Director's Take - Empowering Tanks in Midseason

Hey, everyone! I’m glad to see all of you digging into Season 10. We’ve loved seeing you welcome our newest hero, Venture, and enjoy the Mirrorwatch event (playable now in the Arcade!). However, this week, I want to look ahead to our midseason update and discuss some changes we have on the way for the Tank role.

In Overwatch 2, tanks are the imposing heroes who take the brunt of the fight while enabling their teammates to secure eliminations.  While tanks are a big target for opponents to focus on, many team comps aim to burn down a Tank’s HP quickly, or they get moved around a lot from displacement abilities. We’ve received feedback that tanks can either feel like they get taken down too quickly in a fight or that they’re impossible to take down.   

So, our midseason update is going to help balance how many hits tanks can take to stay in the fight better.  First, we’re specifically buffing the Tank passive to have a 25% damage reduction from headshots, which should help cut down on being burst down in a fight. We’re also increasing the knockback resistance for tanks from 30% to 50%, which should allow them to hold the front line a lot more and not feel as subjected to displacement abilities.

We’re also making some global gameplay changes that impact tanks. One is that we’re reverting the Armor damage reduction back to reducing five damage per projectile with up to a 50% maximum. This means heroes like Reaper or Tracer will have more work to do to take down heroes like Reinhardt.  Heroes with high burst damage per projectile will still be effective but these kinds of Tanks have better means to counterplay that type of damage.

Next, we made a light change to our overall HP recovery passive that will enable mobile tanks to get back to the front lines faster: The health regeneration passive for all heroes will no longer recover 20 HP per second out of combat but instead recover 10 Health + 5% of their maximum HP per second. This means a hero like Reinhardt will recover their health at 45 health per second in a Role Queue match.

Altogether, these changes should have an impact on some of the pain points our tank players are experiencing, as well as the balance of the game. I have a feeling we’ll see a lot of movement in the meta over the remainder of Season 10.

In some more individual changes, Junker Queen is getting a buffed Commanding Shout, which will be activated even if you are channeling other abilities like Carnage or Rampage, and its cooldown is getting reduced to 12 seconds. This change should allow her to be more engaged in intense fights where you need to charge in more quickly.

With Wrecking Ball, we’re seeing some creative play with the changes to his Grappling Claw; however, his ability to contribute to the fight is getting a small buff. The impact damage from a full-charged swing using Grappling Claw is getting increased from 50 to 60. Piledriver is increasing the enemy movement lockout from 0.5 to 0.75 seconds. And finally, Minefield will be a little more threatening, with explosion damage increased from 130 to 165 and knockback increased from 5 to 10 meters.

Additional changes coming this midseason include some light buffs for Junkrat, Echo, and Hanzo, but we’ll reveal those when you can jump and take these changes for a test drive when the Midseason patch arrives on May 14. That’s all for this week, everyone! Thanks for reading, and let’s make a great game.