The event is live with skins, capture the flag, and hero changes
Well, I hope you weren’t expecting much more than festive outfits and capture the flag for Overwatch‘s Lunar New Year 2019 celebration. There are eight Year of the Pig skins to look at and possibly unlock including Guan Yu Reinhardt and Lü Bu Reaper, and Blizzard has adapted the Busan map for CTF.
As far as hero changes, there are only three in today’s patch, but their impact will be felt.
- Brigitte‘s armor-granting Rally now has a maximum duration of 30 seconds. The hope is that opposing teams will have more of a chance to fend off potential snowballing.
- D.Va‘s Defense Matrix cooldown has doubled to two seconds, giving enemies more room to “play around her Defense Matrix by increasing its downtime between uses.”
- Reaper‘s life-stealing passive ability has gone from 30 percent to 50 percent of damage dealt in an effort to help him “keep the pressure up.” Stay vigilant, tank mains.
Blizzard has also tweaked armor’s damage-reducing capabilities under the belief that it was “a bit too strong overall, especially when heroes were being healed quickly and often.” More specifically:
Before this change, armor reduced all incoming damage by up to 5, maxing at half of the normal amount. This change reduces the damage reduction to 3, while still capping at half. This change will be most noticeable for heroes who fire quickly or in bursts, such as shotguns, and do more than 6 damage per shot. For example, Soldier: 76’s Heavy Pulse Rifle will now do 16 damage per shot to armored opponents, up from 14 (an increase close to 15%).
And there’s a much-appreciated fix for “a bug that caused a delay for heroes loading into the victory screen line up if they had a golden weapon equipped.” I was wondering what was up with that!
These are the eight new skins for Lunar New Year 2019:
General Brigitte
Guan Yu Reinhardt
Hong Gildong Tracer
Huang Zhong Hanzo
Lü Bu Reaper
Sanye Orisa
Zhang Fei Torbjörn
Zhuge Liang Zenyatta
You can, of course, still unlock old Lunar New Year cosmetics. The Year of the Pig runs until Feb. 18.
