Blizz_GeoffGoodman

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 ...

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 bubbl...

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 rea...

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 l...

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 ...

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.

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 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.

I think that the team had made great decision with changing the team composition to be 5v5, but I think most reason why people get upset on that change, is because of the tank synergy we have right now. Has the team thought about forgiving that in any way, by idk changing dps maybe?

One of the core goals of Overwatch hero design is to create these fun synergies and combos throughout the entire roster. It certainly sucks to lose some of these combos, but a lot of game design is making a call to decide if what you are gaining is worth what you are losing. In this case, after significant playtesting, we think its more than worth it for the benefits we gain out of 5v5.

It seems that the tanks with OW2 go more in brawly direction than protect and peel direction, which I am scared makes the game more 'watch out for yourself' than 'watch out for your teammates', and I don't like this direction. Should we expect loads of changes from ...

Currently, no EMP does not remove over-health. But, hopefully as evidence from some of my other answers, things are very heavily in flux right now, especially in regards to CC and Sombra, so its possible we'll make it work on all over-health.

Brig and Torb gain over-health instead of over-armor now, but it acts like normal health and so doesn't have any innate damage reduction built into it anymore. We'll have to compensate for that as needed, probably by giving more health for them.

Though I will go one step further and ask, "should armor even work the same way it does in OW1?" Its fairly complex and if you ask an average player how exactly armor works most of them will just say something like "oh i dont know, it reduces damage taken somehow". We haven't changed anything with it yet, but its on my list to look at and maybe simplify into something like, "armor health takes -X% damage".

It has further implications if we do that, like bigger hits no longer fe...

She actually started as a Support! I talked about that in a different answer already though.

For OW2, I've done some iteration on her in regards to how she might work in a world where there is less crowd control effects for Damage heroes. Recently we've run two different playtest ideas for her:

1. She couldn't hack players at all anymore, but instead she gained a +50% damage bonus when shooting an enemy in the back.
2. She could hack players again, but a hack on an enemy just meant your allies could see that player through walls instead of silencing them. She could also hack while invisible (she was visible while hacking, but invis wasn't broken). Then, she gained a +30% damage bonus against hacked targets.

These were interesting tests, but each had their own share of big problems.

For #1, it felt weird/bad to just never be able to hack enemies. Shes supposed to be this hacker but her hack was relegated to health packs mostly. This is...

I would say overall, yes there is a shift towards at least slightly more of a raw FPS game. However, Tanks and Support (and even some dps like Doomfist) have always been more about abilities than just aimskill/shooting. This isn't going to change. I feel like this is core to what makes Overwatch what it is, reflecting many different playstyles and empowering many different types of skilled players in different ways. Its always been a balancing act for us, but for a while during OW1's new hero additions it was really starting to feel like we were pushing maybe a little too far away from our FPS roots.

Other than a bunch of stuff we've thrown on the test server and pulled at the last minute (like Zen's discord being able to target through barriers), maybe the most significant was Sombra's hero design. For most of her development, she was a Support hero instead of a Damage hero. In this role, her main goal was to hack every enemy, while sneaking around and trying to stay alive. At that time, Hacking an enemy was a long duration debuff that reduced their healing/damage output, rather than the short duration high-impact debuff it became later.

The idea was that she was balanced so that if she successfully got enough hacks on the enemy team, your team would effectively be able to win a 5-6 (since she wasn't very good in combat for her team), simply because the debuffs were strong enough to allow for that. This is all fine and good on paper, and it was pretty fun to play her this way, but people just hated getting debuffed in this way. In fact, every time we'...

I think the common one that comes up here is Mei, which is something we've talked about in the past, but we haven't run the "mei tank" experiment internally yet. I feel like she would have to change quite a bit to fit the tank role, so its a bit more of a rework to have her fit well into that role. That doesn't mean its off the table, just that its not a trivial change to throw in and try out.

If we did try it, im sure we'd try the ice slide that everyone loves to think about :) It certainly feels more acceptable on a Tank, which would allow her to engage in front of her team etc.

Doomfist I think requires a bit more thought than even Mei. He is extremely unique, even amongst the Overwatch roster, but he essentially requires CC to control him, and he throws out a bit too much CC himself, even if her were a tank. We haven't started digging into him yet, as we're still figuring out how some of these CC changes are going to play out, but hes on my list to look at as so...

I would say freezing with her primary in PvE is a minimum of what you'll see. We have so many crazy ideas for talents for every hero, I can't wait to show you guys more as we get closer.

For me, in the short term, i'd say the biggest misconception I see about 5v5 and 1 Tank being that off-tanks are being removed, changed, etc. But really, many off-tank heroes are getting tankier, and many main tank heroes are getting less tanky and more damage/options, so really the new Tanks are somewhere in-between MTs and OTs.

If anything, I would guess that off-tanks would have an easier time adjusting to OW2's new Tank role than main-tank players.

I would say a lot about OW2 is going to be different. The tank play will certainly change, but if you're an experienced off-tank player im sure you'll find great success with those same heroes in OW2 as a solo tank.

Sure!

When re-approching Bastion the biggest starting point is like, "what is the core of this hero that feels like we should make sure to preserve". Our answer to that is he is a transforming robot, with huge damage potential when he is using his various modes well. We want to make sure Bastion isn't purely about aim-skill, but he also has a big focus on situational awareness and timing/positioning.

We're looking at pushing his recon form's range out by changing his recon weapon. This helps him generally be more useful, but also helps create separation between his other forms, especially sentry. For sentry form, the cost of reducing his mobility to gain huge damage is still interesting and its the heart of what makes him work. However, completely removing his mobility has proved to be too harsh of a penalty, and frankly its not realistically possible to balance him with this downside in mind (especially between different skill levels). So right now we're testing al...

Honestly we're not sure yet. We'd like to have it exist in some form, but I'd say balancing the game for both 5v5 (1 tank) and 6v6 (2 tanks) is unlikely, so the 6v6 mode would most likely be an arcade mode or something like that if we can do it at all.

Possibly, that's still on the list to play around with.

For what its worth, she can still freeze with her ultimate.