Blizzard has revealed theOverwatch 2Season 3 patch notes ahead of the new season’s start on Tuesday, February 7.Overwatch 2Season 3 is nearly here, bringing with it a host of new content along with a major balance update that’s looking to tweak all the Tank heroes in the game to some extent.
Overwatch 2Season 3’s headlining new addition is the Antarctic Peninsula map. The first new Control map sinceOverwatch 2launched in early access last year, theAntarctic Peninsula features a fishing mini-game, penguins that players can interact with, and more. But while the Antarctic Peninsula should prove to be a solid new addition toOverwatch 2’s maps, the hero balance changes may ultimately have an even bigger impact on the game.
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As confirmed by Blizzard in theOverwatch 2Season 3 update patch notes, all heroes in the game are having their Ultimate charge changed so that they only retain 25% of it instead of 30% when swapping heroes. In the meantime, Blizzard is also reducing the health of allTank heroes inOverwatch 2for modes that do not involve role queue, i.e. Quick Play or Competitive Play. This way, Tank heroes won’t be quite as overpowered inOverwatch 2’s Arcade game modes and other playlists.
Blizzard is making other, more specific changes to various characters with theOverwatch 2Season 3 update, including a slight buff for Roadhog. Thelast hero balance update nerfed Roadhogafter manyOverwatch 2players complained about him being overpowered. Blizzard isn’t rolling back any of the major changes it made to Roadhog in the previous balance update, but it is extending the time of his Whole Hog Ultimate attack from six to eight seconds. This way, Roadhog players may actually have time utilize his other abilities, like his healing and hook, while their Ult is active without sacrificing the chance to damage enemies with Whole Hog itself.
AnotherOverwatch 2Tank hero that’s getting some notable changes in Season 3 is Reinhardt. According to Blizzard, Reinhardt’s Charge cooldown is being reduced from eight to seven seconds, while thedamage of his Fire Strikeis being increased from 90 to 100. The Earthshatter Ultimate attack is getting the most changes, with damage from it dramatically reduced from 250 to 170, though the knockdown duration is being increased from 2.5 to 2.75 seconds. This will make it so Reinhardt can’t really kill any enemies in one hit, which is one of the reasons why Blizzard nerfed Roadhog as well.
The fullOverwatch 2Season 3 patch notes can be found here, but fans should note that this is just the tip of the iceberg.Overwatch 2has a lot planned for Season 3, and it will be interesting to see how fans react to all the changes once they’re live in the game.
Overwatch Credits are back
Ping System Update
COMPETITIVE PLAY
Season 3 competitive play begins now! Here are some of the latest updates aimed at improving the competitive experience in Overwatch 2:
WORKSHOP UPDATES
Workshop Moderation Tools
We added new menu options when reporting a player. Our goal is to give players more ways to report inappropriate behavior so that we can take action in a timely manner. As a result, you can select the category and sub-category that best explain why you are reporting the player or their custom content. The major categories include:
ALL HEROES
Developer Comment: As part of this patch, there was a tuning pass for how often ultimate abilities are being generated, so expect to see several ultimate cost adjustments across multiple heroes.
TANK ROLE PASSIVE
Developer Comment: This change to the tank HP pools helps to address the relative power of those heroes in game modes where there can be multiple of them on the same team.
Doomfist
Junkerqueen
Developer Comment: The overall base health for Junkerqueen is increased by 25 HP.
Ramattra
Annihilation
Developer Comment: The idea of an ultimate ability potentially lasting forever is an exciting concept, but the reality is that if it’s too easy to do it causes a lot of frustrations and with Ramattra’s ultimate in particular, an excessive amount of visual noise. We’re limiting the maximum duration to 20 seconds, which is still highly impactful for most team fights, but it guarantees it’ll end in a reasonable amount of time.
Earthshatter
Rocket Hammer
Developer Comment: In similar fashion to Roadhog’s Chain Hook combo changes last season, we’d generally like to avoid heroes in the Tank role from killing enemies in one shot. Earthshatter direct hit damage is being reduced with that goal in mind. In most cases, targets on the receiving end would die anyway during the knockdown stun, but it does open up some potential for their allies to intervene.
For now, we’re fine with Charge pin staying lethal to many characters due to the difficulty and risk involved. The Fire Strike damage increase does mean it could once again one-shot when combined with Baptiste’s Amplification Matrix, but that requires an ultimate combo with another hero. We’ll see how it plays out and adjust if necessary.
The Rocket Hammer knockback reduction sounds like a loss of power though it is actually aiming to reduce the number of times Reinhardt accidentally knocks enemies out of his melee range.
Roadhog
Whole Hog
Developer Comment: Allowing Roadhog to use abilities during his ultimate made it much more reliable in a solo tank environment, though doing so was often much like just canceling the ultimate as it ran out of time. We’re adding a couple seconds to the maximum duration to increase the flexibility of player choices during the Whole Hog ultimate, but we’ll keep an eye on if it’s simply too much damage or knockback overall.
Pile Driver
Minefield
Developer Comments: Wrecking Ball received some of the fewest changes in the transition to 5v5 as he proved to be one of the most effective solo tanks in early testing. His extreme mobility and massive health pool enable him to choose when to fight much more freely than other heroes. These changes are aimed at reducing his downtime so he can press that advantage even further. The regenerating shield health pool often leads to not needing to search for as many health packs before getting back in position.
Combat Roll
Peacekeeper
Developer Comment: Combat Roll not being blocked by players is mostly a small quality-of-life change to make the ability feel smoother, particularly when rolling in a direction that you’re not facing.
Junkrat
Concussion Mine
Developer Comment: As the Concussion Mine already has damage falloff the further from the explosion the enemy player is, lowering the maximum damage will require Junkrat to be slightly more accurate to achieve the same lethality with some of his combos.
Soldier:76
Heavy Pulse Rifle
Developer Comment: This is more an adjustment for the gun feels rather than strictly trying to add power, but it does have an effect on both. It makes the weapon handle more similar to the original version in that you can burst fire more accurately before the recoil kicks in.
Machine Pistol
Hack
Developer Comments: Sombra is underperforming after her last round of changes. While we make progress on a small rework for her abilities, this damage increase will help strengthen Sombra even against targets that aren’t affected by her Hack effect. It’s a small increase per projectile, but it adds up quickly due to her fast fire rate. The health pack duration increase is a minor buff to avoid needing to re-hack them quite so often.
Torbjorn
Deploy Turret
Developer Comment: With the move to 5v5 and one less player to shoot at it, Torbjorn’s turret tends to survive longer than ever. We’re reducing its health slightly to help it feel less like a sixth player and be easier to deal with once someone turns their attention to it.
Widowmaker
Developer Comment: We experimented with Widowmaker at 200 health for a while due to concerns that the increased power of tanks made her too vulnerable to them. Ultimately she gains more advantages from 5v5 than she loses so we’re returning her back to 175 HP to better enable more heroes to contest her lethal ranged capabilities.
Repair Pack
Rally
Developer Comment: Repair Pack having a small amount of instant healing will help Brigitte have more agency in saving an injured ally and generally makes the ability feel more responsive and impactful.
Regeneration Passive
New Passive: “Sympathetic Recovery”
Developer Comment: Replacing Mercy’s Regeneration passive with a more interesting interaction was something we wanted to do after all support heroes gained a similar version of it through their Role Passive.
For the Caduceus Staff change, this will empower Mercy even more as a triage healer and enable her to more often save low health allies. The overall time it takes to fully heal a 200-health hero from 1 hp is about the same as before.
For Guardian Angel, the cooldown increase is necessary to reduce the greatly increased mobility resulting from the recent rework to the jump cancel. It enabled Mercy to quickly launch herself long distances in any direction and be overly evasive for such a short downtime.
Zenyatta
Orb of Destruction
Developer Comment: We’ve been discussing options to potentially increase Zenyatta’s survivability. We’ve seen previously in the beta that Zenyatta is on somewhat of a knife’s edge for balance. Even just 25 more shield health pushed him into overpowered-must-pick territory at the pro level. To balance his powerful damage output, the lack of mobility is an intentional disadvantage by design, so we’d prefer not to change that too much. Instead, we’re adding more ammo to lengthen the times between when Zenyatta is most vulnerable, which is when he is reloading.
Sombra
Symmetra
Overwatch 2is out now in early access for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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