Just in case you didn’t hear earlier, Blizzard introduced the support sniper Ana today.
With the arrival of the newest Overwatch hero, Blizzard is using the opportunity to include other revisions to the game. According to the patch notes, gameplay during Overtime has been modified to end faster and have players respawn slower. Competitive play matches can now only have one of each hero per team. Bastion, Lucio, and Soldier 76 get a 10% increase in cost to their ultimate, and Roadhog is up an entire 45%. D.Va benefited greatly from the patch, with their ultimate costing 15% less, the delay from their explosion reduced to three seconds – and they don’t get damaged at all from that. Mercy’s damage boost is now 50 percent instead of 30. Finally Zenyatta’s base shields were buffed to 50, with his orbs of Discord and Harmony traveling four times faster than before. Speaking of fast, Zenyatta now moves twice as quick during his ultimate.
Of course it’s worth reading over the whole thing yourself if you were curious about anything specific.
So why the Competitive play hero limit? Jeff Kaplan explained some details as to why in a forum post.
In Quick Play, where things are intended to be more relaxed, this is fine. But in Competitive Play, we feel that hero stacking is becoming detrimental and leading to some not-so-great player experiences. For example, we’ve seen organized teams on Assault and Hybrid maps use hero stacking to overtake the first point before the defense has a chance to counter. We’ve also seen players use specific stacked compositions just to frustrate their opponents or cause indefinite delays in overtime (among other strategies). While this kind of thing is certainly possible in any mode, the higher stakes of Competitive Play means these kinds of tactics were popping up more often than anyone would like.
Blizzard knows that gamers will try and beat the Overwatch system at any chance they get. They also predicted this in another case with the upcoming hero, Ana. Community Manager Lylirra took to the forums to beat players to the punch. Blizzard seems to have anticipated that people would try and stock up on loot boxes to prep for Ana’s release.
Before you do that, though, please remember the following: Loot Box contents are generated at the time that they earned or purchased, NOT when they are opened.
This means that any Loot Box you earn or purchase now, or at any point before Ana is released, will not have a chance to contain her cosmetic items. Only those Loot Boxes that are earned or purchased after she is live and playable on your gaming platform will be eligible for her skins, sprays, voice lines, hero emotes, etc. (This is how the system will continue to work for future content updates, too.)
The newest Overwatch updates are available now on PC via the Public Test Server, but they’ll make their way to an official release on both PC and Consoles in the not too distant future.
