Blizz_Alec

Perks are mainly about creating new things for your heroes to do, increasing situational viability, and giving you more agency over your in-match experience.

For that goal of increasing the amount of situations in which a hero can be viable: That can come through via shoring up weaknesses against certain heroes, that can also come through by adding mobility so certain heroes can be played on more maps. That goal led to perks like Junkrat's Frag Cannon, Sigma's Levitation, and many more.

For perks like Sombra's White Hat, that is fulfilling a particular hero fantasy that many players wanted us to lean into and we think that's an interesting opportunity the perks system creates. Over time, we'll see how players respond to some of those more off the wall ones.

We have a fix for this coming next week actually. You'll get two random perks (one Minor and one Major) each time you spawn.

We played with a variety of movement perks for heroes that don't have much mobility. We wanted to see if we could do a movement perk for Torbjorn. I think it only lasted a playtest or two but Torbjorn could launch himself off of his turret by double jumping on it. And the idea was that if you had the Sticky Turret, you could change the angle of that leap and catapult yourself into backlines. Maybe we will come back to that one day, was certainly silly!

The goal there would be that every hero gets at least one new perk to play with! Still scoping out what that refresh would look like for Season 18, but somewhere around 25-50% of the perks changing (some being completely new and some receiving significant tuning). If we have perks that players really love, we don't want to immediately remove those and the refresh would be looking at perks that are more middling in interest.

We'd also like to evaluate how the perks system functions overall at that point too. That could include changes to the catchup mechanics, gain rates, or even a starting level choice. Those are fairly early discussions though and how this season goes will give us good insight of where to take perks next.

We did want to add more friction to counterswapping and we've seen that drop quite a bit since Season 15's launch. It'll be some time before players settle on how much less they want to counterswap but in Ranked Role Queue we've seen players swap about 25% less and more so at the highest ranks (Masters+ players swap much more than the ranks below that).

For power spikes, the goal of the perk system isn't to limit power spikes. We actually introduced more power spikes and hopefully more texture to your individual hero's moment to moment gameplay through the perks system. We think a number of our heroes needed bigger moments than they had previously.

Going forward, we are looking at raising up some of the less impactful perks and making sure you feel there's a real choice between your Minors and Majors. We have a lot of opportunity to make that choice more interesting by cutting out some of perks players aren't gravitating towards. Things like Roadhog's increased Pig ...

Well the goal overall is to make fun perks for every hero! That can be more difficult on certain heroes though, as boosting certain elements of their kits can cause issues. Currently, the number buff perks are some of the perks we like the least and plan on changing a handful of those over time. This initial launch has given us plenty of signal on which perk combinations players find compelling and which ones they don't!

Think it's important for us to stay true to our values for Minor and Major perks. Your Minor Perks are supposed to be lighter, nice little upgrades. Your Major Perks are supposed to be transformative. We have some work to hit that goal for all of the heroes and offering more transformative Major Perks.

1. Actually neither! The true impetus for this was our need for a game system layer to introduce more change into the core game. Having some talents to pull from was nice to have but a large majority of the perks were built for the perk system specifically. The team had gotten really great at expanding kits, so there was plenty of good experience for us to bring good learnings into building perks. Junkenstein's Lab gave us more signal for Stadium and how much we could expand the bounds of an Overwatch match while still making it feel like Overwatch.
2. We played with a number of different iterations. Originally we had three levels but there was no choice, didn't feel very different. Some iterations later we gave players their Minor Perks passively but you had a choice between two Major Perks later on in the game. We really liked the choice that gave, so decided to bring it in earlier at the Minor Perk level. Overall, we felt this was the right amount of change to introduce...

Like you, I also believe Clash is awesome when it all comes together! We actually spent a good amount of time on Clash's scoring before we made the decision to pull it from Competitive. Even with scoring changes, we believed the mode needed some fundamental geo changes to points A+E to perform better as a Competitive mode. Currently we are experimenting with building another Clash map from the ground up with a different approach to the layout to see if that solves some of the core issues the mode has. That's all very early, but hopefully some significant geo changes along with scoring changes can get Clash into a great spot.

Some of the winners so far have been Ana, Bastion, Pharah, Ramattra, and Winston. When it comes to individual perks: Ramattra's Vengeful Vortex, Mauga's Firewalker, Zarya's Energy Lance, and Soldier 76's Agility training have all been quite impactful. It's important though to look at the combination of your Minor and Major perks, what rank thresholds players are using them at, and how quickly a hero is gaining their perks. There's still quite a bit for us to dig through there!

In the immediate, we mostly plan on balancing perks in order to make them feel more impactful. There will still be some core kit tuning alongside that, but there's still a meaningful amount of change we want to inject into the system throughout the next few patches. Tuning to perks and actual perk swaps (hoping for some in 16.0) are included in that.

We are taking a few good swings here. Excited and even slightly nervous, looking forward to sharing with y'all.

Posted below, just a small social media break!

Hey hey! Just taking a small social media break and seeing how it goes (it's only been 12 hours ha). Will definitely still be communicating with y'all but maybe through official comms more than usual. Preference for those types of comms has usually been streams, bit more difficult to have quality conversations on twitter.

Posted below, just a small social media break!

Hey hey! Just taking a small social media break and seeing how it goes (it's only been 12 hours ha). Will definitely still be communicating with y'all but maybe through official comms more than usual. Preference for those types of comms has usually been streams, bit more difficult to have quality conversations on twitter.

It's a bug and a fix should be going live tomorrow at 11am! Sorry about this one

1. I think we are more happy in the 20% DPS Passive world than the 15% (it cuts through a lot better, helps mitigate the healing more effectively) so Mercy is more worth a look when that world is permanent. There are some questions of how far we can push her movement and know that is one of the most requested changes.
2. Mercy is still a top-picked 3/4 Support and even higher on console until you hit GM/Top 500. Her performance follows a similar trend, where she's in the top grouping for most ranks and remains above average at the highest ranks. Doesn't mean that she wont receive changes but that is where she is at currently.

Answered the Roadhog question in a different place, but yes changes coming soon.

For Lifeweaver, one of the discussions we are having right now (actually this week) and have been having for a while is around the friction that comes with switching between his healing and damage. Giving him more flexibility here would be a great boon to his capability within team fights. Additionally, we've experimented a lot with his Petal Platform. Personally would love for that to be a more attractive area to stand on as a teammate (whether that be through a buff the platform gives you or something else) but there's a lot of learned behavior to work through as allies hop off the platform quite often.

These fall outside of hero design but can talk briefly about the first two questions

1. Think you are referencing the speed boosts that would potentially come to Flashpoint. Took us some time to get these in a good place but they have been promising in playtests and are on track for a later season. It's important to us that when we add elements like that to a mode that it not only brings quality gameplay but is also communicated well through Sound and VFX. Feel good here now.
2. We got a lot of great feedback but there are some things the team wished we did better with the Clash Preview. Firstly, it should have showed up more in Quick Play so y'all got more reps on it and can get a better feel for the flow of the game mode. Secondly, we don't think it was best suited for Open Queue in Arcade. If we do something like this again, we'll clean that up. With the feedback we received, we've been investigating how to make the final point more appealing to capture for the ...

Some of this is related to meta happenings or balance changes but also related to armor changes/headshot reduction for Tanks. From what we can see the biggest winners (in terms of their performance delta) of the patch are: Ana, Junkrat, Pharah, Roadhog, Sigma, Wrecking Ball, and Zarya.

Many heroes stayed relatively similar while a handful saw a decrease in performance (Bastion, D.Va, Mauga, Orisa, and Reaper).

Yes, we plan on nerfing his survivability very soon. We are touching Take a Breather and Whole Hog in an upcoming patch. Hoping that can go live tomorrow.