[2020] Upcoming experimental card

later this afternoon we will be deploying changes to the experimental card (hopefully)

i wanted to give a little insight to the changes that we are trying. the term “crowd control” or “cc” is used to refer to abilities that heroes can do to other heros that cause them to lose control of their character. examples include mei’s ability to freeze you, reinhardt knocking you down with earthshatter or getting stuck in junkrat’s trap.

in overwatch, we need to walk a fine line with crowd control abilities. on the one hand, we are a highly competitive first person shooter. on the other hand, one of the defining things about overwatch is the fact that our heroes have amazing abilities and mobility. we understand that crowd control abilities can cause a lot of frustration. any time, control is taken away from you it generally doesn’t feel good.

so these experiments are targetted at certain heroes, specifically at their crowd control abilities, with the intent being that they will affect you less and have a lower overall impact on the game.

the one exception on this round of experiments is roadhog. we actually want to try to buff his ult a little bit to make it more impactful. it’s not as much of a pure buff as it might seem at first – while you will knock enemies back more, you’re also likely to push them out of damage more (unless you corner them).

internally, we have some bigger ideas about crowd control for overwatch 2 and are trying some experiments we are not able to bring to the experimental card (more fundarmental and larger changes).

we’ll see how this round goes and we’d love feedback. hopefully we can put some of these changes live if the test goes well.

HERO CHANGES (ONLY IN EXPERIMENTAL)

Roadhog

Whole Hog knockback increased 20%

Reinhardt

Earthshatter knockdown duration lowered from 3 to 2.5 seconds

Sigma

Accretion
Knockdown duration is now a fixed 0.8 second instead of scaling with distance
Cast time reduced from 0.75 to 0.65 seconds

McCree

Flashbang stun duration lowered from 0.85 to 0.7 seconds

Mei

Endothermic Blaster freeze stun duration lowered from 1.5 to 1.3 seconds
Blizzard duration lowered from 5 to 4.25 seconds

Ana

Sleep duration lowered from 6 to 5 seconds

Brigitte

Shield Bash stun duration lowered from 0.75 to 0.65 seconds

Hey everyone!

We just tried to push the experimental card to Retail servers, but saw that it caused some crashes. We’ve pulled it back temporarily until we can identify and fix the issue.

Thanks for your patience - we’ll update as soon as we have more information!

fyi: the experimental card is causing issues so we had to bring it down. we’re working on bringing it back up but it is unlikely to happen today. apologies.