It’s no surprise that Overwatch’s newest hero Brigitte is an extremely popular pick right now, and that popularity means a lot of people aren’t playing her in her intended support role. Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan says it’s not something to worry about.
For more on Brigitte, check out the latest Overwatch patch notes.
DBLTAP notes an Overwatch forum post by Elminster, anticipating the general frustration felt across the game at the phenomenon of players insta-locking Brigitte, and then playing her as aggressively as possible while expecting the rest of the team to act as back-up.
“Please,” Elminster wrote. “You assume everyone else must build around you all the time. Let those who play frontline / support, play Brigitte.”
It’s a solid point, because Overwatch is meant to be a game about composing a team and changing characters and roles as needed. But Kaplan waded in this week to cool frayed nerves.
He said he’d jumped into free-for-all deathmatch so he could check on how Brigitte was performing without locking other players from using her, and won by seven kills against a bunch of Brigittes and a Hanzo. So, good job, Jeff.
But then he went to quickplay to see how others were using the new support.
“Mostly, the tried to play her like a main tank,” he wrote. “The funniest to me was the Brigitte who kept solo pushing the choke on Hanamura over and over again, spamming ‘I need healing’.”
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go well, since Brigitte is a hybrid support, and not primarily a damage dealer. After the match, Kaplan said, she complained about getting gold in healing and quit.
“They’ll learn,” he said.
It’ll take some time for Brigitte’s role to sink in across Overwatch’s massive player base, and that’s normal with new heroes. Until it does, expect to see this kind of thing pretty often.