Thank you for posting these answers to many good questions. Time for me to get back to work on getting the dev post directory updated.

Good day all,

A handful of our developers took the time to address questions surrounding gameplay design and lore revolving around Overwatch’s 30th Hero, Baptiste. Their answers to YOUR questions are below.

UPDATED: Please note that Baptiste will be unlocked in Competitive Play two weeks after his release.

LORE

Does the Caribbean Liberation Front have affiliations with Talon, Overwatch, Blackwatch, Helix Securities or any other in-game organizations?

Michael Chu: They’re not directly related, but members of one would often end up moving to one of the others. Many of these organizations sprang up in the years after the end of the Omnic Crisis. After Baptiste and his Caribbean Coalition squadmates finished their tours of duty, they found the most lucrative path that still...

Hey Zhearun,
Do you mind posting the following info:

1. List or screen shot of your Overwatch PTR sound settings
2. List or screen shot of your spacial audio settings in Windows
3. Copy of your DxDiag

Thanks!

Thanks for the report. Please let us know if this issue happens again after our most recent PTR patch update.

Thanks for this report. Please let us know if you encounter this again after today’s PTR patch update.

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that pl...

Oh I just got my instructor in my web scripting class to punch in the Konami Code on PlayOverwatch.com… he couldn’t believe what he saw.

Hmm… you’re right…

I actually looked into the railings stuff with Symm/Reaper ground targeting and worked on it for a while last week. It turns out its a bit more complicated and is going to require some code changes to try to change it, but i’m hoping we can get something in next patch if it goes well in play testing.

As far as the teleport build speed… maybe. I totally get the thing where you go to try to make the clutch save and the build time is so long that they die anyway, but the concern is we need to make sure we don’t just give your whole team nearly instant teleportation across a huge area. If we’re not careful it could really make all chokes not even worth trying to defend etc. That said it something we could try and play test with and see how it goes.

I think that’s certainly possible. Overall her healing output is still higher than the other healers, which she pays for by not being able to split focus and do other things while healing. I’d also love to be able to increase the power of her damage boosting, but it causes a lot of issues with various breakpoints where suddenly X hero can one-shot 200 health heroes etc. There are other ways to make it feel better without just adding raw damage though, we’ll see.

I always thought it would be cool to try to do some sort of “tunneling” effect, where you could maybe temporarily destroy or remove a small part of a level to move or shoot through.

Honestly it’ll probably never happen due to immense tech issues, but it always seemed like it could be cool to see.

We have a ton of unused ability and weapon prototypes sitting around. They’re generally either something we’ve tried on a hero in the past and didn’t like, or something we did like but didn’t feel like it fit right on the hero we were testing.

Some examples off the top of my head:

Bomblet Gun: We had this gun where the projectiles would stick into enemies, but the impact damage was pretty low. The alternate fire had a fairly long animation time but would remotely detonate all the little bombs you stuck into all your targets. It was pretty fun but we just need the right hero for it to work with (it was really fun playing around with it on Tracer!).

Invis Wall: This was originally on Sombra i think? The idea is you plant this wall that made it so enemies couldn’t see you though it, but you and your allies could see just fine. It didn’t block bullets like a barrier, it was just for hiding while running past a choke or just throwing into the middle...

We’re mostly going to see how this next patch shakes out, since it has a ton of changes in it already.

That said, we would have liked to keep the Junkrat buff at 140 from a pure DPS stand-point (especially against Tanks/Barriers), but it was just really pushing it once he could one-shot 200 health heroes with a 50%+ boost (Orisa ult, Nano, Baptiste ult, etc). We experimented with making the grenades no longer explode on enemy impact once they hit a surface (as a way to nerf his spam, without affecting direct hits) but it felt really weird and kind of broken in a lot of cases.

So possibly Junkrat buffs and some different Reaper buffs, since the pure passive healing buff was really problematic at the lower ranks.

Thanks for the response, and I look forward to the responses in Baptiste Q&A. Have a good night.

I’d say at this point its pretty clear Brigitte’s initial balance was pretty far off the mark. She has been nerfed multiple times since then and she is still very strong.

Another regret is although I really like the way Hanzo has turned out, I somewhat regret increasing his projectile speed specifically. It will always feel great when testing a change like that, and it has helped make him a lot more consistent… but he has lost some of what helped make him feel very different than other heroes. That’s not to say you’re going to see Hanzo nerfed next patch or something, but its just one of those retrospect things that I wonder if there was another way to get to the same goal.

Geoff, what do you think was the most overpowered balance change the team has made?

Thanks!

Overwatch is certainly a challenging game to both tune and continually add new/interesting content. When I think back to how the game was in beta, or even launch, I feel like we’ve come a long way since then. Remember, there was a time when McCree’s fan the hammer did full damage per bullet, Zenyatta had 150 health, Pharah’s Conc Blast did 700 damage to shields/barriers (poor Zen…), Reinhardt’s charge had no “wind up”, it would just come out instantly and pin/kill anyone in front of him.

That said we’re committed to continue to update and tune the game. Although there will always be some changes that will not be popular with some players, know that the the goal is always to keep every hero unique and powerful for everyone.

While I’m here i might as well clear up a couple minor misconceptions I see occasionally about my history at Blizzard. Previous to the Overwatch team I worked on World of Warcraft as an encounter designer. I made a ton of different con...