Director's Take – Hero Balance Preview for Overwatch 2: Invasion

news.blizzard.com:

There is a lot coming to the game in Overwatch 2: Invasion. We've talked about the new Story Missions, the Event Mission, our new game mode Flashpoint, the new Hero Progression System, as well as Hero Mastery Missions… and we'll be talking about our newest Support Hero soon. On top of these new additions, there are also a lot of changes coming to our current heroes next season. Nearly half of our heroes are getting balance changes. I won't go over every change in the season here—they'll all be in the patch notes—but I'll go over some of the larger ones.

But two quick bits first.

There was a lesson in the Lifeweaver release where our newest hero was interesting, but just wasn’t strong enough on release, and we don’t want to repeat that.  For Overwatch 2: Invasion, our aim is to have our newest hero be exciting and impactful on day 1. It’s not our intent to release a hero that’s way overpowered, but we’d prefer that people play her because she brings value, not just because she’s new. We will be watching her very closely, listening to player feedback, and will make early changes if necessary.

We’re making a change to the way we calculate damage against armor. Armor damage reduction is now additive with other sources of damage reduction and respects the current cap of 50%. It used to be multiplicative with damage reduction from abilities, creating situations where certain heroes were much more difficult to damage than intended since they were bypassing the damage reduction cap. This shouldn’t be a big change and will mostly affect Ramattra and Orisa.

Ok. On to balance.

One of the themes for balance changes this season is reacting to some of our recent tuning tweaks. We made several changes to Cassidy's Magnetic Grenade this