kkuriboh

I want to ask about Sombra. Can you share anything about some ideas you've went through when it comes to her kit for OW2? I'd imagine her hack might be oppressive in a setting where you can just hard focus it onto the Solo Tank of a team. And maybe there is a goal to push her towards more of a DPS as her kit is almost Supportive in nature with Hack.

And a fun follow up, have you ever considered making her a support at any point? If so are there any ability ideas you tried you'd consider sharing? :D

She actually started as a Support! I talked about that in a different answer already though.

For OW2, I've done some iteration on her in regards to how she might work in a world where there is less crowd control effects for Damage heroes. Recently we've run two different playtest ideas for her:

1. She couldn't hack players at all anymore, but instead she gained a +50% damage bonus when shooting an enemy in the back.
2. She could hack players again, but a hack on an enemy just meant your allies could see that player through walls instead of silencing them. She could also hack while invisible (she was visible while hacking, but invis wasn't broken). Then, she gained a +30% damage bonus against hacked targets.

These were interesting tests, but each had their own share of big problems.

For #1, it felt weird/bad to just never be able to hack enemies. Shes supposed to be this hacker but her hack was relegated to health packs mostly. This is potentially solvable if we added a lot more things...

nardstorm

Will the green overhealth still be removed by EMP? How do Brigitte and Torbjorn’s temporary armor factor into that?

Currently, no EMP does not remove over-health. But, hopefully as evidence from some of my other answers, things are very heavily in flux right now, especially in regards to CC and Sombra, so its possible we'll make it work on all over-health.

Brig and Torb gain over-health instead of over-armor now, but it acts like normal health and so doesn't have any innate damage reduction built into it anymore. We'll have to compensate for that as needed, probably by giving more health for them.

Though I will go one step further and ask, "should armor even work the same way it does in OW1?" Its fairly complex and if you ask an average player how exactly armor works most of them will just say something like "oh i dont know, it reduces damage taken somehow". We haven't changed anything with it yet, but its on my list to look at and maybe simplify into something like, "armor health takes -X% damage".

It has further implications if we do that, like bigger hits no longer feel like they are armor-p...

Zbordek

Hello there! Thanks for doing the ama :3

ow-state question:

1. Should we still expect Paris and Horizon maps back in Overwatch 1 or you kep them for Overwatch 2?
2. I think that the team had made great decision with changing the team composition to be 5v5, but I think most reason why people get upset on that change, is because of the tank synergy we have right now. Has the team thought about forgiving that in any way, by idk changing dps maybe?
3. It seems that the tanks with OW2 go more in brawly direction than protect and peel direction, which I am scared makes the game more 'watch out for yourself' than 'watch out for your teammates', and I don't like this direction. Should we expect loads of changes from what we have been shown on the stream in terms of tanks?
4. Are endorsements also a thing in OW2? Are there any plans on improve this system/make some changes? Cause right now it seems like it does not really matter, cause I, as level 4 endorsement player still get matches with level 1 endorsement players, which are more likely to throw, leave, and be toxic in the competetive match. I think that we shouldn’t be put together in game, and I would actually rather have a longer wait with players of similar endorsement level than have instant queue but with low-endorsed players.
5. Does the team know that Symmetra does not have a SINGLE cosmetic that shows her Golden Gun? Be it Victory Pose, or Highlight Intro but please, every other hero has at least one, we don’t have any and Symmetra has been in game since launch! Is it a team joke to mistreat her? :(
6. On the stream all the maps were either Push or Hybrid, but we didn’t get any KOTH maps, are these under rework too?

less weighted questions:

1. What is most-challenging thing about developing OW2 and maintaining OW1?
2. Can we expect the comics to come back? I mean we got the Tracer's London Calling, but this did not give us much, the comics we had earlier seemed to give great lore bits.
3. Which of the new maps we were shown on stream has been built for longest time? It seems that New York is the bestly-polished, but so does Rio.
4. Pineapple on pizza - yes or no? :)

I think that the team had made great decision with changing the team composition to be 5v5, but I think most reason why people get upset on that change, is because of the tank synergy we have right now. Has the team thought about forgiving that in any way, by idk changing dps maybe?

One of the core goals of Overwatch hero design is to create these fun synergies and combos throughout the entire roster. It certainly sucks to lose some of these combos, but a lot of game design is making a call to decide if what you are gaining is worth what you are losing. In this case, after significant playtesting, we think its more than worth it for the benefits we gain out of 5v5.

It seems that the tanks with OW2 go more in brawly direction than protect and peel direction, which I am scared makes the game more 'watch out for yourself' than 'watch out for your teammates', and I don't like this direction. Should we expect loads of changes from what we have been shown on the stream in terms of tank...

Terca

How does 76's ult work? Is it simply a temporary 'aim-bot' where his bullets are guaranteed to hit all enemies that he can during a period? Or is there also a buff that goes along with it, in terms of bullet damage or whatnot.

It works (hopefully) how you'd think it does, by automatically aiming at the nearest target to your reticle within a certain area on the screen, which is currently designating by that large circle in the HUD.

The thing you might now know about it though is that it also locks your spread to zero, which means you can just hold the button down and go to town. This means even if you are an FPS god and somehow can literally hit every bullet without your ult, it still offers you a significant benefit in aim, in a sense.

Gingerware

Hi Blizzard Designers!

Soldier 76 is the first labeled offensive hero which rocks a support ability, when compared to other heroes with a offense "role" on the battle.net/overwatch website. I am actually a little concerned about this, and possible balance issues down the line.

My question specifically: currently where do you feel Soldier 76 is in terms of damage/health/support when compared to other offensive heroes currently? Are you finding the balancing of Soldier 76 to be a delicate problem, given his aoe healing ability?

Some 'topical' observations:

Soldier 76 rocks the same health as Pharah, and more health than Tracer, but has the ability to heal. He has a slightly slower weapon speed than Tracer, and possibly more damage output than Pharah. He would be able to escape Reaper with sprint, has an ultimate essentially as strong as Reaper and McCree, and seems like he can hold is own in a 1:1 quite well among any of them.

Finally, I had the privilege of playing Overwatch at Blizzcon 2014, and simply cannot wait to play more of this exciting game.

Its true he has a typically more support-like ability in his Biotic Field, but the roles aren't meant to be hard rules that we have to follow. They're meant to be more guidelines so players can more quickly understand how to they should approach playing the character.

For example, as you guys have seen by now Zenyatta can pump out some insane damage, but he is listed as a support still.

As far as 76 being overpowered, he is! Everyone is!

Just to clarify: We do actually have damage fall off for certain weapons in the game, but Soldier: 76 doesn't currently use any. We tend to reserve fall off for weapons that are intended to be close range weapons, such as Tracer's Pulse Pistols or Reaper's Hellfire Shotguns.

For example, In a game of upward in TF2, I can spam the doors with soldier but I can only deal 30-40 damage (if they even hit the target). To dish out the real damage I have to get close to the enemy and take risks

As far as spam is concerned, there's a few things to keep in mind comparing Overwatch to TF2. Firstly, we're only 6v6, whereas TF2 can range from 8v8 to 16v16, so they tend to have a lot more stuff flying through the air at any given time.

Secondly, our tank role heroes are generally very good at shutting down spam like this. If your team is being locked down by a bunch of Pharahs firing rockets into a choke, a single friendly Reinhardt pushing out with his shield up should be all your team needs ...

Whamboozled

Hey. My only concern with spam is that I can build my ultimate off shields. I want to always be aiming for that for a quick build up and a tank trying to prevent ranged poke and spam against his team could actually be helping the enemy team. How do you feel about placed shields (not the ones attached to heroes) charging ults, and is there any consideration to tweak it? or leave as is?

Well we've recently been experimenting back and forth with this mechanic. In our latest builds hitting shields doesn't generate ult for either party.

But even with the way it was, both the shield owner and the attacker gain ult equally (and even then only at a 20% rate), so if you were firing into an enemy barrier to charge your ult you're also charging his/her ult as well.

CJGamr01

u/blizz_geoffgoodman Why is Sombra DPS instead of Support? She has no damaging abilities beyond primary fire (unlike all other DPS), and if she was a Support, then it'd be more equal (8/17/7 is a weird spread of heroes, 8/16/8 makes a lot more sense). TIA!

Actually, im not sure if people are aware of this even, but Sombra was initially prototyped as a Support hero. In fact, it really went far beyond prototype, she only became a damage hero in the stretch of her development.

She had some of the most significant changes while going through developement. Her whole kit used to be centered around staying invisible and landing hacks on the entire enemy team (you could hack more than one target at a time). But hack worked differently then: It used to last a lot longer and it reduced your healing and damage output instead of making you unable to use abilities.

This meant even though you had one less healer as a support, you theoretically made up for it by reducing the enemy team's damage. It was a pretty fun little mini-game for her, but people were ultimately very frustrated by being debuffed like that, even if they knew on paper she was reasonably balanced. In fact, we've tried a couple times to try a damage-dealt debuff (Wrecking Ball had ...

felixw1

Do characters that exist in the story (like Mauga, sanjay, dae-hyun) have a chance at being heroes in the future?

This is always a possibility! Ana is an example of a hero that came from the story. She wasn't created initially to be made a hero but we saw a cool opportunity while making a new support to have it be her and it worked out great.

That said not every character/personality in the story will (or even should) be a hero, but we'll see!

Geminiboys12

How many unused concepts of heroes have you guys made?

This is actually really hard to answer actually.

Most of the time heroes go through a ton of iteration, and single abilities or weapons get cut. Often times we'll end up using an older cut idea on a new concept. For example, Orisa's first ult was an idea where she could "teleport" away (we'd probably kit this differently though), and then 'drop' anywhere else on the map via drop pod or something similar. This was back when she was extremely early and we didn't have a character yet, so I was sort of imaging a character more like Dutch from Predator (hence the mini-gun, etc). It ended up not really working for the gameplay, and really didn't make sense once we started developing Orisa's character.

Much later we were working on Doomfist and thought we could revist that old idea and thats how he ended up with his ult!

SnipersaurusRex

Who is the hero who has been the most difficult to develop or fine-tune to get the balance just right?

Sombra and Genji were the two hardest heroes to make, probably.

Sombra worked very differently and had to go through major changes pretty late in her development (as I posted about earlier), and Genji started out having only his sword for a weapon (he is still refereed to as SwordNinja in our internal files, etc). His main kit initially involved invisibility, wall perching, and having an 'execute' animation where if he got behind you he could stun you and start this long animation which would just instantly kill you if he finished it.

The idea was he could easily pick off people who were not with their team, but otherwise it would be very difficult to use execute. This kit caused all kinds of problems though, especially his sword being his only form of attacking. Once we moved away from invisibility and instead chased the agile ninja fantasy, and made the sword his ultimate, everything started clicking into place.

colorfulchew

What is your best "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" for Overwatch?

This is actually something that comes up fairly often. In general I like to try to keep 'tech' in the game if we can, but sometimes its some weird bug that can cause a lot of other problems, is super unreliable, or is just straight up overpowered.

For example, the Genji ledge dashing bug was cool but both extremely overpowered and also really inconsistent/buggy feeling (which makes sense I guess, as it was a bug). That one we opted to just remove instead of trying to work out way to implement it as a feature, mostly because Genji already has really strong mobility and we didnt want to add more onto that.

Mercy's glide jump though was something that wasn't really intended but we ended up having to fix for unrelated reasons. When we did that, we went ahead and implemented it as a real feature of the hero so it works a lot more consistently now etc. She also has the big vert super jump which is a lot more tricky to pull off but we haven't really adjusted or changed anything about that...

DarkPenfold

What are the most commonly-requested hero buffs, nerfs, or reworks that you’ve actually tested internally but never pushed to PTR / Experimental, and why were they discarded?

Our tools are pretty robust so its pretty easy for us to whip up some changes and run a playtest to see how they feel. We've done quite a bit of tests of all kinds of tweaks, some small some big, that come from the community.

For example, we tried Symmetra as a Support hero where her turrets healed instead of dealt damage. This was sort of fun but was kind of frustrating as a Symm player because Overwatch moves so fast. We started trying to tune the turrets to have super high range, or being able to have a ton of them out, etc. It ended up just feeling like a mismatch, but honestly i'd be up for taking another crack at it at some point. Maybe if she had some other primary way to heal and the turrets were just a way to provide auxiliary healing it might have gone better.

Its hard to think of other specific examples off the top of my head right now, but I know there are more things that we've specifically tried out and ended up not doing. There are some other popular ideas, such as M...

Jesterskull25

Symmetra is mostly used in OWL just for the teleporter. Have you considered reworking her into a healer in the future? She’s already being picked like a Support. If not this, what do the developers think Symmetra needs?

I touched on this in another answer earlier but the tldr of it is: We tried it once, and it didn't work out very well. That said, the door isn't fully closed on this yet, its possible we'll re-try her as a Support (healer) in the future.

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[deleted]

Every day! I'm mostly playing whatever hero I feel like needs to be looked at more, or has recent changed we're testing etc. Though if i'm just picking to try to win, I find myself mostly going for Ashe/Widow/hitscan in general. Or Junkrat, I still have a lot of fun flying around with Junkrat.

KnightThyme

Settle an argument I had with a friend. In an alternate timeline where Offense and Defense did NOT get merged into the Damage role, would Ashe have released as an Offense or Defense hero?

Hmm tbh I hadn't actually considered this until now. From a 'sniper' perspective, we had generally considered them to be more defensive oriented. But she isn't really a sniper, exactly. On just a whim i'd say Offense, but I could be swayed to make her Defense. I mean, this is basically a big part of why we merged them into one category, at some point it becomes fairly arbitrary feeling.

Webbo9999_

Will Jeff Kaplan be a playable hero in Overwatch 2?

Hmm I've always wanted to do a grappler hero...

gameruler156

why is tracer unable to recall out of grav when reaper and moira can fade out, while those abilities are on a shorter cooldown? not being able to blink out is understandable

This is understandably super confusing, I totally agree with you. Its sort of came about this way from a chain of rules that really don't even matter anymore necessarily. But heres how it went:

Junkrat trap is made, it blocks movement abilities. Ok cool, lets playtest it. Oh, its weird on Reaper though... is Wraithform a movement ability? It technically makes you faster but doesn't really feel like a movement skill, and being able to wraith (even if you cant move) would feel a lot better. So we go with that.

Later, Zarya's ult gets the 'no mobility' rule added to it. We just follow Junkrat trap's rules, which means Reaper can now escape grav. Hmm maybe this is fine? Lets roll with it, its consistent.

Moira is made. Fade works very similar to Wraithform, we're consistent where can be with the two of them. However, Fade is clearly much more of a mobility skill than Wraithform... so it kind of breaks down in the junkrat trap/zarya ult case, which is where we are now.

This is somethin...

Drakon519

Was there any hero abilities that you thought would be easy to implement, but ended up causing major issues, or maybe caused you to completely scrapped the ability? My other question is what is the funniest bug you ever came across during development?

The one that immediately comes to mind is Symmetra's wall ultimate. When we (designers) first talked about it, it seemed pretty simple. Lets just take Reinhardt's shield and scale it way way up, that should be fine right?

Well it turns out... not exactly. There were two major hurdles with this thing.

1) On the gameplay front, a lot of our abilities need to know if they can hit something by checking if the object is just 'in range' of it. Well then it begs the question... 'where' is the shield exactly? For example, we wanted Sombra's EMP to destroy the wall, but it was having trouble finding it unless you were near the 'center' of it, since it was such a wide and flat object.

Gameplay engineering needed to come up with some new tech made just for her wall to allow certain abilities, and other targeting, to understand and be able to hit the wall correctly in different places.

2) On the engine side, having a giant effect cutting through your entire screen, that has transparency to ...

KuroKitten

There's been a lot of talk about reworking certain Damage characters into Tanks/Supports, such as Mei into a Tank, or as mentioned Symetra back into a Support.

What have the team's thoughts/discussions been around this idea?

Yea we've been talking a lot about this, especially as we're working on OW2.

Mei as a tank comes up quite a bit, its something we can maybe try. She would have to get nearly reworked though, for example her secondary fire is far too much dmg and long range to go on a Tank, but its a possibility.

Other ones that come up pretty consistently in conversations are Roadhog as a DPS, Symm as a Support, Brig as a Tank.