Director’s Take – Retrospective on Season 6 Hero Balance

news.blizzard.com:

Hey y'all! This is Alec, Lead Hero Designer, stepping in for Aaron this week. We thought this Director’s Take would be a good time to chat about our heroes, recent balance changes, and what we’ve learned from them, and talk a bit about the philosophy behind our two upcoming reworks for Sombra and Roadhog.

Let’s start with Illari. Going into Illari’s launch, our slogan was “safe side of strong.” We want hero releases to be impactful. It’s best for the game for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it creates change throughout the meta. An impactful hero launch can shift other heroes’ viability and create new and unique team compositions - an unimpactful hero launch can feel as if the game didn’t enter a new season.

Making a new hero feel impactful on launch is challenging because we are asking you to choose between that hero and their overall potential versus picking the heroes that you may have hundreds or thousands of hours on. Players like to try new things, but players also like to win. To mitigate this friction, while you are learning the nuances of a hero, we generally will continue to aim for the “safe side of strong” with our hero releases and then tune them where necessary. In situations where the hero's kit contains mechanics we'd describe as more “sharp” or potentially polarizing (say we were to release Widowmaker again), we may exercise more caution with this approach.

We aimed to make sure Illari was powerful, and we were happy to see that she launched in an impactful, game-changing state, but it's important to evaluate where that power is coming from. A lot of her initial power budget was wrapped up in her Healing Pylon and her lethality. Despite its potency, the Healing Pylon itself can feel invisible