Overwatch League: What to Do Before Season Two (Part Nine)

There are no more OWL games, but there’s plenty else to do in the meantime! As most may know, the Overwatch World Cup is ongoing but currently in its downtime between stages. Check out our own Katrina Weil’s pieces on that here! There being no Overwatch League to watch at the moment to watch doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do! TGH has written seven different pieces on What to Do Before Season Two already, and we’re still hungry for more! We’ve covered Twitch channels, the Summer Games update, Overwatch articles, the Overwatch World Cup, All-Star Weekend, the new D.Va-centric cinematic/map, Season Twelve of Competitive, and the past OWWC Weekend & Tespa Tournament

One of the best things about Overwatch is that it’s a constantly evolving game. Updates change and tweak hero abilities, which in turn influences the meta game. The meta influences team compositions and coordination, which keeps changing and therefore rarely feels stale. Updates to maps and the addition of new ones definitely breathe new life into the team shooter.

All of these changes come in the form of patch updates that originally release to the PTR , or Public Test Realm, and make their way to the main game after some tweaking. There’s one such recent patch update that is small, but may have a large impact.

Busan is (Officially) Here!

Courtesy of: Gamespot

The first big thing that happened with the newest batch is the official release of the Busan control point map! We’ve covered this in one of our previous editions of this series, but it was only released in the PTR at that point. Now that it’s official, you have no excuse to try it out now! Just keep in mind that the map won’t hit competitive play until later. For the time being, you can play it on quick play or arcade!

Blizzard Beats Broken Bash

We’ve covered the recent start of Season Twelve for competitive play, which features Ana as being a key player. That will remain unchanged as there is a tweak to the character’s in-scope sensitivity that allows users to fine tune their accuracy.

Blizzard Entertainment announces Overwatch Hero 27 – Brigitte.

Brigitte has long been considered overpowered, if not outright broken by most players. This most recent patch seems to further fix the shield bash. This change, while seemingly small, will definitely change in-game events. Her shield bash used to counter other stuns such as Reinhardt’s Charge or Doomfist’s Rocket Punch without stunning Brigitte. That has now been fixed for the better, so if Brigitte tries to counter a Charge or Rocket Punch with her shield bash, it will leave both players stunned. This is definitely a change for the better, as now Doomfist and Reinhardt can use their abilities against Brigitte without worrying about her out-stunning them and allowing her to get free health charge from a few hits of her flail.

Rein’s Ultimate is Finally Fixed!

Image courtesy of: Dailymail

Speaking of Reinhardt, he has changed a bit for the better as well. His most broken ability has long been his Earthshatter Ultimate, with irregular hit recognition.

Now, his Ultimate ability should be closer to fixed than ever as Blizzard says that it “consistently hits enemies near walls, no longer hits enemies that enter the damage cone after the ‘wave’ has passed, no longer damages enemies behind barriers blocking it, and always travels up inclines and around the payload.”  These are many small tweaks of one ability that should “make the Earthshatter’s behavior more predictable and effective.”

There are a few more tweaks that aren’t huge or worth mentioning here, but you can find all of them here if you want to check the full update out. Now that you know the biggest changes in the game, go play it and see how the changes feel!

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Featured image courtesy of 8subjects