Overwatch – Upcoming balance for support Heroes

The supports of Overwatch are going to be seeing some minor balance changes in an upcoming patch. Geoff Goodman, one of the Overwatch developers, took to the forums to drop some numbers for players, giving a heads up on how things will change.

Support hero balance has long been a hot topic, and in particular in the last six months following the addition of Moira and Brigitte, with that time period also having seen major adjustments to Mercy.

The major issue has generally been that at different points in time, a subset of the Support heroes have been too powerful, resulting in their crowding out of the other options. It seems Blizzard is now looking to address this, making changes across the category in order to make the choice of Support heroes a stylistic one based on what their toolkit offers, rather than on their raw output power.

Below are the full notes on the exact changes:

Ana

Nano Boost additionally heals the target instantly for 300 HP.

Brigitte

Shield Bash cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds.

Lúcio

Sound Barrier effect increased 50% from 500 to 750 shields.
Crossfade aura radius increased 20% from 10m to 12m.

Mercy

Primary fire healing beam reduced 17% from 60 HP/s to 50 HP/s.

Moira

Healing resource base regen rate increased 20%.

These updates are now live on the PTR. Blizzard will be keeping a close eye on how these changes impact each hero, their pick rate and general play.

Overwatch lead hero designer Geoff Goodman informed the Overwatch community of the upcoming changes through a forum post. Goodman had this to say on the changes, “In the next patch we’re reviewing the current state of support heroes and are making some changes to nearly all of them to keep them competitive with each other.”

We aren’t seeing a complete rework of any of these support heroes, but there are some seriously impactful changes coming that are sure to shake-up the current support meta.

More info at – Source