Overwatch heroes Junkrat and Mercy have been nerfed pretty heavily in the PTR.
Game Director Jeff Kaplan confirmed that changes came to the PTR in the afternoon. This was in response to a lengthy post on the official Overwatch forums discussing balancing issues with Junkrat and Mercy.
While there is no official patch note released yet, Overwatch’s Principal Designer Geoff Goodman detailed all the changes coming to the two heroes.
The duration of Mercy’s Valkyrie ultimate was changed from 20 seconds to 15 and it no longer reduces the cast time of Resurrect to zero seconds. She also no longer receives a bonus charge for Resurrect during the ultimate and the speed boost granted to Guardian Angel with the ultimate has been decreased by 50 percent.
Junkrat’s Concussion Mine now deals less damage to targets farther away from the explosion’s center. You can see the change to his mine in the tweet below:
Goodman explains that it has become a bit too easy for Junkrat to throw out huge bursts of damage in a large area because of the flexibility of the double-charge mine. Now it requires more accuracy to pull off a bomb-mine combo for a kill.
He also said that while previous changes to Mercy’s Resurrect have allowed people to counter her more easily, her ability to use Resurrect through Valkyrie made the changes moot. The recent changes are meant to reduce the overall power of the ability and make her easier to deal with.
Goodman said that they will likely iterate on the changes in the coming weeks.
It is unknown if there are any other changes coming with the new patch. We will update when the patch notes are released.
The community has chimed in on the changes, both praising and deriding them.
What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comment section below.
The last patch came on December 14, 2017 before that year’s winter event. You can see the full patch notes below:
General
Fixed an issue that caused the game client to crash when certain visual effects were displayed Competitive Play
Fixed a bug in Competitive Play that sometimes caused incorrect time adjustments between subsequent rounds on hybrid maps Heroes
Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Roadhog’s Chain Hook to miss targets from certain angles and distances Fixed a bug that prevented Torbjörn’s Forge Hammer from upgrading his turret when used at certain angles and distances
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