Geoff Goodman spoke about potential hero reworks coming with Overwatch 2 during the Reddit AMA of July 2020. These reworks may or may not be confirmed at BlizzcOnline in a few weeks.
To remind you of what could be happening:
Roadhog
May be moved to the Damage role.
They told us his playtested damage kit in the 1-3-2 experiment in this post. To summarise, 400 max health, take a breather no longer reduces damage, scrap gun gets buffed. Jeff does say that this was not planned for 2-2-2 though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Note: In the public 1-3-2 experiment, he was not playtested as a Damage hero.
Roadhog Quote
Mei
May move to the Tank role.
Geoff Goodman says they could “maybe try” Mei as a tank, and she “comes up quite a bit [when speaking about reworks]”. He mentions her secondary fire does too much damage and has too much range for a tank though.
Geoff didn’t speak much about this. All he said was that Tankgitte comes up “consistently” (see above Mei quote, where he also mentions Brigitte).
Symmetra
May move to the Support role.
Geoff speaks about Symmetra several times in the Reddit AMA. Firstly, he says:
"[Healing Turrets] ended up just feeling like a mismatch, but honestly i’d be up for taking another crack at it at some point."
He suggests that turrets were her primary/only way to heal, and says perhaps the Healer Sym experiment “could have gone better” if she had a different, primary way to heal with turrets just being auxillery healing.
In another answer, he says "the door isn’t fully closed yet. its possible we’ll re-try her as a Support (healer) in the future."
His final mention of a Healer Symmetra is when he responds to a question asking “Do you regret any hero reworks?” to which he says:
"Maybe we could have pushed harder on Sym as a healer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer."
Shortly after OW2 was announced, Jeff Kaplan said at an Overwatch 2 panel:
"Today on November 1st 2019, I do not think any hero needs a major rework. Major reworks are messy and scary and not one of the best things for us to do. They can occasionally be exciting and occasionally they’re neccesary…But we don’t have any major reworks planned.
Now there is some time before Overwatch 2 comes out and I think a major release like Overwatch 2 is a great opportunity for us to revisit everything and to really reconsider everything so I would not rule that possibility out."
Note: This was said 8 months before the Reddit AMA. It’s quite possible that Jeff’s stance has changed on this, especially considering Geoff Goodman (lead hero designer and head of reworks) has shown a degree of interest in reworking several heroes.
Please bear in mind that this is purely speculation based on some vague developer quotes. Manage expectations! Geoff only showed interest in reworks, he did not confirm they were reworking any heroes.
I’m disappointed they didn’t even mention Bastion. He’s by far the hero that needs a rework the most. But now that you mention it, I vaguely remember Geoff saying “we don’t think any hero needs a rework right now, but maybe Bastion” a few years ago and nothing came of it.
This could bring back her old aggressive playstyle, so I wouldn’t be opposed to a tank rework as a Brig players myself.
I’d definitely prefer it if they kept her as a support and somehow made it work.
But if it made it healthier for the game…and I suppose I’d still be able to enjoy her and get the old playstyle back so…I’m not opposed to it at all
I’d be all for reworks within a hero’s given role, but reworks that move a hero between roles I’m generally opposed against; the exception for me being support Symmetra but that’s mostly because that’s her original role and I think there’s still potential there. Brigitte might work as a tank, but I still hold the opinion that there is room in the game for a tankier support.
My memory might be wrong but I think maybe 1 or 2 years ago a dev said on a stream (I think on Seagull’s stream when he was interviewing a dev), that if they were to rework a hero in the future then Bastion will (probably) be priority number 1. Or something along those lines.
Short of making the hero disgustingly OP, I can damn near guarantee in a 2/2/2 environment no one would want a “support” on their team incapable of recovering health.
Whether they’re right or wrong- players would be quick to hate and blame that hero: “we need more heals!”
Wait what really? I must just suck at killing her then half the time I just ignore her and look for the other support. When she ults, I try to pretend she never existed.
People keep posing this set of responses as an active intent. What I read out of each of these was an honest, albeit polite response that was intent on not saying “no” to avoid boxing themselves in if they ever decide to change their minds.
I would frankly be surprised if any character gets a rework for OW 2; because having to run a parallel game for balance internally (and lets say six new characters on top) whilst also supporting a different kit in a live game over an extended period is very difficult. Let’s not even touch on how you would seriously aggravate the communities of each main when they loaded the very first game in OW 2 and their main was in a different role or suddenly had a very different kit from literally one moment to the next.
That being said, I would not be surprised to see Bastion get a soft rework. His skin kind of hints at an energy weapon now, and he is one of the easiest since he is used so little to begin with and he’s been in Torbjorn’s care for a while by the lore.
PS: Forcing Sym into a healer role will damn the character forever as F-tier or D-tier at best.
PSS: Forcing Brig into Tank role when we already are short on Tanks and Supports will not help the game, and only makes people who despise Brig happy.
I would say most non-meta characters need a rework
Sym and Bastion just don’t fit well at all in OW
Genji and Doom need to be changed in some aspects (I think Doom could even become a Tank, as his personality is “fight face to face” not “flank, kill, get the heck out”. Genji is hard to say what should happen, I’ll think about it)
Junkrat is way too good in closed areas but completely trash in open ones. He should be changed a lot to have a better balance between both scenarios
Moira of course needs utility (and no dmg orb, pls Jeff)
Mei definitely IS a tank
Pharah could get something, not sure what tho
There is also meta characters that could get a rework:
Roadhog is a tank with a one-shot ability and no ability that protects an ally (take a breather is for self-use, and is almost never used to make hog body block damage)
Sigma has a bit of everything, if they made suck the main tank ability and his barrier not have 100% damage absorption, I think it would be better
If his barrier had like 50% dmg absorption, the dmg could go right through, but causing only 50% of the normal dmg. The barrier would technically have double the health, so about 400 shield health would do it. AoEs should bot go through and cause 100% damage
Well maybe by OW2 the tank/support role will have a couple more heroes each to the roster if they were to do it.
But I totally get your point and don’t disagree with you
There will be tweaks to a lot of kits, no question. In fact, I think a few of the tweaks lately which seem nonsensical on the surface might actually be due to testing with the new character kits coming in. I personally have been using the degree of variance of new kits to gauge how close Blizz is on OW 2 development, as I expect we will see a surge of kit revisions in the months just prior to OW 2’s release. Based on that approach, I don’t think they have made much real progress and the leaks of a 2022 release are true. I really believed they would release in the May-June 2021 timeframe, but no longer. I would bet that maybe three kits are close to completion, maybe four, and two or more are in half-developed states and all are likely to be under constant revision over the next year including in-game characters.
she has the highest death rate out of all the supports