Director’s Take: Balance Updates for Season Five

news.blizzard.com:

As Season Four ends, I'd like to look at the game's balance. This season we saw a wide selection of heroes get played, and for the most part, the game felt fairly balanced. From a win rate perspective, Seasons Three and Four were some of the most balanced in recent Overwatch history! With this in mind, let's look at three different topics from Season Four and talk about how they will change in Season Five and beyond. Specifically, I’d like to go over heroes like Junker Queen and Lifeweaver, one-shots, and crowd control abilities in 5v5.

There were a few standouts from a tuning perspective in Season Four. In the midseason patch, Junker Queen was given a series of buffs, and she really started to dominate. Her win rate popped up by about 5%, and she went from being one of the lowest-picked tanks to one of the highest. For most skill tiers, Queen and Reinhardt were the two most picked tanks for the latter half of the season. However, at Masters and above, Queen is far and away the most picked tank. One of the big changes that we made was to increase the healing received from her passive. We like this addition to her playstyle, but it makes Queen too survivable, so we'll be reducing the health she receives from Commanding Shout from 200 to 150 to compensate. We'll also be increasing the cost of her ult by a small amount since she is getting it at a faster rate than before the midseason changes.

Lifeweaver is a really dynamic hero. Some of the plays that people have pulled off with him during Season Four were pretty astonishing. However, he's not powerful enough to be a solid pick for most players. Previously, we stated that we would like there to be a reason to pick new heroes over others in the roster. This is still our goal