Overwatch 2, like most live service games, often implements big changes that don’t necessarily stick around. In 2020, there was an Experimental mode that changed the original Overwatch’s team composition to one tank, three damage heroes, and two supports that was quickly reverted. Hero tweaks have come and gone. But recently, Blizzard has made questionable decisions permanent after testing out tweaks—and the latest test is even more worrying. In an upcoming patch, the team will remove hero limits, which restrict teams from using multiple of the same hero, even in role-locked modes, to which I say: please don’t.
News of this comes from a new Director’s Take blog post from game director Aaron Keller, in which he talks about upcoming balance changes and tweaks. As part of the mid-season patch, Blizzard will be nerfing the new damage hero passive that weakens healing by 20 percent while a hero is dealing out damage. This change was meant to allow those heroes’ damage output outpace healing in order to get more kills, but after utilizing it for the first half of season nine, Blizzard will be adjusting it to a 15 percent healing reduction to give support heroes a fighting chance.
There are also some standard hero tweaks coming on the mid-season patch, like ones that give Ana and Lifeweaver higher healing output, a buff to Doomfist’s ultimate, . and a buff that gives Mauga’s Cardiac Overdrive 100 passive overhealth in order to increase his survivability. Wrecking Ball will remain unchanged, but Keller says he will get a small rework in season 10.
Near the end of the post, Keller talks about the next iteration of Quick Play: Hacked, a temporary mode that replaces standard Quick Play to test out possible changes. The last time Blizzard did this, it increased the speed of pretty much everything in the game, from objective capture to payload movement speed, and ultimately ended up implementing them into the main game. This time, the team is experimenting with removing hero restrictions that keep players from choosing the same character on one team.
The original Overwatch initially let players pick whoever they wanted and roll into battle with teams composed of all one character. In 2016, just a few months after the game’s launch Blizzard implemented hero restrictions, which have been the standard for most of the game’s lifetime, while also having a No Limits mode in the Arcade menu that let people play whoever they wanted. Keller says this possible change is meant to give players more freedom, but if the game is balanced and designed around hero synergy, these changes may make for interesting chaos, but the whole thing sounds better suited for an arcade mode.
Considering the quicker objective capture change was implemented after being tested in Quick Play, there’s good reason to believe that if Blizzard is testing this out, it could end up being the new standard. But as a person who primarily plays Quick Play, I’m frustrated that the mode has become a dumping ground for experiments when it should function as an emulation of the competitive experience without the pressures of ranks.
If removing hero limits is going to become the new norm, it makes me wonder what the point is of having various modes with different rulesets that cater to other ways of playing. If No Limits already exists, is the goal to give each of these modes a bigger player pool by culling what makes them distinct? Maybe. But right now this sounds like a way to spice things up without much consideration for why these modes were distinct in the first place—or why people loved Overwatch to begin with.
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