Blizz_JNoh

No official plans at the moment but I’d love to have more of the MEKA Squad in the game. I’m also a big fan of them!

I wouldn't necessarily call it a rework since it’s more tuning than changing the mechanics but the general goal of the changes is to help improve her mobility and enable her to better react to the faster pace of 5v5. Can't go into all the details but there are things like a shorter teleporter build time and faster secondary fire projectile speed.

We're certainly still experimenting with many different ways to ensure that tanks are powerful and satisfying to play in this new format. One of those experiments is seeing how far we can push tank base health up before the gameplay starts to breakdown.

Some of the tank results have been surprising. D.Va specifically has ended up much more relatively powerful with only an extra second of Defense Matrix energy. She has other changes as well but that one did some heavy lifting! Roadhog as well had several experimental buffs along the lines of more damage reduction, resetting Hook cooldowns, or even being able to cleanse himself of things like anti-heal that were taken out because he ended up being just so impactful at a base level (largely due to how valuable an early Chain Hook can be in 5v5).

There are still some problematic mechanics we're working to resolve like Orb of Discord being nearly always on a tank or Echo Duplicate choice coming down to being the best on...

What we've found from our internal playtesting is that generally support heroes have become the most impactful role by a wide margin with overall less incoming damage on the field and with the reduction of a tank, fewer high health pool targets to try and keep up. This led to the average time to kill becoming much higher and many fights stalling out longer than we'd like. Not only healing output but utilities like Mercy Resurrect, Ana Sleep Dart/Biotic Grenade, Zenyatta Discord, etc are even more impactful in a 5v5 world.

The general approach was to reduce healing output by some amount, but we don't really know what that amount is on an individual level. A little peak behind the scenes for game dev: The blanket passive heal reduction with a new concept of being "in-combat" is a shortcut for us as designers to find an approximate value of what it should be changed by since to adjust the value from playtest to playtest, we only have to change that one number rather than edit ...

I can't give out any specific details, but the answer is yes! There aren't too many instances of this but also in some cases, there are important balancing factors which haven't been changed yet in those playtests builds because of new mechanics and interactions with unreleased or reworked heroes.

I think it's important to have a concept of these high damage output heroes, which each have their own limitations and tradeoffs, though not necessarily to fulfill the role of specifically taking out tanks and barriers. This is especially true with the format change to one tank per team in 5v5, because it can give players more options to respond to a variety of challenges they may be trying to overcome in game (more depth of team comps can lead to deeper gameplay). We have taken some tuning steps to make abilities like Storm Arrows and Echo's beam less lethal against tanks but still keep them powerful in other situations.

This is an interesting one we're keeping an eye on since internally the resounding feedback has been that Zarya is far in the other direction and many think she is too strong and constantly high energy with being able to bubble herself twice.

There's a couple details that get overlooked with this new shared cooldown set-up in that the duration of the barriers have been extended slightly (we started at 3 seconds and its gone down to 2.5) and the cooldown timer starts ticking immediately, unlike on live where the barrier has to be destroyed or time out first. So if the barrier isn't broken your cooldown is coming up quicker than on live by some amount. The current internal cooldown is 9 seconds and it's easy to tune that lower if she isn't performing well, but at some point it breaks down and too many of those barriers quickly gets annoying to try play against.

The flexibility to barrier yourself twice in succession or an ally twice is also powerful utility in itself...