Director’s Take – Mixing Up the Meta in Midseason

Hello, wonderful people, and welcome to the mid-Season 9 Director's Take! This season had the most significant changes to the game that we've made in a long time. When we launched Season 9 in February, we wanted to make sure to keep an eye on your feedback and react to what we saw. We've had two patches so far, and we have another one, which is quite the stunner, coming up next week. Let's get into that… no, wait! ...Let's talk about where we're at… and then get into that.

The changes made this season were designed to address multiple issues in the game, based largely in part on your feedback. We're happy with how these modifications have shifted the game, but there are two areas we want to improve a bit: the Damage passive, and how some individual heroes have landed after the shakeup. We think the direction we’re heading in is correct but agree that some changes still need to be ironed out.

Let's start with the Damage passive. It's had quite a big impact on the game. It was designed to push our Damage heroes to the forefront of a fight. In terms of securing kills, it's definitely doing this. Overwatch is about eliminating the opponents and sending them back to spawn, so we think it's healthy for Damage heroes to have a large impact here… but it may be pushed a bit too far. There can be moments where it feels a bit too dangerous, even as a Tank, to expose yourself, or where your health can burn down quicker than expected while being healed.

One of the goals of the recent health increase was to soften some of the burst damage in the game. This is one of those effects that can be very difficult to tune just right, so we're going to take a small step back in the next patch and lessen the healing reduction from 20% to 15%. We'll keep an eye on it and go from there.

With balance, we're touching roughly half the heroes in the roster in this patch. The power of heroes moved around a lot this season, and while we think this type of change can be healthy for the game, we'd still