The Overwatch 2 meta is getting a major shakeup in the upcoming season, not via a new hero, but from a new competitive gameplay update that will add the self-heal passive to Tank and Damage heroes.
With this change, all three categories of playable heroes will have some version of a self-healing passive, as Support class heroes currently already field it. However, the version coming to Tank and Damage heroes will be a “modified, tuned-down version.” Currently, all Support heroes receive 15 points of healing per second after not taking damage for two seconds, but it’s undetermined what that value will be for Tank and DPS heroes in season nine.
In a Director’s Take blog post from the Overwatch 2 development team, game director Aaron Keller explained that the team hopes these changes “give non-Support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves,” while also takings “some of the pressure off Support players to keep everyone alive.”
This massive change is itself part of a major endeavor by the Overwatch 2 devs to make winning matches less reliant on team cohesion, strategy, and mechanics, and to make individual players playing well feel like their actions are more important to winning. Earlier in the post, the game’s devs come out and say matches with a lack of teamwork is when the game is at its most frustrating: “The reliance on teammates can simultaneously be one of the best and worst attributes of our game.”
This attempt to try and cancel out the bad games brought on by bad teammates is part of a plan to see the game drastically change in just one or two years. Instead of the same game with new heroes and maps added, the developers feel “the game should always evolve with new systems and features,” such as a map voting system and changes to both the competitive system and hero balancing.
Earlier this week, Overwatch 2 launched a new experimental “Quicker Play” mode. With many big changes happening to the game, it remains to be seen how they all play out with the community.
