If I was a dev, I would have made a lot more substantial gameplay changes going into OW2. I would mainly focus on gameplay consistency, ensuring players performance feels consistent across matches and try to remove the inherit advantage some heroes have from their wonky hitboxes.
1. Heroes now have movement acceleration while firing
I feel like there is a massive disconnect in the community to what movement acceleration actually is. Movement acceleration does not slow down the game. You can still freely travel at max speed.
All it means is that if you want to suddenly do a U-turn or A-D strafe, it means your character model has to slow down first before instantly going max speed in the opposite direction. Games have movement acceleration to stop things like A-D spam.
The current design of Overwatch is massively problematic, zero movement acceleration necessitates the need for gigantic hero hitboxes, enlarged projectile hitboxes and many aiming mechanics being made as easy as possible to counter-act the inconsistency it introduces. Quite frankly, all the massive design trade-offs that have to be made to accommodate zero movement acceleration is absurd and it is stupid the game is still balanced around it.
I would implement it in a way, so the game still feels as responsive as possible but when shooting you are forced to make yourself slightly more vulnerable and can’t rely on A-D crouch spam to survive.
2. All weapons having a hitbox piercing mechanic
I do not mean piercing in the sense of being able to hit multi-targets. Piercing in the sense that if you hit an enemy and the character model shoulder blocks an otherwise headshot hit, the damage will be calculated as a headshot.
Hitbox manipulation is incredibly easy in this game and throws consistent aiming out of the window. It is especially bad on heroes that have an inherently wonky hitbox in the first place.
This change is to once again make player performance feel more consistent. If you are aiming exactly where a players head hitbox should be, but a random a$$ animation blocks it, this mechanic will allow you to still land that deserved headshot.
3. All non-ability 1-shots removed
This will require substantial reworks to both Hanzo and Widow. They will still retain their 1-shots but the capability to do will be tied to abilities instead.
Specifics would have to be sorted while balancing, However, 1-shots in their current form are too easy to pull off and the above changes would make them utterly dominant in games. Removing 1-shots off a standard primary would essentially be required.
4. All non-explosive (AOE) projectiles heroes receive a massive increase to projectile speed, projectile hitboxes are made pixel-perfect
Projectiles in Overwatch are balanced in an asinine manner. They are relegated to the spam role. Hit-scan are balanced around precision shots and consistent tracking.
Projectiles are balanced around spam.
I would argue that projectiles should be balanced more like hit-scan. You don’t balance a game around inconsistency, you balance it around an assumption of consistent performance which current projectile balance makes incredibly hard to do.
I would make all projectiles pixel-perfect in terms of hitbox size but massively increase projectile speed (50-100% increase) depending on the hero.
I would also massively reduce ammo capacity of a lot of projectile heroes. Hanzo can’t have an infinite mag, Torb has McCree’s primary but with 18 shots before reloading instead of 6.
The game is balanced like this simply because of how absurdly slow projectiles actually are in this game, which promotes absurd levels of spam damage which particularly hurts tank players.
5. All hero hitboxes are made pixel-perfect
This is self-explanatory. Overwatch is meant to be a competitive game, it shouldn’t have massively increased hitbox sizes. The game is only designed like this currently due to the game having zero movement acceleration. Once this has been fixed, the game can actually be made to have visually correct hitboxes.
Competitive integrity - Restored.