Overwatch Dev Tracker

Mercy stayed about the same as before, the changes were mostly neutral in terms of power. Her win rate is still around 51-52%. There was a small drop in pick rate from 9 to 8%. Her ‘damage taken’ stats increased by like 4 or 5% but her average deaths stayed the same – likely we can attribute this to the new passive at work and taking more damage due to the longer GA cooldown.

We don’t have further changes planned for Mercy at the moment. We feel it would be good to let this one settle and see how players adjust to the changes since it can take some time, and then evaluate if more adjustments are necessary. The meta is also quite different between the two patches so it’s even more surprising that Mercy wasn’t really impacted overall.

Despite the stats not changing much there have been both positive and negative effects on the player experience. There has been positive sentiment around players feeling like they can more fairly try to counter Mercy in ways that were...

When looking at adding to a hero or reworking them, we first ask: can we achieve our desired gameplay changes in their current kit and abilities? The GA meter for Mercy in OW2 is a good example of adding something new within her present abilities. If we can’t solve for desired gameplay within what we have, we’ll next ask if there is room on the hero for something brand new. We are currently asking those questions for Sombra and Roadhog. If we end up doing new abilities for either of them, it’ll take some time and I’d expect small holdover changes like the ones in our Season 3 patch.

Varying health amounts is a great tool to utilize when designing or balancing a hero. Characters like Reaper and Mei, who thrive in close-range combat, can utilize their larger amounts of Health to help mitigate the risk of approaching close-range fights. Varying health amounts can also help provide flavor to a character. Tracer has a low amount of health because she's quick and nimble, yet Torbjörn has more Health because he's heavily armored. The last balance patch lowered Widowmaker's health to 175, which shows we're considering health amounts when it comes to balancing the heroes overall.

I was looking at Widowmaker stats just last week, mainly for map balance discussions, but it was interesting to see that with the current map pool there were 4-5 maps where Widowmaker was really effective, 4-5 maps where she is quite bad or rarely picked (presumably because she’s not good there) and the rest were that she was playable, but not particularly great.

For anyone wondering her worst maps were 2 of the Push maps and 3 Control maps. Her best maps were 3 Payload and 2 Hybrid maps.

Snipers feel quite counterable to me at the moment but it’s certainly something we keep a close eye on to make sure they don’t get out of hand. I think the instances where snipers feel oppressive to play against are really memorable as it’s typical of human nature to remember the bad more than the good. At least for me, it’s rare that I remember when the enemy Widowmaker was ineffective and swapped off versus when she was dominating.

Great question! We’re certainly aware of the heroes that the community is generally more receptive to being meta though we don’t specifically plan around trying to make them the most powerful.

They are usually already popular heroes that will be played regardless of their underlying strength at any time. Many of these heroes have an advantage of having been available since the original game launch and are more accepted because of it.

As a fun exercise, imagine some of the launch heroes being released today and what the community reception to them would be just seeing the design/abilities on paper.

Our primary goal with hero balance is to try and get every hero to be viable at the top end of the competitive ladder (Masters-Top500, within a range of statistical viability since it’s a measurable goal). We also try to keep a handle on any significant outliers at lower skill tiers as well as large community pain points.

I love seeing the community engagement since it means players are passionate about the game. There are many great ideas that generate discussion for us or at least help inform us of the current community sentiments. The downside is that it can be disappointing for them when they don’t see their suggestions directly take effect in game and wonder why we aren’t using their perfectly calculated solutions.

Many players don’t consider the game balance ecosystem as a whole and focus almost entirely on their own experience with a particular hero and how to make that one hero stronger or feel better to play, which doesn’t always align with our goals as designers or what the stats imply about the current balance. There are always tons of other limiting factors like tech/schedule/implementation considerations players aren’t aware of so you really can’t fault anyone there.

For the second part of the question, we do think about upcoming heroes or changes and how they relate...