Overwatch 2 Director confirms sweeping tank changes that “build on a hero’s fantasy”

Overwatch 2’s Game Director Aaron Keller has revealed plans to overhaul the tank role with a series of individual buffs to the cast of heroes.

Tanking in Overwatch 2 has become quite the challenge, and the balance team has made a number of adjustments to try and make the role more approachable.

Ever since the game switched from one tank to two with the sequel’s jump from 6v6 gameplay to 5v5, tanks have received myriad updates including decreased knockback, taking less headshot damage, and more.

To further complicate the matter, supports being able to pump heavy amounts of healing into tanks resulted in a DPS getting a new passive where doing damage to a target would lower their healing received.

Although this DPS passive has been controversial, there have been calls for it not to be as effective on tanks. Game Director Aaron Keller says the team is considering that, but he wants to take a different approach for now.

“What we’re currently discussing is whether the path forward from here should be centered around broad, systemic changes, or per hero changes. We’re discussing limited versions of the former, for instance we’re looking at reduced versions of the Damage role passive. However, we’d like to do more of the latter,” he revealed in a June 28 blog post.

According to Keller, targeting individual heroes can have a “dramatic impact on their effectiveness” when compared to making role-wide changes.

“We’re putting together a patch that is targeted at increasing the tankiness of many of these heroes, but we’re doing it through individual changes to each of them. Ideally these changes would build on a hero’s fantasy. Increasing the health of Reinhardt’s shield is a good example of accomplishing both of those goals,” he said.

The Director says that this patch could arrive as early as the S11 mid-season patch, but we may not see these changes until well into Season 12.

Meanwhile, earlier in June, Lead Hero Designer Alec Dawson revealed some balance changes in the works for Winston and Reinhardt in a future update. In addition to Rein’s Charge being able to eliminate squishy heroes again, Winston’s ultimate and secondary fire would also be getting improvements.

Dawson also teased nerfs to CC abilities such as Sombra’s Hack and Ana’s Sleep Dart to make the tank role a lot easier.