Blizz_Alec

1. I think we are more happy in the 20% DPS Passive world than the 15% (it cuts through a lot better, helps mitigate the healing more effectively) so Mercy is more worth a look when that world is permanent. There are some questions of how far we can push her movement and know that is one of the most requested changes.

2. Mercy is still a top-picked 3/4 Support and even higher on console until you hit GM/Top 500. Her performance follows a similar trend, where she's in the top grouping for most ranks and remains above average at the highest ranks. Doesn't mean that she wont receive changes but that is where she is at currently.

Answered the Roadhog question in a different place, but yes changes coming soon.

For Lifeweaver, one of the discussions we are having right now (actually this week) and have been having for a while is around the friction that comes with switching between his healing and damage. Giving him more flexibility here would be a great boon to his capability within team fights. Additionally, we've experimented a lot with his Petal Platform. Personally would love for that to be a more attractive area to stand on as a teammate (whether that be through a buff the platform gives you or something else) but there's a lot of learned behavior to work through as allies hop off the platform quite often.

These fall outside of hero design but can talk briefly about the first two questions

1. Think you are referencing the speed boosts that would potentially come to Flashpoint. Took us some time to get these in a good place but they have been promising in playtests and are on track for a later season. It's important to us that when we add elements like that to a mode that it not only brings quality gameplay but is also communicated well through Sound and VFX. Feel good here now.

2. We got a lot of great feedback but there are some things the team wished we did better with the Clash Preview. Firstly, it should have showed up more in Quick Play so y'all got more reps on it and can get a better feel for the flow of the game mode. Secondly, we don't think it was best suited for Open Queue in Arcade. If we do something like this again, we'll clean that up. With the feedback we received, we've been investigating how to make the final point more appealing to capture for the attacking team. Many games could result in the attacking team not actually wanting to push onto the last point because it wasn't worth the reward (harder to capture, give up a lot of positioning if you lose). Plenty of iteration happening here now to address that particular issue.

Some of this is related to meta happenings or balance changes but also related to armor changes/headshot reduction for Tanks. From what we can see the biggest winners (in terms of their performance delta) of the patch are: Ana, Junkrat, Pharah, Roadhog, Sigma, Wrecking Ball, and Zarya.

Many heroes stayed relatively similar while a handful saw a decrease in performance (Bastion, D.Va, Mauga, Orisa, and Reaper).

Yes, we plan on nerfing his survivability very soon. We are touching Take a Breather and Whole Hog in an upcoming patch. Hoping that can go live tomorrow.

For the most part, we are relatively happy with the new bases both have been given but there is still some fine-tuning to be done.

I'll start with Wrecking Ball. Our goals were to give him more flexibility with his movement/engage options, heighten the benefits he gives to his team, and give him some quality of life updates. I think our changes all attempt to address those goals but one I think we can hit harder in the future is heightening the benefits he gives to his team. We were a little conservative with the Adaptive Shields change (overhealth is hyper scary in coordinated environments), so perhaps there's room for that to be more pronounced through tuning and actual feedback received in game (working on some updates there). Overall though, Wrecking Ball is doing much better after his recent updates and we believe we have a great base to work with going forward.

For Roadhog, aside from the conversations about his current survivability (we plan to hit that soon) there are some things for us to look at concerning the frequency of his combo. For example, his Pig Pen begins to go on cooldown when you throw it. So you can pre-place one, it gets destroyed, and then Roadhog already has it ready again (even though the enemy may think there's a window where Hook is less deadly). That's one discussion we've recently had. Still some work here for us to do in terms of the value Pig Pen brings outside of the combo as well and how we can make those windows of combo potential less frequent.

I tapped in our own Gavin Winter for this first part, he's what he had to say: "There haven't been any changes to these systems, but there are edge cases like the example of Guxue that was recently posted in this subreddit where our systems don't perform in the way we'd like. Most players will still be placed appropriately as they transition from Quick Play to Competitive Play, but unfortunately cases like this have always been possible. Explaining exactly how this happens would make it easier reproduce, so you'll have to excuse me from not going into intricate detail here."

For the second part of your question, we believe we made it slightly too difficult to climb at the highest ranks and are looking at making some adjustments soon.

1. We should do a better job about this, especially when it comes to getting the community's visibility on what we are seeing vs. what the playerbase may seem to think is the best hero at any given one time. These can differ regularly as certain heroes get power reputations (weaker or stronger than their reality at a given rank) that are hard to shake off. Thanks for the feedback there, will make sure we have something here even if it's a simple change.

2. Symmetra kept some of the buffs in that patch but yes we hear the feedback of where her current power level is. We may have been a bit overreactive to the Mauga compositions popping up during that timeframe (he was certainly overtuned), but we wanted to be sure of it. For right now, we are in discussions about Symmetra and especially her frontline presence. Believe that's a piece of the kit we'd like to promote further, whether through her survivability or beam damage.

The two upcoming updates that were mentioned were for Cassidy and Reaper.

For Cassidy, we started some exploration pre-Season 9 for his update. Due to where he was at that time, this update was originally looking at multiple pieces of his kit but we saw the Season 9 changes largely benefit him so the update has gotten more focused on Magnetic Grenade and other Quality of Life updates (specifically to his Ultimate). In Season 11 we are updating Magnetic Grenade. It will behave closer to old Flashbang (no magnetic homing to the target, used in the short range) and will slow/hinder the target. We think that plays a lot better with his kit and removes some of the larger frustrations around Magnetic Grenade. More specifics on all that soon.

For Reaper, we went fairly wide as well in the beginning and then started to focus closely on updating Shadow Step. At the moment, we have something we quite like but it's actually a large technical challenge and we are in the process of planning out the work/seeing what's possible. In the meantime, we may buff Reaper in some non-Tank Buster ways as he lost a lot in the most recent update.

No secret testing of anything upcoming in the immediate! We do look at how some changes play out though when they become more real and get lots of games, I think the Bastion Ultimate in particular was quite fun even if very loud and on the border technically. Reinhardt's Frenzy passive was also something we played around with internally but it was quite hard to communicate effectively. It's always good to see what players get excited about when there are more wacky ideas such as Mirrorwatch or April Fool's, some of those could become real down the line.

Yes, mainly a look into the world of some ability overlap

Some of this was for Widow duels - there were spots we saw Widows dueling each other (from statue to spawn on King's Row was one sightline we used) and just not dying even though we felt the distance should have resulted in a kill. Should still be safe from one-shot when playing 250hp heroes further back (behind car on first point, ledge above is fine too for King's Row for example). If it ends up shifting her effective range too much, it could get rolled back.

Her melee was only dealing 30 damage instead of 40 (the new increased amount)

Trending in the right direction here design wise for a smaller set of changes. Hopefully won't have y'all waiting too long, this won't be a Roadhog in terms of timeline.

Very well at all rank thresholds, one of the reasons we are putting out some initial changes today to lower his damage output (which also affects his sustain).

During the BlizzCon trial Mauga was actually performing much better than community perception, but there were some issues with his survivability and things like his head hitbox size. We pushed him a bit further with the understanding that we would act quick if things weren't in line with our overall balance goals. Today's nerfs should give us a better look at where he will end up once he enters Competitive.

Two Maugas enter a Cage Fight, one leaves? both leave? There's a lot of Mauga right now, more than any other hero. He's responsible for many deaths, even his own.

Want to clarify here that the first time we do this it will be for a limited time as an experiment. With that said, we're still discussing how exactly it will work in the match flow and where we put this experiment. Should everyone get a ban against one hero in their role? Should this experiment actually run in competitive for a weekend or should it get its own queue? How long is this phase before you select heroes, how much time does a team need to feel like they are strategizing but not so long it significantly increases the match length?

Those are the sorts of questions we talk about in our design meetings around this. I think any sort of ban system in Overwatch has the chance to be fairly polarizing, especially when your main gets banned. The point of the experiment will be to gather some initial feedback and make sure that if we ever move forward with permanently adding bans, we've covered all our bases.

Reaper is also on that list! Had our first brainstorm and have aligned on our overall goals for what we want to see with Reaper's abilities. One of those goals is modernizing Reaper's kit, Shadow Step and Wraith Form standing out there.

We may also explore some new abilities for Reaper (on the right-click), but don't want to take the space just because it's available. If we add something there, we'll want it to give him slightly more decision making in-combat than he has currently.