The Overwatch 2 update released on May 9 included a hidden nerf to Tracer’s Blink ability. It wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes, but players were alerted to its existence by one Blizzard dev in a tweet on May 11.
The nerf, Overwatch developer Chris Sayers explained, is actually a visual effect rather than anything mechanical. It gives other players a subtle but discernible visual cue showing what direction Tracer is blinking in. It’s a quality-of-life change intended to help people track her after she blinks at close distances, which can be difficult in the midst of all the chaos that unfolds in a team fight.
Tracer mains might not like it. She has the lowest health pool, so making her easier to track means she’ll run into trouble more often, especially in low to mid rank games. The feedback from everyone else, however, has been overwhelmingly positive.
Those who have had trouble tracking Tracer at close distances praised the change, describing it as “amazing.” One player even said that, while it wasn’t very hard for higher ranked Overwatch players to track her in this scenario already, it’s still a nice visual change that looks cool, so there’s no complaints there.
What’s more, some are just happy knowing the devs are putting in the time and effort to think about things like this and actually implement the changes, regardless of how minor they are.
But while everyone seems to like this change, the May patch itself created a lot of headaches upon release. It broke a number of hero’s abilities, including Doomfist’s Power Block, and made it possible for Sigma to keeping flying even after his ultimate ran out.
These issues have been fixed, but it made for a interesting first few days.
