[2021] We’re the Overwatch 2 Hero Design and Balance team, and 1 hour from this post, we’ll be here to answer your questions about the OWL playtest videos we recently released on YouTube!

This is something we've been experimenting with, and talking a lot about. No hero has moved roles yet though, but we've started testing Doomfist as a tank (as previously mentioned)

Doomfist's kit is full of crowd control effects and mobility, which makes it difficult to tune and balance him as a DPS in OW2. As a Tank though, he can keep those key properties to his kit since those can fit nicely into a Tank role (mostly the crowd control stuff).

Of course this means he'll be losing some damage and gaining some defenses. This is still being tested and iterated on, so I dont have a ton of details on it yet as it is still in the early stages. Some of the early feedback so far is that he's not really feeling like a tank without having at least one active defensive button (his main defenses are passive atm), so thats something we'll probably try next.

The biggest change here is the less ult gain from tanks. We haven't actually modified and ultimate costs outside of this change (and the implicit 5v5 changes, obviously).

Having ults happen less often was something we were targeting early on, and this tank change largely accomplished this for us by itself. This is something thats super easy to iterate on though, and im sure we'll be tweaking it throughout the game's development/beta etc.

This is an interesting one we're keeping an eye on since internally the resounding feedback has been that Zarya is far in the other direction and many think she is too strong and constantly high energy with being able to bubble herself twice.

There's a couple details that get overlooked with this new shared cooldown set-up in that the duration of the barriers have been extended slightly (we started at 3 seconds and its gone down to 2.5) and the cooldown timer starts ticking immediately, unlike on live where the barrier has to be destroyed or time out first. So if the barrier isn't broken your cooldown is coming up quicker than on live by some amount. The current internal cooldown is 9 seconds and it's easy to tune that lower if she isn't performing well, but at some point it breaks down and too many of those barriers quickly gets annoying to try play against.

The flexibility to barrier yourself twice in succession or an ally twice is also powerful utility in itself. Using both barriers at exactly the same time is the worst case scenario for cooldown management but sometimes necessary. Part of the interesting gameplay can be making that choice.

So far, broadly speaking, we've found that supports are often more safe in a 5v5 environment because there is one less tank trying to dive and take them out. There are instances where this isn't true, like Sombra and her rework trying to assassinate them, or being sniped easier without a lot of barriers to hide behind, etc. In those situations sometimes its a matter of just trying to position more carefully or maybe Sombra just being bit too OP right now :P

Initially we were worried that supports without mobility to escape might be weak in this environment, but so far we've actually seen Zen/Ana being very strong instead of weak, because of the nature of their offensive capabilities in a 5v5 environment.

Its funny, I actually tried to throw him some buffs right before the build went out but I missed the deadline slightly.

He has been pretty tricky to tune with his rework, but it was great to see him playtested by these great players. I feel like his new design is solid, its really just a matter of getting his numbers into a good place now. Since this playtest, we've buffed him in a number of ways: He moves faster in sentry mode, his ult starts dropping faster (though the projectile moves slower so you can see it a bit more), his recon fire rate has been increase, and other buffs.

The tricky thing though, is when playing him it can feel like you still get thrashed pretty hard because he is such a large hero, he is very easy to target and hit with everything (especially when he gets discorded, etc). There is a lot we can tweak with that as well though, such as increasing his passive (Ironclad) to offer more protection while transformed. We also have new tuning knobs to help control his Sentry mode, since it now has a cooldown and duration associated with it.

I think it's important to have a concept of these high damage output heroes, which each have their own limitations and tradeoffs, though not necessarily to fulfill the role of specifically taking out tanks and barriers. This is especially true with the format change to one tank per team in 5v5, because it can give players more options to respond to a variety of challenges they may be trying to overcome in game (more depth of team comps can lead to deeper gameplay). We have taken some tuning steps to make abilities like Storm Arrows and Echo's beam less lethal against tanks but still keep them powerful in other situations.

I can't give out any specific details, but the answer is yes! There aren't too many instances of this but also in some cases, there are important balancing factors which haven't been changed yet in those playtests builds because of new mechanics and interactions with unreleased or reworked heroes.

What is your planned direction for the design/balance of support heroes for making sure they are still impactful?

Even in this 5v5 environment, Supports are still feeling very impactful. In many ways, they are actually more impactful than in OW1 currently. In 5v5, there is less damage going around to both teams, coupled with the ability to focus heavily onto your single tank it becomes actually easier for both teams to sustain longer fights.

Which leads directly into the next question

It seems like you want to move away from healing considering the 25% healing reduction, but you also nerfed the utility with the removal of brig's stun and cooldown increase on Ana's sleep dart. Some people have brought up that you maybe want supports to frag more but why play a support over a dps at that point? It's just very confusing what you are trying to so.

Theres 2 parts to this question so let me break it down.

• The healing reduction was an attempt at combating the first question/answer here, where sometimes fights can sustain for too long and it felt like it was too hard to confirm kills with 1 less player per team dealing damage. That, and we were trying to make "poke" damage be more meaningful. Right now, even in OW1, sometimes it can feel like shooting an enemy is doing nothing but feeding your enemy supports ultimate charge. That said we already backed out of this specific change internally, but we still have similar goals and we're looking at other iterations.
• The utility nerfs to Brig's stun and Ana's sleep dart are more a response to trying to chill out crowd control effects from the game, and less about having them frag more. Ana's sleep dart is extremely strong but its also a great playmaking tool and leads to some sweet highlights and counterplay opportunities (I've seen more videos of clutch sleeps on a flying Pharah or Genji ult online than maybe any other support highlight). So its not likely that we'll remove Ana's sleep dart, but other non-tank CC's we've been taking a hard look at and trying to change them to remove the CC component and buff it in other ways, which leads to the next question:

Also, is Brig's shield bash just a place holder for now or is the increased damage with no other effect the final product?

I think it wasn't super clear all the changes that Brig's shield bash has gone through from just the video. Some notes on how it has changed

• It lost it's Stun (that much was clear)
• It can go through barriers once again (this was removed a while ago in a balance patch to try to address concerns with Brig vs. Rein/Orisa etc)
• It deals more damage, once again. This damage was all but removed in a previous balance patch to try to reduce her stun combos, but now it can retain this damage.
• It's damage now triggers Inspire. Initially I actually thought this might feel like a minor change but upon playtesting I found this to be extremely helpful. You can shield bash enemies to trigger inspire and move to safety without ever lowering your shield.
• It travels much further, almost twice as far. It is much more useful as a mobility tool in this version.
• It has a much reduced cooldown. Its not really important how much of a cooldown reduction it has right now, as it is likely to change as we iterate on the balance of the game, but what is important is that having a reduced cooldown combined with the ability to travel much further makes her generally a lot more mobile so she can escape or be aggressive a lot more easily as needed.

What we've found from our internal playtesting is that generally support heroes have become the most impactful role by a wide margin with overall less incoming damage on the field and with the reduction of a tank, fewer high health pool targets to try and keep up. This led to the average time to kill becoming much higher and many fights stalling out longer than we'd like. Not only healing output but utilities like Mercy Resurrect, Ana Sleep Dart/Biotic Grenade, Zenyatta Discord, etc are even more impactful in a 5v5 world.

The general approach was to reduce healing output by some amount, but we don't really know what that amount is on an individual level. A little peak behind the scenes for game dev: The blanket passive heal reduction with a new concept of being "in-combat" is a shortcut for us as designers to find an approximate value of what it should be changed by since to adjust the value from playtest to playtest, we only have to change that one number rather than edit every healing script value individually. The reason for the "in-combat" rule was mainly because we already know from earlier tuning in Overwatch's history that when healing is too low (Mercy/Zen/Lucio especially), it's annoying to try and heal large health pool tanks between fights. We've considered adding a bonus heal multiplier to the Tank role passive, but it also contributes to the issue of fights stalling out as mentioned above. It could still happen in some form though.

So far the role passives have been great, and helped quite a bit with both balance and hero design, in general.

have always thought that one of the things that was a balance point in the support roster was that Mercy and Zen have a passive self heal but can't heal themselves under fire. Now the supports that are able to heal themselves while under fire are additionally getting a passive self heal. Is this something you have considered? Should Mercy and Zen also get a way to heal themselves while under fire?

Yep, this is something that we talked about quite a bit when working on these passives. We still want Mercy and Zen to be better at healing themselves, but we're just raising the minimum self-healing bar from zero to "some small amount". As we're designing support heroes, this is a constant question we struggled with in the past and this role passive allows us more flexibility in designing future heroes.

Does it really make sense for a hero that slows you down (Mei) to also passively move faster than you? What about heroes that already moved faster? Are they now moving too fast?

Currently the movement bonus that dps heroes get is very small, but can still be impactful in these kinds of situations you mentioned. Overwatch is a game that has an insane amount of mobility, so this change is somewhat of a drop in the bucket compared to what heroes can do with their abilities (especially for a hero like Mei, who has no other significant mobility options). We're still very much in testing on these so we'll see what sticks and what needs to be changed or removed.

Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect? Is there any you are already planning on acting on?

Yep, we had a good mix of things we expected and things we didn't expect. Probably the biggest surprise for me was just how good they thought Sombra was in this iteration. We had been playtesting those changes for at least a few weeks and while she felt strong, she never really felt like she taking over our games or anything.

Obviously when you get her in the hands of pros with amazing game sense and coordination it makes confirming kills a lot easier. We've since focused a bit on her numbers and tweaked her down a bit to try to keep her under control while still allowing her new kit to play well.

Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya's bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?

I think there is a good amount of iteration to still be done with Zarya. I think Josh already touched on some Zarya stuff in another thread but I would definitely say she is not set in stone. She was always going to be a bit tricky to tweak in this 5v5 environment and im sure she'll see some more changes over time.

We're certainly still experimenting with many different ways to ensure that tanks are powerful and satisfying to play in this new format. One of those experiments is seeing how far we can push tank base health up before the gameplay starts to breakdown.

Some of the tank results have been surprising. D.Va specifically has ended up much more relatively powerful with only an extra second of Defense Matrix energy. She has other changes as well but that one did some heavy lifting! Roadhog as well had several experimental buffs along the lines of more damage reduction, resetting Hook cooldowns, or even being able to cleanse himself of things like anti-heal that were taken out because he ended up being just so impactful at a base level (largely due to how valuable an early Chain Hook can be in 5v5).

There are still some problematic mechanics we're working to resolve like Orb of Discord being nearly always on a tank or Echo Duplicate choice coming down to being the best on the buffed up tanks. Generally we haven't found tanks to be getting blown up instantly unless they're hard overextending or aren't working with their team at all, in which case they should be vulnerable there, but of course we'll have to see how that holds up at the professional level.

if it was still 6v6 and he was a off tank i can kinda see it? my guess is that hes going to use his CC to push enemies into bad positons or something.

Yep, this can still be a big part of his kit. For example, one thing we're testing is for Rocket Punch to create an area knockback around a target he impacts, creating a new ability to knock multiple enemies away (or into walls!).

i just hope i can still do rollouts and stuff because that is what made doomfist challenging and very fun to play.

Doomfist's high mobility is a huge part of his kit and that's not going to change. In fact, its part of what makes him potentially a good tank, being able to initiate fights for your team.

if he doesnt work as a tank in ow2 is he going to remain as a DPS with the same kit?

This is tricky tbh. In a world where almost all crowd control has been removed from non-tanks, Doomfist would be a huge outlier. Maybe there is a world where he can still exist as a DPS with less displacement and crowd control effects, but it would certainly be a challenge to make that work.