The Overwatch League offseason hasn’t been the most exciting for the Philadelphia Fusion, they announced their entire roster in one full swoop and haven’t left much to be done before the new season starts in February. However, Overwatch and the game developers from Blizzard announced a new huge update coming soon to the game. The update changes many heroes and looks to change the meta of the game from double shield to something completely new. This obviously affects the Fusion players majorly, especially if the character they play the most has been changed, they may need to change characters completely or just adjust at how they play that certain character.
I will list the official patch notes that Blizzard released and then I’ll talk about how that affects the Fusion players going forward. I will note two things for some of you new esports followers, in the gaming world, if a character has been made stronger through a change, we call it a buff and if the character has become weaker through a change, we call it a nerf. I will also mention that this update probably won’t be the last one to come out before the new season starts, so it may not make too much of a difference as some changes may be reverted later on.
Right, onto the actual patch notes. Starting us off is a general change that applies to all characters who have armor within their total health that sees the armor damage reduction total raised for 3 to 5, this means all characters will do less damage to armor, making characters with armor in their health a lot tankier. Right now, it doesn’t seem like this change is that huge but once I’ve run through some of the changes to tanks, it’s a massive change that will certainly change the meta of the game.
Now onto the changes to specific characters, and there’s quite a lot. Starting off, we look at the changes to tank character Orisa. The first change sees her base armor value increased from 200 to 250. The second change to Orisa sees the movement speed penalty she receives when using Fusion Driver reduced from 30% down to 20%. A third change has been made to Orisa, this time to the main reason players play her, her shield’s health has been reduced massively from 900 to 600. The final change made to Orisa sees her Fortify ability reworked, reducing the cooldown from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
All these changes are a part of a bigger picture in Overwatch. For a long time, the meta of the game has been to play two shield tanks and pretty much hope you can destroy your opponent’s shields first and then kill off their players before they can destroy your shields. With this patch, every shield tank has received major nerfs. Taking Orisa’s shield health down seriously hurts her, especially with the ability recharging at the same rate as it was at 900 health, to counter this huge change, they’ve buffed her mobility during Fusion Driver, allowed her to use her Fortify ability more often to give her a better chance at surviving and then increasing the amount of armor she has makes her tankier. It’ll be interesting to see how major the changes will be once the update has gone live on all platforms soon, it’s going to be a while before we truly know how good/bad these changes will be for Orisa.
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