The recent armor update is causing Blizzard to go back and look at the damage numbers of certain heroes – and they will have new tools to do so.
Heroes with beam attacks are treated differently in Overwatch, since they do not deal damage in a traditional sense with bullets that can be measured.
Geoff Goodman, the Hero Designer at Blizzard, discussed possible changes on the way for characters with those beam weapons because of how they interact with the new armor patch.
Winston’s Tesla Cannon has its damage measured differently than projectile weapons.
Zarya, Symmetra, Winston and Moira have weapons that fit into this category, which Goodman refers to as “channeled effects.”
“Right now all ‘channeled’ effects are reduced by a flat amount [against armor] like any other source of damage,” said Goodman. “But the size of the damage packets is purely based on how fast they tick, even though the tuning of the weapons are done via a general DPS calculation.”
Symmetra is another “channeled effect” character getting a tech update.
Blizzard is not saying that these characters will be getting buffs, but they are saying Zarya, Winston, Moira and Symmetra will need additional looks in the current meta – and new technology will help balance them in the future.
“We’re getting some new tech which allows us to separate armor reduction amounts for these effects from their update rate. This doesn’t mean we’re going to just go through and buff all of these weapons necessarily but we are going to go through them all and make sure we’re happy with how much damage they are all doing to armored targets.”
The new tech changes should allow Blizzard to balance their roster even more, since Winston and the others can have their attacks adjusted separately from traditional weapons like the ones used by Soldier 76, Tracer or Reaper.
Source: Blizzard Forums
