Some random thoughts I have about the new mythic weapons feature they’re adding. I will not get into whether the monetization for these is fair, as there are already enough threads about that
1. Upgrades
It’s been confirmed the weapons will have 4 levels like the skins. There is the base skin for 50 prisms, a flourish, kill effects, and gameplay-reactive VFX for 10 prisms each.
The base weapon in addition to just looking cool has some special sound effects on most abilities. There are also may be visual effects like a big explosion on firestrike contact and a gushing of lava after people are hit with earthsatter, but it’s not clear if these are death effects or just base special VFX for the skin since we haven’t seen these abilities without people dying. There is also apparently an alternate ult voiceline of “Big slam” according to the blog. We also didn’t get to see him use shield or charge at all, so it’s unclear whether those are effected, even though they don’t really involve the weapon.
A flourish is basically a special emote for the weapon, the blogpost claims that you will be “spinning it in the air”. We see the very end of this sequence in the trailer. And we see rein is still walking during it so it’s presumably an emote you can use while walking similar to a weapon inspect, but with flourishing instead of inspecting. It’s also not clear if this is something that will happen automatically, say after you get a kill, or if you will need to manually activate this, and if so how
Kill effects are the most self explanatory, when people die there’s a small explosion and their corpse vanishes and there’s a demonic circle on the ground under them. Will be interesting to see whether these effects are strictly client side or not.
Reactive effects just means that there are effects that change depending on your gameplay. You can see in the trailer that the fire on his weapon gets more intense as he fights more people, so I presume it’s based on either eliminations or damage (or maybe the on fire meter, that’d be cool), and for support weapons it’ll probably also include healing. I hope for future weapons they manage to come up with some effects other than making the weapon glow or emit elemental effects
One thing I’ll say is the direct copying of the mythic skin upgrade system is kind of odd. There, I can realistically say hey, I don’t care about being able to make ashe red, I’ll only buy the first 2 tiers. But with the weapon there’s really no reason you’d ever not want the giant hell hammer to be able to catch on fire
The blog also mentions “watch as the demon’s power grows in every match you play” I think this just refers to the effects getting more intense throughout the match as you do damage and not any sort of permanent stat tracking system.
2. Roster Distribution
Overwatch has 40 heroes and 11 mythic skins. With 1 hero added every 2 seasons, it’d take until approximately season 69 for everyone to have a mythic skin. But with mythic weapons in the mix, presuming we get one each season, then it’ll only take until season 30 or 3 years from now to get the whole roster kitted out with at least one mythic cosmetic, which is a lot more reasonable.
Of course there will probably be some heroes that get both a mythic weapon and a mythic skin. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, especially since some of the prime candidates for mythic weapons already got skins before this system was planned. I do wonder what will happen if you equip a mythic weapon and skin at the same time though
3. Weaponless heroes
Some heroes don’t really have a weapon, or have a weapon that is very closely attached to their skin. Basically I don’t see what kind of manicure you could possibly give moira to make her fingernails mythical or how you could make an wrecking ball cannon that looks good on an arbitrary skin. Maybe they’ll just lean more into the special effects on these, or maybe they’ll just avoid giving these types of heroes weapon skins. The latter route may be a bit less interesting, but it’d be a good opportunity to give a mythic to some of the more slept on dps heroes, I especially think torb would be great for a mythic weapon
4. The choice
You essentially now have 2 options, the mythic skin or the mythic weapon. But the skin is a full customizable skin that includes multiple weapons, so how is it ever no the right option?
Well first of all, the weapon skin can be viewed as a backup option in case you don’t like the normal skin or the hero it’s for. The weapon also has a lot of the same benefits as a mythic (ult voicelines, VFX, SFX) as well as the entirely new Death effects, reactive effects, and flourishes. So if you only care about what you see from your first person perspective, the weapon is arguably better
Then there is also the versatility of being able to equip it with any skin. Some people dislike the mismatch, but thankfully Reinhardt has a number skins that this weapon would look perfect on.
Overall I still think the skin is a better deal than the weapon in general and that the weapon should probably cost slightly fewer prisms, but they’re still close enough that it’ll probably come down the the quality and heroes of the individual skins more than anything
Also remember you have the option not to spend and save your prisms for next season. I advise waiting until we get a trailer for next season before spending any prisms this season, who knows you might end up wanting to carry your 80 prims over so you can get both mythics next season (Again assuming they do weapons every season)
5. date
The skin doesn’t actually come out until July 23rd, which is presumably the midseason patch date. It’s not clear why. Maybe some technical things needing sorting out, maybe they just want to stagger the releases of mythics. I don’t really like it if that’s the case though. Like it’d be lame to complete the battlepass and then have to wait another week or two for the mythic you want to actually come out
6. non-mythic weapons
I wonder if non-mythic weapons are still on the table, since they haven’t released any last season and aren’t planning to this season other than the pink mercy bundle, which is an anomaly. Honestly I think it’d be weird if they didn’t since I’ve seen quite a few people in games who bought the light ones
7. Theme
I notice the hammer has nothing to do with the season’s theme, but to be fair I don’t really know how you can do a good weapon for this theme. I hope with future seasons they maybe try to match the weapons to it. For example if mercy didn’t just get a mythic I’d say it’d be perfect to give her some sort of arcane staff during the upcoming witches season