Alongside the arrival of a brand-new season for Overwatch 2, Lead Hero Designer Alec Dawson hosted a Q&A on Twitter to answer questions that players may have about the game. Notably, he revealed that “for some time,” we’ll be getting two new Support heroes for every four that come out. This will further expand the pool of playable heroes for Support mains and may entice more players to try out the role.

Other than the plan for more Support heroes, Alec also mentions various planned changes to the game, such as a Brigitte rework. You can check all the questions asked in the Q&A below for your convenience.

There are a number of things we are still looking at to help Support feel better in the short-medium term (balance, certain systems).

Long-term though we'll be making additional support Heroes. For some time, every four heroes you'll see 1 Tank, 1 DPS, and 2 Supports.

— Alec Dawson (@GW_Alec) December 6, 2022

Q: I was wondering if the “experimental” servers will be brought back into OW2, and if the community or creators get more vote or say on some fun or wacky experiments to test 🙂 Appreciate all the hard work you and the team do, thanks for doing a Q&A 

A: Lots of value in getting the experimental changes back in. Our team also loved collaborating with the community on some of the wacky changes, hope to make that happen in the future again.

 

Q: Can we expect to see some support balance changes in the near future? Not just numbers but more aggressive changes like a new ability or some sort (replacement for brig ult and mercy rez in mind). Please help us solve the queue times. Thanks and good job as always.

A: We have something we like design-wise for Brig’s Ult but it does require additional resources (art,vfx,etc.). Still figuring out exact timeline for the change.

 

Q: In OW2, the support role has the fewest players, bottlenecking the role queue. Why do you feel that happens and what can be done to address the problem through hero design?

A: There are a number of things we are still looking at to help Support feel better in the short-medium term (balance, certain systems). Long-term though we’ll be making additional support Heroes. For some time, every four heroes you’ll see 1 Tank, 1 DPS, and 2 Supports.

 

Q: First of all I want to say thanks for all your efforts and your honest communication with the community. I don’t necessarily have a question but, I was wondering how would the devs feel about interacting more with smaller streamers/content creators.

A: We’re just getting going on some of our communication efforts and hope to interact with the players in a number of places. If a creator has a great idea, they should get in touch with our community team and we’ll see what happens. I for one love podcasts 👀

 

Q: Can Symmetra have the ability to hold her alternate fire as long as she wants (possibly with ammo drain if needed). Would allow her to be more precise with the shots she takes and less reliant on spamming. Just a quality of life change that could be impactful for the hero.

A: Something we consider here is if a hero is feeling active enough, holding onto a charge for too long can hurt that goal and mislead players. With that though, we do want to create situations that reward you for smart play. Can certainly look at extending the current duration.

 

Q: Would yall ever considering removing the brief beam breakage when Mercy uses her ultimate?

A: Definitely open to quality of life changes. Recently read through a document with some other great Mercy suggestions. Schedule has been a bit compressed so far, but do want to do more quality of life passes for all of our heroes in the near future.

 

Q: Respectfully, as a Mercy in high rank myself, I can’t believe Mercy is top 3 when it comes to pickrate in GM. A glance at the leaderboard even shows you that at Top 500 and the reason she’s being picked by non Mercy players is likely due to Sojourn.

A: In GM for pickrate it goes: Kiriko, Mercy, Ana, Lucio. Sojourn definitely has an effect.

 

Q: Will we be seeing any changes to Ball or Brigitte? These 2 characters have been on the edge of “probably the worse in their roles” to “easily worse in their roles without question”. It feels both of these characters are overlooked, maybe you can expound on that?

A: Mentioned this in another place but yeah we have something we like for Brig, but need to find timing (there are some dependencies here on other groups). Ball is at the top of our list still. Will be trying some iterations on his changes soon.

 

Q: Are you planning any significant changes to Sombra? As it stands now with her damage, it’s less than what it was during OW1 and she has an arguably worst hack. I get she was too strong with the 40% damage boost but did she really need that plus a nerf to an already weaker hack?

A: We want to take a more significant look at Sombra and her kit vs. just number tweaking. So that may take a little time but when we do make changes to her, we’ll aim them to be larger than a balance pass.

 

Q: This might only be tangentially relating to hero balance and design, but has the team considered limiting FFA to DPS only? With Tanks getting much stronger in 5v5, it just feels oppressive in FFA Deathmatch for them to be running about dominating with CC and big healthbars.

A: Looking at a change to Tanks in non Role-Queue matches, particularly with their increased health pool. Hope to have something we like in Season 3.

 

Q: thoughts on getting rid of switch ult charge and replace the current dps passive with it(?) not being punished as hard for switching contributes a lot to the rock paper scissors meta on tank and current dps passive is not balanced throughout the dps class(.) supports can hold that L

A: I think there’s definitely a question of if we removed too much friction with retaining the Ult Charge. It does feel good in a lot of places and we want you to consider switching heroes, though the number may be a bit too high. So talking about it but nothing at the moment.

 

Q: A lot of Doomfist players have stated they don’t want the character to become a “punch bot”. However, it seems like this is what he’s moving towards as his punch got a majority of the buffs. If players dislike this, would the team consider buffing other parts of his kit instead?

A: Have heard that feedback, we’ll see where Doomfist ends up as these are more aggressive changes. We did want to make his block and Ult more impactful, as seen in the buffs there. If we ever return the slow on his Shift, it would most likely be in a smaller area than before.

 

Q: Why did Supports this patch get so few changes compared to other roles? Mercy’s pistol changes and a 1 sec reduction on Sleep Dart doesn’t do much to help fix the issues of supports struggling to help carry the team.

A: Overall we see the pressure on Supports coming from a few heroes. Hopefully the Sojourn changes in this patch can alleviate a good amount of that pressure. Will definitely make more changes as we move forward to continue that goal.

 

Q: There are some heroes that are generally considered unfun to play against, and even some heroes considered unfun to play with. Is this just part of having a large roster of heroes or is this something that you guys think about and would like to fix. Hog/Sombra/Doom for example.

A: A bit of both. We want to make sure our Heroes have sharp mechanical identities and sometimes their abilities are going to result in larger imbalance of fun than others. There’s also a risk evaluation here. Sombra probably doesn’t have enough of that risk with her E. So we want to make sure if there are sharp things occurring, there is also an amount of risk. You can look at Hog right now and say there’s not enough risk now that we have Cleanse. In the future we may look at his kit to either inject risk or decrease payoff to be closer.

 

Q: Can we please get the written patch notes before the Twitter space every time a new patch comes out? There is no tangible benefit to revealing patch notes through a Twitter space over the normal text.

A: Thanks for the feedback here, I’ll let our team know!

 

Q: Not traditional hero design / balance question, but is there a reason why Rampage doesn’t drop the flag in CTF? It seems a little weird bc of how much movement it gives and all other movement abilities force the player to drop it

A: Seems like a bug, will see if we can get this changed!

 

Q: I’m not sure why queen is getting 2 buffs and 3 nerfs meanwhile doom (an arguably better tank in S1) is getting 2 nerfs and 10 buffs. These Queen changes are undoubtedly a net nerf and some explanation would be appreciated.

A: The buff to Junkerqueen’s passive is quite significant. She’ll be able to hold her own a lot more in fights and be tougher to take down. We want to make her a more attractive option, so if these changes don’t put her in that realm then we will come back with more.

 

Q: What do you guys think about the balance state of Cassidy? Are there any plans to balance him involving his revolver damage or grenade damage? What about the balance to high noon?

A: Perhaps too one-note in his capabilities as they point towards similar functions. There’s a lot that goes into ability reworks, but I think ultimately we want to find slightly more utility for Cassidy.

 

Q: Now that the DPS passive changed, are you going to revert the Genji changes? or at least some of them? I feel like the nerfs hurt him a little bit too much..

A: With any of our balance changes we’ll see how those heroes do afterwards. If we look at Sombra and Zarya, those were too harsh. Genji is still in the mix but we’ll see how much the passive changes his standing. If he drops too far, could see one of those changes being reverted.

If you haven’t tried the new season out yet, check out the patch notes for Season 2 before heading into Competitive (your teammates will be grateful).