February 18, 2016 (beta)

Overwatch Patch Notes – February 18, 2016 (beta)

General

Miscellaneous

• Completed a tuning pass for end-of-match commendations
• Increased the cooldown on using Voice Lines

Hero Balance Changes

Bastion

• Configuration: Recon
  • Maximum weapon spread decreased by 25%
• Configuration: Sentry
  • No longer gains any armor bonus
  • All changes to bullet damage made in our February 9 beta patch have been reverted

Developer comments: We've given Configuration: Recon a bit of a boost to allow Bastion to "run-and-gun" more efficiently when needed. We've also made significant changes to Bastion's survivability and offensive capabilities when in Configuration: Sentry. By removing the 300 additional armor, Bastion is now more vulnerable to attack; however, its overall damage output has been increased (as a result of reverting earlier nerfs to sentry bullet damage). We're very eager to see how both of these updates play out in the beta.

D.Va

• D.Va's mech is no longer move- or aim-locked after being called down
• Self-Destruct
  • Ultimate charge now generates passively even when D.Va is dead or her mech is destroyed
• Call Mech
  • Ultimate cost decreased by 20%

Developer comments: The changes we made to how heroes gain ultimate charge in the February 9 beta patch had some unintended side effects for D.Va, making it much harder for her to generate Ultimate than before. These changes should help correct this pain point, as well as provide a nice quality-of-life change to the process of summoning her mech.

Mei

• Endothermic Blaster
  • Alternate Fire
    • Ammo cost decreased from 50 to 40

Developer comments: The goal of this small change is make it so that using Mei's alternate fire doesn't feel like it's compromising her primary fire.

Mercy

• Guardian Angel
  • Can no longer target the souls of dead allies

Developer comments: The change we made to Guardian Angel in the February 9 beta patch (allowing the ability to target the souls of dead allies) was intended to help Mercy get to where her Resurrect may be the most needed. In practice, this change caused problems. We saw a lot of feedback from players noting that they'd accidentally target a dead ally when they meant to target a living ally, or that they'd target a dead ally thinking it was a living ally initially. As a result, we've reverted the original change.

Torbjörn

• Turret bullet damage decreased from 16 to 14
• Turret repair amount decreased from 100 to 50 health per swing
• Rivet Gun
  • Maximum ammo decreased from 20 to 18
• Alternate Fire
  • Cost decreased from 5 to 3

Developer comments: Torbjörn's turrets currently feel a little too powerful, so (to start) we're taking away some of their power as well as removing Torbjörn's ability to out-repair reasonable incoming damage. Torbjörn's Rivet gun is also getting a small boost to allow for more liberal use of his Alternate Fire when needed.

Bug fixes

General

• Fixed several in-game locations in which it was possible to use Tracer's Blink ability to exit intended play space
• Fixed an issue when blue-colored effects would sometimes get "stuck" on screen
• Fixed a crash that could happen when opening Loot Boxes
• Fixed several client- and sever-side crashes

Heroes

• Fixed an issue that caused Zenyatta to receive more credit than intended for kill assists when determining Play of the Game

Spectating

• Projectiles will now appear to line up more correctly with targets when viewing a player in Spectator Mode