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As stage two approaches, what impact will the newest patch have on the Overwatch League?

The Overwatch World Cup is back! (Image: Blizzard Entertainment)
Editor
2nd February, 2018
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We’re four weeks into the inaugural Overwatch League’s first stage and there’s been plenty to talk about.

The Seoul Dynasty aren’t invincible, with two straight losses sending the Korean giants to abyssal depths of second place. The Dallas Fuel have vastly underperformed, while the Los Angeles Valiant have been a huge surprise packet. We’ve had thrilling five-round matches, some wild upsets and even some controversy with Dallas’ Felix “xQc” Lengyel copping a four-game ban for a homophobic slur.

The actual game of Overwatch has had a new patch recently, league commissioner Nate Nanzer explained on the competition’s official program Watchpoint that it made no sense to employ balance changes mid-stage – especially with the stage winners receiving a financial reward.

“Since we have the stage finals coming up,” he told Watchpoint, “we didn’t think it made sense to make those changes in the middle of a stage.”

The league will instead wait until stage two, which starts on February 22 (AEDT), to bring the LAN servers up to date.

Nanzer did clarify, however, that the league would consider using a new patch mid-stage if it became clear a character or composition was “broken”.

That gives us time to look over the incoming balance changes and work out what differences we might see in the meta.

The biggest change is, of course, to the game’s most prolific healer and support hero – Mercy. Her controversial re-work late last year helped bring her back into the metagame and went some way to combating the extreme prevalence of dive strategies, but as time has worn on she’s proven to be far and away the most useful healer in the game – and that’s created a stifling lack of variety in the support section of most teams.

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As such, Blizzard have stepped in and are now giving her ultimate ability – Valkyrie – a fair few nerfs. For starters, she’ll no longer have instant access to the Resurrect ability once the ultimate is triggered, nor will the ultimate give her Resurrect ability a bonus charge.

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The Guardian Angel ability is having its speed boost halved during Valkyrie, while the ultimate’s overall duration has been cut from 20 seconds to 15.

More cynical players will view this as a grumbling admission by the developers that they got her rework horribly wrong, but in any case this should help bring previously dominant healers such as Ana and Lucio back into the game in a big way. Zenyatta may not have suffered as big a relegation as the others, but if Lucio returns to prominence this will see him picked more as well.

But this change should bring about more than just more character variety for fans to enjoy – this could have a pretty big impact on the league itself.

The need for teams to run Mercy in their composition has made life difficult for many support players who specialise in the game’s other healers, with a lot of those players on the rosters of struggling teams.

San Francisco’s support duo of Daniel “dhaK” Martinez Paz (Lucio) and Nikola “Sleepy” Andrews (Zenyatta) have both had their discomfort at playing Mercy observed, Shanghai’s Zhaoyu “Fiveking” Chen (Lucio) and Peixuan “Freefeel” Chen (Ana) prefer other healers, while the two supports of the thus-far disappointing Dallas Fuel – Sebastian “chipshajen” Widlund and Australia’s Scott “Custa” Kennedy – have both had more success as Ana or Zenyatta.

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Florida’s Sebastian “Zebbosai” Olsson, on other hand, has enjoyed great success with every healer in the game except Mercy.

If the meta shifts enough to see Mercy’s stranglehold on supreme healer diminish, many of the league’s struggling teams could find themselves surging in stage two and beyond.

Another character who’ll be receiving a nerf when stage two rolls around is the Australian scavenger, Junkrat.

His recent minor rework has seen him jump back into the meta and, although he’s not having anywhere near the same impact as Mercy, he is receiving a small nerf to his Concussion Mine ability.

He is keeping the ability to have two on the field at once, however they now deal less damage further away from the explosion.

This change appears to have been made more in the spirit of keeping the player experience fun. Junkrat has often been bemoaned for his ability to inflict devastating damage – regardless of whether the player using him can aim or not. The professionals will be able to aim well enough for this change to have minimal effect on their play, but hopefully it results in fewer cheap deaths for players like you and me.

In any case, Junkrat’s use at the highest level is still very situational, so don’t expect to see him become a stage two dud.

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The other big addition to Overwatch recently has been the new map, Blizzard World.

Commissioner Nate Nanzer said, however, they were waiting until stage three to introduce the theme park escort map to the league.

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