Hey everyone!
We’re back with another Experimental mode focused on testing some changes to Baptiste, Mei, and a change in how we address health value adjustments. As with all Experimental modes, these changes are not guaranteed to reach the live version of the game.
What are we trying to address?
We’ve identified some weaknesses with Baptiste and Mei’s kits, which we’d like to address. Baptiste has been one of the lower-performing Support heroes recently. For Mei, we’ve found that reductions to her maximum ammo have had detrimental effects to her gameplay.
We’re also making some health adjustments to a number of heroes in increments of 25, rather than 50. Historically, we’ve always adjusted health and shield values in increments of 50 for ease of understanding how many hits a hero could take. After years of balance updates and fine tuning, we want to try getting a bit more granular with this approach.
What are we testing?
For Baptiste, we’re testing some changes that should allow Baptiste to deal damage quicker and land more impactful healing grenades. We’ve also found that the current iteration of Amplification Matrix forces teams to group closely together, so we’re increasing the width of the Amplification Matrix window for more accessible use.
Mei will now reload 15 ammo per second when she uses Cryo-Freeze. Since she spends more time out of ammo, Cryo-Freeze just delayed the inevitable need to have to reload afterwards. She still won’t be able to reload while frozen, but this should improve her gameplay flow.
We’re adjusting base health (and shields) for the heroes below in increments of 25 to test how more granular changes to health impact gameplay.
- Brigitte (+25 health)
- McCree (+25 health)
- Symmetra (+25 shield)
- Widowmaker (-25 health)
We hope you check out the new Experimental mode and provide us with your feedback! Science will reveal the truth – And all great science requires data! As always, this is an Experiment, so the changes in this test may not reach the live game.
Thank you!
