Sorry no this would be part of other changes, like Fade still causing your team to phase out (like the last experimental card).

It was a fun experiment, but it was too good as a dispeling/cleasing tool and far too good at countering zarya/sigma ults. We're going to try a version where she can still phase out her allies, but she doesn't remove debuffs (like ana nade) and it wont break people out of these ults. You can, however, learn to time it vs. sigma ult to try to cancel the damage part of the slam, or just reduce incoming damage while stuck in Zarya ult, which can still be very powerful (maybe too much still? we'll find out)

This is a reasonable request. I'll look into it.

On the lethality/ttk front:

Its hard to know exactly if lethality has crept up in the actual hero data, if the meta and/or player skill has pushed it up further than it was, or if its all just perception, but we've tried a couple internal experiments where we've tried lowering dmg and healing across the board to see how it feels. That experiment didn't quite work as a simple experiment, because there are a number of heroes that have certain thresholds that break if you lower damage etc. We'd have to do something more methodical to test it properly but I can tell you for sure the game doesn't feel very good when lethality gets too low, even if healing also gets low.

On the healing front especially, once health bars are moving up and down a lot more slowly, it makes it really hard to feel like you're "saving" people in clutch situations (unless you use an ult or something of course).

Interestingly, on our list of experiments to try is to make the game signific...

I absolutely love working on Overwatch and the team is amazing. I'm regularly inspired by the amazing people that not only directly work on the game but also support us from other groups. Much love to folks in IT, Battle.net, Risk, Game Security, Customer Service, Localization, etc.

The community regularly inspires me. It's why you'll find me on reddit and our forums regularly outside of the AMA. Thanks for being a player and a fan, we're thankful for you! <3

Making Overwatch a better, more positive place to play for everyone is super important to us. While we've made a lot of progress with player reporting, thank you messages for reporting bad behavior or abusive chat, endorsements, etc., we're always looking to do more.

We definitely know it can be difficult for women of all ages to use voice chat, as the abuse and harassment takes away your enjoyment of the game (and as you noted, your SR!). I hear this from the women on the OW team, across Blizzard, and in our community.

There are some initiatives under development that we hope will directly address these issues, but I can't quite talk about them yet.

In the meantime, everybody please continue to report players who are being abusive through the in game reporting mechanism, whether they're being abusive to you personally, or anyone else. The reports do matter, and as a community we can make Overwatch a more positive place for everybody.

creating new heroes is a lot of fun. our process is interesting in that new heroes can come from story (76, ana), design (pharah) or art (winston). we really inspire each other with ideas and we'll add different heroes for different reasons. we're always talking about "what does the game need right now"

All parts of the team collaborate in the creation of the heroes. Heroes are usually available to play in team playtests months before they will come out. So we all get a look into them in an extremely early state.

The game engine is a good bit more flexible in development than it is in retail, so often the designers have what they need to make something work; we just need to make a pass to control the performance and efficiency of the heroes so that they will function well on all our supported hardware. On occasion, like with Echo, we need to do more significant rewrites of systems so that we can get things within a shipping budget.

Zarya, Zenyatta, McCree

One time I accidentally replaced Ana's dart projectile with Ana's ragdoll. That meant any time I shot Ana's rifle a dead Ana shot out of my gun hehe.

This comes up fairly often, and in the past we have done a few things to nerf ultimates already. We've nerfed the ultimate costs across the board twice now, to try to make sure they aren't coming up too often. We've tried to adjust ults that feel like they don't have enough counterplay, such as Sombra's EMP getting a longer delay before going off.

Overall this is something we're very aware of and we're trying to make sure ultimates still feel like big moments within the game, but not just purely being an 'I win' button. Abilities like Baptiste's lamp (which btw i find funny the community calls it this, since internally we literally used a lamp model while testing it) were created to help open up more options to counter ults without requiring your own ultimate. Ideally it should feel great to land a big ultimate, but also feel great if you can work around or straight up counter an enemy ultimate, which is also why we made a change a while ago which made it so if you ever kil...

Remote support is challenging. Our team regularly works together to support each other, we have chat channels for help, and people utilize that regularly for support. While engineers are often helping the team out with connectivity issues, it really has been a team wide effort to band together and solve problems.

thank you so much for saying that. warms my heart. but i always remind people: overwatch is made by a whole team of amazing developers... i am just one tiny and equal part of that. but thank you.

I think one of our core processes that helps us be successful is finding ways to fail early and fail fast. For us this usually means prototyping abilities with really rough blockout art until we have a kit we generally like. Keeping things in this rough state means it is a lot easier for us to change direction or iterate.