JoshuaNoh-1358

Should be up until Monday. glhf!

The spread changes not going through for Reaper is indeed a bug.
We’ll get it fixed, thanks for the report!

Wow, time sure does fly!

I’ll never forget working at the first Overwatch Blizzcon demo. At the time we only had 12 heroes and 3 maps but the pure joy and excitement on everyone’s faces after they played the demo and jumped back in line again and again was overwhelmingly beautiful.

A heartfelt thank you to the Overwatch community for an amazing four years and really bringing this game to life with your thoughtful involvement and passion! Looking forward to many more.

We’re currently looking at lowering the minimum activation time between when you throw the Concussion Mine and how soon you can detonate it to help bring back the way some players double mine or side jump.

Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it!

The way Hanzo arrows work is there is a base speed of 25 and it adds another bonus speed determined by how long the shot was charged up.

Last patch this was 25+100 x Charge for a total maximum speed of 125.
The PTR value is now 25+85 x Charge so the max speed is now 110, the same value as it was before the Hanzo rework.

I think the old patch notes are incorrectly only listing the bonus speed value and not including the base speed.

Hey, thanks for trying to clarify this! I’m definitely hearing a ton of feedback over the last day and am learning a bunch from this experience.

I came to share my personal viewpoint, listen to the community, and try to make the game better together. I’m truly not attempting to callously disregard anyone’s concerns and say everything is fine.

I’m aware there are distinct increases in power across several aspects of the game such as raw healing output, the introduction of new heroes and mechanics, or things like Wrecking Ball’s extreme mobility. I don’t think this is inherently negative as balance is relative across a large number of factors. There have also been losses of power such as the recent barrier changes.

The idea I was trying to express (and failed to, clearly…) is that I don’t personally feel like there is an unreasonable amount of excessive power creep that makes the core gameplay not feel like Overwatch anymore.
For example, GO...

Yes pick rates are definitely important to consider when trying to interpret win rates. The win rates I’m looking at are from un-mirrored competitive ladder stats (specifically for PC players on patch 1.43 at the GM+ MMR range), meaning games where the hero is not being actively played on both teams.

We don’t balance solely off of stats anyway but they help inform us when something could be really out of whack or can give us a slightly more unbiased lens when trying to identify the root causes of gameplay issues.

Stats don’t do a great job of telling us subjective things like how fun something is, player feedback does. We can try to infer a little bit of that from pick rate but there are too many competing factors.

The most common feedback I’ve been reading recently is that Baptiste and Mei are very overpowered (there are some upcoming changes to these two as well) and Genji/Soldier are clearly the weakest heroes.

When I looked into the current patch stat...

Dropping by with a fun fact!
Looking at GM players for the current patch (1.43), Genji and Soldier: 76 are #6 and #7 in terms of win rate for damage heroes (out of 16 total).

They’re not doing quite as poorly as the general community sentiment would imply. Game balance perceptions/opinions are often repeated and perpetuated enough that they start to become accepted as fact by many players.

We also should remember that things like win rates and hero power/effectiveness can fluctuate significantly depending on the players’ skill level. If someone complains that Reaper is too strong and another says that Reaper is too weak, they could both be correct for their current skill level.

When making balance changes we typically look at the high end potential of player skill for a hero but also try to keep in mind if a given change would be a significant detriment to the overall gameplay experience in lower ski...

We’ve actually been playtesting a Boosters cooldown reduction recently.

It sounded kind of intimidating on paper (tested a 3 sec CD first) but in practice hasn’t been that crazy and allows D.Va to play the midfield more freely, which works well with the current 10 meter Defense Matrix range.

Some version should make it to the next PTR cycle.

Hey there,

Balance changes take time and there will of course be more to come. We’ve just barely entered into 2-2-2 role queue and released a new hero at the same time. It’s important to collect statistics/data, as well as feedback to make informed decisions.

Reverting all balance changes over the last year is unlikely to happen. Any hero change could potentially affect a meta to some degree, but not all changes are directly targeted at the current meta, if that makes sense.

For some transparency, we’ve known for awhile that we would be moving to a 2-2-2 format (it required a long time to implement) and not all changes over the last year were directly targeted at affecting the 3-3 GOATS meta (eg. Soldier, McCree, Junkrat buffs).

The goal of the changes that actually were aimed at GOATS was not to kill it entirely but to weaken it enough, without destroying the individual heroes, that other new comps could arise to compete with it. Though it took a long ti...

Confirming this is an intended change for 1.40.

The turret slow does stack with itself, so 2 turrets will slow an enemy more than 1 turret will, unless that enemy is already slowing themself by a higher value. The new stacking rules are for splitting out friendly (ie. self slows) and enemy slows and taking which is greater.

So if Reinhardt has his shield out and is slowing himself by 50%, then you won’t notice him moving even slower until an enemy slows him by a value greater than that 50% (such as 3 Sym turrets hitting him).

The new rules were to help prevent heroes that slow themselves from effectively being rooted when affected by an enemy snare as well.

This bug fix can have a significant impact for both Zarya and Symmetra beam damage and to a lesser extent Winston and Moira. It will make damage feel more consistent but does not increase their maximum damage.

The issue was that if you were tracking a target with a beam and then lost it (within about a 0.15 sec window) it could end up dealing a partial damage value instead of the full amount.

The odd part of this fix is that the damage increase scales inversely with tracking accuracy. The more accurate a player’s tracking is, the less noticeable the change will be, with professional players likely being the least affected.

We’ll be keeping a close on eye on Zarya and Symmetra in particular this patch.

It’s a bit of a trade off. The infinite duration teleporter ended up being oppressive to play against when we tried having the cooldown start immediately. It meant Symmetra effectively had 2 teleporters and enemy players didn’t feel rewarded for destroying one.

This isn’t my area of expertise but MMR won’t be reset to zero. For active players, we’ve been tracking per role MMR to get an estimate of about where you would land. You’ll still have to do 5 placement matches for each role and MMR will adjust a bit more quickly early on.

Sounds cool! I actually made a prototype of an ability like this in the past.

In the use cases where it works it’s interesting as a disarm or anti-heal and it has some strong team play elements given that they could break you out of a “soft” crowd control effect.

Unfortunately it comes with a lot of problems to solve, is highly situational in its use, and is a rather difficult ability to tune. Not to say that we’ll never try it again, but it’s certainly tricky.

Most people on the team just call me JNoh due to how our internal playtest handles appear.

It’s both! Often times our artists make amazing concept characters where we feel compelled to absolutely make that a hero and figure out a gameplay kit for it.

Other times we can start with a mechanic we want to see in the game or a role that needs to be filled and figure out a character fantasy centered around that.

Sometimes there are just cool ideas left over from old iterations of a hero prototype that we eventually want to work into a new hero as well.

Yes it was an accident, it’ll be there in the next updated patch notes.

Hello, happy to be here!
I just recently got a forum account though I don’t actually have much time to post here. I will try to clarify changes when I can.

I suppose nobody knows who I am, but I joined the design team last year. I’ve mostly been working on hero prototypes and balance patches with Geoff and the rest of the design team.

Thank you all for your feedback, every voice matters.