Blizz_JNoh

At its core, Overwatch is a game designed around being able to swap heroes to gain a tactical advantage or help solve a challenge you might be encountering. This contributes to keeping the moment-to-moment gameplay experience dynamic, drives hero diversity and offers a wider range of both strategic gameplay and skill expression in learning when/where/how to play multiple heroes.

There is a question of how much of an advantage is too much compared to the cost of switching. Ideally we want counters to be clear and understandable, but soft enough that it's still possible to outplay a disadvantaged matchup. It is a team game though and 1v1 matchups are not the highest priority when assessing the heroes.

Tanks do feel this the most with only one of them per team in 5v5 role queue, but all roles do experience the pressure to counter and be countered to an extent.

We're striving to find a balance between swapping heroes every death, (which certainly feels too of...

Hanzo is still an effective mid-range burst damage hero even without the one-shot kills. Post season 9 with the projectile size changes actually saw an increase in Hanzo's performance on the stat side. I do hear you on the loss of how good the one shot kills felt, but an overarching goal of season 9 was to reduce a lot of those burst damage frustrations for players on the receiving end of it. Armor changes in season 10 have also been a benefit to his damage.

Still very early but we've been experimenting with adjusting health pools for some of the more evasive or high damage heroes which would also put them back into the range of lethal Hanzo headshots and some other hero combos at 225 HP, but while it would bring some interesting texture to hero interactions overall there are also a bunch of other problems to solve if we want to go through with it.

There aren't any plans currently to shift resources toward supporting something like that. Sites like Overbuff don't have the complete picture, but the data there for win rates and such is generally fairly close.

There is some argument against being too transparent with those stats in that it can create a bit of a feedback loop where you might see player behavior driven by what appears to be the meta in the stats, but that kind of happens already with just the general discussion and sentiment around heroes without stats as well.

Our target range for hero viability by win rate is between 45-55% unmirrored win rate at Masters rank and above. Those individual win rates often can fluctuate 2-3% by day, mostly because heroes tend to have a wider range of win rates per map and we're looking at the global average of those, but also individual player performance isn't consistent.

Lower pick rate heroes fluctuate more and there is less confidence in their win rate be...

Probably Sombra due to permanent invisibility restricting how deadly we can make her but also because she is a hero that excels with strong team coordination.

There are a handful of other heroes with performance stats that differ greatly from the broader community perception of them and that can create difficulty in how we approach balancing them as well.

Anti-Heal is a useful mechanic for the overall health of the game as it helps to ensure that healing never gets too far out of control. The complaints around it feeling oppressive are understandable (as debuffs are never something players enjoy being affected by) and we'll be looking for ways to soften its impact while keeping Ana a viable hero.

The simplest solution here is just decreasing the duration of the effect though there is certainly a point where it swings from feeling OP to not useful enough if the time is too low to really capitalize on.

The reaction around it does also suggest that healing is probably too impactful overall so we'll be looking to address that in the near future as well, whether that is handled in the case of individual heroes like Roadhog Take a Breather or more systemically.

An important aspect of our hero design philosophy is that heroes should have clear strengths and weaknesses to create more varied and interesting gameplay. When we look to buff a hero for example, we want to keep this in mind and typically try to focus on a heroes intended strengths rather than clearing away their weaknesses.

We do want to avoid counters being too easy and effective without adequate counterplay options. There is a broad goal of making sure every hero choice is viable in some capacity and feels good to play, while hopefully not feeling too unfair to play against.

Some direct matchups are not reasonably close, like Winston vs Roadhog, but we don't strictly balance off of 1v1 matchups as Overwatch is a team game (Winston has a good chance to win by going after everyone that is not Roadhog for example).

Generally we've found that when the heroes are balanced closely enough, individual player performance and teamwork has significantly more impa...

This is usually trying to be consistent with game mechanics. We do make exceptions when necessary for the sake of game balance, but the less often we need to do that the easier it is for players to learn and understand these many interactions across multiple heroes.

Mauga's ultimate tethers are applying what we internally call "Mobility Lock" which disables movement skills. Other things that use this mobility lock are Junkrat Steel Trap, Cassidy Magnetic Grenade hinder effect, Zarya and Sigma ultimates. For gameplay consistency, you should be able to use Symmetra Teleporter and Lifeweaver's Lifegrip against those abilities.

Game design goes through a lot of iteration to find the most engaging combination of mechanics within the scope of our goals. We naturally try a lot of prototype variations even with a strong starting idea.

We tried a few alternate mobility abilities for Overrun. One of the first ideas was a short range dash that would toss enemies into the air behind him if you impacted them. It was fun to use but the transition from third person to first person and trying to turn around to shoot them wasn't easy, and solutions like automatically doing a 180 with the camera took away control from players.

The weapons had a couple alternates such as a flamethrower or incendiary grenade launchers. There were a few attempts at having two very different firing weapons in each hand, so one being hitscan like it is now and the other being a travel time projectile. It didn't play as well when trying to fire both at the same time unfortunately, especially in versions where they have differ...

We'll have to see how this develops over time as there's always a learning curve for new heroes. Shooting both guns is not always more effective due to the large spread and more random nature of it. Learning when to use each firing mode to your advantage is part of the fun. Generally if enemies are further than 15 meters or so you'll want to use the alternating primary/secondary fire.

Mauga is intended to be an aggressive, high damage output tank as he offers less in defense to his team compared with other tank options and doesn't have great mobility. We're lowering Mauga's weapon damage in general which will help with some of this where it can feel extreme at times.

He has good and bad matchups within the tank role, which is great for creating some depth, so it's not necessarily a role-wide problem. Sigma/Dva match up well and have an advantage against him, Roadhog/Junkerqueen/Ramattra are fairly even matchups, Zarya/Rein can do decently but require more support from their team, and Mauga is strongest against the dive tanks and Orisa.

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...

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...

The Experimental Card was much more useful in the past when the patches were further apart (months vs weeks). The turn around time to have it patched and reacted to between releases means it isn’t really feasible as a testing for upcoming live patches sort of thing, though hopefully we’ll try to find some fun uses for it again in the future outside of just patch previews.

The most polarizing changes are usually during the hero prototype or rework phase rather than anything for live balance. There have been a lot. The ones that immediately come to mind are Sombra Hack reducing max health for a minute, Wrecking Ball knocking down enemies he rolls over, and D.va having an ability to tether and drag enemies with her mech (launching them tethered to her ult was hilarious and mean).

This is an interesting one since I often play Pharah even without Mercy, so I’m probably biased there. Pharah is a hero that is tough to find buffs for (and she performs better on the stats side than most so it always becomes a question of if she even needs changes). She is quite situational as a pick but very capable of taking over the game in the right circumstances and is sort of a harder skill check for the enemy team than most heroes in terms of trying to counter her. I wouldn’t put that all on the Mercy combo, but it is very powerful.

We’ve considered potentially reworking Pharah to make her more interactive, but it would be a dicey one since to make big changes there, it would likely mean she has to lose the air time she is capable of. Her design started as the ‘rocket launcher’ hero but her identity quickly shifted to the ‘always flying’ hero. Losing that would likely alienate a large portion of her fans.

Jumping in late for this one since I had some meetings earlier but wanted to respond to this.

Can't speak for everyone but for some insight into the hero design team we've had a significant amount of time dedicated to creating the talent trees (we previewed some of these at Blizzcon).

For context there are about 40-50 talents split into 3 trees per hero and each of those trees has a few talents that are a similar complexity to creating a new ability for a hero.

Heroes in OW usually have 3-4 abilities and a weapon so prototyping a new hero is actually faster than making the talents for one (in terms of design time and scripting - not counting all the real production and art that has to happen).

There are 36+ heroes to do that for and then we've also got the PvP side with all the 5v5 rebalancing, hero reworks, and new hero development on top of that.

Overlapping abilities is always an interesting discussion topic for our team. We're generally okay with it but it really depends on what the ability mechanic is.

For example we've found many players are not excited by stacking barriers. Healing is an ability mechanic that stacks and prevents dying but is fine until the values get too high and consistent, so it's really a question of degrees.

We'll see if stacking or alternating AoE speed boost becomes too problematic or conversely if it opens up new and interesting gameplay strategies. There is currently a cap on maximum speed boost which if I recall correctly is 75% (that value could change in the future)

We actually tried this out early on in OW2 development. The nice thing about it was that it reduced the effectiveness of the AD strafing spam. This made hitscan heroes much more consistent with their damage output, which wasn't a problem since we could balance around that.

The main problem was that players were so used to how responsive movement feels in OW1 that it was too jarring to make a big a change there and after trying smaller and smaller increments, it kind of got to the point where there wasn't much tangible benefit to aiming but movement still felt "laggy" so we got rid of it altogether.

There was a backend issue with hotfixing (updating without a full patch) that was causing a lot of players to crash when trying to play the experimental card. No ETA on when that will be resolved but many of those changes will also be in the upcoming beta.