Overwatch 2 Season 2 – Hero balance changes

Heroes have changed; balanced has been restored. Or has it?

Ed Farish

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There’s been some interesting debate since the release of Overwatch 2’s second season, with players thrown into discourse about the latest balancing to heroes such as Kiriko and Soujourn, both players who dominated the meta in Season 1. Here, we’ll go into to detail about these hero balance changes, and whether or not we believe they’re effective enough.

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Sojourn’s railgun

Since last season, Sojourn was able to completely overwhelm players, and it’s no big secret to say that she was unbalanced and devastating. The Railgun of hers was particularly nasty to play against, being able to one-shot smaller players easily. To add to this, nothing about the rest of her kit, speed or defence was bad enough to warrant something of a balanced character.

This time around in Season 2, Sojourn’s nerf includes a lowering of the railgun’s power and alt-fire damage, meaning that at full power it won’t one shot enemies, but leave them with a fraction of health instead. Some have argued this is not enough, and that because charging the alt-fire means shooting enemies anyway, they’ll go down regardless.

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Kiriko’s Ultimate

No big secret either; Kiriko’s Ultimate, Kitsune Rush, was probably the most powerful Ultimate in the game. This is almost entirely down to the attack speed this boosts to teammates. The “nerf” in question, then, is that the Kitsune Rush no longer increases cooldown and movement speed as fast as it used to. Some have said, however, this is not enough.

Overwatch 2 Season 2 hero buffs

There’s been some minor buffs to certain characters too, the list – albeit short – gives some much needed power to selected character’s attributes. These are:

• Bastion’s Ultimate is quicker to achieve
• Ana’s Sleep Dart has a (1s) faster cooldown
• Symmetra can’t fire for as long with her primary fire, but her turrets deal a bit more damage
• Mercy’s secondary weapon now has 25 shots instead of 20

Whilst these are all extremely underwhelming and not exactly going to change the course of Overwatch 2 gaming history, at least Doomfist received a decent buff. His punch now deals increased damage, he charges up faster using his Power Block, and he gains more Overhealth with damage dealt using his abilities. Hurray for Doomfist mains.

There you have it, these are all the significant changes we’ve seen made so far. Hero balance changes? Well, the verdict is not quite what we expected, but at least they’re trying.