Blizzard has now rolled out its latest update for Overwatch 2, after delaying it for a few days earlier in the week. The new mid-season cycle patch, as Blizzard is referring to it, has now gone live after a “critical issue” forced it to be held up. However, there are some pretty substantial balancing changes for a number of Overwatch 2 heroes, some of which will go down well with certain players rather than others.
The game is currently over halfway through its first season, and with season two looming, Blizzard has been focusing on tuning and adjusting skill determination for players taking part in competitive play in Overwatch 2. In addition, the team will be increasing the precision of queue time estimates for each individual role in role queue matches. Aim assist has also had some tweaking, especially for those playing the game in crossplay lobbies. Official comments from Blizzard on this have been shared below.
As far as the heroes go, there are some nerfs incoming for Genji, Sombra, D.Va, Zarya and Kiriko. There’s also a somewhat unexpected nerf for Junkrat, which has taken many players on the Overwatch 2 forums by surprise. Regardless, here are some of the most notable patch notes for today’s update.
Overwatch 2 Patch Notes
Crossplay and Aim Assist
We made a change to Aim Assist in Crossplay (PC+ Console) lobbies. If you play in a Crossplay game now, Aim Assist is enabled in all matches except Competitive.
In our data, we found many groups were crossplay groups between PC and console players. This meant if you were playing on console and grouping with players on PC, you were opting into a bad experience for yourself to play with your friends. Also, if you had a group that was primarily console, but one of your friends was a PC player, you had to leave the PC player out to have a good experience.
We’d like to reiterate—at this point Aim Assist exists only on console platforms.
We’ll be monitoring the deployment of this change carefully and making changes quickly if needed.
Heroes
D.Va
D.Va felt too deadly after the last round of changes given how resilient she can be with her improved Defense Matrix.
- Fusion Cannons – Spread increased from 3.5 to 3.75
- Boosters – Impact damage reduced from 25 to 15
- Call Mech – Call Mech ultimate cost reduced by 12%
Zarya
Early player sentiment predicted Zarya as one of the weakest solo tanks in 5v5, although her high damage potential and barrier uptime have proven to be extremely effective. For opponents, feedback has indicated this can feel as though Zarya has very limited windows of vulnerability, which feels difficult to deal with when combined with her ramping damage potential.
These changes will reduce the barrier uptime, making it slightly more difficult for her to gain energy and will provide enemies with more time to deal damage to her.
- Particle Barrier- Duration reduced from 2.5 to 2 seconds, cooldown increased from 10 to 11 seconds
- Projected Barrier – Duration reduced from 2.5 to 2 seconds, cooldown increased from 10 to 11 seconds
Genji
Genji has greatly benefited from the move to 5v5. Changing to a single Tank and the reduction of crowd control has removed a lot of obstacles for Genji. However, he hasn’t received tuning updates since he wasn’t actively in the meta until launch—an intentional decision based on our general preference to avoid preemptive adjustments when possible. These changes will bring Genji more in line with the other flanking damage heroes like Tracer and Reaper.
- Shuriken- Maximum ammo reduced from 30 to 24, damage reduced from 29 to 27
Junkrat
- Steel Trap – Arming time increased from 0.5 to 0.75 seconds
- Trapped duration reduced from 3 to 2.5 seconds
Sombra
With Sombra’s rework, she gained a lot more damage to help account for the reduced ability lockout duration of Hack. This has proven to be too deadly for a flanker with easy access to the enemy backlines, especially in 5v5.
She can also no longer channel hack on an already hacked target as feedback indicated the reduced cooldown combined with hacking from stealth proved to be too frustrating for many players. This is essentially a per-target cooldown that enables Hack to keep its current 4-second cooldown for potentially hacking multiple targets.
- Hack – Ability lockout duration reduced from 1.75 to 1.5 seconds
- Hacked enemies are no longer valid targets for hacking for the duration of the 8-second effect
- Hacked enemy damage multiplier reduced from 40 to 25%
Kiriko
This invulnerability window is primarily intended to help avoid instantly dying to something unseen after teleporting through walls, but it ended up being a little too long and led to some confusion while shooting at Kiriko.
- Swift Step – Invulnerability duration reduced from 0.4 to 0.25 seconds
Alongside these changes are a number of bug fixes for players on both PC and console, so be sure to check out the full patch notes on the official Overwatch 2 website.
Overwatch 2 is available now and is free to play on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch and PC.
