Director’s Take – Tricks, Tweaks, and Treats for Season 13

Hello and happy Autumn. It’s that time of year where there is a chill in the air, everything seems to have a pumpkin spice flavor (bleh!), and you can feel the magical spirit of Halloween quickly approaching. In case you missed it, we just revealed a lot of cool tricks and treats coming for Season 13 in our Developer Update, including an up-close look at the new Spellbinder Widowmaker Mythic Skin, a detailed look at four maps that are getting major changes, new updates to the in-game scoreboard, and a first look at the hauntingly fun Junkenstein’s Laboratory. (Insert scary thunder here.)

Okay, so to kick things off, let’s take a look at Tank adjustments. Ramattra’s Pummel while in Nemesis form is getting an adjustment that will better give opponents a chance to take cover without really impacting the lethality of the attack. The attacks from Ramattra’s punches will no longer pierce barriers, but instead will deal 2.5 times the damage on them. This gives Ramattra more strategy to decide whether to focus on breaking a barrier which can leave opponents vulnerable to attacks from your teammates, or instead focus on individual targets. Heroes like Reinhardt also now have more of a choice to make—using their barrier’s health or eating the punch themselves. We hope this change can make for a more interesting engagement while Ramattra is in his Nemesis form.

Mauga’s getting a buff to Gunny, his Incendiary Chaingun, where ignite damage over time will now last four seconds. Combined with the burst potential of Cha-cha, his Volatile Chaingun, Mauga will have more reason to stay focused on smaller targets without making him stronger against other Tanks.

For Supports, you’re going to see a notable change for Juno, who has performed really well. She remains popular, and we expect that to continue well into Season 13, but we want to bring in her healing potential a bit and encourage players to rely on her mobility more. First off, her fall-off range is reduced, which will require her to be closer to allies to heal or enemies to attack effectively. The Mediblaster also has a small nerf to the healing amount. You can also expect some changes for Brigitte and Baptiste this next patch as well.

We have quite a few big changes to a couple of our Damage heroes. Sojourn has changes to her Railgun and Disruptor shot that will better give more skill to her playstyle. Energy no longer holds a minimum of 25 but will now deteriorate much slower. We’re also powering up Disruptor shot to be stronger—damage per second is increased to 80 and will generate a small amount of energy for the Railgun for any damage dealt. We’re looking to make the ability feel less ignorable for opponents and reward anyone playing Sojourn with well-placed Disruptor Shots. These changes are focused on getting more power into her kit outside of the Railgun shot itself and make her neutral gameplay feel better.

Alec mentioned changes we had coming for Sombra in our previous Director’s Take and we are now ready to share the details of what you can expect. We are moving Stealth away from being a passive that activates on its own to instantly triggering every time you use Translocator. It will now only stay active for five seconds after you translocate. This change moves away from allowing Sombra to take any position she wants, but instead gives her a play loop that increases her lethality. Sombra is revealed briefly when she takes damage or uses her hack, instead of losing the stealth entirely. Translocator also has a longer cooldown, so you will need to carefully plan how you attack your enemies or use the ability as an escape route.

We’re also giving back Sombra her Opportunist passive which allows you to see targets that are critically injured through walls along with increasing weapon damage over time. We’ve also reduced the Hack ability lockout to one second, which has been a frustrating part of her kit that opponents have had to deal with. We’ll be watching how you all adapt to these changes and what new strategies you deploy with this new playstyle.

Okay, let’s change the subject and talk about Competitive Play and matchmaking. We still want to encourage you to group up with your friends even when playing Competitive, so we have several changes to matchmaking which should help. Matchmaking for the Wide pool has been tuned to focus on shorter queue times. We think having evenly matched players on the Tank role is really important, so we've also upgraded our Role Delta tech to prioritize matching Tank players against each other even more closely than the other roles.

Playing in pre-made groups is a great way to play Overwatch, especially in Competitive, but at the highest ranks we think the advantage of grouping becomes pretty overwhelming. Higher-rank matches will now take into account the benefit of grouping when constructing a match. We’ve also tuned down multiple Modifiers related to MMR decay. This will make it more difficult for new accounts to unfairly climb higher into Top 500 than they might deserve without punishing more seasoned accounts.

Finally, at Top 500, you’ll now be required to complete the Seasoned Competitor lifetime challenge, which requires the player to win 750 games in Competitive Play in Overwatch 2 before you can appear on any season’s Top 500 leaderboard. With this change, we are confident in lowering the individual season threshold for games played on a role to 25 per season. This will allow our veteran and seasoned players to not feel pressured to play as much throughout each season. There will be some other changes to matchmaking, so be sure to read up on our patch notes when the new Season goes live next Tuesday.