In one of the wildest updates I've ever seen from a competitive shooter, Overwatch 2 is giving every hero in the game their own built-in healing as part of an effort to reduce the dominance of "team strategy and mechanics."
Director Aaron Keller outlined the upcoming change, which will arrive in Season 9, in a new blog post. This seismic update is actually just one part of "a massive set of gameplay and balance changes coming to that season," but it sounds like a huge meta shift in its own right.
"In Season 9, both Tank and Damage heroes will get a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive," Keller explains. "This should give non-Support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves. It 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."
I'm not sure if healers should be worried that Overwatch 2 is about to eat their lunch, or relieved that, after enduring years of unfair demands and taunts – "I need healing," ad nauseam – they can officially tell everyone to go heal themselves and actually mean it. I suppose that'll come down to how potent this passive healing is in practice.
The fundamental purpose of this change is to help reduce the frustrations that, as Keller puts it, can be caused by Overwatch 2's "reliance on teammates."
"In Overwatch, there is a constant tug of war between the power of a team and the power of an individual hero or player," he says. "A change like this shifts that balance a bit. This is something that we are constantly evaluating. We still want Overwatch 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."
At first blush, this sounds like a way to grease the wheels of moment-to-moment engagements, giving Overwatch 2 players a little more room to go off on their own. Whatever the case, overtly pulling back from teamplay is a bold move for a team shooter, even if there is a notable difference between pulling back from something and outright abandoning it. The initial response from the game's support community seems to be one of moderate panic cut with cautious optimism.
"We want to improve this by looking at the game through the lens of teamwork," Keller says of the feeling when teamwork falls apart in Overwatch 2, "and make it easier for players to be part of the team while also lessening some of the pain when it's not happening. In fact, a lot of our goals for improving the core game stem from looking at Overwatch as a whole, improving the parts of the game that are working and finding fixes for the parts that negatively affect the experience."
On the heels of Keller's post, lead hero designer Alec Dawson shared some more granular updates on Overwatch 2's meta, teasing that "big shakeups are coming with Season 9" including plans for "shifting more of Mauga's power towards awarding aggression." It seems Orisa, who's apparently "out of the basement" after recent changes, is still "due for a look in terms of where her power budget is allocated, mainly for feel."
Blizzard wants to make new Overwatch 2 heroes free for everyone right away: "We're actively working towards it."
