[2023] We're the Overwatch 2 hero design team, and we'll be here tomorrow at 11:00 AM PT to answer questions about Mauga's first week in-game!

We playtested a first round of Wrecking Ball changes last week and think it's off to a good start. Overall, we are looking at making it a bit easier to play alongside Wrecking Ball with various support heroes, increase Ball's options in combat, and implement some quality of life changes.

In terms of timeline, it depends on how far we go with some of the changes and what's required there. It could end up as a bigger balance patch, it could end up with giving Wrecking Ball a new ability. Right now though, I think it'll lean closer to the first and not need the same sort of support that Roadhog and Sombra needed. Hopefully get something out there in the next few seasons.

Mauga is intended to be an aggressive, high damage output tank as he offers less in defense to his team compared with other tank options and doesn't have great mobility. We're lowering Mauga's weapon damage in general which will help with some of this where it can feel extreme at times.

He has good and bad matchups within the tank role, which is great for creating some depth, so it's not necessarily a role-wide problem. Sigma/Dva match up well and have an advantage against him, Roadhog/Junkerqueen/Ramattra are fairly even matchups, Zarya/Rein can do decently but require more support from their team, and Mauga is strongest against the dive tanks and Orisa.

We wanted to lift up some other tanks that we knew would have a particularly hard time with Mauga, but the changes themselves weren't necessarily tied to their direct matchup with Mauga. The change to Doomfist's Ultimate for example was something we believed would help players engage with it more regularly, the change to Winston's primary fire helps him in a number of matchups.

For Roadhog, we saw internally that he had quite a hard time with Mauga so even though he had been performing quite well across our rank thresholds, we decided to hold off on any changes. How Roadhog slots into the meta will be made more clear with upcoming Mauga changes and Mauga's inclusion into Competitive.

We'll have to see how this develops over time as there's always a learning curve for new heroes. Shooting both guns is not always more effective due to the large spread and more random nature of it. Learning when to use each firing mode to your advantage is part of the fun. Generally if enemies are further than 15 meters or so you'll want to use the alternating primary/secondary fire.

As we inevitably add more heroes to the game, with their own set of abilities and visual kits, we'll continue to look at past vfx and new vfx to make sure they all play nicely together.

We always strive for clarity but the Orisa post was a great example of how it can be difficult to read some of those stacking effects. Team is currently talking about solutions for that and hears the feedback on the readability for some of Mauga's abilities.

Game design goes through a lot of iteration to find the most engaging combination of mechanics within the scope of our goals. We naturally try a lot of prototype variations even with a strong starting idea.

We tried a few alternate mobility abilities for Overrun. One of the first ideas was a short range dash that would toss enemies into the air behind him if you impacted them. It was fun to use but the transition from third person to first person and trying to turn around to shoot them wasn't easy, and solutions like automatically doing a 180 with the camera took away control from players.

The weapons had a couple alternates such as a flamethrower or incendiary grenade launchers. There were a few attempts at having two very different firing weapons in each hand, so one being hitscan like it is now and the other being a travel time projectile. It didn't play as well when trying to fire both at the same time unfortunately, especially in versions where they have different firing rates and how you want to aim travel time projectiles by leading a target, and tracking the ammo pools separately is difficult.

The Cage Fight ultimate was pretty successful from the start, but we still tried other versions to see what would play best. It was a physical wall instead of a barrier at one point. There was also a completely different ult that was more of an area effect debuff to enemy damage dealt, the opposite of damage boost.

We are reducing his damage, and those changes went live in this morning's hotfix patch (https://overwatch.blizzard.com/news/patch-notes/). This change will inadvertently affect how much life steal he receives during Cardiac Overdrive, making him a little less tanky.

This is usually trying to be consistent with game mechanics. We do make exceptions when necessary for the sake of game balance, but the less often we need to do that the easier it is for players to learn and understand these many interactions across multiple heroes.

Mauga's ultimate tethers are applying what we internally call "Mobility Lock" which disables movement skills. Other things that use this mobility lock are Junkrat Steel Trap, Cassidy Magnetic Grenade hinder effect, Zarya and Sigma ultimates. For gameplay consistency, you should be able to use Symmetra Teleporter and Lifeweaver's Lifegrip against those abilities.

Reaper is also on that list! Had our first brainstorm and have aligned on our overall goals for what we want to see with Reaper's abilities. One of those goals is modernizing Reaper's kit, Shadow Step and Wraith Form standing out there.

We may also explore some new abilities for Reaper (on the right-click), but don't want to take the space just because it's available. If we add something there, we'll want it to give him slightly more decision making in-combat than he has currently.

Right now, there's not a strong desire to potentially make such a swap. Heat systems give significantly more damage uptime compared to traditional ammo systems. They're functionally just a constant reload you can cancel at anytime, unless you hit 0 ammo. The reload time gives players a window of opportunity to avoid his fire.

Want to clarify here that the first time we do this it will be for a limited time as an experiment. With that said, we're still discussing how exactly it will work in the match flow and where we put this experiment. Should everyone get a ban against one hero in their role? Should this experiment actually run in competitive for a weekend or should it get its own queue? How long is this phase before you select heroes, how much time does a team need to feel like they are strategizing but not so long it significantly increases the match length?

Those are the sorts of questions we talk about in our design meetings around this. I think any sort of ban system in Overwatch has the chance to be fairly polarizing, especially when your main gets banned. The point of the experiment will be to gather some initial feedback and make sure that if we ever move forward with permanently adding bans, we've covered all our bases.

An important aspect of our hero design philosophy is that heroes should have clear strengths and weaknesses to create more varied and interesting gameplay. When we look to buff a hero for example, we want to keep this in mind and typically try to focus on a heroes intended strengths rather than clearing away their weaknesses.

We do want to avoid counters being too easy and effective without adequate counterplay options. There is a broad goal of making sure every hero choice is viable in some capacity and feels good to play, while hopefully not feeling too unfair to play against.

Some direct matchups are not reasonably close, like Winston vs Roadhog, but we don't strictly balance off of 1v1 matchups as Overwatch is a team game (Winston has a good chance to win by going after everyone that is not Roadhog for example).

Generally we've found that when the heroes are balanced closely enough, individual player performance and teamwork has significantly more impact on the outcome of a match than hero choice does, until you reach the highest levels of competition.

Two Maugas enter a Cage Fight, one leaves? both leave? There's a lot of Mauga right now, more than any other hero. He's responsible for many deaths, even his own.

The way Mauga was designed invites players to get up into the thick of the fight all together with his team. Overrun encourages players to land directly on top of their opponents and his dual-fire mode is more effective at close ranges. Cardiac Overdrive and Cage Fight invite his teammates to stay close to him to take advantage of their defensive benefits. This can cause Mauga's to go into a lot of situations that are more precarious and will result in him struggling if his team isn't on the same page. Mauga's abilities are versatile and have uses in situations where they don't get full value. Overrun, for example, lets players run away from a fight with damage resistance, so they can poke from farther away with alternating his single-fire chain guns. As time goes on and players explore Mauga's kit more, more nuanced uses of his abilities should hopefully make playing as him less polarizing. His abilities also have a lot of tuning points in regards to both how he helps himself and how he helps his teammates, so there's plenty of room to change his numbers as he develops in the future.

Very well at all rank thresholds, one of the reasons we are putting out some initial changes today to lower his damage output (which also affects his sustain).

During the BlizzCon trial Mauga was actually performing much better than community perception, but there were some issues with his survivability and things like his head hitbox size. We pushed him a bit further with the understanding that we would act quick if things weren't in line with our overall balance goals. Today's nerfs should give us a better look at where he will end up once he enters Competitive.

Anti-Heal is a useful mechanic for the overall health of the game as it helps to ensure that healing never gets too far out of control. The complaints around it feeling oppressive are understandable (as debuffs are never something players enjoy being affected by) and we'll be looking for ways to soften its impact while keeping Ana a viable hero.

The simplest solution here is just decreasing the duration of the effect though there is certainly a point where it swings from feeling OP to not useful enough if the time is too low to really capitalize on.

The reaction around it does also suggest that healing is probably too impactful overall so we'll be looking to address that in the near future as well, whether that is handled in the case of individual heroes like Roadhog Take a Breather or more systemically.