Blizzard has published a preview of some of the Overwatch 2 Hero changes coming at launch over its previous betas, and players are scared of the prospects of a new passive ability making DPS heroes faster.
In Overwatch 2, each role - tank, support, and DPS - gets a passive ability. In the betas, DPS players retained 30% of their ultimate power when swapping heroes. That passive now applies to all heroes, so you'll have much less of a penalty for hero swapping regardless of which role you play.
"Of course, that means the DPS role once again finds itself without a role passive," Blizzard explains in its patch notes post. "So along with this change, we're introducing a new passive to DPS that increases their movement speed and reload speed by 25% for a brief window after getting an elimination. We believe that this change is the right balance of rewarding players who perform well in the Damage role without being overpowered. However, in future seasons, we may continue to experiment with what these passives do as we look to shake up the meta regularly."
While Blizzard's indicating that this passive is open to change, players are already frightened of the possibility of speeding up DPS heroes.
"That new DPS passive does not sound healthy," Reddit user haydnc95 says. "Imagine an even faster Tracer or Genji in the backline, no thanks. We don't need faster DPS and they don't need a universal passive."
"What are they thinking with the dps passive?" sgtcuddles asks. "Can't wait for a teammate to get picked then reaper getting a free speedboost into my team."
"The only thing I dislike is the dps passive," eGG__23 says. "As someone who plays squishy supports with no mobility, having the enemy dps suddenly become faster to kill me is one of the reasons I hated the first beta. I really hope they redo the passive. It seems like they’re open to it once the game launches. And who knows? Maybe dps don’t even need a passive."
We'll see what effect the new passive has on the game soon enough, a these changes should be live in Overwatch League competition on September 22, ahead of the game's full launch on October 4.
We recently learned that lead hero designer Geoff Goodman has left the Overwatch team - he had been with the game since some of its earliest iterations.
