Director’s Take – Balance Preview for Season 8

news.blizzard.com:

This is one of two remaining Director's Take Blogs for 2023! We'll release another one in two weeks and take the last part of the year off for the holiday season before we pick back up again in the new year. I'll be writing this one in a sort of turkey-induced fever dream and the next one just after we launch Season 8. This is when we'll release our newest hero Mauga, along with quite a few balance changes for the game. We'll take a look at those changes and touch on a few other topics as well.

We're making a general change to the amount of ult charge retained when swapping heroes, reducing it from 25% to 15%. We do like that this mechanic removes friction when swapping heroes, and think that it still should at 15%. However, there is a perception that it's almost always an advantage to counter-swap upon dying, and we're lowering this value to see if it has an effect on swap rates.

Let's look at changes coming to some of our heroes for Season 8, starting with some of the larger changes coming to our tanks.

We released a reworked Roadhog late in Season 7. Roadhog quickly became one of our top performing tanks, with a win rate somewhere around 54%. There’s been a lot of feedback around his kit, but we’re going to hold off from making any changes at the start of Season 8. Mauga has a lot of answers to Roadhog and we’d like to see where the meta settles a bit before aiming at the midseason patch for any balance adjustments.

There are times when Doomfist players use his Ultimate purely as an escape. It's a little disappointing to activate Meteor Strike and intentionally land on a health pack rather than enemy players!  Starting in Season 8, Doomfist will now regenerate 75 health per second while in the air. We're slightly