Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Support players are in shambles.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced a massive change coming to Overwatch 2 in Season 9: every hero is getting a “modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive,” allowing Tanks and Damage heroes to simply heal themselves rather than rely on Support teammates.
Game director Aaron Keller announced the change via a new blog post, which goes over Blizzard’s 2024 plans for the first-person shooter:
Overwatch 2 gives Tanks and Damage heroes self-healing
Starting in Season 9, Overwatch 2’s entire roster of heroes will gain access to a similar version of the Support self-healing passive, which replenishes HP over time when out of combat. Keller announced that the change would “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.
The change is meant to address teamwork problems during game matches - namely, the lack of it. Keller said:
When a team works together — each player using their hero to their fullest potential while relying on each other to execute a strategy — the game feels magical. However, when this isn’t happening and players are all working on their own, the game is far from magical and can become frustrating. The reliance on teammates can simultaneously be one of the best and worst attributes of our game.
Giving Tank and Damage heroes would allow them to stay alive without relying on their Support teammates too much, and Support players would feel less tied down to their teammates and thus be able to engage enemies more. This touches on one of the current meta’s biggest problems: the introduction of Mauga has led to feast-or-famine matches where a great Mauga can stomp the enemy team or be eliminated immediately due to his sheer size. Support players have complained that they have to stick to Mauga like glue to keep his health up, leading to rather repetitive gameplay for an entire season’s worth of matches.
However, this change has not been popular with players, even if it hasn’t been implemented just yet. Toning down the importance of teamwork might fix matches where players aren’t getting along, but it’ll also just give them more agency to stop working together at all. Teamwork is an absolute necessity for a 5v5 game like Overwatch to feel fun to play, but messing with the synergy of hero roles might just break them entirely. Supports like Lucio might feel even less inclined to heal teammates now that they can do it themselves. Damage heroes can just chase kills on the other side of the map without the safety net of their teammates thanks to the self-heal.
Keller has since admitted that, “It was a mistake to talk about this lone change out of context, since it's a part of a much bigger set coming to Season 9,” so we’ll just have to see how the change lands when Season 9 launches. Other changes coming to Overwatch 2 include the addition of Party Frame health indicators, which will display the health of your teammates onscreen at all times. The developers are also looking into, “backfill improvements, changes to our scoreboard, and ways to mitigate spawn camping.”
Aside from that, we know that Overwatch 2 is also getting two new heroes codenamed ‘Space Ranger’ and ‘Venture’ in 2024.