GeoffGoodman

Hmm… you’re right…

I actually looked into the railings stuff with Symm/Reaper ground targeting and worked on it for a while last week. It turns out its a bit more complicated and is going to require some code changes to try to change it, but i’m hoping we can get something in next patch if it goes well in play testing.

As far as the teleport build speed… maybe. I totally get the thing where you go to try to make the clutch save and the build time is so long that they die anyway, but the concern is we need to make sure we don’t just give your whole team nearly instant teleportation across a huge area. If we’re not careful it could really make all chokes not even worth trying to defend etc. That said it something we could try and play test with and see how it goes.

I think that’s certainly possible. Overall her healing output is still higher than the other healers, which she pays for by not being able to split focus and do other things while healing. I’d also love to be able to increase the power of her damage boosting, but it causes a lot of issues with various breakpoints where suddenly X hero can one-shot 200 health heroes etc. There are other ways to make it feel better without just adding raw damage though, we’ll see.

I always thought it would be cool to try to do some sort of “tunneling” effect, where you could maybe temporarily destroy or remove a small part of a level to move or shoot through.

Honestly it’ll probably never happen due to immense tech issues, but it always seemed like it could be cool to see.

We have a ton of unused ability and weapon prototypes sitting around. They’re generally either something we’ve tried on a hero in the past and didn’t like, or something we did like but didn’t feel like it fit right on the hero we were testing.

Some examples off the top of my head:

Bomblet Gun: We had this gun where the projectiles would stick into enemies, but the impact damage was pretty low. The alternate fire had a fairly long animation time but would remotely detonate all the little bombs you stuck into all your targets. It was pretty fun but we just need the right hero for it to work with (it was really fun playing around with it on Tracer!).

Invis Wall: This was originally on Sombra i think? The idea is you plant this wall that made it so enemies couldn’t see you though it, but you and your allies could see just fine. It didn’t block bullets like a barrier, it was just for hiding while running past a choke or just throwing into the middle...

We’re mostly going to see how this next patch shakes out, since it has a ton of changes in it already.

That said, we would have liked to keep the Junkrat buff at 140 from a pure DPS stand-point (especially against Tanks/Barriers), but it was just really pushing it once he could one-shot 200 health heroes with a 50%+ boost (Orisa ult, Nano, Baptiste ult, etc). We experimented with making the grenades no longer explode on enemy impact once they hit a surface (as a way to nerf his spam, without affecting direct hits) but it felt really weird and kind of broken in a lot of cases.

So possibly Junkrat buffs and some different Reaper buffs, since the pure passive healing buff was really problematic at the lower ranks.

I’d say at this point its pretty clear Brigitte’s initial balance was pretty far off the mark. She has been nerfed multiple times since then and she is still very strong.

Another regret is although I really like the way Hanzo has turned out, I somewhat regret increasing his projectile speed specifically. It will always feel great when testing a change like that, and it has helped make him a lot more consistent… but he has lost some of what helped make him feel very different than other heroes. That’s not to say you’re going to see Hanzo nerfed next patch or something, but its just one of those retrospect things that I wonder if there was another way to get to the same goal.

Thanks!

Overwatch is certainly a challenging game to both tune and continually add new/interesting content. When I think back to how the game was in beta, or even launch, I feel like we’ve come a long way since then. Remember, there was a time when McCree’s fan the hammer did full damage per bullet, Zenyatta had 150 health, Pharah’s Conc Blast did 700 damage to shields/barriers (poor Zen…), Reinhardt’s charge had no “wind up”, it would just come out instantly and pin/kill anyone in front of him.

That said we’re committed to continue to update and tune the game. Although there will always be some changes that will not be popular with some players, know that the the goal is always to keep every hero unique and powerful for everyone.

While I’m here i might as well clear up a couple minor misconceptions I see occasionally about my history at Blizzard. Previous to the Overwatch team I worked on World of Warcraft as an encounter designer. I made a ton of different con...

Just fixed this one, thanks for the report!

Yep, sorry I forgot this note! This change sets his wall-speed to roughly as it was before the speed song nerf, but its actually a decent buff because it affects you while you’re in heal song as well.

Oops, sorry. This is an internal name we use (almost everything has a different internal name). Fixed!

We’re looking at updating the PTR soon with the following additional hero changes:

Junkrat

• Frag Launcher: Impact damage increased from 40 to 60

Lucio

• Speed Song: Effect lowered from 30% to 20%
• Amp it up: Speed song amped effect reduced from 70% to 50%
• Wall Ride: Passive movement speed gained while wall riding increased from 20% to 40%.

Mccree

• Bonus damage ramp from the previous 1.34 change will now begin after 1.5s, down from 2.5.

Reaper

• Passive: Healing amount reduced from 50% to 40%

Symmetra

• Photon Projector: Primary fire damage ramp speed increased by 20%

Zarya

• Particle Cannon: Alternate fire radius reduced from 2-3 to 1-2 (based on energy level)

Zenyatta

• Orb of Discord: Effect reduced from 30% to 25%
• Orb of Destruction: Damage increased from 46 to 48

I’m not s...

No this only affects how much armor reduces these weapons.

We still may do something with Shadow step in the future, but its not likely to suddenly become something you can do in combat like Tracer’s blink.

It’s meant to be a way to sneak behind enemy lines to drop on them or otherwise ambush them. In the past we’ve buffed it towards further reinforcing this direction like increasing its range and reducing its sound range.

The armor change I am referring looks like it isn’t going to make this next patch, so it will probably the patch after.

Those particular changes won’t be massive, but right now all “channeled” effects (Zarya, Symmetra, Moira, Winston, etc) are reduced by a flat amount like any other source of damage, but the size of the damage packets is purely based on how fast they tick, even though the tuning of the weapons are done via a general DPS calculation. For example, Winston’s tesla cannon was initially tuned way back when to have a faster update rate because it felt a lot better to use that way. However, currently that also means he does a lot less damage to armor.

We’re getting some new tech which allows us to separate armor reduction amounts for these effects from their update rate. This doesn’t mean we’re going to just go through and buff all of these weapons necessarily but we are going to go through them all and make sure we’re happy with how much damage they...

This post is to track further updates to the PTR as we make them. The following changes are planned for a PTR patch that will probably come on Monday.

Brigitte

• Shield Bash
  • Damage reduced from 50 to 5
• Inspire Passive
  • Cooldown reduced from 1.5s to 1.0s
  • Duration increased from 5s to 6s
  • Total healing increased from 80 to 100

Dev Notes: Reduces Shield Bash’s damage reduces her total stun combo damage potential while still allowing Whip Shot and her basic melee attacks to retain their full strength. Brigitte is a hybrid tank/healer, and lately we’ve been reducing her effectiveness by reducing the power of her non-healing functionality, but we want to make sure she is still a viable pick so we’re increasing the uptime of her Inspire passive to help increase her overall healing output.

Doomfist

• Seismic Slam
  • Victims no longer lose air c...

We do have one shield bash change we are playtesting right now, which is likely to hit the next PTR: Shield Bash no longer going through barriers.

This means it is a lot more tricky to land a clutch stun on an enemy Reinhardt, for example, but you can still use the ability to close distance and land melee hits to trigger Inspire.