Overwatch: Hanzo's New Ability Nerfed, Significant Symmetra Re-work Update

Hanzo, the more collected of the Shimada brothers, is an Overwatch hero that takes a certain level of skill in order to master. If not properly understood, chances are you're the Hanzo main people joke about. In an effort to make Hanzo a bit more accessible to players, Blizzard made a few changes to his play style, most notably his Scattered Arrow. Replaced with "Storm Arrows," it didn't take long before the swap out to come under fire once more. In addition to Hanzo's upcoming rework, we've also received a new update regarding Symmetra's changes coming soon.

Geoff Goodman, Overwatch developer, recently took to the game's forum to provide an update for Hanzo mains. He confirmed that internal nerfing was a success and that they've decided to move forward to scaling back his newfound abilities, "We're reducing the damage per arrow from 80 to 70, which not only drops them out of one-shot territory for 200 hp heroes (w/ dmg boost), but also drops them out of one-shot range of 150 heroes such as Tracer and D.Va pilot.

The ability will still be very strong overall, but this change should help mitigate the most frustrating element of fighting against it. We're looking at getting this change up onto the PTR soon."

Prior to the change, below was what the latest patch brought for the sniper:

• Storm Bow
  • Projectile speed increased from 85 to 100
• Sonic Arrow
  • Cooldown decreased from 20 seconds to 12 seconds
  • Duration decreased from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
  • Radius decreased from 10 meters to 7 meters
• New Abilities
  • Lunge
    • Press jump while in the air to leap horizontally
  • Storm Arrows
    • Replaces his existing Scatter Arrow ability
    • Hanzo can now rapidly fire up to 6 arrows that deal reduced damage but are always fired at full power

In addition to the Hanzo redesign, Support class Symmetra continues on her journey from Support to Defense. Goodman added that progress is gong very well and that many of her changes have already begun bleeding over into testing servers. Here's the breakdown:

"Firstly, her turrets are still projectiles, but they are now able to be destroyed while in the air. This makes it harder to throw them directly at people in a fight to force them to turn around to kill it. Now you have to be a little more sneaky where you throw them or just pre-place them.

Secondly, her teleporter ability now requires a button input to trigger, but the teleporter works both directions. This means you can do new tricks like tossing it into an enemy Zarya ult from far away and pull your team out to safety. We've also seen interesting strats where a Symm can baby-sit a friendly Ana/Zen and place a TP if they get jumped on, giving a mobility out to heroes that don't typically have that option. There is a small cooldown before you can take the teleporter once you've used it, so you can't just spam back and forth instantly.

Those are the biggest changes since last post, but there have been many small numbers tweaks to get her in shape. Hopefully we'll have something reasonably soon for you guys to see/play!"

With most of Overwatch's Support line-up consisting of healers, it did seem a bit odd that with her turret-centric play style she wasn't considered more defense. This re-design aims to change that, which will ultimately lead to her re-classification.