I’m having a blast with Overwatch’s new hero D.Mon, and that comes as no surprise to me.
The mech pilot and teammate Overwatch icon D.Va plays like a combination of her and Reinhardt at times (my two other favorite tanks), wielding a shield and energy sword with Armored Core-like mobility. As a tank main since the original game’s launch 10 years ago, I’ve been loving her so far. She’s the game’s most fun new tank in quite a while.
Unfortunately, it pains me so say that while she does a lot of cool things, she doesn’t really excel at any of them. She’s a “jack of all trades but master of none,” to coin a cliché phrase, but it really rings true with her.
Blizzard has conquered the most important part of a hero to begin with: she’s fun. But now she needs to be somewhat competitive, which is always a struggle, especially in a game that now has a whopping 53 heroes to try and balance to keep in line with each other.
D.Mon is mostly an up-close melee hero, but her melee attack feels flimsy compared to others like Reinhardt or Brigitte. Her sword deals 60 damage per swipe, so it’s weaker than Reinhardt’s but a bit faster, and many players are saying that attack animation looks and feels like she’s swinging a pool noodle. I…can’t disagree.
She can poke at a distance with her left-hand cannon, and she has dive potential with her Surging Strike, but neither feels all that impressive or worth it in comparison to other tanks. Her shield’s health is also just 650 (Reinhardt’s is 1,500, to compare), which is due to balance the fact that her movement ability allows her to power-slide in and out of combat.
“When she had too much fuel and stuff like that, she would hunt people down,” lead hero designer Kenny Hudson told me earlier this month. “She can take up space very well. Like, even though the sword does less damage than Rein, you still don’t want to get hit by it too often.”
Some number-tweaking feels inevitable for D.Mon, because while she’s fun to play (especially now in mirror matches against other tanks playing the new hero), she’s easily outclassed by a number of others, which is not great when you’re the solo tank in five-vs-five format. She definitely feels better suited for an off-tank role in six-vs-six, in my opinion. But that’s another ongoing convo about the general state of the game.
Update on Aug. 12 at 2:50pm CT: Asked and answered. Blizzard has already deployed a hotfix with several buffs for D.Mon. Check them out below:
