As Overwatch 2‘s Season Four wraps up, game director Aaron Keller has reflected on the overall balance of the game. “This season we saw a wide selection of heroes get played, and for the most part, the game felt fairly balanced. From a win rate perspective, Seasons Three and Four were some of the most balanced in recent Overwatch history,” he stated.
Keller went on to discuss specific heroes, starting with Junker Queen. “In the midseason patch, Junker Queen was given a series of buffs, and she really started to dominate. Her win rate popped up by about 5%, and she went from being one of the lowest-picked tanks to one of the highest,” he noted. To address this, the team plans to reduce the health she receives from Commanding Shout from 200 to 150 in Season Five, in addition to increasing the cost of her ultimate slightly.
Turning his attention to Lifeweaver, Keller expressed that the hero had shown promise during Season Four, despite not being a prevalent pick. He shared, “Previously, we stated that we would like there to be a reason to pick new heroes over others in the roster. This is still our goal for new heroes—we want them to bring something new to the table.” With this in mind, Lifeweaver will receive numerous buffs in Season Five, including increases to his healing and damage output, a heal on Life Grip, a slightly reduced hitbox, and quality-of-life changes to Petal Platform.
Keller also acknowledged community concerns regarding the prevalence of one-shot situations, particularly with Widowmaker and Hanzo. “We’d like to reduce the frequency of these in-game,” he mentioned. For Widowmaker, Season Five will adjust her damage falloff from 70-100 meters to 40-60 meters, while Hanzo will receive a slight damage nerf to prevent one-shot kills on 250 health heroes.
Lastly, Keller touched on the topic of crowd control abilities. “When we launched Overwatch 2, we made some significant changes to our combat model… A part of that change was to remove most of the crowd control abilities from our damage and support heroes. However, we feel like there is room for more CC, especially soft CC, in our lineup,” he explained. With this, Mei’s Endothermic Blaster and Cassidy’s magnetic Grenade will undergo updates in Season Five.
Source: Overwatch 2 Blog
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