actively working on and have tinkered with iterations internally! The overall goal here is to bring back some lost synergy in Cassidy’s kit (ex/Fan the Hammer losing some of its ease of use). Magnetic Grenade is rather flat in what it does and while some abilities can be in this space Cassidy’s kit already has a lot of simplicity, making Magnetic Grenade a prime candidate for adjustments. We won’t be in full stun mode like Flash Bang, but are looking at ways to push Magnetic Grenade into an ability that either enables Cassidy to line up more shots or provide newfound utility.

Neither A or B. Our wider matches aren’t because of any type of scarcity, they’re because the criteria we use to reject candidates are currently a bit too simple. We’re adding additional tuning knobs to correct this issue soon.

The Experimental Card was much more useful in the past when the patches were further apart (months vs weeks). The turn around time to have it patched and reacted to between releases means it isn’t really feasible as a testing for upcoming live patches sort of thing, though hopefully we’ll try to find some fun uses for it again in the future outside of just patch previews.

The most polarizing changes are usually during the hero prototype or rework phase rather than anything for live balance. There have been a lot. The ones that immediately come to mind are Sombra Hack reducing max health for a minute, Wrecking Ball knocking down enemies he rolls over, and D.va having an ability to tether and drag enemies with her mech (launching them tethered to her ult was hilarious and mean).

Due to the SR Decay system we launched with in OW2 our SR distribution curve was noticeably shifted left (meaning that there were more lower ranked players than higher ranked players). Most players did not play enough games for their SR and their MMR to converge.

In Season 3 we made several changes that shifted the curve back to the right (meaning that we moved back toward our intended distribution of ranks) to begin correcting for SR Decay’s removal at the start of Season 4. Fortunately, our MMR distribution curve (MMR being the value we use to make matches) has remained the same, meaning that our ability to predict outcomes and make the best matches we can remain unchanged.

This should be fixed... right now! See our patch notes at https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/ for details.

Coin Line is being replaced with "Win 5 games in Mystery Heroes, Free-for-All Deathmatch, or any Arcade mode" in the mid-season patch along with other Weekly Challenges changes!

Every character in the game is going to get varying amounts of value at varying time investments. Some characters, like Wrecking Ball, require a lot more investment in to start getting large amounts of value from. A player gets less value at the start because they're being constantly exposed to new situations and aren't going to confidently deal with them. As the player experiences more and learns from their mistakes, they start getting more and more value. Other characters get a lot of value at the start, but time investment doesn't necessarily reward as much value increase as others. Not every character's value increases over time is linear. Mercy gets a lot of value from new players because of the ease of using her Caduceus Staff, but the value for time investment will fall off fast unless players dedicate themselves to mastering her movement and positioning.

We think it's important to have characters that have varying value curves for difficulty to serve different players. So many people who never played FPSes or even video games before got into Overwatch because of characters like Mercy. On the flipside, many players love devoting themselves to difficult or complex heroes, and we wouldn't be able to create rewarding experiences for them without characters like Wrecking Ball.

It’s certainly a complex issue, but we do suspect that some aspects of OW2 can lead to the game feeling more one-sided than OW1 did in some cases.

We’ve been looking at all sorts of issues that affect how one-sided our games feel. We know that leavers cause matchmaking to feel bad in Quickplay because our priority is to get a player into the match as quickly as possible, and this doesn’t always mean the player that is backfilled is as good a fit for that match as the one that left. We think we can improve our process here in the future.

Addressing more punishing gameplay specifically, we know that getting back-spawned or spawn killed if your spawn room just shut down (due to an objective capture) are bigger swings since we have fewer heroes in a match. We’re working on a solution for these issues for Season 4.

We know that there isn’t a silver bullet for solving the issue of one-sided matches, but we’re attacking the problem from several angles simultaneously!

We have been revisiting some of our hero design philosophies and seeing how they line up with OW2. One of the core pillars we have when developing a new hero is Counterplay in Mind. Heroes should have clear strengths and weaknesses as well as space for situational upside. Some of our recent heroes may have been doing too many things well on launch without those weaknesses to offset their strengths.

As we look into the future, it’s quite easy to look at the positive feedback surrounding added complexity in the hero kits and continue down that path. For us though, creating Overwatch heroes will always be about variety and making sure there are different playstyles with varying amounts of complexity. We tend to look at this over the course of the year, balancing those three hero releases so that there’s a healthy mix of playstyles.

We agree that we can do more to disincentivize leaving games, especially at the end of competitive seasons. We’re considering making ranked penalties partially carry over from season to season and we’d like to make sure that leaving games is never optimal for progressing challenges regardless of whether you’re in ranked or unranked.

Junkrat has moved quite a bit since his latest nerf two weeks ago (down 3-4% at both the highest ranks and the metal ranks). We understand that there are further pain points in his kit though. One change we’d like to make but it will take some additional tech is: Junkrat’s grenades have a smaller hitbox after bouncing off a wall. We believe that type of change would alleviate a lot of the pain points when facing Junkrat and still keep his gameplay rewarding. No timeline though as it involves multiple teams.

I love these types of questions! So it depends on the types of changes we want to make. Let’s use two changes as an example here: Orisa’s recent Fortify nerf (125 to 75) and something like Brig’s upcoming ultimate rework (I’m going to try to answer this without revealing too much about the change).

Say we wanted to just do a seemingly simple change like the Orisa Fortify nerf. It’d start with the balance team making a decision then informing other groups (for this usually our Producer/QA/Live Ops) that a change is coming and will require a hotfix. Then a designer would go into Orisa’s scripts, make the change, and submit. At that point QA and Live Ops are notified, QA tests the change to make sure it’s all good and Live Ops will then get the build process going. We usually see that hotfix occur the next day, so overall a small change like this takes about two days (critical changes can happen faster but hotfixes have a chance to introduce a small amount of instability).

Now for the Brig Rally changes, these are changes that do involve other teams. So we may start off with a similar origin point, design wants to make a change. This change could involve various art disciplines (such as vfx, modeling, etc.) or sound, so now it’s important to see where we can fit on their calendar. Design mocks up the change, shows it to art/sound so we can get an estimate on how big the ask is and then hopefully slots the change in for a future season. Since our other disciplines are working on so many things, such a change may not happen the next season or even the season after – it’s dependent on how big your ask is, how much lead time design is giving the affected teams, how much bandwidth those teams have, and ultimately how high of a priority the change is. That process can take anywhere from a month to 6 months, so we have to be forward looking and work together constantly in order to deliver new things to the community in a timely manner.

I love seeing the community engagement since it means players are passionate about the game. There are many great ideas that generate discussion for us or at least help inform us of the current community sentiments. The downside is that it can be disappointing for them when they don’t see their suggestions directly take effect in game and wonder why we aren’t using their perfectly calculated solutions.

Many players don’t consider the game balance ecosystem as a whole and focus almost entirely on their own experience with a particular hero and how to make that one hero stronger or feel better to play, which doesn’t always align with our goals as designers or what the stats imply about the current balance. There are always tons of other limiting factors like tech/schedule/implementation considerations players aren’t aware of so you really can’t fault anyone there.

For the second part of the question, we do think about upcoming heroes or changes and how they relate to the current roster. The recent examples being we didn’t make changes to Roadhog who was underperforming because we knew Kiriko cleanse could potentially make him more viable (it did) and that Junkerqueen ultimate was going to be really strong without the cleanse as well.

Great question! We’re certainly aware of the heroes that the community is generally more receptive to being meta though we don’t specifically plan around trying to make them the most powerful.

They are usually already popular heroes that will be played regardless of their underlying strength at any time. Many of these heroes have an advantage of having been available since the original game launch and are more accepted because of it.

As a fun exercise, imagine some of the launch heroes being released today and what the community reception to them would be just seeing the design/abilities on paper.

Our primary goal with hero balance is to try and get every hero to be viable at the top end of the competitive ladder (Masters-Top500, within a range of statistical viability since it’s a measurable goal). We also try to keep a handle on any significant outliers at lower skill tiers as well as large community pain points.

I was looking at Widowmaker stats just last week, mainly for map balance discussions, but it was interesting to see that with the current map pool there were 4-5 maps where Widowmaker was really effective, 4-5 maps where she is quite bad or rarely picked (presumably because she’s not good there) and the rest were that she was playable, but not particularly great.

For anyone wondering her worst maps were 2 of the Push maps and 3 Control maps. Her best maps were 3 Payload and 2 Hybrid maps.

Snipers feel quite counterable to me at the moment but it’s certainly something we keep a close eye on to make sure they don’t get out of hand. I think the instances where snipers feel oppressive to play against are really memorable as it’s typical of human nature to remember the bad more than the good. At least for me, it’s rare that I remember when the enemy Widowmaker was ineffective and swapped off versus when she was dominating.

Varying health amounts is a great tool to utilize when designing or balancing a hero. Characters like Reaper and Mei, who thrive in close-range combat, can utilize their larger amounts of Health to help mitigate the risk of approaching close-range fights. Varying health amounts can also help provide flavor to a character. Tracer has a low amount of health because she's quick and nimble, yet Torbjörn has more Health because he's heavily armored. The last balance patch lowered Widowmaker's health to 175, which shows we're considering health amounts when it comes to balancing the heroes overall.

When looking at adding to a hero or reworking them, we first ask: can we achieve our desired gameplay changes in their current kit and abilities? The GA meter for Mercy in OW2 is a good example of adding something new within her present abilities. If we can’t solve for desired gameplay within what we have, we’ll next ask if there is room on the hero for something brand new. We are currently asking those questions for Sombra and Roadhog. If we end up doing new abilities for either of them, it’ll take some time and I’d expect small holdover changes like the ones in our Season 3 patch.

Mercy stayed about the same as before, the changes were mostly neutral in terms of power. Her win rate is still around 51-52%. There was a small drop in pick rate from 9 to 8%. Her ‘damage taken’ stats increased by like 4 or 5% but her average deaths stayed the same – likely we can attribute this to the new passive at work and taking more damage due to the longer GA cooldown.

We don’t have further changes planned for Mercy at the moment. We feel it would be good to let this one settle and see how players adjust to the changes since it can take some time, and then evaluate if more adjustments are necessary. The meta is also quite different between the two patches so it’s even more surprising that Mercy wasn’t really impacted overall.

Despite the stats not changing much there have been both positive and negative effects on the player experience. There has been positive sentiment around players feeling like they can more fairly try to counter Mercy in ways that were difficult with her extreme mobility before as well as Mercy players having more agency in their ability to save low health allies. However, at the same time the reduction in mobility is going to feel bad for Mercy players needing to adjust to the new timing.