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To the heroes of Overwatch,
A little over a week ago, the Overwatch 2 Beta came to a close, and we’ve been hard at work reviewing player feedback, internal data, and gameplay to help direct our next decisions. Next week, we plan to share more information about the data we’ve collected, but we wanted to share an update with our community in the meantime.
Moira
After taking community feedback into account, we’ve decided to revert the Moira beta changes, namely the new Necrotic Orb ability. We’ll dive deeper into this in an upcoming statistics blog, but the main reason for its removal is that the overall gameplay loop became too passive for many players. The power that Necrotic Orb brought to the table necessitated a long cooldown to make the effect impactful but not overly frustrating to play against. However, this meant many players would just hold the ability for the perfect moment, which had the side effect of decreasing the amount of “cool stuff happening” in moment-to-moment gameplay and shifting too much of it into healing.
Necrotic orb and all of Moira's compensation nerfs will be reverted in time for Overwatch League, starting August 11.
Mercy
Super jump is the result of a bug that occurred during Guardian Angel. This bug became a core mechanic of high-level Mercy gameplay, and it added a lot of depth to her movement. Our goal was to integrate it into her kit for Overwatch 2, so it wasn’t as hidden for new players.
We recognize that the first iteration on Guardian Angel didn’t quite feel right, and we saw similar thoughts from our players.
We’re currently testing another iteration of Guardian Angel that includes the directional control we added in the beta, but it also allows Mercy to super jump in a similar way as before. This means canceling the ability with crouch will launch her straight upwards, without having to look in that direction.
Partnering Feedback with Development
The team would like to thank everyone who was involved in the testing process. Your feedback continues to be a core component in the development of Overwatch 2.
The Overwatch 2 beta allowed us to test new features and ideas, and we’re super happy to get players involved in that process. We’re constantly looking at player thoughts and gameplay data to help drive our decisions, and the changes to Mercy and Moira were heavily influenced by community feedback. Make sure to keep an eye out for more information on our findings from the Overwatch 2 Beta coming soon!
We hear you, and we can’t wait to show you what we come up with next!