[OW2] Beta #2, what I expect / want

General Discussion
1

Well my general expectations are at least

FEATURES

Start date

  • As close to June 16th as possible. Like June 17th or June 24th, if possible. Open the doors when the hype is still warm from the June 16th announcements.

Access to the Beta

  • Please don’t make people sit through another 4 hours to get a key if they already had one. Although if you really want people watching streams. Just offer some limited edition sprays, and that Genji/Illidan, Symmetra/Tyrand skin as drops. And you will get a lot of viewers. But in less of a forced way.

Access to the Beta (Part 2)

  • For people who don’t have a key yet, don’t make it take FOREVER after they spend 1-4 hours earning a key, for it to transfer over. You’re gonna cause a lot of resentment from this.

Access to the Beta (Part 3)

  • If it fits with your business strategy, make the beta be an Open Beta. It avoids all the above listed problems.

Keep the Drops going

  • Your streamers are kinda aggro, Overwatch 1 is kinda dead for viewership, and they just spent the last month with reduced revenue and probably playing other games. You can reward them and get them to be a lot more “positive” in their coverage if you keep the drops going.

Either keep the Beta open until Beta #3

  • Because OW1 is kinda dead both from player counts and viewer counts
  • Or put a “OW1.5 Experimental Patch” onto Live with all the balance changes and 5v5.
  • Don’t make people suffer with… well 6v6… for the next 1-4 months

A New Support Hero

  • Probably the Hanamura Fox Girl character

2-3 New Maps, and more old maps

  • Probably some of the ones we’ve already

Competitive Mode

  • The usual with Role Queue

Replace Quickplay with modified QPC

  • Change Quickplay to a version of Quickplay Classic that has 1Tank maximum/2Support maximum per team. This should cut down queue times a lot. And calm down the VideoGameDunkey’s of the world. And generally be quite familiar to former players who left before the end of 2018.

Get rid of Open Queue, but have No Hero Limits in the Arcade

  • For people who legitimately just want to test out the new hero changes, then peace out. Not people who wanna cheese with UltraGOATs.

Enable Mystery Heroes in the Arcade

  • For a lot of people, this is their main game mode

New Skin Models

  • Have at least have at least one version of the new hero model skins accessible per hero (I.e. Hat Bastion)

Replay viewer

  • How do you expect to get favourable video coverage if people gotta work extra hard to get good video coverage. Put they feature back, even if the interface isn’t pretty yet.

Streamer mode

  • Not sure what this would entail, but if you wanna make Streamers happy, then put in some anti-steam-sniper stuff.

BALANCE

Junkrat

  • Rebalance tweaks, for instance: 2x larger projectile size for grenade launcher before first bounce.

Symmetra

  • Rebalance tweaks, for instance: Primary Fire gains charge levels from all damage dealt by primary/secondary/sentries
  • Also faster projectile speed on zero charge Orbs
  • Also faster alternate fire charge speeds, even the primary fire charge level goes up.

Widowmaker

  • Put her HP back to 175hp. I have no idea why it was raised earlier, unless you were trying to benchmark her data versus Sojourn. Unless there’s some weird exotic change you got in mind to reign in ranged oneshots in OW2. This is going to be a big problem in Comp.

Hanzo

  • 175hp, for similar reasons as Widow. Risk vs Reward balancing etc.

Bastion

  • Low selfdamage from the grenade
  • Instant explosion when you yourself come in contact with the grenade (For rocket jumping without a delay)
  • Lower the cooldown to 6 seconds, down from 10 seconds (Why is it so long?)

Mercy

  • Superjump mostly fixed (No autosuperjump, because devs will be roasted for that)

Moira

  • Weaken Rework

Baptiste

  • Tone down the self survival on Regen burst. Less instant heal more heal over time. (So it doesn’t feel like he’s undivable)
  • Heck remove that entire 2x instant heal mechanic for his selfheal, and give him better forward jumping movement, because THAT would be fun.
  • Increase the explosion radius on his heal grenades to accommodate for more spread-out teammates and larger maps

Lucio changes

  • Self sustain to be a little toned down, he’s a bit too tanky. Like -10%

Ana

  • The 1.5sec stun on Sleep Dart shrunk as small as is reasonable

Doomfist:

  • Power Block slows down movement a lot less
  • Ult grants him 100% empowered punch charge

D.va

  • Lower delay between DM usages, so D.va can reliably eat Sleep Dart AND Biotic Grenade
  • Maybe faster base movement speed while walking, or larger DM range

Also I personally would like

Ana

  • Biotic Grenade: Put a version of Weaken on it instead of AntiHeal (Which does not stack with Moira’s version)
  • (Alternatively) Biotic Grenade: Healing received during AntiHeal is refunded to the affected enemy player after AntiHeal wears off. Indicate this backlog of healing with “Purple Health”.

Roadhog

Take A Breather

  • Gives a persistent cleanse for it’s cast duration, maybe make this AOE for teammates if possible

Thick Skin (Passive)

  • 30% less Ult Charge feeding resistance (I think this secretly already exists)
  • 50% less Headshot bonus damage taken

DPS Only Mode

  • Add some sort of primary game mode that’s DPS Only. Like Domination, CS:GO style, Dirty Bomb, Push Only, etc. Soak up as many excess DPS players as possible.
2 Likes
2

Surprised new heroes isn’t on the list. More than 1. Tank AND support. They can’t do just one at a time anymore.

3

The only things i want is screenshake to be gone and probably an option to switch back to ow1 ui or reposition the ui of your choice. Last beta was uncomfortable for me to play because of those things.
Also new redesigns and workshop would be pretty nice.

4

I’m trying to temper my expectations a bit… But not entirely.

But to be honest if I slimmed this list down as much as possible it would mostly just be

  1. New Heroes
  2. New Maps
  3. Quickplay replaced with QPC but with Tank/Support Role Limits
    • I cannot express how drastically important it is that queue times are good in this next beta. Not having this alone would probably cost the company literally hundreds of millions of dollars in lost opportunity cost.
  4. Fix that Mercy SuperJump thing
  5. Moira Weaken Rework
1 Like
5

Oh they can and most likely will….hell ZERO isn’t out of realm of possibility

6

Taking away role queue QP solves nothing. 1 tank maximum is not enough for open queue - the whole point of that mode is for the longest queue time players (tanks) to be able to play somewhere else with shorter queue times. It defeats the purpose if they might not get to pick tank. I could see a 2 tank maximum.

2 Likes
7

It solves a lot.

  1. No UltraGOATs unbalanced nonsense cheese
  2. Fast Queue Times

For people who just wanna cheese it and test stuff out, TBH they really should just have a No Hero Limits mode in the arcade. Let people go full cheese and test out the new heroes. 3x Orisa’s with 2x Moira? Go nuts.

But people people who legitimately wanna play like it’s still GOATs / Slambulence / TripleTank in 2022. They can quit the game entirely, if it’s that big a deal for them. There’s not enough of those people to matter. And the opportunity cost of lost playerbase for having crappy queue times is literally hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of times larger than that.

8

If you force everyone into open queue then you’re going to have a lot of tank/DPS players forced into playing support if they want a balanced game. It completely undermines the goals of role queue.

1 Like
9
  • TBH I think only Competitive should have Role Queue.
  • Quickplay should have Role Limits, but no Role Queue
  • Open Queue Competitive should have Role Limits, but no Role Queue

Anything without Role Limits should be cheese modes in the arcade. Like No Hero Limits. Or Mystery Heroes (But maybe even that should have some semblance or Role Limits)

Whatever players they lose off of a decision like that would be tiny in comparison to those they gain/retain.

Especially given that a lot of the more “MOBA-ish” players are gonna be headed to PVE anyways.

And yeah, sorry if this comes off as a bit harsh. But when people basically bring up the prospect of designing the game to avoid losing like 2,000 people, but in the process lose like 200,000 people instead. It really makes me wonder if they are seeing the bigger picture.

There really aren’t that many people who want “NeoGOATs” compared to those who just want good queue times, without the game becoming overly defensive biased.

10

As someone with a fast computer who will be almost guaranteed first pick in every game, I support this.

Just kidding

11

She can already do this

12

Only if the Ana player doesn’t know how to press 2 buttons with the same second.

13

C o u g h , c o u g h -

I CAN FEEL MY SOUL LEAVING MY BODY

MAKE IT STOP-

14

I suspect they may give us a completely different set of maps - remove all the maps in beta1 and give us 3 new maps and some old maps in beta2. Why? Because they want as much testing as possible on so-far unplayed maps. If they just dilute the map pool by adding maps then the maps they released already will get a lot more play than other new and old maps. It makes more sense, from a testing PoV, to have a separate pool of maps per beta.

I would say the same about heroes, but since we only have 1 new hero so far that probably wouldn’t make sense.

15

I’ll be honest I do not expect anything, no changes, no new heroes, no new maps.
Maybe they’ll have got some more of the OW1 heroes and maps working in OW2, that’s it.

16

Well, that’s one way to avoid disappointment.

17

You know the ranged oneshot hero nerfs are coming. Just a question of when, and whether they change the hero’s damage uptime or survival.

18

Sym and Torb rework please!!! That’s all