Blizzard Entertainment will be making some pretty major changes to a few characters when Overwatch 2 launches. Among the characters getting pretty substantial reworks are turret character Bastian, and his hacking counter Sombra. These changes will go far deeper than just the hat that Bastian is sporting, which he borrowed from Torbjorn. Blizzard revealed these changes on Saturday during the Overwatch League finals.
The first major change that was stated for him is sure to make at least my friend group happy as Bastian will no longer have a self-heal feature dragging out attempts to put him down. This is being replaced with an all-new alternate fire that shoots a grenade-like ball that can bounce off of walls and stick to players. It will deal large amounts of damage but that sounds still preferable to him having a heal on deck.
Bastian will still have his sentry form from the first game, but this time around he will also be able to move in it on tank treads at a reduced speed. However, now the ability has a cooldown which means that while it might still be strong it cannot be used all the time.
His ult has also seen a change with him now acting as a mortar instead of a tank. He will be locked in place and able to call down three strikes on the map before firing them and returning to normal. This ability will probably be very good to help take points.
Sombra on the other hand acted as a counter to bastions, being able to sneak behind a setup defense and hack Bastian out of turret for which would also block his heal mechanic. This was good to help start strong pushes but relied heavily on a team known how to capitalize on such a move.
The first major change to Sombra is a reduced cooldown to her Hacking ability, with the said ability now having a duration of 8 seconds. It will also have two components to it, with the first being that it disables abilities like in the first game. The effects of this have now been reduced to only one-second meaning that will not last the full duration of the hack.
The second component will expose the hacked character to both the Sombra and her team for the duration of the hack, making this the primary function now. Her passive will now allow her to do 50 percent more damage to hacked characters meaning that despite enemies getting their abilities back quicker there is a strong benefit to hacking enemies.
For her ult, it has been tweaked so that it no longer removes all shields, but It will now do damage to enemies up to 40 percent of their current health. It can also be linked with passive ability, so any character affected by her ult takes more damage when Sombra shoots them.
Arguably the biggest change, and the most desired one for Sombra mains, is she no longer breaks stealth to hack. As she hacks enemies she will briefly flash where she is, but it will not remove her from stealth completely and once the hack is done she will return to that state.
While this all sounds interesting, the truth is we have no idea when to expect the game still. Blizzard has been at the center of rampant allegations of fostering a hostile workplace as well as sexual harassment allegations and more. These have seen multiple high-profile members of the company left, including the man from which Overwatch character Mccree took his name. This character will be getting a name change due to these allegations.
This leaves it unclear if the game is still on track for a release the company had planned for, or if the project has seen some setbacks due to it.
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A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.