Take a breather, support players, Overwatch 2 is about to roll out an update that will make your job much easier. It looks like every character will get the self-healing passive ability once reserved for support players in the hero shooter’s ninth season. It’s certainly an interesting choice.
News of this massive change comes from a Director’s Take blog post from game director Aaron Keller, who explained that tank and damage heroes will receive a “tuned-down” version of the passive healing all support heroes get by default. This perk was implemented in Overwatch 2 and lets support heroes recover 15 HP per second if they go 1.5 seconds without taking damage. This gives support characters some survivability, as they often have lower HP than other heroes.. But now, it sounds like everyone is getting a similar perk, but Keller’s blog post notably doesn’t mention specifics in terms of how much HP tanks and damage characters will passively gain or how long they have to go without taking damage to start regaining health.
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“This should give non-support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves,” Keller wrote. “It should also take some of the pressure off support players to keep everyone alive since individual players now have more control of their own health pool. In Overwatch, there is a constant tug of war between the power of a team and the power of an individual hero or player.”
Player reaction has been mixed, as some support players feel like this undermines the role’s utility or might disincentivize tank and damage players from staying close to their supports for healing and to capture objectives. Keller acknowledges a sweeping change like this can have huge ramifications the team may not even realize until it happens, which is why Blizzard is reserving the right to undo the change if it breaks the game.
Depending on if you’ve got a good team with you, playing support can feel like babysitting and constantly trying to top your teammates’ health off while they run into the line of fire. Anything that takes that pressure off you and puts more responsibility on individuals to keep themselves alive so you can…support them instead of having to take on the burden of sustainability by yourself is welcome. But healing numbers have already been reaching peak levels in Overwatch 2 over the past year, so we’ll see how Blizzard manages this new variable moving forward.
In the meantime, Overwatch 2 is hosting a “quicker play” spin on the standard Quick Play mode, speeding up objective capture time across the board for a weekend. What do you think about the upcoming Overwatch 2 change?
