Season 2 retrospective: A look back and the road forward

news.blizzard.com:

The Overwatch team has been preparing to conclude Season 2 as we gear up to Season 3, and we’re incredibly thankful for all the player feedback we’ve seen over the past months. We’d like to take some time to reflect on this past season and give you a sense of where we’re going in the future.

Here’s more info about what we’re doing now and how we’re thinking about longer-term changes.

We watched Ramattra closely when he first released, including community gameplay and conversations. We started asking ourselves some challenging questions about his kit’s performance based on your feedback—What was the community’s first impressions of his kit? Is his kit approachable? Which abilities and moments are resonating with our community? What are the sore spots?

The next set of questions focused more on his viability—How’s he performing as players learn how to play him? What compositions is he fitting into? Are there early dominant strategies? Answers here help us decide if we want to make any changes to the hero within the first two weeks, before they enter competitive play.

Ramattra’s initial release was met with a lot of positive feedback in terms of fun factor. We saw a lot of great conversation around his kit and the overall design, but it was clear that you felt Ramattra wasn’t viable in enough situations. At this point, there are many different factors that go into making balance decisions including player feedback and hero performance— though this is limited to quick play data (which can differ from Competitive).

With our learnings, we chose to increase his power while in Nemesis form by upping his armor and speed. Alongside the Nemesis Form changes, we also decreased the cooldown on his Void Barrier to create more overall uptime