Overwatch 2’s Game Director Aaron Keller has confirmed a massively controversial change coming with Season 9, and it hasn’t gone down well with fans.
In a newblog postyesterday afternoon, Keller announced that “both Tank and Damage heroes will get a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive” with the launch of Season 9. This means - for the first time in Overwatch history - every hero will have the ability to heal themselves whilst outside of active combat.
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This is a major change to Overwatch 2’s gameplay. So, as you can imagine, the community hasn’t reacted too kindly to such a massive adjustment. Over on theOverwatch 2 subreddit, one player said that they had to check the date as they “thought this was an April fools joke.” Then there were plenty of Support mains simply saying that they “do not like this.”
One of the key issues with this change is that it runs the risk of making Support’s obsolete, thus further taking away from Overwatch 2’s “team-based” element.
Keller Clarifies Self-Healing Change
As it didn’t take long for the Overwatch 2 community to express their disappointment over the change, Aaron Kellertook to X(formerly known as Twitter) to clarify a few things. In his post, Keller said that self-heal is “one part of a much larger set of changes coming to the game in Season 9.” Keller didn’t go into great detail, but said that the studio is talking about “the role of DPS in securing kills, and the strength of healing.”
Keller then went on to explain that it was a “mistake” to talk about self-heal as a standalone change, as it is part of a much bigger set of changes coming with Season 9. The Game Director then ended his statement by saying that more details about balance changes will be released in the future.
Overwatch 2 players have also been expressing their outrage over “Quicker Play”, a new weekend event that replaces the usual quick play with faster payloads and TS-1 bots, faster control point capture speeds, faster respawns, and shorter rounds.
Multiple postson the Overwatch subreddit say the mode is “way too quick” as it doesn’t even allow most heroes to build their Ultimate. Others said that the mode “sucks” and expressed their unhappiness with the fact that it had completely replaced the normal quick play mode for the weekend.
Thankfully, Quicker Play is only a temporary mode, but the self-healing changes will be here to stay from the upcoming season. There’s currently no confirmed release date for Season 9, but it is expected to be released on February 20th.
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