Overwatch 2: New Season, New Issues

Overwatch+2%3A+New+Season%2C+New+Issues

CONNOR BAKER, A&E EDITOR

Overwatch 2 season 2 began this Tuesday, and like the game’s release, there was a lot more bad than there was good. 

Starting with the good though, the new tank hero Ramattra released and has quickly made an impact. Along with affecting queue times, his style of play is very aggressive and makes him a menace in battle. He reminds me of a more attack style Orisa. 

His primary fire is a beam staff that has infinite range but the projectiles do take some timing to hit. He also has a stun ability that grounds any flying heroes, which I absolutely love. He also has a temporary shield that he can cast from a range, similar to Sigmas. He also has a second form called Nemesis form, which makes him much larger, gives him more health, and adds an ability called Pummel. This ability replaces his primary fire and Ramattra punches and shoots out a short range energy bursts that can hit through shields. 

The best part about Ramattra in my opinion is his voice. He has a deep robotic voice that can either inspire or intimidate you. His voice lines stick out amongst all the others and either leave me wanting to charge into battle or run for my life.

Along with Ramattra, we get the second battle pass. There’s nothing awful about it, but I still have yet to be impressed by much of it. The new Poseidon skin for Ramattra is cool, and there are some other decent ones, all having the Greek Mythology theme. It’s cool that Blizzard gave this season a theme, but they really need to work on the rewards in the pass as a whole. I’m not trying to grind for voice lines.

This season also brought the game’s second Mythic skin, Zeus for Junker Queen. The community seems to enjoy the skin, but I’m personally not a huge fan of it. It just seems a lot more simple and the customizations for it are underwhelming. I am a much bigger fan of Cyber Demon, and I don’t even play Genji. I just think Blizzard could have done so much more with this skin, but if the community is behind it then I won’t complain too much.

Along with the new battle pass, we also got a new map, Shambali Monastery. I personally love this map, it has a great atmosphere and I love fighting in the cave area. The maps Blizzard World and Rialto also made their return replacing Gibraltar and thankfully Hollywood.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any new maps for the Push game mode. In the stage it’s in right now, I don’t enjoy Push at all, and a new map could have changed that. For now though, I’m still most likely going to leave every game of Push I get put into.

And finally, with a new season, comes a new patch, and this one is BAAADDDD. The primary focus of this patch has by far been Sojourn’s so called “nerf”, but really, all they did was make her even more broken. The railgun’s headshot multiplier was reduced and the damaged dropoff was increased, but this really makes no effect because the railgun can still one shot and no one hits it beyond 40 meters anyway. Along with these useless fixes, they raised her base damage and reduced the charge of her railgun during her ult. What a fix. 

I don’t know what Blizzard was thinking with this patch, especially since Sojourn’s balancing issue is something the entire community has seen as a problem. Before this patch, Sojourn was topping the leaderboards when it comes to stats, and with this patch, I can only see it getting worse. 

Another hero that was made broken was Tracer. Tracer is a hero that no one has ever really had a problem with. Her abilities are simple and it comes down to the player to have a good game on her. So you know what you do with a perfectly balanced hero? Raise their base damage for no reason. ALL FIXED UP. They also made changes to make another balanced hero Kiriko weaker, and other minor fixes like slightly improving Doomfist.

Overall, this season has perfectly reflected what Overwatch 2 has been as a whole. Disappointing. I think what needs to happen is Blizzard needs to start listening to the community and actually they play the game to see how the changes affect gameplay. It’s clear no one at Blizzard has ever had the misfortune of playing against a Sojourn.

It’s unfortunate that for every step forward Blizzard takes, they take five steps backward. I hope that they will start to listen to the community and put in the effort to understand the changes that need to be made. Until then, I’m gonna keep buying the battle passes that I hate.