Blizzard is introducing passive self-healing to all Overwatch 2 heroes in an upcoming update to coincide with Season 9, in what some might call another nail in the Support hero coffin.
Blizzard explained the upcoming changes, as well as its goals for Overwatch 2 going forward, in a recent Director’s Take blog post. According to the post, in Season 9, “both Tank and Damage heroes will get a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive. This should give non-Support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves.”
This change is part of Blizzard’s aim to improve Overwatch 2’s “individual and team-focused gameplay to meet the needs of our core audience.” Part of this is looking at how the FPS can be improved for players in situations where team compositions or teamwork as a whole isn’t working quite as well as expected – “the reliance on teammates can simultaneously be one of the best and worst attributes” of Overwatch 2, the blog post says.
Other features, including the Ping system and Spawn Together system (which Blizzard says is set for fine-tuning in Season 9 to “make the effect more prominent”), have already been implemented in Overwatch 2 to encourage team play and “align” with Blizzard’s goal of making it easier “for players to be a part of the team while also lessening some of the pain when it’s not happening.”
The blog post further explains the choice to add passive self-healing to all Overwatch 2 heroes, saying the upcoming change “should also take some of the pressure off Support players to keep everyone alive since individual players now have more control of their own health pool.” In Overwatch 2, “there is a constant tug of war between the power of a team and the power of an individual hero or player. A change like this shifts that balance a bit. This is something that we are constantly evaluating. We still want [Overwatch 2] to be defined by team strategy and mechanics, but we feel this can be pulled back a bit now and possibly more in the future.”
Blizzard has made it pretty clear, both in this post and beyond, that it doesn’t plan to let Overwatch 2 chug along with rebalances and new content (in the form of maps, heroes, and events) as the only changes over the course of the game, and want to keep changing things up to keep the game fresh, even if this results in big changes to how Overwatch 2 gameplay looks or feels.
Like the much-decried shift from a six-player team composition to five during the transition to Overwatch 2 in 2022 – at the expense of a second tank player – this change does feel like it could impact team play for the worse, as opposed to improving it. While self-healing passively could have its uses when you’ve got a rogue Moira who’s decided to play as if the scientist hero was DPS all along, or another Support hero has just decided healing is a vague concept rather than a role to play – it seems like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If heroes can heal, albeit slowly, on their own, why would Support players be as focused on healing them too?
I could wax lyrical about how mechanical changes or new features have come at the expense of individual hero and team strategies in Overwatch 2, or how Support players are already on the back foot when it comes to being recognised in lower-level competitive play for their efforts, but we’d be here until Season 10 is released if I did.
Overwatch 2 Season 9 is expected to launch in February, but there’s no concrete release date just yet. We’ll be likely to see more news from Blizzard about exactly what the changes coming to the hero shooter will look and work like prior to the new season dropping.
What do you think about self-healing for all heroes? Let us know in the comments.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
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