Last night one of Overwatch’s most popular streamers, Ster, hosted five of Blizzard’s staff in a Q&A and gameplay stream to show off the upcoming patch, currently on the PTR. While there a host of details about upcoming changes and plans were revealed, as well as some rather expert Ana gameplay from Ster if that takes your fancy.
Ana’s skins, abilities and more all detailed in our dedicated post.
Here’s everything that was talked about:
- Mercy’s damage boost will be reverted back to 30%, as it is currently too powerful with the likes of McCree, especially with his own buffs on the PTR.
- Zenyatta might get toned down to 175 health (25 HP, 150 shields) if he proves too strong, but no definitive decision yet.
- Ana is getting her own comic – though no mention of more animated shorts – very soon (presumably on or before release)
- Four new maps are in the pipeline, though that doesn’t mean all of them will make it to final release. One is quite far along and will be out “soonish.”
- There’s also new modes being developed, but the first map will be using the ones we have now.
- As we mention in our roundup of all currently known information, there will be new skins before the end of summer.
- They want to bring the length of Overwatch competitive games down a bit in season 2 (beginning in August and also bringing the removal of the ‘coin flip’)
- All players will eventually be able to see ally health bars, but it won’t be in this patch.
The stream is around an hour and a half and features game director Jeff Kaplan, game designer Michael Chu, balance designer Geoff Goodman and a bunch of other folks from big blue. You can watch it here:
Community members have gathered various clips and bits of info in this Reddit thread.