The Queue: Overwatch Day

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

We’re celebrating! It’s Overwatch Day!

There’s usually a delay between when heroes become available in-game and when they’re allowed to be used in tournament play. It isn’t a huge delay, but enough of a delay to ensure those new heroes are relatively balanced. If a new character is released in a super broken state, it wouldn’t be very good for the competitive scene if that character was allowed in a tournament a few days later. That character would need to be banned every single match by the players to ensure no foul play — the tournament itself might as well preemptively ban that character and let players make more interesting decisions.

In the case of Chromie, she’s in the exact opposite situation when it comes to balance. By all indications, she’s terrible right now. Last I saw, she hovered somewhere around a 30% winrate — almost all other characters hover in the 45%-55% area, right around that 50% ideal. Even the most overpowered characters in Heroes right now aren’t as overpowered as Chromie is terrible. When looking purely at the win/loss ratios, Chromie is the worst hero in the game. Why would you play that in the competitive scene? It’s possible one of the pro players has the magic formula for making Chromie good, but not very likely.

Chromie has the lowest health in the game, has a wind-up period on her skillshot, and has no escape tools other than talenting into a rapid-fire hearthstone … which removes her from the field completely. The only way Chromie is effective is if her opponents ignore her completely. All it takes is one person putting pressure on her to force her to hearth or die.

When it comes to Demon Hunters, I think Night/Blood Rlf is the “right” choice. That is, it’s a situation where I feel like the race and class are conjoined. Demon Hunters are Elves. When I think of Demon Hunters, I think of badass Elven cyclones of pain. I can’t envision any other race as a Demon Hunter because Demon Hunters and Elves have been so closely tied together. I love playing Humans in WoW, but I can’t imagine a Human Demon Hunter. Or a Draenei Demon Hunter, an Orc Demon Hunter, or whatever. They just don’t work for me.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think the others should be playable — I’m a fan of letting people play whatever they want — but I can’t see myself wanting to play a Demon Hunter who isn’t an Elf of some variety. Maybe I’ll change my tune if they actually allow Demon Hunters of different races. We’ll see!

No matter what I do, no matter how many times I try to be a mage or a big, burly barbarian, I inevitably end up stealthing with a bow. See, it starts out with me using a big two-hander, or a sword/board, but then I see some bad guys off and the distance and decide I can soften them up with arrows before entering a melee. I snipe, get some headshots, they’re all dying, my stealth and bow skills are going up, but my other skills aren’t… and suddenly I’m an assassin archer again.

It was mentioned back in February, but as far as I know hasn’t been clarified (or even mentioned) since then. In a blog post, the Overwatch team stated loot boxes would be available for purchase via real money. We haven’t seen signs of that in any of the beta stages, so who knows when that will be implemented. Since they’ll be giving out all of Overwatch’s future new maps and heroes for free, I’d guess they might continue adding new skins to loot boxes and use those to generate revenue.

I’d prefer they only did those overlaps like Widowmaker Nova when absolutely necessary. The Overwatch heroes are too cool to make them skins of existing characters. However, I can understand why they did Widowmaker Nova in particular. First, their kits aren’t all that different — they’re both snipers. And they had one hell of a time trying to balance Nova in Heroes and it’s debatable whether she’s actually balanced (or fun to play) right now. Sniper characters who take you from 100-0 from stealth/hiding is not super fun in a game like Heroes of the Storm. It works in FPS games, but not MOBAs or RPGs. Adding another Sniper character would be a big pain in the butt.

I think the other characters are unique enough they could be their own thing. There are certain similarities such as Symmetra and Gazlowe both using small turrets, Lucio and Brightwing both healing through passive AOEs, and so forth. But even when there are specific abilities which overlap, the rest of the kit doesn’t. Symmetra also has shields and teleporters. Lucio … you know what, it would actually be hilarious to have Brightwing in rollerblades with dreads.

Lucio Brightwing, please.