eatmyfacekek123

rip doom rollouts.im not sure how doomfist can really work as a tank especially with the game being 5v5 now.

if it was still 6v6 and he was a off tank i can kinda see it? my guess is that hes going to use his CC to push enemies into bad positons or something.

i just hope i can still do rollouts and stuff because that is what made doomfist challenging and very fun to play.

is there any hints you can give on how doom as a tank is going to work? everyone in the doom community is super anxious and curious on what doomfist is going to be in ow2.

if he doesnt work as a tank in ow2 is he going to remain as a DPS with the same kit?

if it was still 6v6 and he was a off tank i can kinda see it? my guess is that hes going to use his CC to push enemies into bad positons or something.

Yep, this can still be a big part of his kit. For example, one thing we're testing is for Rocket Punch to create an area knockback around a target he impacts, creating a new ability to knock multiple enemies away (or into walls!).

i just hope i can still do rollouts and stuff because that is what made doomfist challenging and very fun to play.

Doomfist's high mobility is a huge part of his kit and that's not going to change. In fact, its part of what makes him potentially a good tank, being able to initiate fights for your team.

if he doesnt work as a tank in ow2 is he going to remain as a DPS with the same kit?

This is tricky tbh. In a world where almost all crowd control has been removed from non-tanks, Doomfist would be a huge outlier. Maybe there is a world where he can still exist as a DPS with less displacement and crow...

TerminalNoob

Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect?

Is there any you are already planning on acting on?

Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya's bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?

Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect? Is there any you are already planning on acting on?

Yep, we had a good mix of things we expected and things we didn't expect. Probably the biggest surprise for me was just how good they thought Sombra was in this iteration. We had been playtesting those changes for at least a few weeks and while she felt strong, she never really felt like she taking over our games or anything.

Obviously when you get her in the hands of pros with amazing game sense and coordination it makes confirming kills a lot easier. We've since focused a bit on her numbers and tweaked her down a bit to try to keep her under control while still allowing her new kit to play well.

Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya's bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?

I think there is a good amount of iteration to still be done with...

HappySleepings

Do the role passives really make sense from a balance point of view, or are they causing issues - Not just with ensuring unique hero identity but also general game balance?

e.g. 1 I have always thought that one of the things that was a balance point in the support roster was that Mercy and Zen have a passive self heal but can't heal themselves under fire. Now the supports that are able to heal themselves while under fire are additionally getting a passive self heal. Is this something you have considered? Should Mercy and Zen also get a way to heal themselves while under fire?

e.g. 2 Does it really make sense for a hero that slows you down (Mei) to also passively move faster than you? What about heroes that already moved faster? Are they now moving too fast?

So far the role passives have been great, and helped quite a bit with both balance and hero design, in general.

have always thought that one of the things that was a balance point in the support roster was that Mercy and Zen have a passive self heal but can't heal themselves under fire. Now the supports that are able to heal themselves while under fire are additionally getting a passive self heal. Is this something you have considered? Should Mercy and Zen also get a way to heal themselves while under fire?

Yep, this is something that we talked about quite a bit when working on these passives. We still want Mercy and Zen to be better at healing themselves, but we're just raising the minimum self-healing bar from zero to "some small amount". As we're designing support heroes, this is a constant question we struggled with in the past and this role passive allows us more flexibility in designing future heroes.

Does it really make sense for a hero that slows you down (Mei) to also p...

Lopad_NotThePokemon

What is your planned direction for the design/balance of support heroes for making sure they are still impactful? I'm sure you already know, but there's been a lot of people worried, myself included about the direction based on the balance changes we see in the videos.

It seems like you want to move away from healing considering the 25% healing reduction, but you also nerfed the utility with the removal of brig's stun and cooldown increase on Ana's sleep dart. Some people have brought up that you maybe want supports to frag more but why play a support over a dps at that point? It's just very confusing what you are trying to so.

Also, is Brig's shield bash just a place holder for now or is the increased damage with no other effect the final product?

What is your planned direction for the design/balance of support heroes for making sure they are still impactful?

Even in this 5v5 environment, Supports are still feeling very impactful. In many ways, they are actually more impactful than in OW1 currently. In 5v5, there is less damage going around to both teams, coupled with the ability to focus heavily onto your single tank it becomes actually easier for both teams to sustain longer fights.

Which leads directly into the next question

It seems like you want to move away from healing considering the 25% healing reduction, but you also nerfed the utility with the removal of brig's stun and cooldown increase on Ana's sleep dart. Some people have brought up that you maybe want supports to frag more but why play a support over a dps at that point? It's just very confusing what you are trying to so.

Theres 2 parts to this question so let me break it down.

• The healing reduction was an attempt at combating the first question/answer ...

BarstMain

How did the Bastion rework perform in these play tests compared to your expectations?

Its funny, I actually tried to throw him some buffs right before the build went out but I missed the deadline slightly.

He has been pretty tricky to tune with his rework, but it was great to see him playtested by these great players. I feel like his new design is solid, its really just a matter of getting his numbers into a good place now. Since this playtest, we've buffed him in a number of ways: He moves faster in sentry mode, his ult starts dropping faster (though the projectile moves slower so you can see it a bit more), his recon fire rate has been increase, and other buffs.

The tricky thing though, is when playing him it can feel like you still get thrashed pretty hard because he is such a large hero, he is very easy to target and hit with everything (especially when he gets discorded, etc). There is a lot we can tweak with that as well though, such as increasing his passive (Ironclad) to offer more protection while transformed. We also have new tuning knobs to help control h...

Aspharon

The change to 5v5 will of course require hero changes across the board, but I'm primarily interested as to how you're going to be looking at supports. With them having both one less tank to heal, and one less tank to protect them, how are you tweaking the supports for the new game, in broad strokes?

So far, broadly speaking, we've found that supports are often more safe in a 5v5 environment because there is one less tank trying to dive and take them out. There are instances where this isn't true, like Sombra and her rework trying to assassinate them, or being sniped easier without a lot of barriers to hide behind, etc. In those situations sometimes its a matter of just trying to position more carefully or maybe Sombra just being bit too OP right now :P

Initially we were worried that supports without mobility to escape might be weak in this environment, but so far we've actually seen Zen/Ana being very strong instead of weak, because of the nature of their offensive capabilities in a 5v5 environment.

DoucheyHowserMD

Do you foresee any heroes changing roles or would you like to keep everyone where they are?

This is something we've been experimenting with, and talking a lot about. No hero has moved roles yet though, but we've started testing Doomfist as a tank (as previously mentioned)

Doomfist's kit is full of crowd control effects and mobility, which makes it difficult to tune and balance him as a DPS in OW2. As a Tank though, he can keep those key properties to his kit since those can fit nicely into a Tank role (mostly the crowd control stuff).

Of course this means he'll be losing some damage and gaining some defenses. This is still being tested and iterated on, so I dont have a ton of details on it yet as it is still in the early stages. Some of the early feedback so far is that he's not really feeling like a tank without having at least one active defensive button (his main defenses are passive atm), so thats something we'll probably try next.

Automated-Waffles

Were ultimate generation rates lower than in the live game? It felt like there were less ults in general, although this might just be due to 1 less player and the 25% less ult charge from tanks.

The biggest change here is the less ult gain from tanks. We haven't actually modified and ultimate costs outside of this change (and the implicit 5v5 changes, obviously).

Having ults happen less often was something we were targeting early on, and this tank change largely accomplished this for us by itself. This is something thats super easy to iterate on though, and im sure we'll be tweaking it throughout the game's development/beta etc.

Minute-Peak-498

In the livestream we saw that Mei had lost her freeze and it was mentioned that mcree was probably losing his stun.

As you want the Tank role to be more crowd control oriented rather than dps and in turn you were looking possibly nerfing mobility due to the less cc options available.

My question is how is this going to effect someone like Doomfist and to lesser extent hammond were their kits relies so much on cc and mobility to function correctly that reducing both these things could utterly destroy the character in both balance and class fantasy.

This is something we're actually in the middle of testing right now. The idea is to reduce crowd control (especially stun) effects on non-tank heroes.

This doesn't mean that tanks will gain more CC, or that they will lose damage and focus on CC more. Its more that by removing some CC effects on existing non-tank heroes, it means that the the current tank lineup would retain the majority of the CC effects as part of their role. This not only gives Tanks something unique and interesting about their role, but it significantly reduces the amount of CC effects in the game as a whole, especially in a world where there is only 1 tank per team.

This isn't a hard rule either. Currently we're pretty happy with Ana's sleep dart, for example, so I don't think we'd change it just to fit within this new paradigm.

As for Doomfist/Hammond, well Hammond is a tank so its ok that he has more CC effects. Doomfist is a hero we'd need to look at though, for other reasons as well (he can be frustrating t...

gabrieltaylorr

I'd love to hear from Geoff/Scott how the underlying philosophy of Overwatch has changed over the years and into OW2. How (if at all) have the objectives for what you want players to feel in game changed going into this next "era" of sorts for Overwatch?

For OW1, most of the philosophy changes have been small tactical changes throughout the game's life, rather than large sweeping changes. The biggest sweeping changes to philosophy were when we went to single hero limit, and then later to role lock.

At its heart, the game has always been about super over-the-top heroes, that are simple to understand but have a lot of depth in gameplay, especially when combined with other heroes on your team. When making new heroes, or changing old ones, its a constant fight for us internally to try and make sure the heroes are simple and focused from a gameplay perspective. This has been gotten harder over time as we add new heroes and push to keep every hero feeling unique at the same time.

For OW2, this core philosophy is still the same, but we're looking at some of these things in somewhat of a new light. We're still pushing hard to keep heroes simple and deep, but there are some specifics we've changed such as more aggressive tank play which can ...

Menelwenn

Are you guys happy with Lucio's boop? =( Definetely can be a star-move on a teamfight to boop people out of the map!

Yea we feel like this is pretty core to Lucio so we're not likely to change this. Also Tanks have a role passive to have reduced knockback effects against them now, so that helps Tanks players quite a bit.

Present_Sea_1639

Is there a chance for Mei to become a tank so she can keep her freeze mechanic in some way?

Possibly, that's still on the list to play around with.

For what its worth, she can still freeze with her ultimate.

UltimateGamerer

After the announcement of 5v5, a lot of people have been bugged by this change.

Will there be other gamemodes that are 6v6 for those who prefer it, and if it's possible to say, which gamemodes?

Honestly we're not sure yet. We'd like to have it exist in some form, but I'd say balancing the game for both 5v5 (1 tank) and 6v6 (2 tanks) is unlikely, so the 6v6 mode would most likely be an arcade mode or something like that if we can do it at all.

Classic_Lee

Hello! So you mentioned in this news blog that Bastion is going to be reworked "from the ground up". Are you able to share some things you are trying with Bastion?

u/blizz_geoffgoodman

Sure!

When re-approching Bastion the biggest starting point is like, "what is the core of this hero that feels like we should make sure to preserve". Our answer to that is he is a transforming robot, with huge damage potential when he is using his various modes well. We want to make sure Bastion isn't purely about aim-skill, but he also has a big focus on situational awareness and timing/positioning.

We're looking at pushing his recon form's range out by changing his recon weapon. This helps him generally be more useful, but also helps create separation between his other forms, especially sentry. For sentry form, the cost of reducing his mobility to gain huge damage is still interesting and its the heart of what makes him work. However, completely removing his mobility has proved to be too harsh of a penalty, and frankly its not realistically possible to balance him with this downside in mind (especially between different skill levels). So right now we're testing allowing him to mov...

Valehar_

As an off-tank player in a 6-stack team, playing mostly scrims, small tournaments and ranked, what can i legetimatly expect for my Ow2 experience ?

I would say a lot about OW2 is going to be different. The tank play will certainly change, but if you're an experienced off-tank player im sure you'll find great success with those same heroes in OW2 as a solo tank.

SpriteGuy_000

What is one common misconception about the game (OW1, OW2, or anything else) that you hear all the time from the community that you'd like to clear up?

For me, in the short term, i'd say the biggest misconception I see about 5v5 and 1 Tank being that off-tanks are being removed, changed, etc. But really, many off-tank heroes are getting tankier, and many main tank heroes are getting less tanky and more damage/options, so really the new Tanks are somewhere in-between MTs and OTs.

If anything, I would guess that off-tanks would have an easier time adjusting to OW2's new Tank role than main-tank players.

LancerJayden

THANK YOU. i'm glad her freeze mechanic is still in her base kit somewhere!. is it possible that freezing with her primary fire could be a pve talent? since she already has other freeze talents (like her cold snap one) in other talents.

I would say freezing with her primary in PvE is a minimum of what you'll see. We have so many crazy ideas for talents for every hero, I can't wait to show you guys more as we get closer.

seyandiz

Have you considered moving some of the more CC focused DPS heroes into the tank role?

Obviously 5v5 is a huge shakeup. We've heard comments from /u/blizz_geoffgoodman and others that a general shift from DPS CC to Tank CC is expected.

Instead of removing Mei's freeze - give her "frozone" movement speed and some rebalancing on her base health and ability health. She has always acted as an off-tank as is. I think Doomfist would be another good example.

Instead of reworking these iconic heroes - rebalancing them to fit the tank role. This would bring some hero mains into the tank role that hadn't previously enjoyed it - as well as increasing the small tank role hero pool.

Lastly - will we see a "Classic 6v6 Quick Play" option in the arcade like we currently see of "No Limits"?

I think the common one that comes up here is Mei, which is something we've talked about in the past, but we haven't run the "mei tank" experiment internally yet. I feel like she would have to change quite a bit to fit the tank role, so its a bit more of a rework to have her fit well into that role. That doesn't mean its off the table, just that its not a trivial change to throw in and try out.

If we did try it, im sure we'd try the ice slide that everyone loves to think about :) It certainly feels more acceptable on a Tank, which would allow her to engage in front of her team etc.

Doomfist I think requires a bit more thought than even Mei. He is extremely unique, even amongst the Overwatch roster, but he essentially requires CC to control him, and he throws out a bit too much CC himself, even if her were a tank. We haven't started digging into him yet, as we're still figuring out how some of these CC changes are going to play out, but hes on my list to look at as soon as we can. Ide...

AlessDreem

How close have you been to make a really controversial change (like deleting brig XD) that barely didn't make it through?

Other than a bunch of stuff we've thrown on the test server and pulled at the last minute (like Zen's discord being able to target through barriers), maybe the most significant was Sombra's hero design. For most of her development, she was a Support hero instead of a Damage hero. In this role, her main goal was to hack every enemy, while sneaking around and trying to stay alive. At that time, Hacking an enemy was a long duration debuff that reduced their healing/damage output, rather than the short duration high-impact debuff it became later.

The idea was that she was balanced so that if she successfully got enough hacks on the enemy team, your team would effectively be able to win a 5-6 (since she wasn't very good in combat for her team), simply because the debuffs were strong enough to allow for that. This is all fine and good on paper, and it was pretty fun to play her this way, but people just hated getting debuffed in this way. In fact, every time we've tried to put this kind of...

solidus__snake

If anything, I would guess that off-tanks would have an easier time adjusting to OW2's new Tank role than main-tank players.

Does that reflect a shift in the team’s focus toward a product that competes more directly with other traditional FPS games? As a tank main, I’ve been concerned that the role may lose some of what made it special in the first game, with tanks moving into more of a “fat DPS” role in OW2. One of my favorite things about Overwatch is that heroes like Reinhardt and Winston provide a gameplay experience I can’t get anywhere else.

I would say overall, yes there is a shift towards at least slightly more of a raw FPS game. However, Tanks and Support (and even some dps like Doomfist) have always been more about abilities than just aimskill/shooting. This isn't going to change. I feel like this is core to what makes Overwatch what it is, reflecting many different playstyles and empowering many different types of skilled players in different ways. Its always been a balancing act for us, but for a while during OW1's new hero additions it was really starting to feel like we were pushing maybe a little too far away from our FPS roots.