Two heroes that just can’t seem to find their proper niche are getting tweaked yet again in Overwatch next season.
Chunky tank Roadhog and slippery Damage hero Sombra are changing quite a bit, but the latter is REALLY changing. She will move from Damage to Support, and Blizzard devs I spoke to at BlizzCon are excited about how she feels.
“Sombra obviously being a hero that’s gone through a lot of different iterations,” said hero designer and former Overwatch esports pro Scott Kennedy .”She has sort of these three pillars as a DPS hero with the invisibility, the ability lock and damage that she can do. When she’s been able to do all three at a high level, it comes really problematic. So I think with this attempt, we are moving her into a support role that allows you to sort of keep the core identity of the hero, which is, you know, the translocator is the same, the invisibility is the same, the ability lock still exists on the EMP. It’s less frequent, but it is still there.”
Sombra’s right-click hack ability now only works on allies and health packs, and her Cyberspace Shift ability also now heals allies, but other than that, she is pretty similar to what players know.
“If you get to look at the abilities, you can heal your allies while still doing the things that make Sombra great,” Kennedy said. “You know, you heal your allies, you’re allowed to move around the battlefield invisibly, and then sort of like, interact with the opposition and your allies at the same time. So we’re really confident and really happy with the way that this support change came through, and we’re excited to see.”
“I was surprised how fun she is,” said Dion Rogers, art director. “Her fantasy remains intact while giving her this whole playstyle.”
Roadhog, meanwhile, has also gone through multiple iterations and is a hero who can’t quite find a sweet spot. His changes are less drastic, but still fun to mess around with. His main addition is a Trash Compactor ability, which sucks up incoming damage and then can be launched back at enemies, or even used to sort of rocket-jump into the air, giving him maneuverability. His hook is also less oppressive, and so is his gun, but the rebalancing act is what makes it a rework.
“The hook is the identity of the hero,” Kennedy said. “You can’t rework where he doesn’t have a hook anymore. So one of the things that we really want to approach when we did. This rework was ‘how do we make the hook combo less frustrating and feel like it has more counterplay’? So with the changes to the gun, the fact that it’s this double firing setup and it’s not going to delete players as much and there’s going to be a window of reaction, it potentially changes up the weight and the frustration of that hook combo.”
Roadhog has always just kind of been a fat guy who soaks up damage, but he can’t do much else, especially when he loses the one-shot hook combo. That’s where the Trash Compactor comes in.
“The other issue with Roadhog is he’s a tank that doesn’t do anything to help my team get space. So we wanted to give him a tool that enables him to move forward. So with the trash compactor, you’re absorbing damage similar to Diva Matrix or Sigma Grass. It sort of becomes this window for allies to be able to move forward and work forward. So he now has a tank ability that is less ‘I’m just soaking damage,’ and it’s more, ‘move forward with me.’ So we’re hoping that some of these changes help implant an identity within the tank role and within the game as it is in the bottom one.”
Roadhog and Sombra’s reworks go live in Overwatch season five next month, alongside the new support hero Doctrine.
