Strap in, y’all, this is a long one. Blizzard has revealed the full patch notes for the Season 2 launch of Overwatch 2. Along with the introduction of Ramattra, the new Shambali Monastery map and the latest battle pass, there are a ton of other changes worth paying attention to.

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As expected, there’s a major nerf to Sojourn, who was definitely overpowered in the right hands in Season 1. However, the changes should make her more balanced and help players with so-so aim get more out of her.

Doomfist and Junker Queen got some significant changes, while Bastion, Symmetra, Tracer, Ana, Kiriko and Mercy got some tweaks. I don’t know that Bastion’s turret mode needed a shorter cooldown, but I will absolutely take a shorter cooldown on Sleep Dart.

I’m glad to see a change in how overtime is handled on Control maps. Rounds will no longer suddenly just end when a team that had 99% progress flips the point back in their favor. Be sure to note the change to the DPS passive as well — that’s a significant tweak. There are bug fixes too, including one for Tracer’s damage falloff.

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For the sake of concision, I’ve omitted the intro, the part about Ramattra’s abilities (you can read about those here) and the Season 2 map pool (full details here). Otherwise, here are the Overwatch 2 Season 2 patch notes, in Blizzard’s words:

General Updates

Control Game Mode

We fixed a bug regarding overtime on Control maps, however, that fix led to other bugs we had to resolve. Ultimately, this led to some anticlimactic gameplay results that we weren’t happy with. After hearing player feedback, we’ve made the following change:

• Whenever a point is captured on Control, the team losing control of the point counts as having contested the point for the purposes of Overtime even if they were not present.
• For example, if Team A has 99% and Team B has current control of the point, but then Team A take back control of the point, Overtime will automatically trigger and start to burn down unless Team B can touch again.
• At lower capture percentages this change will have no impact on the game mode, as this new rule is only applied for the purposes of Overtime

Hero Unlocks and Challenges

• We’ve added challenges for unlocking Junker Queen, Sojourn and Kiriko
• 70+ player icon rewards have been added to challenges with the release of Season 2

Shop Update

• We’ve added a hero purchase tab in the Shop

Competitive Play

Season 2 Competitive Play begins now! Here are some updates we’re introducing to competitive:

• There are new, temporary Competitive title rewards for name cards based on your end of season rank
• You can only earn these titles at the end of the current Competitive season and can only use them in the season following
• Heroes that aren’t eligible for competitive play will have a lock icon in the Hero Gallery
• Implemented a group of matchmaking enhancements to improve match quality
• Minor polish improvements to the competitive play UI flow
• New hero Ramattra won’t be available in competitive for 2 weeks

General Hero Updates

Damage Role Passive

• No longer provides a movement speed bonus
• Reload speed bonus increased from 25 to 35%

Developer comments: We’ve decided to remove increased movement speed from the Damage role passive and, in turn, make the reload speed more significant. While the additional movement speed was a helpful indicator that the passive was active, we saw change in speed negatively affecting the ability to aim precisely.

Tank Updates

Doomfist

Developer comments: There are several changes here for Doomfist with the intent to increase his presence as a disruptive brawler-style tank. The buff to his passive ability will help him stay in the fight longer, especially when he’s hitting multiple enemies with his abilities.

The changes to Power Block and Meteor Strike are intended to increase the availability of Empowered Rocket Punch, which enables him to more easily disrupt enemies and impact multiple targets. Due to gaining Empowered Rocket Punch more consistently, the stun duration and size are slightly decreased to reduce some of the frustration in playing against it.

For Rocket Punch, we’re shifting some of its damage away from requiring wall impacts so that it’s broadly more useful regardless of where fights are taken.

Rocket Punch

• Impact damage range (minimum-maximum) increased from 15-30 to 25-50 damage
• Wall slam damage range (minimum-maximum) reduced from 20-40 to 10-30 damage
• Empowered Rocket Punch wall slam stun duration range reduced from 0.5-1 to 0.25-0.75 seconds
• Non-Empowered Rocket Punch now stuns for the minimum 0.25 second duration on wall slam
• Empowered Rocket Punch knockback radius reduced from 4 to 3 meters
• Minimum time before cancel option becomes available reduced from 0.25 to 0.12 seconds
• Cooldown reduced from 4 to 3 seconds – this has been in since his rework but was not mentioned

Power Block

• Cooldown reduced from 8 to 7 seconds
• Duration increased from 2 to 2.5 seconds
• Minimum damage mitigated required to empower Rocket Punch reduced from 90 to 80 damage

Meteor Strike

• Now empowers Rocket Punch on landing
• Enemy slow duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds

The Best Defense… (Passive)

• Maximum temporary health increased from 150 to 200 health
• Temporary health gained per target hit with abilities increased from 30 to 40 health

Junker Queen

Developer comments: Commanding Shout is Junker Queen’s primary tanking ability and utility, but the additional survivability it granted her team proved to be too powerful and needed to be tuned back significantly in a previous patch. We’re looking to shift more of that survivability into Junker Queen herself by increasing the amount her passive ability heals through dealing damage with wounds.

• Torso and head hit volume size increased 12%

Rampage

• Wound duration reduced from 5 to 4.5 seconds
• Ultimate cost reduced by 10%

Commanding Shout

• Cooldown reduced from 15 to 14 seconds

Adrenaline (Passive)

• Adrenaline passive healing multiplier increased from 1 to 1.25x damage dealt by wounds

DPS Updates

Bastion

Developer comments: The intent for Bastion’s Ultimate is that enemy players can survive it if they are quick to react to the damaging impact areas, however, it ended up being too easy to avoid the damage areas entirely. We’re reducing both the amount of warning time and explosion damage so that it’s more reliable in dealing damage, but it won’t be as lethal the closer the target gets to the edge of the explosion range.

Configuration Artillery

• Delay before projectile drops reduced from 1 to 0.6 seconds
• Explosion damage reduced from 300 to 250
• No longer deals explosion damage to self
• Minimum delay between placing shots reduced by 20%

Reconfigure

• Cooldown reduced from 12 to 10 seconds

Sojourn

Developer comments: Sojourn is performing well at the highest tiers of Competitive Play but poorly below those tiers. Much of the perception that she is too powerful seems to be driven by the reaction to dying to long-range, charged headshots from her Railgun secondary fire. These changes are aimed at reducing frustrations there, with the biggest change being the reduced critical multiplier for headshots. A fully charged headshot no longer kills a full health 200 hp hero. To help account for this loss of power, we’re increasing the damage of her primary fire and how quickly her energy charges during her Ultimate.

Railgun

• Energy delay before draining reduced from 8 to 5 seconds
• Secondary fire damage falloff starting range reduced from 70 to 40 meters
• Secondary fire critical damage multiplier reduced from 2 to 1.5
• Secondary fire damage now scales linearly with energy from 30 to 130 damage (1 energy converts to 1 damage added)
• Primary fire damage per projectile increased from 9 to 10
• Overclock energy charge rate increased by 20%

Symmetra

Developer comments: The changes to Symmetra’s primary fire will make her gameplay faster by enabling her to charge the beam up to dangerous levels more quickly. However, it will also drain to less lethal levels at an increased rate when not damaging a target. We’re reverting the adjustments to her ammo management because, while it helped with matchups where there were no barriers, it lost something interesting to its interactions.

Photon Projector

• Beam charge rate and decay rate increased by 20%
• Primary fire ammo consumption rate increased from 7 to 10 per second
• Primary fire gains ammo from damaging barriers again

Tracer

Developer comments: We balanced Tracer’s damage in a previous patch due to an undiscovered bug regarding her Pulse Pistols’ falloff damage. The bug is resolved, so we are reverting the damage.

Pulse Pistols

• Damage increased from 5 to 6

Support Updates

Ana

Sleep Dart

Developer comments: Sleep Dart is still one of the most powerful crowd control abilities in 5v5, though with the addition of cleanse mechanics to offer a potential counter to this effect, we’re more comfortable with reducing the cooldown here to improve Ana’s personal survivability.

• Cooldown reduced from 15 to 14 seconds

Kiriko

Developer comments: The hit volume adjustment is to help address her arms sometimes blocking headshots in some of her animations. Kiriko feels balanced overall, but her Ultimate could feel too frenetic at times. We’re reducing both the movement speed and cooldown rate boost it grants so that it’s easier to aim during its effect for both allies and enemies, as well as there being fewer abilities being thrown about. The rest of the changes are primarily for quality-of-life improvements to make the abilities feel better to use.

• Arm hit volumes width reduced 15%
• Added an auto-wall climb hero option

Kitsune Rush

• Ultimate cost increased by 10%
• Movement speed bonus reduced from 50 to 30%
• Cooldown rate reduced from 3 to 2 times faster

Protection Suzu

• Cast time reduced from 0.15 to 0.1 second

Kunai

• Ammo increased from 12 to 15

Swift Step

• Ability input can now be held to activate

Mercy

Developer comments: This is a change that will enable Mercy to better defend herself or even go on the offensive at times. In 5v5 these situations occur much more often.

• Weapon swap time reduced from 0.5 to 0.35 seconds

Caduceus Blaster

• Ammo increased from 20 to 25

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed a bug that was causing Roadhog’s breaths to not be audible when viewing some animations in the Hero Gallery
• Fixed a bug that caused some players to lose competitive challenge progress
• Resolved an issue where several products couldn’t be unlocked from the Hero Gallery
• Fixed an issue with the Lifesaver Challenge not counting Mercy’s Resurrect as a ‘Save’
• Resolved an issue with purchases not immediately showing up after purchase
• Fixed a bug with Torbjörn and Symmetra’s turrets displaying hostile red overlays in Deathmatch for the player that placed them

Maps

Busan

• Fixed an area of the map where players could get stuck

Colosseo

• Fixed geometry that allowed some heroes to contest undetected

Esperança

• Fixed some areas that could be used to escape the playable space
• Fixed geometry that allowed some heroes to contest undetected

Gibraltar

• Fixed lighting issues across the map
• Fixed some areas where Torbjörn could place his turret in unreachable spots

Nepal

• Replaced some missing pillars on Sanctum

Rio

• Fixed a bug that allowed some heroes to get inside of the payload

Route 66

• Fixed lighting issues across the map

New Queen Street

• Fixed some issues with shadows across the map
• Fixed an area of the map where players could get stuck

Heroes

• Heroes no longer take damage from their own abilities if they’re on the other side of a friendly barrier
• Fixed an issue with the Damage Passive where sometimes a double reload animation could occur when the buff was active

Cassidy

• Resolved an issue with some skins using the wrong props in the Flashbang victory pose

Doomfist

• Fixed an issue where Doomfist’s Power Block reduced the damage from some area of effect abilities
• Meteor Strike – You can no longer detect Sombra if the targeting reticle gets near her

D.Va

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to use Self-Destruct during their Mech’s destruction while Hacked

Junker Queen

• Jagged Blade can no longer be recalled while slept, stunned, hacked or frozen
• Fixed an issue with Jagged Blade being consumed by friendly abilities like Deflect, Defense Matrix, etc.
• Jagged Blade now takes a curved trajectory on return

Mercy

• Guardian Angel now correctly resets its cooldown if Valkyrie is used
• Guardian Angel ‘cancel boost’ is now disabled when Mercy is stunned

Moira

• Junkrat’s Trap no longer displays at chest height in first person when using Fade

Pharah

• Fixed a bug that reduced the ult cost of Rocket Barrage

Soldier: 76

• Fixed an issue where Soldier 76 was unable to critical hit max range enemies during Tactical Visor

Symmetra

• Fixed a bug that resulted in all voiceover being cut out when taking the Teleporter

Tracer

• Fixed a big causing her Pulse Pistol damage falloff to not start until max range

Winston

• Resolved an issue with the Werewolf skin and the Excuse Me highlight intro turning Winston red in the Hero Gallery

Zenyatta

• Fixed an issue with melee not correctly animating if used to cancel alternate fire

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