Overwatch 2 team reveals major damage and healing changes coming in future patch

Season 8 of Overwatch 2 is here, but the developers are wasting no time in hyping upcoming gameplay changes still in the pipeline.

The Overwatch team has been teasing a slew of gameplay refinements to change how OW2 is played in 2024, and we just got our first idea of just what they have in store.

In Season 9, Overwatch 2 will be getting a major ladder update in the form of Competitive 3.0, blending some of OW1’s ranked system with the sequel’s – but the devs have more in mind to improve the game.

During a discussion on Twitch, Lead Hero Designer Alec Dawson teased what some of those changes will be, pinpointing burst damage and healing as well as the DPS role passive.

Overwatch 2 is making changes to burst healing and damage

Speaking with Emongg and Flats, Dawson indicated that there would be some “fundamental changes” to the game at the start of the new Overwatch year to make things feel vastly different.

“Right now we are internally testing some things, particularly looking at some of the burst damage in the game and some of that reliance on the burst healing as well. We’re seeing if we can soften how powerful both of those can be,” the dev explained.

Being able to deal high amounts of damage at once can effectively melt even heroes with the highest of HP, so it appears that the team wants to prevent players from just blowing up in the middle of a fight.

Dawson went on to give an example of how getting CC’d as a tank often leads to a quick death with the amount of damage coming at you, and what the game could look like without heavy burst damage.

Furthermore, he stated that the DPS role passive of getting a faster reload speed after earning an elimination would be looked at to become more “meaningful.”

“That’s our opportunity in Season 9 to really evaluate a bunch of those things and see how we’re doing and create bigger shakeups than normal balance changes,” he said.

We’ll have to see what the full extent of those updates look like in a few months down the road, but in the meantime, players have all of Season 8 to get through.

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