Overwatch 2 Announces Major Changes to Controversial Characters

Blizzard has announced it's making changes to two controversial characters from backlash from fans who have been hands-on with the Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X game via its beta. And everyone who has been playing the beta can agree two characters, in particular, need to be fixed: Symmetra and Mercy. The former was recently nerfed into oblivion while the latter's super jump is equally broken. That said, after previously acknowledging both characters needed to be fixed, Blizzard has detailed these fixes. 

"We recognized in the first beta that Symmetra didn't quite fit into the play space Overwatch 2's changes were defining: Faster paces, more engagements, less barriers," said Blizzard of one of the two characters. "There are fewer tanks that Symmetra can use to charge up, and the removal of Assault (2cp) maps takes away a defensive stage that she previously shined on. We expected the changes to Symmetra's Teleporter and secondary fire projectile speed to be the primary solutions, but we overshadowed these with other nerfs. One of these nerfs was no longer gaining ammo from barriers, which we removed to put power back into her ammo capacity since barriers are much less prevalent. Our reasoning for some of the other nerfs was that Symmetra is already a statistically strong hero, and we feared these changes alone would push her over the edge. That said, one of the benefits of this beta is that we can make changes and iterations prior to launch."

Adding to this, Blizzard notes it's trying out a few changes in internal tests. One of these changes involves increasing Secondary Fire projectile size from .4 back to .5. The second change is reducing the Secondary Fire charge time from 1.2 seconds back to 1 second. Lastly, the plan is to change the Teleporter cooldown from 16 seconds to 12 seconds.

"Additionally, we have another change for her in mind that we're currently testing internally.," concludes Blizzard while speaking about Symmetra. This iteration charges her primary fire beam to level 3 faster to help compensate for less tanks and shields to charge it up. We're not sure if this change will stick, but our goal is to make Symmetra feel more natural in Overwatch 2."

Then there's Mercy. "Guardian Angel gives Mercy important mobility that is key to her survivability," says Blizzard of Mercy. "Over time, players learned that if you jump during the ability at a specific time, you could launch Mercy up into the air. This is super cool; however, it was completely unintentional. Mercy's 'super jump' was the result of a bug that occurred during Guardian Angel, but players made it a part of her utility. We liked the idea of a bug turned into a feature, so the changes to Mercy in this beta were meant to make the super jump more reliable and consistent."

The blurb about Mercy continues: "We saw some issues with the implementation of this latest version throughout the first week of the beta, so we'll be changing up the ability in the mid-cycle patch. Our goal with the next change is to give players even more control over Guardian Angel while also increasing its flexibility. After the patch, Guardian Angel will not automatically launch Mercy into the air, but it will now have a meter that charges while the ability is active. When cancelling Guardian Angel with Jump, Mercy will now be launched into the direction she is facing. The more charge she gets during the ability, the more momentum the launch has when she cancels it with Jump. We're looking forward to seeing how the community engages with this ability in the beta to get Mercy ready for the Overwatch 2 launch! "

The announcement, which is linked in the first sentence, also makes note that changes are coming to Junker Queen, Sojourn, and Zenyatta. That said, like the changes to Mercy and Symmetra, none of it is set in stone as it's all going through testing.