Overwatch’s next hero Doctrine was revealed at BlizzCon today, and he’s a total bad-ass.
The support healer was created with the fantasy of a vampire-like character in mind, and his kit fits the bill. He’s currently playable now in-game in a hero test ahead of his launch next month, but I took part in an interview with Blizzard devs specifically about him.
A key part of Doctrine’s kit is his Invigorating Drones ability, which sends bat-like drones out to allies to heal then but also grant attack speed. This quickly brought up a worry about that ability stacking with others like it, such as Juno’s ultimate, to create an attack speed that quickly becomes overwhelming or impossible to deal with.
“It did open up a conversation of like, should we put a cap on how much attack speed there is?'” hero designer Scott Kennedy said. “There is a 300 percent cap on attack speed, but there’s currently no way to hit that cap. When we were adding Doctrine, we’re like, ‘should we limit that? Should we reduce it?’ And we sort of came to the conclusion, let’s see how it plays out. And if it gets to the point where stacking a lot of these abilities does end up becoming a problem, we’ll re-evaluate that cap and if it needs to come down because yes, some people are attacking very fast with Kiriko, and then Soldier when he has his attack speed, all these heroes. So, definitely something to look out for.”
“There’s also an additional part to that which is as speed goes up in the game for attacks and reloads, all of the animations get sped up for everything you can do,” added senior animator Kyle Disanjh. “So there is a little bit of concession there where it’s like you can move so fast that when you reload, you can’t even register what just happened. The sounds play really fast, the effects play really fast. So there is also like an art consideration too where, ‘oh, do we need to maybe revisit some of how these work,’ because we’re attacking fast, so it’s kind of all investment.”
Part of what makes Doctrine so fun is choosing which ally will get his drone to buff their attack speed, and it plays similarly to how Zenyatta would choose which opponent to give a Discord Orb to.
“I would say there’s a lot of heroes that get value from attack speed,” Kennedy said. “I think the default by a lot of players is going to tanks. You’re sort of flipping that battle of like you have more attack speed. Put it on a Reinhardt. He swings really fast. But there’s a lot of combinations which the way it works sort of amplifies it. Think of your Genji’s while in ultimate. You have Bastion who’s just going to shred through damage with the increased attack speed. Then you can put it on other heroes like Tracer. And it works where once you put it on the target, they can go as far away as they want. They can use this for six seconds and they’re not tethered to you in the same way that Mercy is with damage boost. So that unlocks a lot of potential of setting up, executing and working together.”
I didn’t have the time to play Doctrine myself at BlizzCon today, but I’m hoping to go hands on tomorrow because he sounds like a genuinely fun new way to heal in the game. Early returns on social media agree.
