Overwatch 2’s tanks have been struggling of late, and Blizzard Entertainment has heard the calls for help with some substantial upcoming changes in season 10’s midseason update.
In just a few weeks, several nice buffs aimed at helping “balance how many hits tanks can take to stay in the fight better” will be coming in a patch, game director Aaron Keller said in a new blog post today.
The biggest change is that the tank passive is getting buffed to have a 25 percent damage reduction from headshots to prevent them from being burst down in a fight, as well as increasing the knockback resistance from 30 percent to 40 percent to mitigate being booped around by crowd control-type abilities.
“In OW2, tanks are the imposing heroes who take the brunt of the fight while enabling their teammates to secure eliminations,” Keller said. “While tanks are a big target for opponents to focus on, many team comps aim to burn down a tank’s HP quickly, or they get moved around a lot from displacement abilities. We’ve received feedback that tanks can either feel like they get taken down too quickly in a fight or that they’re impossible to take down.”
But that’s not all. A couple of global gameplay changes coming in OW2 means a recent armor tweak is being reverted as armor will now reduce five damage per projectile and max out at 50 percent, while another is that the health regen passive for all heroes will now recover 10 health plus five percent of their max HP per second. This benefits tanks, who have a higher health pool in general.
“Altogether, these changes should have an impact on some of the pain points our tank players are experiencing, as well as the balance of the game,” Keller said. “I have a feeling we’ll see a lot of movement in the meta over the remainder of season 10.”
A couple of individual tanks are being changed, too. Junker Queen will receive a buff to her Commanding Shout ability, while Wrecking Ball is getting even more slight buffs after a bit of a rework at the start of season 10.
Overwatch 2’s midseason update is set to land on May 14 and will also include buffs for Junkrat, Echo, and Hanzo. You can check out Keller’s full blog post for more information.
