Overwatch 2 Update Lowers Difficulty Against Tough Heroes

• Overwatch 2's 12th season introduces a new balance patch.
• Juno, the new support hero, has received several updates.
• Lifeweaver's Healing Blossom now passively charges.
• Multiple heroes have had their health reduced to 225.
• Season 12 adds the new mode Clash, a King of the Hill-style mode.

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Game Tips

New Overwatch 2 Patch Makes It Easier to Kill Some of Its Peskiest Heroes

Sombra, Mercy, and other mobile heroes are getting a little bit weaker.

Overwatch 2 has begun its 12th season.

Alongside the Egyptian-themed battle pass and new support hero Juno, Blizzard has released a balance patch.

The tweaks have addressed some longstanding issues with heroes like Lifeweaver while also giving a few tweaks to tanks after supercharging them last season to mixed reception.

There's also a new mode added to the rotation, so the patch has a lot to unpack.

Juno's Updates

Juno is obviously the star of the season and she's received a few tweaks since her test period back in July.

Nearly every ability in the Martian medic's kit has been balanced in some way.

Her primary fire has been reduced to 28 shots per second from its original 34.

Her lock-on torpedoes that damage enemies and heal teammates have become more powerful.

Her speed-boosting Hyper Ring ability has an increased deploy range alongside a shorter cooldown.

So while her healing and damage output has been lowered, her abilities have been made more efficient.

Those are the kinds of minimal changes you'd expect as Blizzard is still figuring out a new hero, so we'll see if farther-reaching changes are on the horizon.

The team also included several quality-of-life adjustments to how Juno's abilities are communicated, which you can read about in the patch notes below.

Lifeweaver's Improvements

Lifeweaver, who Blizzard has had trouble balancing since he launched last year, is getting some pretty notable quality-of-life improvements.

His primary Healing Blossom that heals teammates now passively charges, allowing you to fire a fully-charged flower across the battlefield instantly.

This passive charge is slower than the manual one you can do by holding down the RT/R2/Left click, but it stays charged when you swap between Healing Blossom and his offensive secondary fire.

This way you're not punished for swapping between modes of fire, allowing you to switch to an offensive attack and quickly return to healing if need be.

The Petal Platform, which elevates any hero (friend or foe) who stands on it, also got a much-needed update.

Now, if someone steps off the platform, rather than remaining in the air and becoming functionally useless, it will return to the ground to lift a player to high ground once more.

There have been plenty of times I've thrown a platform down as Lifeweaver just for someone to fall off of it almost immediately, so this is a welcome change.

Health Nerfs

One balance change that affects multiple heroes is a health nerf that cuts a lot of squishy characters' health down to 225.

Overwatch 2 increased most characters' health in February after adding passive health regeneration in season 9.

Blizzard is tweaking health pools for mobile heroes that can get away from a scrap, so the hope here is that this will make it easier to take out the heroes who often harass a backline and get away just before a killing shot.

Heroes affected by this nerf include flight-based characters Echo, Juno, and Mercy.

Pharah is notably absent as well as those who can escape a fight easily like Lucio, Sombra, Kiriko, and Moira.

Hanzo, meanwhile, has also had his health nerfed, which Blizzard says is to balance the fact that he can one-shot a lot of these heroes now that they have 225 HP.

New Mode: Clash

Beyond hero changes, Season 12 also adds the new mode Clash, which is a King of the Hill-style mode that feels like a reason for Blizzard to bring back old maps without revisiting the maligned two-point capture mode that was phased out in Overwatch 2.

Both the Hanaoka and Throne of Anubis maps are based on fan-favorite maps from the original Overwatch, Hanamura and Temple of Anubis, respectively.

We'll see how the community reacts to the mode in the coming weeks.

Full Patch Notes

General Updates

• Avoid As Teammate
• The Avoid List has been updated with the following new features:
• Players now have 15 avoid slots divided into 3 Pinned slots and 12 Recent slots.
• Pinned Avoid slots guarantee that these players will never be in your matches and unlike our old Avoid slots, they never time out.
• The new Recent Avoid slots do time out after 7 days like the old Avoid slots and they only prioritize constructing teams without these players on them.
• The player with the lowest time remaining in the Recent list is removed from the list if a new player is avoided when the list is full.
• Time Remaining for an avoided player in the Recent list can be refreshed by using the Reset Avoid Expiration feature.
• The Avoid List is now its own tab in the Social menu, which still only appears when at least 1 player is avoided.
• Any players that were avoided when Season 11 ended will be removed from the avoided list due to the aforementioned updates to the system.

Developer Comments: Avoiding other players has been a great way to curate your experience since the system was added, but with these changes, we wanted to explore giving players best ways to manage their avoid slots.

• Spawn System Changes
• Group Respawn is replaced by Wave Respawn for all non-Competitive modes.
• Wave Respawn is added to Competitive Play.
• Default respawn time increased from 10 to 12 seconds.
• Overtime respawn time increased from 13 to 14 seconds.
• Wave Respawn is disabled in Overtime.
• Overtime respawn time is not increased in Flashpoint.
• Wave Respawn is disabled when the Payload is near the end of the track in Escort and Hybrid game modes the same time the existing Anti-Stall system activates.
• When the first hero on a team dies, they start a new Wave for their team.
• Any hero that dies within 6 seconds of a Wave starting automatically joins that Wave.
• A hero joining a Wave will respawn at the exact same time as the hero that started the Wave. This means that the respawn time of heroes joining the wave can be as long as 12 seconds if they died at the same time as the first hero or as short as 6 seconds if they catch the end of the Wave.
• If a hero starts a Wave and no other hero joins the Wave, they will respawn 2 seconds faster. This hero will respawn in 10 seconds, the default respawn time before Season 12.

Developer Comments: These changes are designed to reduce the number of one-sided matches. For an in-depth analysis of our thought process behind the changes to respawning, read the latest Director's Take on PlayOverwatch.com.

• Shop Updates
• You can now try out all skins in the practice range from the Hero Gallery or the Premium Shop.

Competitive Play Updates

• Mid-Year Rank Reset
• Competitive skill ranks for all players have been reset for Season 12.
• Players will need to complete ten placement matches for each role to be ranked and start climbing on the leaderboard.

Developer Comments: Our plan is to reset ranks every 6 months alongside larger updates that shake up the metagame, including significant hero balance changes, new heroes like Juno, new game modes like Clash, and changes to core systems like the respawning changes mentioned above.

• Predicted Rank
• The Predicted Rank that was displayed to players in Placements at the end of each match is now displayed in all locations that rank is displayed for individual players.
• Predicted Rank is only displayed to players viewing their own Rank; other players can't see this information.
• Predicted Rank is now used to determine whether a group is Wide or Narrow, meaning that Placements are no longer automatically considered Wide.
• This will allow players to get much faster queues in many scenarios after their Rank has been reset.

Hero Updates

Developer Comments: Our recent 2-1-1-1 patch, which adjusted all the Tank heroes, saw a significant gain in interest for the role and had a positive lasting effect in queue times for Damage and Support as well. There are a few additional tuning changes in this update for Tanks, but this patch is largely focused on adjusting many of the more mobile heroes in the Damage and Support roles.

Mobility is very powerful, and we would like for there to be more of a tradeoff for the flexibility that it brings, especially as we add speed-boosting abilities by welcoming Juno to the game. We're moving a handful of heroes to a 225 HP maximum and in some cases increasing potency elsewhere in their kit.

• Tank
• D.Va
• Developer Comment: The increase in Defense Matrix availability didn't help D.Va's overall performance that much compared to the amount of frustration it is causing players on the opposing team, so we're reverting it to the previous duration.
• Defense Matrix: Maximum duration reduced from 3.5 to 3 seconds.

• Orisa
• Developer Comment: Orisa is still underperforming, so we're increasing the impact damage of Energy Javelin to better reward accuracy with the ability.
• Energy Javelin: Impact damage increased from 60 to 80.

• Zarya
• Developer Comment: Zarya's secondary fire didn't benefit much from the projectile size changes in Season 9 since it's mostly aimed at the ground. We're increasing its damage to keep it feeling effective relative to her primary fire beam.
• Particle Cannon: Secondary fire minimum damage increased from 47 to 55. Secondary fire maximum damage increased from 95 to 110.

• Damage
• Echo
• Developer Comment: No additional adjustments to support the reduced health pool as, like Pharah, Echo was one of the top performing Damage heroes recently.
• Base health reduced from 250 to 225.

• Hanzo
• Developer Comment: Hanzo doesn't quite fit the category of being as highly mobile as the other heroes we're moving to 225 HP, but like Widowmaker, his potential long-range lethality merits as he is now able to one-shot the 225 HP heroes. It's also nice for the Hanzo mirror match to be more decisive as well.
• Base health reduced from 250 to 225.

• Junkrat
• Developer Comment: This is mostly a reversion back to how Junkrat's grenades used to ricochet in early Overwatch, which enables more control over the angle of the bounce and helps the weapon better control spaces with some tricky shots, but the projectile size is now reduced after a couple of bounces so there will be fewer random-feeling direct impacts near the end of the projectile's lifetime.
• Frag Launcher: Projectile size is now reduced by half after the second ricochet. Projectiles preserve slightly more velocity on ricochet.