What is it?
Bleed status is a proposed new effect to mitigate healing without directly nerfing healers. Bleed status is not DoT but rather a debuff that reduces the healing that a hero receives from their allies by 50%. Bleed status does not impact self-healing, and it’s cured by a health pack like burn and poison effects.
Who benefits from it?
Rapidfire heroes like Soldier, Bastion, Orisa, Sombra, Tracer and Hammond can proc bleed. Burst damage heroes like Widow, Hanzo, Ashe, Genji, Junkrat and Reaper cannot.
How do you proc bleed?
This is a skill-based status effect that requires a player to maintain a particular level of accuracy against an individual target for a set amount of time, in addition to meeting a fixed damage threshold value.
If a player targets their enemy with 20% accuracy, it will take 8 seconds to proc bleed. If shooting with 30% accuracy, it will take them 5 seconds. At 40+% accuracy, it will take 3 seconds. These numbers are a starting point only and may need tweaking. Focus fire does not proc bleed faster.
Who is affected?
The status will have less relevance in mid and lower ranks where accuracy is lower. It will have more relevance at higher ranks. GOATS is likely to be the most affected comp, as 3 tanks in a deathball formation are an easy target that allow DPS to continually proc bleed, thereby reducing the enemy team’s stacked AOE healing by 50%.
What does it look like?
On an enemy, bleed looks like a poison effect—only red. For the hero experiencing the status, it looks similar to the fire effect but red. Hero audio samples that already exist for burn and freeze can be reused here.
What about the tanks that aren’t doing great currently?
Thankfully, they already have abilities that can easily be tweaked to provide bleed immunity. For instance, Orisa’s fortify would provide immunity, cure the status if present and remove any buildup toward the status. The same could work for Roadhog’s take a breather and Hammond’s adaptive shields.