Overwatch 2 Support Players In Shambles Over Self-Heal Change

Overwatch 2 players are angry over a new season 9 change.

By Cade Onder

Overwatch 2 players are furious over a new change to how healing works in the game. Online games, particularly competitive ones, are always evolving and changing. Players are constantly offering feedback to games like Call of Duty and other shooters to help improve the experience and fix annoyances. It's up to the developers to filter out what's actually valuable and can improve the game and what's just noise. After a game has been around for a long time, though, some times the developers shake things up too much and hurt the game with their changes. PUBG ran into this problem and is only just now resolving a lot of these issues.

Overwatch and Overwatch 2 have experienced this on multiple occasions, however. The series has had a lot of ups and downs as Blizzard is constantly infuriating its own player base. Whether that fury is actually justified is totally up to you to determine, but the latest issue is causing a lot of drama in the community. Earlier today, Blizzard announced some changes it is either planning to bring to Overwatch 2 or simply considering. Some of it seems beneficial such as map voting, but other things are raising hell among the player base. The biggest point of contention that seemingly no one enjoys is the fact that all heroes are going to get self-healing passive abilities. Fans believe this will render support characters like Mercy far less useful and also cause a lot of balancing issues. Some characters can already self-heal and there are also health packs sprinkled throughout the map to help those in a pinch. This has resulted in players telling Blizzard that they've totally lost the plot.

Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller saw the backlash and noted that this change is being incorporated along with a number of other things that will change how the game plays, so maybe it's not as bad as it seems.. "Clarifying a few things with the self-heal," said Keller." It's one part of a much larger set of changes coming to the game in S9. Internally we're talking about, and targeting some of these changes at damage spikiness in game, the role of DPS in securing kills, and the strength of healing. It was a mistake to talk about this lone change out of context, since its a part of a much bigger set coming to Season 9. Sorry for that, and I look forward to more discussion around S9 balance changes when we drop more details." 

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