Widowmaker – MMO Fallout

McCree_02

Blizzard has announced the removal of Overwatch’s “avoid this player” feature after, perhaps unsurprisingly, the function was abused to avoid playing against highly skilled players. Meant to allow players an opportunity to avoid toxic players, Jeff Kaplan explained on the forums that the function was abused to avoid professional-tier players.

One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match.

On the other hand, players can still make use of the ‘prefer this player’ feature. Widowmaker is the sniper class of Overwatch, allowing skilled shots to take out enemies from far away. Blizzard recently nerfed Widowmaker’s abilities in order to better balance out her abilities.

(Source: Blizzard)

McCree_02

It was nice of Blizzard to provide us with this PR snapshot of McCree and Widowmaker side by side, because the two are the focal point of the first big balance patch for Overwatch. Launched on PC today and coming to consoles as part of a larger patch on a later date, players will either be crying foul or rubbing their hands in glee at the knowledge that two of Overwatch’s more problematic characters have been chained back a bit.

McCree’s balance brings his pistol damage from 70 to 45, while reducing the wait before he reloads by more than half (.75 seconds to .3 seconds).

McCree was performing too well against all targets, making him feel like a must-pick in many situations. By reducing the damage of his alternate fire, McCree is now significantly weaker against tanks like Roadhog and Reinhardt, but still maintains his lethality against smaller targets like Tracer and Genji.

Widowmaker, on the other hand, has been equally buffed/debuffed in various areas. While the base damage of her scoped shot has been reduced by a fifth (15 to 12), the damage multiplier on headshots has been boosted from 2x to 2.5x. Additionally, players must now wait for the unscoping animation to finish before scoping again. Finally, her ultimate now costs 10% more.

In the right hands, Widowmaker can often feel unstoppable—even when just landing body shots instead of critical heads shots. The changes to her alternate fire weaken body shot damage while leaving her headshot damage unchanged. Additionally, we felt her Ultimate ability, Infra-Sight, was coming up a little too frequently, especially considering its impact on the game.

In short: McCree can’t take down tanks as easily and Widowmaker can no longer one-shot even characters like Tracer with a hit to the body, preventing her from dominating the battlefield as she was before. Also on the block for a balance is D.Va, although she will be made more powerful. Unlike McCree or Widowmaker, D.Va’s balancing patch is going to take a bit more time to iron out the specifics.

(Source: Blizzard)