Overwatch 2 shocks players with new self-heal update

Aaron Keller, the director of Overwatch 2, announced in a Director’s Take blogpost that the team plans to implement a passive heal effect for all DPS and tank heroes. Overwatch’s core gameplay is designed around the roles that each hero plays. Each hero is made to fill either a tank, healer, or DPS niche, with healers like Mercy and Lucio tipping the scales of every teamfight. Much of the game’s complexity lies in picking specific targets to focus on so that the team eventually collapses and secures objective sites. This delicate class balance is what keeps the game fair for everyone and encourages cooperation within the team to ensure the matches are won. Because of the constant changes to hero kits, metas begin to form around specific characters that occupy multiple roles at the same time.

Community Reactions to The Update

After Blizzard announced the update, the community was largely divisive, with many different takes on the potential this could have with the moment to moment gameplay. Many players, especially support mains, feel that this update could diminish the importance of an anchored healer in competitive environments. In contrast, others say that this could break the current health sustain meta and allow for more individualistic players to rely less on teamwork. Specific details of this change are still unknown, so the community speculates what free health regen would do for the future. Whether or not this change will be good for the game when it launches remains to be seen.

This update will be live once Season 9 of Overwatch 2 arrives on February 14. According to the director, this self-heal acts as a scaled-down version of what support heroes have, implying that it may either take longer for the passive regeneration to occur or that the healing per second is lesser than the support version. The idea behind this change is that it will take pressure to perform off support players and ease the strict teamwork requirement that most random matches have. Blizzard hopes to bridge the gap between player skill and teamplay by giving DPS players more opportunities to survive untenable fights. As it stands with current team compositions, health sustain has become so effective that fights end up as long, drawn-out poking matches, with diving becoming a risky play like the old deathball team comp of OW1. Now with Mauga’s entry into the roster, players feel that the game has become stale as his skills encourage more deathballing without the fun risk-making plays that Overwatch has been known to have. 

Overwatch 2 Takes A Different Approach to Gameplay

It seems like Blizzard is experimenting with OW2 to see how they can evolve the game with quality-of-life features and reworks while keeping to its roots as a team-based hero shooter. With a new mode coming to Quickplay called Hacked and the addition of party frames that display the health of fellow team members, Blizzard also plans to release a dynamic spawn system that lets dead players spawn next to teammates and a spawn camping protection feature in Season 9. Even if a new feature were to be released with poor reception, the Overwatch team is known to remove it swiftly. Time will tell if these changes will do the game some good and be a permanent addition to the core gameplay loop or change the meta in a way players won’t expect.