Director’s Take – Tricks, Tweaks and Treats for Season 13 – Overwatch 2 – Blizzard News

Hello and happy autumn. It’s that time of year when it’s chilly, everything seems to have a pumpkin spice flavor (meh!), and you can feel the magical spirit of Halloween fast approaching. In case you missed it, we just revealed a bunch of cool tricks and treats for Season 13 in our Developer Update, including a close-up look at the new Spellbinder Widowmaker Mythic Skin, a detailed look at four cards getting big changes, new updates to the in-game leaderboard and a first look at the terrifyingly fun Junkenstein’s Laboratory. (Insert scary thunder here.)

Okay, let’s start by looking at tank modifications. Ramattra’s Pummel in Nemesis form is getting a tweak that will give opponents a better chance to take cover without really affecting the lethality of the attack. Ramattra’s punch attacks will no longer pierce barriers, but instead deal 2.5x the damage. This gives Ramattra more strategy to decide whether to focus on breaking a barrier that can leave opponents vulnerable to attacks from your teammates, or instead focus on individual objectives. Heroes like Reinhardt now also have more choices to make: use their barrier health or take the hit themselves. We hope this change can make for a more interesting engagement while Ramattra is in its Nemesis form.

Mauga gets a buff to Gunny, his Incendiary Chaingun, where the damage done by time will now last four seconds. Combined with the burst potential of Cha-cha, his volatile Chaingun, Mauga will have more reason to stay focused on smaller targets without making him stronger against other tanks.

For Supports, you will see a notable change in Juno, which has performed very well. She remains popular, and we expect that to continue well into Season 13, but we want to push her healing potential a bit and encourage players to rely more on her mobility. First, her fall range is reduced, requiring her to be closer to allies to heal or enemies to attack effectively. The Mediblaster also has a slight advantage in healing amount. You can also expect some changes for Brigitte and Baptiste this next patch.

We’ve made quite a few big changes to some of our Damage heroes. Sojourn has made changes to her Railgun and Disruptor inclusion that will better enhance her playstyle. Energy no longer has a minimum of 25, but will now degrade much more slowly. We also strengthen the Disruptor shot to be stronger: the damage per second is increased to 80 and generates a small amount of energy for the Railgun for any damage dealt. We want to make the ability less ignored by opponents and reward everyone who plays Sojourn with well-placed Disruptor Shots. These changes are aimed at getting more power into her kit outside of the Railgun shot itself, and making her neutral gameplay feel better.

Alec mentioned the changes we had for Sombra in our previous Director’s Take and we’re now ready to share the details of what you can expect. We’re moving Stealth away from a passive form that activates on its own, to an instantaneous trigger every time you use Translocator. It now only stays active for five seconds after you translocate. This change prevents Sombra from being able to take any position she wants, but instead gives her a play loop that increases her lethality. Sombra is briefly revealed when she takes damage or uses her hack, rather than losing stealth completely. Translocator also has a longer cooldown, so you’ll need to carefully plan how to attack your enemies or use the ability as an escape route.

We’re also giving Sombra back her Opportunist passive, which lets you see targets seriously injured through walls, along with increasing weapon damage over time. We also reduced the Hack ability lockout to one second, which was a frustrating part of her kit that opponents had to deal with. We’ll look at how you all adapt to these changes and what new strategies you deploy with this new playstyle.

Okay, let’s change the subject and talk about competitive play and matchmaking. We still want to encourage you to form a group with your friends even if you’re playing Competitive, so we’ve made several changes to matchmaking that should help. Matchmaking for the Wide pool is tailored to shorter queue times. We think it’s very important to have evenly matched players in the Tank role, so we’ve also upgraded our Role Delta technology to prioritize matching Tank players against each other even more closely than the others roll.

Playing in pre-made groups is a great way to play Overwatch, especially in Competitive, but at the highest ranks we think the benefit of grouping becomes quite overwhelming. Higher rank matches now take into account the benefit of grouping when creating a match. We also reduced several modifiers related to MMR decay. This will make it harder for new accounts to unfairly climb higher in the Top 500 than they deserve, without punishing more seasoned accounts.

Finally, Top 500 now requires you to complete the Seasoned Competitor lifetime challenge, which requires the player to win 750 games in Competitive Play in Overwatch 2 before appearing on the Top 500 leaderboards of any season. With this change, we are confident that we can lower the individual season threshold for games played on a roll to 25 per season. This will ensure that our experienced and seasoned players will not feel pressured to play the same amount each season. There will be some other changes to matchmaking, so be sure to read our patch notes when the new season goes live next Tuesday.

We can’t wait for you to join the game to check out all these changes to our heroes and Competitive Play. Let us know what you think and look for even more information in our Developer Update next Monday. It will be enchanting. Thanks everyone and let’s make this a great game!