I just wanted to make a post about how I’ve been feeling about Overwatch lately and some issues I’ve been having with it. I basically exclusively play Overwatch, I play some other games sometimes but 90% (if not more) of the time I’m playing a game, I’m playing Overwatch. I haven’t used the forums in a while but just wanted a place to kinda rant and write down all of my thoughts. Its probably going to be long and kinda all over the place so sorry in advance.
CONSOLE CAREER PROFILES
So, I’m a console player and ever since OW2 launched on October 4th which was 8 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days ago (according to google because I’m too lazy to actually check), console career profiles have just simply not worked and been showing completely incorrect data. This is a small issue but weirdly enough, watching my hours go up on heroes I enjoy was a majour motivation for me to play the game. Every patch I hope that maybe it’ll get fixed, and it has yet to.
Blizzard came out like a week after launch saying they didn’t lose the data (except some from the first few weeks after launch) and that it would be fixed in “several weeks”… well its been more than several MONTHS. And just to clarify, my main hero who I had around 700 hours on on the last day of OW1, now reads 190 hours, all of the heroes show completely wrong stats. On Echo it shows I have a 628% win rate, 480% on Ashe, 150% on Pharah, then 63% on Brig which I believe could be accurate as she is my main and I had a 61% win rate at the end of OW1 if I’m remembering correctly.
CUSTOMIZATION TAB
That leads into my next topic which is the customization tab, where you find your player icons, name cards, and titles. It’s just not organized and is completely inconsistent with where they place things.
Starting with name cards, it goes through Halloween Terror and Lunar New Year, showing the cards we got from challenges during the events, then Overwatch League and Pachimari. These all mostly seem fine until we get further down, it is organized as the following:
Battle Pass - The battle pass name cards from only season 1 and 2.
Shop - The shop cards from season 2 and 3.
Season 1 - The shop cards from season 1.
Season 3 - The challenge card from the One Punch Man challenge.
Season 4 - All of the battle pass and shop cards from season 4.
Pride - All of the free pride cards.
Season 5 - All of the battle pass and shop cards from season 5.
Its just so strange how inconsistently they organize these. Sometimes they put battle pass cards in the battle pass section and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they put shop cards in the shop section and sometimes they don’t, some of the events have specific categories and some are just mixed in.
Then we get to titles which start with the general Overwatch section, where the lifetime challenge titles are, along with the option to not use a title (and depending on the patch, this may or may not work). Then you have the mostly seasonal competitive titles mixed in with some non-seasonal ones, this is all fine. Then we get to the following:
Battle Pass - Every battle pass title from seasons 1 through 4 in order of completion.
Season 2 - All of the titles from Battle for Olympus.
Season 3 - All of the titles from Loverwatch.
Season 5 - All of the battle pass titles from season 5.
Why all of the sudden are the battle pass titles not listed under battle pass? Why not just have categories named after the events in which the titles came from? I just don’t understand. It’s like with the whole customization tab, a different developer comes in last second before each new season and throws them into a random category without looking at how they’ve previously been organized (or lack thereof).
Current Balance
To be honest, as a casual player who still plays “to win” I guess, but without taking it too seriously, I’m fairly happy with the current balance. I do have a few gripes though.
Starting off with Mei, who is (or was) my second main and my main in the damage roster, I’m just super disappointed with the changes. Without bringing up the fact that she is basically OW1 Mei at one of her weakest points but without freeze, she just isn’t fun for either party now. The beam slow changes are just extremely annoying to play into, especially as a tank, while also not really getting that much value.
For me before, I liked the beam because it was a quite decent cleaving burst of damage with a slow. Her new freeze doing so much less damage is just annoying as the Mei player, because there are a lot more cleanses in the game now, and also your icicle follow up can just be matrixed. It seems so weird and stupid to say that out loud but for me personally, it just feels impossible to get anything done and because you can’t actually freeze, the enemy can also use movement abilities and just simply shoot at you while chilled or whatever its called. I don’t know, it just feels terrible and slow to play in a fast paced game.
On top of that, her wall range and health being nerfed, Blizzard having a lot more counters than in OW1 as well… I think shes just objectively a worse version in more ways than not of her OW1 self. But hey, I’ve been wrong in the past tons of times. I personally just want a revert but I feel as if thats unlikely. Some other ideas I have are maybe buffing the damage to around 70dps instead of 55, and/or maybe adding the hindering effect to frozen targets, but overall I think it would just be way healthier and more fun to just revert it. I’m in the minourity of preferring OW2 Mei over OW1 though, so maybe other Mei players would prefer a buffed version of her current self, but I’m sure non-Mei players probably just want it reverted as well. Just really disappointed, especially since she just got a really nice skin.
With the mention of hindering, Cassidy… who thought of this? Can they just scrap the whole magnetic grenade idea and give him a smoke grenade or a complete new ability or something. Do they or do they not want crowd control in the game? Can they please be consistent with literally anything?
Moving onto Lifeweaver, I am honestly extremely happy with his current balance. I hated playing him and having him on my team before the buffs but now he’s really fun and I don’t mind having him on my team either. I understand theres a core issue in the fact that he doesn’t really have any play potential and can only react to things, but I kinda like the idea of that being his thing. I think we should wait to see how this all plays out, but something I would like to see changed on him is 2 charges of dash, I’d even be okay with a higher cooldown in exchange for that. But like I said, I’m extremely happy with him as of now. Also the new Cleric skin is a 10/10.
Lastly, I want to talk about Hanzo. This hero has replaced Junkrat for my least favourite hero, I despise him. Maybe this is just me being stupid but is he supposed to be a sniper or an up-close hero? Widowmaker can only oneshot from within a reasonable (debatable but…) range now, but Hanzo can still oneshot from across the map and also has storm arrow which can basically delete most of the roster and also just follow up with a body or headshot after if they don’t die. Skill issue I suppose but still. He literally shoots logs and to be honest is pretty hot, so why don’t we have a sexy lumberjack skin for him yet?
General thoughts to wrap up…
Overwatch 2 should’ve never existed, they should’ve just kept developing and updating the first game. The whole OW2 pvp update could’ve been just that, an update similarly to 2-2-2… but there’s no going back and changing that. So, for what it is, I’m fairly happy with it. Most of my gripes are the little things, the “Blizzard Polish” that they used to be famous for kind of just missing… They all add up and really make the game feel bad sometimes, but I still love the game and loved the game before as well.
Honestly, another game could replace Overwatch at this point for me if only there were literally any good games… to me it feels like basically every modern game has its issues and maybe a lot of that has to do with the fact they just want money, and if they aren’t like that they don’t have a big enough team to keep up. So, for now I’ll just keep getting high on copium and hoping Blizzard will start to do better.
Sorry this was all over the place and kinda spammy, but let’s be honest, we all play Overwatch in 2023 so its not like we’re not all used to unorganized flops like me.