Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – May 18, 2021

A new patch is now live on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

OVERWATCH ANNIVERSARY 2021

We’re celebrating Overwatch’s fifth anniversary with brand new items, including Legendary skins like Funky Baptiste, Venus Moira, Junkfood Junkrat, and more! Participate in the weekly anniversary Challenges for even more amazing rewards, such as Cybermedic Ana, Bird of Paradise Echo, and the 8 Ball Wrecking Ball skin.

If you missed any Overwatch events from the previous years, you’ll be able to unlock items from past events using credits or by opening Loot Boxes. Every day, we’ll feature a set of your favorite seasonal brawls in the Arcade.

Thank you for playing Overwatch with us for half a decade. We can’t ...

Welcome to Season 28 of Competitive Play

Season 28 of Competitive Play is here!

Unlocked at level 25, Competitive Play is designed for those players who want to put their skills to the test, and offers a more serious experience than our Quick Play or Arcade Modes.

GETTING STARTED

Before you can kick off your competitive career, every player will be required to complete five placement matches in a selected role to obtain their seasonal skill rating for that role. Within the standard Role Queue competitive mode, players will earn separate skill ratings (SR) for each role in Competitive Play, for a total of three distinct SRs. This rating will be a number between 1 and 5000, with higher values indicating a greater skill level. Players will also be assigned a tier per role based on their rating—Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, or Grandmaster – and climbing into the next tier is possible as you improve. Open Queue will utilize the same rating and tier system, but since ther...

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – April 28, 2021

A new patch is now live on PlayStation and Xbox. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

BUG FIXES

General

• Fixed a bug that caused statistics on the Career Profile screen to extend off-screen

As a note - We are planning on leaving this PTR up for 1 week!

Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – April 26, 2021

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that platform.

BUG FIXES

General

• Fixed a bug with team composition tips appearing on hero select in non-role-queue 6v6 game modes

Maps

Nepal

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to stand on top of the bell

Oasis

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to stand in an unintended location

Heroes

Junkrat

• Fixed a bug that caused the default RIP-Tire portrait to appear when equipping specific skins
• Fixed a bug where using RIP-Tire on a ledge could cause it to appear on the ground underneath

Rein...

Hey everyone, this year’s Archives event is introducing our new mechanism for weekly event unlocks!

To unlock Archives weekly rewards, you’ll need to earn Stars. Stars can be earned by completing Archives missions. Each week, a different Archives mission will offer double stars, and you’ll have the opportunity to earn the most Stars by playing on higher difficulties or Challenge variants. With this system, you’ll be able to earn Stars even if you do not succeed with your Archives mission.

Our goal with making this change is to allow unlocks to be more closely tied to the seasonal content, while also finding ways to allow for partial credit even when you don’t win a match. Previously, the system was all-or-none in that losing a match didn’t earn you any progress towards your weekly unlocks. Please note that this will be an iterative process and we’ll continue to make adjustments to this system in ways that make unlocks more engaging for the seasonal content.

If you have an NVIDIA Reflex enabled GPU you will find an option to enable the “Flash Indicator.” When enabling this option a small white square will be displayed when your primary fire button is first pressed. For users who have Reflex Latency Analyzer equipped monitors, you can use the flash indicator in conjunction with Geforce Experience to get real-time measurements of your total system latency. It is important that the flash indicator be displayed with our without Reflex enabled so that users can understand their total system latency in all scenarios.

NVIDIA also has a post to help provide some insight, here: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5175

Appreciate you following up with these additional details! For more information on the flash indicator resulting from the Trigger Flash option, please check out this article from NVIDIA: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5175.

Thanks for sharing your experience with the new feature. We’d like to follow up to ensure that we understand the issue and can troubleshoot accordingly. There were two options included in this update:

1. Reflex, which has 3 modes: Disabled (default), Enabled, and Enabled+Boost. These modes control if Reflex will be enabled to lower input latency.
2. Additionally, there is a second option: the Trigger Flash. When Trigger Flash is enabled, we present a white square so that players with Reflex Latency Analyzer equipped monitors can measure their input latency. In order to be able to form accurate comparisons with Reflex on, and off, it is important that this white square be presented always.

These options are independent of one another, so if you have the Reflex option turned off, the trigger flash can still be turned on separately. The Trigger Flash should be disabled by default, requiring you to enable it to be active. Do you mind confirming which options you have selected? We want to verif...

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – March 22, 2021

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

EXPERIMENTAL HERO UPDATES

This experiment is intended for use during the Overwatch League Experimental Card Tournament and for you to try out these player-suggested changes yourselves–there is no plan to implement these changes outside of this experimental card.

HERO UPDATES (ONLY IN EXPERIMENTAL)

Ana
Biotic Rifle

• Ammo increased from 12 to 14

Nano Boost

• Can now be self-cast on Ana by using the interact key

Ashe

Dynamite

• Damage reduced from 100 to 90

Baptiste

Regenerative Burst

• Healing reduced from 75 to 65

Immortality Field

• Now protects teammates to a minimum health threshold of 1 health, down from 20% of ...

Nope - Only Xbox next week!

Hey everyone,

We want to give you a heads up that there will be an hour or two of server downtime on the Xbox platform on the morning (PT) of Tuesday, March 23rd. We will be conducting some server maintenance during this downtime. Please see the schedule below for an outline of the anticipated downtime (subject to some change):

• 10:00 AM PT – Competitive Games will be disabled
• 10:30 AM PT – Creation of all other game modes will be disabled
• 10:55 AM PT – Servers will go offline

Our team will work as quickly (and safely) as possible to keep the server downtime to minimum. With that said, we do not anticipate the downtime to extend longer than two hours. We will also be sharing some messaging in-game on the day of the patch.

Thanks for your patience!

The Overwatch League Flash Ops Experimental Card Tournament has been announced! Be sure to check out the Overwatch League website for more details.

It’s important that we clarify that these Experimental changes will be present for the sole purpose of the tournament – The changes within are not intended to reach the Retail environment. Since the Experimental mode provides a unique environment, it serves as a great tool for something fun and engaging like this tournament.

We hope that everyone enjoys playing with the Experimental changes pitched by Overwatch League pro players and community members. An opportunity like this allows us to “break the mold” with heroes and gives you an opportunity to check out your favorites with altered abilities.

From now until April 9, 2021, Overwatch players who purchased the “Alien” Overwatch League MVP skin have the option to request a refund. Once your request is processed, you will receive 200 League Tokens and the skin will be removed from your collection.

To request a refund, contact Blizzard Customer Support. Our Customer Support team will help guide you through the process: https://support.blizzard.com/article/000285678.

If you are a console player, you’ll first need to link your console account with a Blizzard account, if you haven’t done so already. Here are instructions on how to do that. If you don’t currently have a Blizzard account, you will need to create one to receive the refund.

Once the refund is requested, it will take some time for the refund to be processed.

Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – March 12, 2021

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that platform.

GENERAL UPDATES

General

• Added Nvidia Reflex support for users with supported Nvidia GPUs. Enabling Reflex from the graphics options screen can reduce input latency. Reflex enabled GPUs can also enable the flash indicator option to help improve the reliability of input latency measurement with Reflex Latency Analyzer equipped monitors.

BUG FIXES

General

• Fixed a bug in the Bounty Hunter game mode that allowed Echo’s Winston clone to lengthen the Primal Rage timer

Maps

D...

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – March 11, 2021

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

HERO UPDATES

Genji

Shuriken

• Recovery lowered from 0.75 to 0.68

Dragonblade

• Ultimate cost increased 15%

Developer Comments: We’re increasing Genji’s Shuriken fire rate to enable him to have more impact outside of his ultimate and increasing the cost of Dragonblade to account for the increased damage potential.

Mei

Cryo-Freeze

• Healing-per-second increased from 37.5 to 50

Developer Comments: A while ago there was a change to make Mei’s Cryo-Freeze collision consistent with her Ice Wall, meaning she could no longer be targeted by allies while inside the block of ice. We’re increasing her Cryo-Freeze healing rate si...

Appreciate you letting us know about this! There was an issue with Deathmatch game modes not applying credit towards the PachiMarchi Roadhog skin. This was addressed last night and should now be properly awarding credit.

Regarding Season 27 Top 500: Top 500 for Competitive Season 27 will begin on March 18th, slightly short of the standard 2-week period following the beginning of the season. While this change stems from last week’s technical issue, it does mean that Top 500 will be active for the same amount of time as any other competitive season.

Welcome to Season 27 of Competitive Play

Season 27 of Competitive Play is here!

Unlocked at level 25, Competitive Play is designed for those players who want to put their skills to the test, and offers a more serious experience than our Quick Play or Arcade Modes.

GETTING STARTED

Before you can kick off your competitive career, every player will be required to complete five placement matches in a selected role to obtain their seasonal skill rating for that role. Within the standard Role Queue competitive mode, players will earn separate skill ratings (SR) for each role in Competitive Play, for a total of three distinct SRs. This rating will be a number between 1 and 5000, with higher values indicating a greater skill level. Players will also be assigned a tier per role based on their rating—Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, or Grandmaster – and climbing into the next tier is possible as you improve. Open Queue will utilize the same rating and tier system, but since ther...

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – March 9, 2021

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Patch 1.58 is a rebase and will require a relatively large download for all platforms.

PACHIMARCHI CHALLENGE

PachiMarchi is here! Now through March 22, win games to earn Pachimari-themed rewards, including the new Pachimari Roadhog skin.

Learn more about the PachiMarchi Challenge on the Overwatch website.

GENERAL UPDATES

General

• [PC-Only] Added “Damage FX” options to the advanced Video options menu that will reduce the amount of impact effects seen during gameplay and replays
• Added a “Custom Spectator Options” menu for live spectating that opens when you press the “View Spectator Options Menu” button as...