Jon and Aaron mental gymnastics on hero unlocks

General Discussion
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Below comes from a Polygon interview:

Jon Spector:

Jon Spector, commercial leader and vice president for Overwatch, said that Blizzard has “put a ton of time and energy into discussing how to make this system fairer for players, how to make sure that we’re preserving the competitive integrity of our game.”

“That observation that Aaron made — about how hero swapping works in reality — was pretty eye-opening for me when we first started working on this,” Spector said. “What we actually see in the data is that a majority of players in Overwatch have a majority of their play time on two or fewer heroes. And you can get to 99.9% of play time for a majority of our players with 12 or fewer heroes. They have a cast of 30 right now, and [when] you look at how people are actually playing the game there, they’re using a couple of heroes for most of how they play. Sometimes they’ll swap and they’ll add in a couple more heroes.

“So when we say, ‘Is it actually going to impact the play experience if someone has 34 out of 35 heroes?’ when we look at the data, we feel really confident that it’s not going to.”

Aaron Keller:

Keller said that as Blizzard has designed and rebalanced heroes for Overwatch 2’s 5v5 team composition, it has strived to make the game “a little bit more organic and a little bit more fluid,” and to “decrease the reliance on hard counters.”

“There will still be some of those in the game,” Keller said, “and there will probably be times in the future where we develop a hero that might have a new mechanic on it. It could take us a little while to get our head around the right way to handle that hero. But generally […] we still think that team compositions, hero picking, and counter-picking is an important elements of the game; we just don’t want it to be the only correct answer.”

“Even with this change of putting heroes in the battle pass, we think that with all of the other systems that we have in place, and with the additional ways of unlocking heroes and some of the ways that Overwatch has changed over time and the way that we’re changing Overwatch for Overwatch 2 […] we will still have a highly competitive game, even though some of the systems and some of the decisions that we’ve made to get there are different than what we started with.”

I like how Jon basically gives up on his explanation and pretty much says “uhh it’s just one hero dude”.

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The big takeaway I heard there was intentionally balancing heroes so there is overlaps.

Which tells me, one of the OW1 Supports is probably getting a Cleanse.

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no hard counters is huge. and allows this to happen. AND its better for competitive integrity to allow one-tricking as yeah, MOST players one-trick or prefer to

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Ah yes I totally enjoyed killing pharas with my sym during the x2 OW2 betas I’ve been in. Hog was totally playable into Ana, Echo totally playable into double hitscan hitscan, DVa totally playable into Zarya and so on.

Now I can play any hero (don’t even need the new ones, those can stay locked) into any comp in this new era of Overwatch thanks to the great balance team!

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Be funny if they went back to the original Moira experiment after all.

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I’m thinking it’ll be on Mercy. She doesn’t have the raw healing output of other supports, or the big defensive ult of other supports.

She needs a bit more “something” to be worthwhile.

I anticipate they push her more into the “Utility OffHealer” route.

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This is such BS.

When I first played OW on console, the first hero I played at all was Zarya. I played one match, didn’t understand how her bubbles worked, then swapped to Reinhardt. I played mostly Rein until Ana was released, then I split time between them, with a few other tanks and healers. I didn’t have to pay to try out any of those heroes in an actual match.

When I switched to PC, I started playing a ton more heroes, but still only tanks and supports. I didn’t play anyone that required precise movement or aim, because I didn’t have any confidence that I could do well with them. I went YEARS without playing ANY damage heroes.

Then I branched out and started playing DPS, and doing decently well on a few of them. In the past year or so, I picked up Widowmaker and have mostly been playing her, and doing pretty well. My aim is a lot better than I thought it was.

That’s how I’ve gone through the roster. When I got bored of a certain hero or role, I swapped to another. I tried out heroes whenever I felt like it. I found new favorites even after many years into playing the game. At no point did I have to invest any money into those experiments.

I didn’t have to pay $10 to find out whether I could ever play Widow decently or not. I didn’t have to pay $10 just to find out that I can’t play Genji very well and probably never will. I didn’t have to pay $10 that very first match when I picked Zarya, only to immediately swap to another hero out of frustration.

Whether people stick to just a few heroes or not, they are ignoring HOW those players found those heroes in the first place. They were ALL available to EVERYONE, from the start.

If I logged into OW1 on day one and saw any heroes locked behind a paywall or Battle Pass, I would have immediately gotten annoyed and moved on to another game. I’ve done it for lots of games before (most recently Multiversus), I suspect I’ll keep doing it in many games to come.

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I agree, they are going to put her into the off-support role with more utility, and rework/balance stuff in her original kit. They have two options to do so. Her R key, when she has her staff out, can be an ability, as well as her right click on her gun can do something. Since Mercy isn’t heavily reliant on “Skill” they can really hit a home run with cooldown management of utility.

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There’s probably a few more than two.

For instance,

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No Hard Counters? So they will remake Phara?

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Mercy’s the other possibility. I dunno though, it’d probably have to be part of a larger rework though and I think they’re already terrified to touch her even for mild tweaks.

Pushing her harder into the off-healer role would be riskier as well, Mercy mains as a group have generally always wanted her to be a main-healer.

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Well if they went that route, they’d probably need to redesign Pharah.
Cause I think Pharah is a big limiting factor on why they don’t just give Mercy like 75hps main heals or something.

That or give her some sort of healing effect on the ground, like a big Soldier Heal.

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I’m sure it’s true that the majority of people have most of their game time on a small number of heroes. I know it’s true for me, but that’s not really the point. Locking new heroes behind a paywall when that new hero might be something you want to play and add to your repertoire is a huge change from how the game worked for years. It’s a change we did not want and don’t appreciate.

It’s the overall change in business model people hate, we couldn’t care less if this specific hero or that specific hero is going to be one of the ones we play a lot or not. The concept is trash.

If it’s not going to be a hero I’m going to play a lot, I’m also not going to feel compelled to spend dozens of hours grinding for it either, so I may have a dead slot on my hero selection screen for a long time.

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Jons excuse is “most of our players are one tricks so who cares”. Well if everyone is a one trick then why make new heroes at all? Really embarrassing responses from the people in charge of the IP. When their mindset is to throw their players under the bus to defend anti-consumer business models you can see why this franchise has been a sinking ship since 2019.

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I wonder, how does he think those players FOUND those heroes that they one-trick? They certainly didn’t pay $10 for each hero until they found one they liked.

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Most players prefer personal weakness, over adaptability.

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Pharah needs a rework independent of Mercy’s balance, she needs to be decent on her own. Echo is a far healthier example of a flying hero.

I think keeping Mercy on basically Brig healing levels is probably fine though. But dropping her to say, Zen and apparently Kirito levels of healing won’t fly,

She definitely needs some sort of burst/high impact capability that’s solely within her own control. And honestly, if they won’t tie Rez back to ult in some form, it’s about time to cut the cord.

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Maybe, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of ways to kill Pharah.

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Nah as a Mercy player with a thousand + hours on her, I can assure you I’d rather have her as an off-healer with more utility than a main healer with bare-bones utility w/ a mediocre ult.

What they need to do:

R- Ability Caduceus Staff

  • Pulls ally to Mercy cleansing all status conditions.
  • Ally needs to push the interact key to accept pull to avoid trolling.

Now she has some utility outside of just healing.

They should swap single target Rez and Valkyrie.

Resurrect

  • Stays single target, has 2 charges, each needing to be independently charged.
  • Reduced cast time to 1 second
  • Reduce ultimate cost down to 1500 for each Resurrect down from 1820.

Valkyrie

  • Reduced to 5 second active.
  • Cooldown 15 seconds.
  • Healing output increased to 65HP/S (Healing becomes single target)
  • Damage Boost remains the same and chains in a 10M radius around targeted ally.

Caduceus Blaster (Right Click)

  • Increased damage shot 20 damage to 50 takes up a certain amount of ammo.
  • Applies a debuff to the enemy, not sure which one should be applied, either a weakened or blind, OR it could be supportive and be a projectile that can hit an ally and increase healing done to them, which would be interesting.

That’s pretty much how I could see her being changed to become more of an off-support healer.

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If what was said about Kiriko is true then the only way they can get around this is by adding cleansing abilities to any of the “base” support heroes. Any of them that are not Ana. Preferrably Zen or Mercy – maybe both. Then we can talk about the effects new heroes/abilities have on the game.

Oh wait…

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