Overwatch 2 latest update balances broken heroes, patch notes and more

The launch of Overwatch 2’s Season Two has brought a flurry of changes to the game, revamping several heroes and addressing pesky gameplay issues from its initial season. Tuesday’s patch saw significant boosts in power for Doomfist and Junker Queen while toning down Sojourn and Kiriko. Additionally, Bastion, Symmetra, Ana & Mercy have all experienced minor tweaks that are sure to create some exciting battlefield dynamics between these greatly improved characters!

Doomfist has been tapped for some major changes that will turn the brawler-style tank into a powerful force on the battlefield. His passive ability is getting an awesome buff to help him survive through group fights and take out his foes with ease. Meanwhile, Bastion’s ultimate can now obliterate its enemies faster than ever before while Kiriko gets hit with nerfs across their ultimates.

Sojourn loses a bit of potency in her railgun but Mercy earns extra skill points so she can make even more accurately placed shots! Check out these new hero updates in Tuesday’s patch update. They could be just what you need to conquer your opponents!

COMPETITIVE PLAY

Season 2 competitive play begins now! Here are some updates we’re introducing to competitive:

There are new, temporary Competitive title rewards for name cards based on your end of season rank
You can only earn these titles at the end of the current Competitive season and can only use them in the season following
Heroes that aren’t eligible for competitive play will have a lock icon in the Hero Gallery
Implemented a group of matchmaking enhancements to improve match quality
Minor polish improvements to the competitive play UI flow
New hero, Ramattra, won’t be available in competitive for 2 weeks

HERO UPDATES

Damage Role Passive

No longer provides a movement speed bonus
Reload speed bonus increased from 25 to 35%

Developer comments: We’ve decided to remove increased movement speed from the Damage role passive and, in turn, make the reload speed more significant. While the additional movement speed was a helpful indicator that the passive was active, we saw change in speed negatively affecting the ability to aim precisely.

TANK

RAMATTRA

Ramattra has been added to the line-up

Void Accelerator (Omnic Form)

Primary: Fire a stream of projectiles in a fixed pattern
Secondary: Create a barrier at the targeted location

Nemesis Form

Transform into Nemesis Form, changing your attacks and gaining bonus armor

Pummel (Nemesis Form)

Primary: Punch forward, creating a wave of piercing energy with every swing
Secondary: Significantly reduces damage taken from the front and reduces movement speed

Ravenous Vortex

Fire a nano ball, which explodes when it hits the ground, spreading a damaging field. Affected enemies are slowed and pulled downward

Annihilation

Enter Nemesis Form and create an energy swarm surrounding yourself. This swarm will lash out towards nearby enemies, dealing damage and pausing the duration when damage is dealt.

DOOMFIST

Developer comments: There are several changes here for Doomfist with the intent to increase his presence as a disruptive brawler-style tank. The buff to his passive ability will help him stay in the fight longer, especially when he’s hitting multiple enemies with his abilities.

The changes to Power Block and Meteor Strike are intended to increase the availability of Empowered Rocket Punch, which enables him to more easily disrupt enemies and impact multiple targets. Due to gaining Empowered Rocket Punch more consistently, the stun duration and size are slightly decreased to reduce some of the frustration in playing against it.

For Rocket Punch we’re shifting some of its damage away from requiring wall impacts so that it’s broadly more useful regardless of where fights are taken.

Rocket Punch

Impact damage range (minimum-maximum) increased from 15-30 to 25-50 damage
Wall slam damage range (minimum-maximum) reduced from 20-40 to 10-30 damage
Empowered Rocket Punch wall slam stun duration range reduced from 0.5-1 to 0.25-0.75 seconds
Non-Empowered Rocket Punch now stuns for the minimum 0.25 second duration on wall slam
Empowered Rocket Punch knockback radius reduced from 4 to 3 meters
Minimum time before cancel option becomes available reduced from 0.25 to 0.12 seconds
Cooldown reduced from 4 to 3 seconds
This has been in since his rework but was not mentioned

Power Block

Cooldown reduced from 8 to 7 seconds
Duration increased from 2 to 2.5 seconds
Minimum damage mitigated required to empower Rocket Punch reduced from 90 to 80 damage

Meteor Strike

Now empowers Rocket Punch on landing
Enemy slow duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds

The Best Defense…

Maximum temporary health increased from 150 to 200 health
Temporary health gained per target hit with abilities increased from 30 to 40 health

JUNKER QUEEN

Developer comments: Commanding Shout is Junker Queen’s primary tanking ability and utility, but the additional survivability it granted her team proved to be too powerful and needed to be tuned back significantly in a previous patch. We’re looking to shift more of that survivability into Junker Queen herself by increasing the amount her passive ability heals through dealing damage with wounds.

Torso and head hit volume size increased 12%

Rampage

Wound duration reduced from 5 to 4.5 seconds
Ultimate cost reduced by 10%

Commanding Shout

Cooldown reduced from 15 to 14 seconds

Adrenaline Rush

Adrenaline passive healing multiplier increased from 1 to 1.25x damage dealt by wounds

DAMAGE

BASTION

Developer comments: The intent for Bastion’s ultimate is that enemy players can survive it if they are quick to react to the damaging impact areas, however, it ended up being too easy to avoid the damage areas entirely. We’re reducing both the amount of warning time and explosion damage so that it’s more reliable in dealing damage, but it won’t be as lethal the closer the target gets to the edge of the explosion range.

Configuration Artillery

Delay before projectile drops reduced from 1 to 0.6 seconds
Explosion damage reduced from 300 to 250
No longer deals explosion damage to self
Minimum delay between placing shots reduced by 20%

Reconfigure

Cooldown reduced from 12 to 10 seconds

SOJOURN

Developer comments: Sojourn is performing well at the highest tiers of competitive play but poorly below those tiers. Much of the perception that she is too powerful seems to be driven by the reaction to dying to long range, charged headshots from her Railgun secondary fire. These changes are aimed at reducing frustrations there, with the biggest change being the reduced critical multiplier for headshots. A fully charged headshot no longer kills a full health 200 hp hero. To help account for this loss of power we’re increasing the damage of her primary fire and how quickly her energy charges during her ultimate.

Railgun

Energy delay before draining reduced from 8 to 5 seconds
Secondary fire damage falloff starting range reduced from 70 to 40 meters
Secondary fire critical damage multiplier reduced from 2 to 1.5
Secondary fire damage now scales linearly with energy from 30 to 130 damage (1 energy converts to 1 damage added)
Primary fire damage per projectile increased from 9 to 10
Overclock energy charge rate increased by 20%

SYMMETRA

Developer comments: The changes to Symmetra’s primary fire will make her gameplay faster by enabling her to charge the beam up to dangerous levels more quickly. However, it will also drain to less lethal levels at an increased rate when not damaging a target. We’re reverting the adjustments to her ammo management because, while it helped with matchups where there were no barriers, it lost something interesting to its interactions.

Proton Projector

Beam charge rate and decay rate increased by 20%
Primary fire ammo consumption rate increased from 7 to 10 per second
Primary fire gains ammo from damaging barriers again

TRACER

Developer comments: We balanced Tracer’s damage in a previous patch due to an undiscovered bug regarding her Pulse Pistol’s falloff damage. The bug is resolved, so we are reverting the damage.

Pulse Pistols

Damage increased from 5 to 6

SUPPORT

ANA

Developer comments: Sleep Dart is still one of the most powerful crowd control abilities in 5v5, though with the addition of cleanse mechanics to offer a potential counter to this effect we’re more comfortable with reducing the cooldown here to improve Ana’s personal survivability.

Sleep Dart

Cooldown reduced from 15 to 14 seconds

KIRIKO

Developer comments: The hit volume adjustment is to help address her arms sometimes blocking headshots in some of her animations. Kiriko feels balanced overall, but her ultimate could feel too frenetic at times. We’re reducing both the movement speed and cooldown rate boost it grants so that it’s easier to aim during its effect for both allies and enemies, as well as there being fewer abilities being thrown about. The rest of the changes are primarily for quality-of-life improvements to make the abilities feel better to use.

Arm hit volumes width reduced 15%
Added an auto-wall climb hero option

Kitsune Rush

Ultimate cost increased by 10%
Movement speed bonus reduced from 50 to 30%
Cooldown rate reduced from 3 to 2 times faster

Protection Suzu

Cast time reduced from 0.15 to 0.1 second

Kunai

Ammo increased from 12 to 15

Swift Step

Ability input can now be held to activate

MERCY

Developer comments: This is a change that will enable Mercy to better defend herself or even go on the offensive at times. In 5v5 these situations occur much more often.

Weapon swap time reduced from 0.5 to 0.35 seconds

Caduceus Blaster

Ammo increased from 20 to 25

SEASON 2 MAP POOLS

Push

New Queen Street – Morning
Colosseo – Evening
Esperança – Morning

Hybrid

Blizzard World – Overcast (NEW)
Eichenwalde – Evening
King’s Row – Evening
Midtown – Morning
Paraíso – Morning

ESCORT

Dorado – Evening
Junkertown – Morning
Circuit royal – Night
Rialto – Morning
Route 66 – Night
Shambali Monastery – Night (NEW MAP)

Control

Busan – Night
Ilios – Evening
Lijiang Tower – Dawn
Nepal – Evening (NEW)
Oasis – Morning (NEW)

BUG FIXES

General

Fixed a bug that was causing Roadhog’s breaths to not be audible when viewing some animations in the Hero Gallery
Fixed a bug that caused some players to lose competitive challenge progress
Resolved an issue where several products couldn’t be unlocked from the Hero Gallery
Fixed an issue with the Lifesaver Challenge not counting Mercy’s Resurrect as a ‘Save’
Resolved an issue with purchases not immediately showing up after purchase
Fixed a bug with Torbjörn and Symmetra’s turrets displaying hostile red overlays in Deathmatch for the player that placed them

Maps

Busan

Fixed an area of the map where players could get stuck

Colosseo

Fixed geometry that allowed some heroes to contest undetected

Esperança

Fixed some areas that could be used to escape the playable space
Fixed geometry that allowed some heroes to contest undetected

Gibraltar

Fixed lighting issues across the map
Fixed some areas where Torbjörn could place his turret in unreachable spots

Nepal

Replaced some missing pillars on Sanctum

Rio

Fixed a bug that allowed some heroes to get inside of the payload

Route 66

Fixed lighting issues across the map

New Queen Street

Fixed some issues with shadows across the map
Fixed an area of the map where players could get stuck

Heroes

Heroes no longer take damage from their own abilities if they’re on the other side of a friendly barrier
Fixed an issue with the Damage Passive where sometimes a double reload animation could occur when the buff was active

Cassidy

Resolved an issue with some skins using the wrong props in the ‘Flashbang’ victory pose

Doomfist

Fixed an issue where Doomfist’s Power Block reduced the damage from some area of effect abilities
Meteor Strike – You can no longer detect Sombra if the targeting reticle gets near her

D.Va

Fixed a bug that allowed players to use Self-Destruct during their Mech’s destruction while Hacked

Junker Queen

Jagged Blade can no longer be recalled while slept, stunned, hacked or frozen
Fixed an issue with Jagged Blade being consumed by friendly abilities like Deflect, Defense Matrix, etc.
Jagged Blade now takes a curved trajectory on return

Mercy