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Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-22T00:49:12+00:00

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 difficult with her extreme mobility before as well as Mercy players having more agency in their ability to save low health allies. However, at the same time the reduction in mobility is going to feel bad for Mercy players needing to adjust to the new timing.

Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-21T21:34:38+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-21T21:33:16+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-21T21:31:45+00:00

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 to the current roster. The recent examples being we didn’t make changes to Roadhog who was underperforming because we knew Kiriko cleanse could potentially make him more viable (it did) and that Junkerqueen ultimate was going to be really strong without the cleanse as well.

Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-21T20:09:55+00:00

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).

Blizz_JNoh · 2023-02-21T20:07:39+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-23T00:35:03+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T22:00:01+00:00

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)

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T21:40:00+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T21:32:37+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T21:27:59+00:00

In general the broad goal is to provide a wide range of playstyle options. There isn't really a big shift in that regard towards being weighted more toward healing/damage/utility etc. We do need to make sure they fit well into 5v5 and are able to have a significant impact on the outcome of a match but that can be achieved in a variety of ways depending on the individual hero kit. Future support heroes could lean more on mechanical skills while others can be geared toward rewarding timing and positioning more than testing things like aiming.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T21:14:34+00:00

Can confirm Junker Queen does a normal Quick Melee if she doesn't have the knife in hand.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T21:08:48+00:00

We’ve worked through a few more iterations to give Moira additional utility. It’s not in the upcoming beta build yet but I believe we’ll be able to patch it in at some point for you all to try out.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T20:54:31+00:00

That’s where the game originally started, for example Symmetra used to be a support with no healing but granted shields instead. We found that healing in general is so powerful and broadly useful that trying to design pure utility supports is a difficult task when it comes time to tune their ability strength to stack up against healing.

It’s possible we try it again at some point but at the moment we try to give all support heroes some amount of healing, though playing with the ratio of healing/utility/damage a hero has can make for unique and very different feeling gameplay experiences.

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T20:42:48+00:00

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!

Blizz_JNoh · 2022-06-22T20:30:16+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2021-10-14T00:55:52+00:00

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 the buffed up tanks. Generally we haven't found tanks to be getting blown up instantly unless they're hard overextending or aren't working with their team at all, in which case they should be vulnerable there, but of course we'll have to see how that holds up at the professional level.

Blizz_JNoh · 2021-10-14T00:13:26+00:00

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 every healing script value individually. The reason for the "in-combat" rule was mainly because we already know from earlier tuning in Overwatch's history that when healing is too low (Mercy/Zen/Lucio especially), it's annoying to try and heal large health pool tanks between fights. We've considered adding a bonus heal multiplier to the Tank role passive, but it also contributes to the issue of fights stalling out as mentioned above. It could still happen in some form though.

Blizz_JNoh · 2021-10-13T23:48:03+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2021-10-13T23:41:08+00:00

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.

Blizz_JNoh · 2021-10-13T23:16:03+00:00

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. Using both barriers at exactly the same time is the worst case scenario for cooldown management but sometimes necessary. Part of the interesting gameplay can be making that choice.

Blizz_JNoh

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